"Have you screamed enough?"
Really unable to stand the other party's high-pitched and long tone, Zhou Yu raised his right hand and waved it twice. After seeing his gesture, Cai Ji closed his mouth in cooperation and fell softly against the wall next to him.
"You, you..."
The appearance of the two people side by side obviously gave him a great shock. The trembling guy even forgot about the nearby exit. He kept trembling his lips, not knowing whether he was going to question how the two came to be together or why they appeared in the men's room.
"Why are you here?"
There was no time to talk nonsense with the other party, so Zhou Yu asked straight to the point. The current situation is quite special, and the possibility that the other party was deliberately sent to the two of them cannot be ruled out.
"I...I...what the hell can I do! You are the ones! What are you doing here!"
As if awakened by his question, Cai Ji shouted in a broken tone. Zhou Yu really wasn't in the mood to explain this, so he took out the switchblade directly.
"I work here!" Cai Ji was frightened by this action. He pulled the name tag on his chest and shouted. Only then did Zhou Yu notice that he was wearing something similar to a restaurant uniform. After confirming that it was a chance encounter, he ignored the other party and pulled Hongye toward the exit of the men's room.
"Wait! You two are here..."
Perhaps mistaking them for some kind of murderous gang ready to massacre the shopping mall, Cai Ji chased after them while trembling.
His unpleasant voice, which started to get high-pitched when he was nervous, stopped abruptly after he walked out of the toilet. Outside the door is a completely enclosed square dark space. Except for the green light emitted by the emergency lights, the space was dark, just a bare cement box.
"...Maybe it's the fire escape area of the mall."
Before Cai Ji fainted from fright, Zhou Yu said simply. Large buildings usually have fire escape areas, and high-rise buildings require special refuge floors. This is the true answer to the superstitious saying that "old buildings will seal off the 14th floor." For buildings about 100 meters long, the 14th floor is usually close to the middle, which is a suitable location for setting up a refuge floor.
"Indeed." Hongye nodded in agreement, then looked around and said, "This is the first time I have entered a place like this...it turns out this is what it looks like inside."
"It should be different in each place. Some fire floors will be decorated with insulation materials, so they won't be so simple."
The two of them wandered around the room and searched, while talking to determine each other's location. While discussing the internal structure of the fire zone, Cai Ji's voice rang again.
"What do you care about fire prevention? Why do you end up in a place like this when you come out of the toilet! You two... you two..."
Hearing him shouting out of breath, Zhou Yu finally couldn't ignore it. He turned to call Hongye and asked: "Why did he follow me? Doesn't it mean that everything seems normal to ordinary people?"
"Well...because he is a slightly talented person."
Hongye looked back at Cai Ji again. She suddenly stopped and asked slightly surprised: "Aren't you the young man that night?"
"...Did you just recognize him? I thought you already knew who he was."
"I didn't pay too much attention to it...well, that makes sense. He should have a talent like insight, so he could also see the secret alley where Ausier hid that night."
"So, is he useful now?"
"It's completely useless. Zhou Yu, when it comes to insight, your body is much stronger than his. You can also see what he can see."
"Then just ignore him."
While the discussion was going on, Zhou Yu felt a thin crack with his hand on the wall.
"There is a door."
He tried pushing and pulling. With a creak, the door disguised as a wall opened to the outside, and dazzling light shone into the room, making it difficult to see what was happening outside.
Since he had no sense of danger, he immediately stepped into the light. The red leaves behind him followed steadily.
"Wait! Don't close the door! Don't let me stay in here!"
Probably not wanting to be left alone in this strange situation, Cai Ji, knowing their danger, also rushed out at the last moment.
However, as soon as he ran out of the fire room, he froze in place, speechless.
The building in front of you can no longer be called a room. Instead, it has a column on the outer wall and a spiral glass staircase on the inside. The entire space is completely transparent, and the stores and customers on the other side can be seen through the outer wall. People outside the glass were chatting and laughing, seemingly unaware that an incredibly tall glass wall was standing a few steps away.
The three of them seemed to be specimen bugs in a glass tube standing in the middle of the building.
Facing such a scene, Cai Ji's thinking came to a complete halt. He rushed towards the wall and slammed his hands on the transparent glass.
"Hey! Hey!!...Fuck! Hey!!!"
Pedestrians passed in front of them in twos and threes. Laughing at each other and talking.
"Hey! Open the door!! There's someone here!! Help!! Hey!!!"
Cai Ji screamed and slapped the transparent, infinitely high wall crazily, but no one noticed him even though it was only a few steps away. The strength brought by the panic quickly disappeared, and he slid down exhausted and sat on his knees on the floor. The floor here is also completely transparent. As long as you look down, you can see all the way into the underground parking lot, like standing on thin ice overlooking the abyss. He just kept staring blankly at the scene below.
"...red leaves."
Seeing Cai Ji's actions, Zhou Yu called out to his companions.
"Yes, I know. This place must have been designed by Auster a long time ago. It is conceptually separated from the ordinary area. This is a place similar to 'Inner Bone'."
"Inside the bone?"
"It's just...well, if you think of the shopping mall as the human body, this is the inside of the skeleton, but there is no marrow here, it is a hollow place. We are in the hollow of the bones."
Zhou Yu nodded. He understood this phenomenon as a modeling-like state. To them, a transparent wall may have a "texture" when viewed from the outside. Naturally, the sounds on both sides were completely isolated.
"So, what to do?" he asked, "Do you want to go up?"
"...That's all we have to do."
The only way in front of you is to spiral up the stairs. Even if you understand that this must be a trap designed by someone, there is no other way to go. The two of them climbed the steps one after another.
Before turning the first spiral, Zhou Yu glanced at Cai Ji who was kneeling on the ground: "Are you going to stay there forever?"
When the other party didn't respond, Zhou Yu continued to climb up. After walking more than ten steps, he saw Cai Ji standing up silently through the glass steps under his feet.
The three people were divided into two groups and climbed up at a spiral distance.
The transparent spiral staircase has no resting platform at all. It rises straight from the ground floor to the heights, running through the mall like a giant tree in the atrium. When climbing, not only can you see the entire shopping mall, but you can even see the sections between the walls and the ground. At its most exaggerated, a pedestrian walked straight towards them, so from both sides of the cylindrical space, one could see the person's internal structure, heart beating, and blood flowing.
This scene is indeed like observing the human body from an intraosseous perspective.
The stairs were very gentle, with only a height difference of about five centimeters on each step, but after climbing about 800 steps, Zhou Yu also felt out of breath.
He took out his phone and looked at the time. It was already half past ten.
"...red leaves."
"What's wrong?"
"The man said our time is until the moon sets, right?"
"Um……"
"Tonight's moon is a new moon...if the calculation is correct, a moon in this form will completely fall below the horizon around midnight. So the betting game does not end at dawn."
So, they fell into the trap of talking.
It was a little too late to realize it until now, but he did not curse the short fat man's rhetorical tricks, but silently accelerated his climbing speed.
After all, where does this endless staircase lead?
Zhou Yu looked up and saw that the overlapping glass structures reflected brilliant lights, which converged into an extremely tiny point of light at the end of the spiral.
The sight, he suddenly realized, was like being inside an animal's horn, trying to get out toward the tip.
