Chapter 385 The Stairwell is a Well
Chapter 385 The Stairwell is a Well
But Lin Yi wouldn't do that. He wore a watch and would glance at the time on it from time to time.
It was only a three-minute walk. He looked back at the iron gate of the clock tower and found that it was no longer visible. There was only a spiral staircase above the stairs that extended into the Fibonacci sequence. At the end was dark fog and floating clouds, like the entrance to the abyss.
Below him was also such an area. Walking here, it was easy to feel a sense of loneliness as if being isolated from the world, and a sense of panic as if there was no end in sight.
He continued to descend, glancing at the time on his watch from time to time.
According to Lao Mo and the night watchman, one hour is "theoretically" enough for him to start from here and reach the observation tower. According to his understanding of this road, the route from the observation tower to the bell tower is divided into four stages, namely the stone bridge area, the lobby and corridor area of the art building, the gallery area, and the passage and stairwell area.
The Stone Bridge area and the Art Building area were both very short, and it would take him about 10 minutes to finish the run. The most important areas were the stairwell and the gallery, but all in all, 40 minutes was plenty of time...
"Don't be anxious, stay calm, don't be anxious at all..." Lin Yi was a little anxious, but at this moment he had to convince himself that he was not anxious.
Suddenly, an illusory, transparent hand of an angel with a strange smile reached out from the wall and grabbed Lin Yi's old kerosene lamp.
Lin Yi was startled, but he dodged it reflexively. After he dodged, he found that a baseball bat had appeared in his hand, as if it was going to smash the wall and the painting that sealed the Smiley Angel...
Lin Yi shuddered, quickly dismissed the bat, and then repeated a few words in his heart: "Don't do it, instinct... I am just a dormitory manager now, and now I have to go back to the dormitory step by step, that's all..."
Although I know I have become very powerful now, please keep a low profile.
He composed himself and walked down quickly.
But as he walked, he began to hear some inappropriate calls. He heard the sound of the rushing wind and the heavy rain that kept seeping through the cracks in the bricks of the wall. He also heard some rustling sounds. Something was not right, but he couldn't tell what was wrong...
He instinctively felt uncomfortable, but after careful observation, he realized that the staircase was indeed a staircase...
He glanced at his watch again. The time was 3:05.
He left the clock tower at about 3:00, or maybe 2:59. Generally speaking, this time is still very normal.
But his heart immediately sank.
Because the time on the watch slowed down and stopped at 3:05:23.
"Oh..." He rubbed his temple and a bitter smile appeared at the corner of his mouth.
As expected, something unexpected happened, but the weird thing is, why didn't he feel surprised at all about it?
Has the unlucky guy really accepted the fact that he is unlucky?
"Time remains unchanged, which means I am 'building a dream', and the depth of the dream layer is still deepening..." Lin Yi pondered calmly.
Of course, rather than saying that he is skilled and courageous, it is better to say that he has raised his fear threshold, and these "little things" are no longer enough to make him panic, or in other words, the things that can make him feel scared now have not appeared yet.
But just as he was comforting himself, the change that made his back shiver appeared "as expected"...
The rustling sound of the wind beside his ears had turned into the gurgling sound of water at some point, and the faint water that seeped out from the cracks in the wall bricks had also turned into strands of water, which flowed across the dark green moss on the wall and flowed into the completely invisible dark abyss below the stairwell...
When Lin Yi stared into the abyss, there seemed to be layers of fog floating in the abyss, as if those human faces were looking at Lin Yi.
“Wow…”
“Wow…”
“Wow…”
There seemed to be some sound of water below...
There seemed to be a smell floating in the air, salty, humid, rotten, and dirty...
Lin Yi shuddered suddenly, he thought of it!
"Is it... that 'well'?!"
This layer is where the well is located!
It was his hallucination, no, he really had a dream, and his consciousness somehow came to that well!
He looked at the walls around him and found that the walls had changed. He was no longer surrounded by the stairwell, but the inner wall of a deep well!
The walls of the well were covered with damp and sticky moss. The bottom of the well was filled with the low sound of waves, mixed with the breath of the sea breeze, which was like the roar of some unknown monster, making people shudder.
“Rustle… rustle…”
The well wall trembled slightly, and some black viscous liquid mixed with mud and sand crawled upwards from the mist...
This time, Lin Yi seemed to have sensed something. The trajectories of the viscous liquid looked like the natural downward movement of some kind of viscous liquid after gravity was reversed...
Like some kind of black, smelly, sticky...blood?
Is it blood?
That cold, terrifying, chilling feeling slowly eroded his mind.
His ears were filled with the sound of the sea breeze whistling in the hollow, the sound of the waves constantly hitting the well wall, and the sound of the viscous liquid slowly moving...
In this mixture of sounds that makes one's soul creep, there seems to be a deeper flow of information that is slowly being transmitted...
That voice was long and ethereal, as if it came from the abyss. The strange syllables were hoarse, dry, and elusive, but when it fell into Lin Yi's ears, it seemed to be calling his name...
[…Lin…Yi…]
[…Lin Yi…]
“Wow…wow…wow…”
“Rustle… rustle…”
The sound continued, like some kind of call.
Lin Yi suddenly felt the steps under his feet loosen. He looked down and discovered that there were no steps under his feet at all. He reached out to grab at the void as a conditioned reflex, but he caught nothing. His body began to fall helplessly towards the surging fog!
The fog below flowed slowly in the darkness, as thick as a ball of ink, as if it had life and wanted to swallow him up.
As he fell, the sound of the waves seemed to change, as if there was an invisible vortex hidden beneath the abyss of the ancient well, and an invisible hand was stirring that vortex.
[…Lin Yi…you’re back…]
【I think……】
[…I’ll kill you…]
Intermittent voices were heard from the surging fog, as if someone was calling his name and talking to him!
“Bang, bang, bang—bang, bang, bang—”
Lin Yi's vision flickered rapidly, and his sight was approaching the floating mist at a speed that exceeded the speed of falling. He seemed to see the sea surface at the bottom of the well, and a long section of iron chain with a black glow emerged from the sea surface.
One end of the chain was nailed into the inner wall of the deep well, and the other end was locked to something unknown, extending into the sea.
The entire chain was engraved with mysterious patterns by hammers, and some areas, such as the contact surface between the chain and the seawater, were already rusted. Under the surging waves, there seemed to be something surging, like a snake head, a tentacle, or something else of an "angel"...
That strange calling sound came from it.
[Lin…Yi…]
[…Take…me…away…]
【bring……】
The gray fog was surging more and more terrifying, like a huge face that had merged with the wind and sand, hideous and evil, exuding an aura that could make one's soul fall.
Lin Yi's mind trembled violently, and his vision suddenly emerged from the fog, and his brain became clear instantly.
"I'm not Lin Yi, I'm not Lin Yi, I'm "Dormitory Manager-33-X0221119003"!"
"I'm in the stairwell! I'm in the stairwell!"
He tried to hold on to the card from the dorm manager, but he couldn't hold on to anything when he was "building dreams".
"That's right! Dream building... Dreams can be traced back to their source!"
"As long as I can trace back to that point, I can go back!"
He thought of the method that the Night Watchman "02" had taught him, and quickly felt the fluctuations of the extraordinary power in the dream layer.
Although, the original method of backtracking allowed him to trace back to the "temple" through the fluctuations of air waves, and now he cannot use the "temple" as the point of backtracking, but don't forget that his watch can reflect the passage of time.
The closer to the surface of the dream layer, the more normal the flow of time. So as long as he finds that the speed of the hands on the watch is close to reality, it means that his consciousness is also closer to reality.
This is the benefit of "anchor", which can help Lin Yi eliminate some wrong options.
Sure enough, as he traced back, he quickly stopped his falling trend and began to float up.
"It works! Great!"
When he first saw the results, Lin Yi was delighted, but he immediately suppressed his joy and quickly went back to his previous steps.
Gradually, he found that the surrounding well walls became more and more blurred, while the environment in the stairwell began to become clearer little by little.
The walls around him seemed to split and repeat, transforming from well walls to stairwells.
And he suddenly discovered that the source he traced back to didn't seem to have changed at all...
In other words, at this moment, he was on a step down the stairs, but suddenly he seemed to stop and his consciousness fell to a lower level.
If we go back, we will return to that point.
Realizing this, he suddenly thought of another question:
"The sinking and rising of the layers should follow some kind of pattern... If my current situation is different from when I was in the clock tower, then it means that my consciousness has not been transmitted with the waves, but is simply sinking here..."
These are two completely different situations. The one in the bell tower was that his consciousness followed the air waves of the "Holy Temple" and traveled through the layers of the art building. But at this time, if Lin Yi's guess was correct, his consciousness did not leave, but the layers changed!
This means——
"This stairwell... is a deep well?!"
The stairwell is a well.
When he first came to this conclusion, Lin Yi instantly felt his scalp tingling and his entire body numb as if he had been electrocuted.
[The stairwell is a well], this initial shock to cognition was no less than when he first came to the conclusion that [a tomato is a heart].
"The deep well... is the unfolding of layers!"
"Like a dome to a city wall...?!"
"If I fall, will I really fall into the sea?"
As if to reward him for answering the question correctly, the temperature around him suddenly dropped, the surging mist turned dark white, and the walls that were originally well cracked also stopped changing. Fine frost spread on the walls little by little, making a "crack...crack..." sound.
[Why... did you stop...?]
A voice that made Lin Yi feel creepy rang in his ears.
His pupils contracted violently.
“This voice…”
“I…I am floating now, right?!”
His heart was shaken, and the corner of his eye moved slowly, and he suddenly found that a sticky liquid had stained his shoulder at some point - the black sticky liquid with a fishy smell that was originally spreading upwards on the inner wall of the deep well!
"this……?!"
[…Lin Yi…]
【Take me...away...】
The low voice was floating, very close, so close that it seemed to be right next to his ear, and yet very far away, as if it was separated by thousands of mountains.
He didn't dare look, didn't dare to follow the sound, but his perception expanded uncontrollably.
Then he saw...
He saw the crumbling wall, the deep well wall, and the moss that connected the layers intermittently like a spider web.
He saw the most horrifying scene—an iron chain appeared on his back, one end of the chain was connected to the inner wall of the deep well, and the other end of the chain was connected to his spine.
His body was flowing with that smelly black sticky liquid. It wasn't that the liquid was spreading along the wall onto his body, but that his body was constantly secreting and seeping out this black sticky liquid. Then the liquid flowed along the iron chain onto the wall of the well, and then seeped out little by little...
“How, how could this happen…?!”
“I… ‘I’…?!”
“What’s going on?!”
[Let’s go… Why don’t you leave…]
The voice was still ringing, low and resentful, intermittent, rampant and crazy...
However, at this moment, Lin Yiqu also discovered that the voice was not a call from a distant land, but a resentful whisper echoing from within his body and from his bones, like wind returning from an empty cavity...
“Clatter… clatter…”
Lin Yi's body trembled, and the chains swung along with it, with faint light flickering.
His heart trembled, and he felt as if he was buried here. He was totally unable to understand and accept this scene.
(End of this chapter)