"Drip, drip..."
Clear drops of water struck Ji Li's forehead, wetting the lock of long hair and tapping at his slumbering soul.
In the pin-drop silence, he slowly opened his gray-black eyes and looked up at this new environment.
Once the familiar dizziness passed, he had already finished surveying his surroundings. The place was so cramped that he could see all of it at a glance.
It was a long, narrow stone chamber with less than five square meters of usable space. Standing inside felt painfully confining. Someone with Wang Da Chui's build would probably have felt as though he were suffocating.
There was nothing inside the chamber. Hard stone walls sealed it off above, below, and on either side. Ji Li tapped them twice with his cane. The dull sound indicated that there were no hidden passages.
The chamber's door was a sturdy barred gate welded from steel rods as thick as an adult's arm.
Beyond the gate lay pitch-black darkness. That area did not seem particularly large either, but there was virtually no light, making it impossible to tell what was out there.
Ji Li stood before the gate, gripped the bars, and shook them hard several times. When they refused to budge, he took out his lighter to examine the lock outside.
The lock was as large as an adult's fist. With it firmly secured, opening the gate without a key or someone outside to help was utterly impossible.
At this point, a few glances were enough to establish the situation—he was trapped.
Ji Li established the situation with a few glances—he was trapped.
This five-square-meter stone chamber was a prison cell. Some "person" had locked him inside to await the official start of the Special Project.
Following that line of reasoning, the other staff members participating