"Ding, ding, ding!"
On the ninth floor of the Northwest Building, the elevator doors kept opening and closing, making that unsettling sound.
Clyde's lower jaw was completely gone, and half his tongue had been cut off. Coupled with his half-red, half-black face, he looked especially eerie in the night.
Lan Yu was startled. Nothing had seemed unusual about Clyde when his back was turned, but the moment Lan Yu saw his face, he sensed danger.
That half-dark, half-light state in particular seemed to have changed something unseen.
Meanwhile, the rational woman behind him stepped forward, gesturing as she walked.
Lan Yu frowned, caught her sleeve, and held her back. His sense of foreboding was growing stronger and stronger.
Clyde still stood at the elevator entrance, cupping the space where his missing jaw had been. His azure eyes were clouded, making it impossible to tell what he was thinking.
He did not move, however. He simply stared at Lan Yu in the same pose, his other hand still pointing at the severed tongue in his mouth.
"Bzzzz!"
Suddenly, a piercing noise filled Lan Yu's ears, forcing him to reflexively close his eyes. And in that brief instant when he blinked—
The world before him underwent a terrifying, earth-shattering transformation.
Old Yu Street sank into endless darkness. In that void so black he could not see his own hand, he saw half a face and half a leg leaning against the elevator entrance.
Clyde?
That half of his face was dark red, and the half-leg was the one he had injured in his fall. They stood eerily alone before the elevator's blinking indicator lights.
The black half of his face and all his other body parts had vanished, as though the sudden darkness had swallowed them too.
Yet a winding trail of