"I knew that system didn't have any good intentions; I thought it really would let us rest." An Heyan covered his head and said.
Everyone woke up; they realized that their task now was to escape this room with no doors.
"I went outside just now; there must be a door here," Gu Zhan observed the entire room and said.
"Outside?" Yu Yezhou was surprised.
Gu Zhan explained, "I just had a dream, and in that dream, I went outside."
Yu Yezhou couldn't help but twitch his brows, treating what happened in the dream as a clue, but only Gu Zhan had that experience.
However, on second thought, it was normal for there to be clues hidden in the instance, as opportunities for dreaming were rare.
"Let’s look around," Yu Yezhou encouraged his teammates, who had just woken from the dream and were still feeling groggy, to start searching for clues.
The six of them began to carefully examine the room’s walls. The walls were pure white and seemed to have nothing on them.
The texture felt no different when they touched it.
"How do we get out? This isn’t even a house," Sang Yue questioned after looking around. "And this room doesn’t match the layout of the room we saw in the female teacher's house where Father was locked up. Are you sure our current identity is Father?"
Gu Zhan said, "Not sure."
His overly honest attitude made Sang Yue smile helplessly.
"You don’t even want to lie to us," Sang Yue joked.
Gu Zhan ignored her joke and said, "Lying to you wouldn’t help."
As he spoke, his gaze remained fixed on the wall.
Gu Zhan felt something was off.
It was strange entering this room, and it was strange being trapped here.
The strangest part, however, was that Mo Tuo had come to find him midway.
He didn’t believe that guy was bored and wanted to chat. After leaving the last instance, they had gone through another one. Mo Tuo should have been trapped inside for a long time. If he was so bored, why hadn’t he come earlier or later, but chose this moment?
It seemed intentional.
Intentionally coming to deliver clues to him.
Would monsters help players?
Gu Zhan knew very well that they wouldn’t; they all had their own reasons for acting.
Mo Tuo wanted something he needed, but on the way to what he wanted, there was this small branch that perhaps needed to help him.
Gu Zhan started to circle the wall, looking for the door he had exited in his dream.
The events of the dream were unclear, and it was hard to distinguish directions on the white walls. After searching for a while, Gu Zhan barely managed to identify a wall.
"It should be here."
The others gathered around, looking at the ordinary wall with nothing special about it and asked, "Why here?"
Gu Zhan couldn’t explain; he could only turn back to look at the sofa and carpet, saying, "How were you lying down before? Go back and lie down again."
Though everyone was puzzled, they followed Gu Zhan’s instructions.
They returned to their previous resting positions, either lying down or sitting, and looked at Gu Zhan.
Gu Zhan compared their positions and kept adjusting his direction until he finally found a very familiar angle.
"Here!" he said confidently.
"Are you still comparing with the scene from your dream?" Yu Yezhou finally understood what he was doing, still feeling incredulous, "Can what happened in a dream really be used as a clue?"
The next moment, the change in the room answered his doubts.
A faint sound of gears turning came from deep within the wall.
Gu Zhan was the first to sense the danger and quickly retreated to the center of the room.
His hearing was surprisingly good; he could hear the subtle differences between the mechanical sounds. Gu Zhan noticed that the sound grew louder as it moved outward, indicating that something would happen near the wall shortly.
"Come over here!" he decisively shouted for the others to gather around him.
Everyone trusted Gu Zhan’s abilities and almost immediately rushed over.
They surrounded Gu Zhan, standing on the narrow floor tiles.
After a while, the mechanical sounds slowly ceased, but nothing happened in the room.
Sang Yue hesitated, "Did we guess wrong?"
"We guessed right," Gu Zhan affirmed.
Otherwise, the mechanical sounds wouldn’t have appeared.
Just as his words fell, a door slowly materialized on the wall before them.
The door’s location matched exactly with what he had seen in his dream.
Gu Zhan frowned, not expecting that Mo Tuo really had come to deliver clues.
But at the same time, sharp spikes suddenly emerged from the ground, glinting coldly, pointing towards the ceiling.
These spikes appeared rapidly; if someone had been standing on the ground, there would have been almost no chance to evade them, and they would likely be impaled by these half-meter-high spikes immediately.
This scene left everyone in great fear. Fortunately, they had followed Gu Zhan’s suggestion to move to the center of the room.
In the entire room, only the central square tile was free of spikes.
"What’s going on here?"
Sang Yue asked, but there was no response from the surroundings, and the room fell silent as if everything had stopped.
Then, with a creaking sound, the tightly closed door slowly opened towards them.
This didn’t seem like a way out; it looked more like a trap.
After this path appeared, no one moved; they seemed to have entered a standoff with the system, remaining still as their enemy did.
After a moment of quiet, Sang Yue couldn’t help but ask, "Maybe it won't move again? I'll give it a try."
As she was about to step outside, Gu Zhan stopped her, saying, "Let me go."
Sang Yue hesitated, wanting to say something, but in the end, she said nothing and let Gu Zhan go.
Although the spikes were sharp, there were gaps between them that allowed a person to pass through.
Gu Zhan carefully navigated between the spikes. Suddenly, one spike thrust forward. Unfortunately, Gu Zhan was standing in the narrow space between two spikes, and he had no way to avoid it, allowing the spike to pierce through his arm.
Fortunately, after the blood flowed, the spikes stopped moving.
Sang Yue covered her mouth, silently screaming, while Gu Zhan merely frowned slightly.
He looked at his arm that had been pierced, calmly removing it from the spike.
It seemed that these spikes could indeed move suddenly; he would need to be more careful on the way ahead.
Covering his injured arm, he expressionlessly walked toward the door.
As he approached the door, the spikes beside him moved again. This time, Gu Zhan was prepared, and the spikes failed to catch him.
He reached for the doorknob, and the moment he pushed the door open, the spikes behind him disappeared.
The white room returned to normal, and everyone then realized that they were indeed in the same room where Father had been locked up in the female teacher's house.
However, compared to what they had seen in the previous loop, this room seemed somewhat different…
Sang Yue looked up at the ceiling, which was raised by more than a meter, and at the suddenly enlarged sofa beside her. "Did we shrink?"
Gu Zhan stood at the doorway, frowning as he looked outside.
Yu Yezhou was about to walk over to Gu Zhan to take a look, but Gu Zhan blocked him with one hand.
The blood from his arm was still flowing, and Yu Yezhou quietly asked, "Are you okay? Why hasn't that wound refreshed?"
In the past, when they emerged from the white room, their physical conditions would refresh immediately.
Gu Zhan replied, "The wounds only refresh at the beginning of the loop; we are already inside the loop now."
"Alright." Yu Yezhou looked around and said, "We need to find something to stop the bleeding; this isn't a solution."
Gu Zhan cautiously backed away from the door and closed it again.
It seemed there was something outside that made him very wary.
Yu Yezhou wanted to ask, but he ultimately kept silent.
After retreating into the room, everyone began to search for bed sheets or cloth to help Gu Zhan bandage his wound.
At this moment, Yu Yezhou asked, "What did you see outside just now?"
Gu Zhan lowered his head, seemingly pondering how to phrase his thoughts.
He rarely appeared this serious, making everyone feel uneasy.
After a long pause, Gu Zhan slowly said, "Outside… there are monsters."
"Monsters?" Yu Yezhou asked, confused.
In this instance, weren't all the remaining beings besides the players monsters? Why was Gu Zhan surprised by them?
Gu Zhan thought for a moment and tried to gesture the size of the creatures with his arm: "They are very big and tall, with human limbs, but they are definitely not human."
"Slender man??" Sang Yue blurted out.
Gu Zhan thought for a moment and said, "Similar, but not quite. They aren't slender or long."
He found it difficult to describe the scene he had just seen; the ceiling, which had already been raised, seemed low and cramped in contrast to the gigantic monster. He felt as if he were a speck of dust before the monster, easily crushed without a second thought.
The monster had not noticed that the door had opened; it was sitting at the dining table, using its hands to cut up something on a plate that emitted a bloody scent. Due to the angle, Gu Zhan couldn’t see what was on the plate.
The room was dimly lit because the monster’s back blocked the light from the overhead lamp.
However, in the light's shadow, it seemed he could see large tentacles growing from its back, twisting and filling the entire room.
That monster was very dangerous.
This was Gu Zhan’s impression of it, which was why he hadn’t made a sound, to avoid drawing the monster's attention and hadn’t let his teammates come over.
He instinctively felt that human sight might attract the monster’s notice.
After Gu Zhan shared this with the others, their expressions darkened.
"Isn't this some ethical mini-game? Why did it suddenly transition to this stage?" Sang Yue asked.
Gu Zhan thought for a moment and said, "This is quite normal; predictably, this should be the last loop. It has been so lukewarm; perhaps it doesn’t align with the system's expectations."
"...Lukewarm?" Sang Yue questioned.
Gu Zhan had actually described the challenges they had faced as lukewarm.
What would a heated situation look like? Right now, they were trapped in a room by a gigantic monster and couldn't get out at all?
Gu Zhan continued to ponder, "Father's role is that of a prisoner; outside should be the guards. Perhaps in his eyes, the female teacher is such a massive monster."
Sang Yue hadn’t forgotten the previous setup and incredulously said, "So he fell in love with this giant monster? How twisted is that!"
Gu Zhan: "…"
Sang Yue's remark left even Gu Zhan at a loss for words.
She had a point.
How could one fall in love with something like that? It was truly twisted.
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