Chapter Summaries

Plot points and events

• Su Chenghe wakes in an unfamiliar, bare room lined with white tiles. Its resemblance to room 1604—the site of a deadly “chef, ingredients, and diners” game—triggers memories of the ordeal in which he was butchered and lost his right foot.
• Li Guanqi, severely mutilated and bleeding, tells Su that he has broken through a barrier and orders him to escape. He collapses immediately afterward.
• Su carries Li toward the exit and tries to use his supernatural right foot to teleport them. It fails, suggesting that the room’s connection to the foot’s origin is interfering with its power.
• Remembering Li’s warning about the breached barrier, Su hurries for the doorway. There he finds the corridor blocked by heaps of bodies in black bags and a greasy, advancing floor.
• The former “ingredients” have returned as vengeful ghosts. They accuse Su of taking what belonged to them and demand repayment, revealing that the restarted manager mission has transformed the old victims into the threat.

Character developments

• Su Chenghe is disoriented by fragmented memories and terrified by his return to a place tied to his past. Despite his fear and uncertainty, he chooses to carry the unconscious Li to safety. His former escape route—the right foot he gained in 1604—now fails him.
• Li Guanqi appears to have forced open the barrier at great personal cost. Though he manages to warn Su, his condition leaves Su to face the immediate danger alone.

Character interactions

• Li’s urgent command to flee gives Su a possible route out, and Su responds by trying to save him rather than abandoning him.
• The ghosts address Su directly, treating him as someone who owes them a debt. Their accusation turns the old relationship between victim and “chef” into a new confrontation.

Significant themes

• Past trauma returning: Su’s escape from 1604 has not ended its hold over him; the setting and his failed power revive the terror of his earlier helplessness.
• Reversed roles and revenge: The former victims have become the hunters, while the old order of chef, ingredients, and diners has been overturned.
• Debts and consequences: Survival through the earlier ordeal now appears to carry a cost, as the dead demand that Su repay what was taken.

Plot points and events

• Wei Guang reaches room 1518 on the fifteenth floor and is pulled inside by Chen Binbin, whom he had been searching for. A nearly dead person is concealed behind the door.
• Chen asks how long Wei Guang has been on the floor. When Wei says he is nearly seven minutes in, Chen hurriedly strips the hidden person and uses their body to seal the door’s gaps, then covers the peephole.
• Chen explains the floor’s recurring “finding someone” rule: every seven to eight minutes, a ghost knocks on each room. If no one answers, it breaks in and kills people until it finds its target.
• Chen’s current tactic is to disguise a victim as an unidentified substitute at the door, hoping to confuse the ghost and make it drag the substitute away instead of entering. He has been using the floor’s occupants this way, but Wei suspects the method only delays the danger and wastes people.
• With the next round apparently due, Wei decides not to wait. He runs to the balcony and prepares to climb onto the neighboring air-conditioning unit. A violent knock at the door interrupts him.

Character developments

• Wei Guang remains cautious but increasingly takes initiative. He notices the hidden person, questions the logic of Chen’s plan, and acts on his growing sense that the room is unsafe.
• Chen Binbin is revealed as highly anxious and practiced in a brutal survival routine. He has found a temporary way to survive, but seems focused on repeating it rather than understanding the ghost’s rules.

Significant themes

• Survival under uncertainty: The characters have incomplete information and must make dangerous choices before time runs out.
• The cost of survival: Chen’s method preserves himself by sacrificing others, raising the question of whether mere delay is a viable solution.
• Pattern, rules, and misinterpretation: The floor’s carefully arranged conditions suggest a deeper solution that Chen may have misunderstood.

Character interactions

• Chen urgently questions Wei about his arrival time and explains the danger, while physically controlling the room’s entrance with a victim’s body.
• Wei listens but distrusts Chen’s strategy, choosing independent action rather than following it.
• The chapter ends with the ghost—or whatever is at the door—arriving just as Wei attempts to escape.

Key plot points and events

• Wei Guang clings to the exterior grille outside Room 1518, unsettled by violent pounding at the door. He suspects Chen Binbin’s plan is failing, but waits to see what happens.
• The pounding suddenly stops. Chen Binbin freezes, then begins turning his head in an unnatural, mechanical way. Just before Wei Guang can see his face, Wei leaps across to the air-conditioning unit outside Room 1519.
• After several blows, Wei breaks Room 1519’s window and climbs inside. He searches for the room’s living occupant, whom Chen Binbin had described as a “substitute” to divert the ghost.
• Wei reasons that Chen Binbin’s method relied on an unspoken rule: one room, one living person, and one substitute. Room 1518 had two living people, breaking that pattern and prompting the ghost to attack. Wei suspects the ghost had been cooperating with Chenbin’s deception—and may now have possessed him.
• Wei concludes he must find a substitute and imitate Chen Binbin’s method to establish a new arrangement with the ghost. Soon, gentle, measured knocking begins at Room 1519’s door.

Character developments

• Wei Guang shifts from observing Chen Binbin’s strategy to acting independently. His quick escape shows his nerve, while his deductions reveal a growing understanding of the ghost’s rules.
• Chen Binbin appears to have lost control of his plan. His unnatural stillness and head movement suggest he may be dead or possessed, though Wei cannot confirm it.

Character interactions

• Wei and Chen Binbin cooperate uneasily: Wei watches Chenbin’s plan, then realizes his presence may have disrupted it.
• The ghost’s relationship with Chenbin seems less like simple pursuit and more like conditional cooperation. Wei now hopes to become its next “partner” by following the same pattern.

Significant themes

• Survival through rules and patterns: A small change in the number of people and substitutes may invalidate an otherwise effective strategy.
• Deception and complicity: The ghost may knowingly have allowed Chenbin’s method to work, making its apparent cooperation as dangerous as its violence.
• Desperation and moral compromise: Wei considers using another person as a substitute because he sees no safer path to survival.
• Uncertainty: Wei’s conclusions are plausible but unproven, leaving both the ghost’s motives and Chenbin’s fate unclear.

Key plot points and events

• Wei Guang escapes from Room 1518 into Room 1519 as the ghost pursues him, expecting to find a living person he can offer as a substitute.
• Room 1519 is clean and recently arranged, but empty. The ghost waits outside and grows impatient when Wei Guang cannot provide anyone.
• As the lock begins to give way, Wei Guang retreats through the window and considers fleeing to Room 1520 or returning to Room 1518. He chooses to return, judging that the known risk may be safer than an unknown room.
• He finds Chen Binbin dead on the floor, his neck broken. The ghost’s footsteps approach, and Wei Guang prepares to offer the substitute in the room.
• Before the ghost knocks, a dying hand grabs Wei Guang’s trousers. Its owner recognizes him and warns him not to trust Chen Binbin, claiming Chen has “been dead for a long time.”

Character developments

• Wei Guang has become more willing to sacrifice others to survive, a change from his former uncompromising integrity. Still, he thinks strategically, weighing risks and searching for clues rather than acting blindly.
• His choice to return to Room 1518 shows that he trusts familiar information more than the apparent safety of an unknown route.
• Chen Binbin’s death confirms the danger Wei Guang feared, but the final warning casts doubt on who—or what—Chen has been.

Significant themes

• Survival and moral compromise: Wei Guang is prepared to use a substitute, revealing how much his experiences have changed him.
• Uncertainty and trust: The apparent rules of the ghost’s behavior offer little security, and the warning about Chen destabilizes Wei Guang’s understanding of events.
• Time bought at a cost: Running and offering substitutes may delay danger, but neither provides lasting safety.

Character interactions

• The ghost pressures Wei Guang with coaxing knocks, then tries to force entry when he fails to comply.
• Wei Guang’s connection to Chen Binbin shifts from relying on him as a possible source of information to confronting his corpse—and then hearing a warning that implicates him.
• The dying stranger’s sudden intervention turns Wei Guang’s carefully chosen plan into a new mystery: whether Chen Binbin was ever truly alive.

Key plot points

• Xue Tingtao is trapped alone in the Fourteenth-Floor corridor, where every attempt to flee leads him back to a sealed black coffin outside Room 1424.
• He recognizes that he has entered a supernatural death rule. The ghost has not attacked, and he suspects the danger is designed to exploit his instinct to investigate and act.
• After nearly ten minutes of running, Xue decides to confront the situation on his own terms. He reasons that remaining still could leave him vulnerable if the ghost emerges, so he chooses to investigate Room 1424.
• He touches the faded death couplets on the door; a fragment crumbles, but the coffin remains still. Beneath the couplets, he finds a black security door and uses a silver key Sin Object to unlock it.
• The key is unusually powerful: it can open any locked barrier and can automatically create an escape route if its holder is attacked. As Xue turns it, the surroundings seem to change, and the resistance feels disturbingly like twisting someone’s neck.

Character development

• Xue’s fear remains intense, but he shows increased self-awareness and resolve. Rather than trying to suppress his nature or act fearlessly, he accepts his weakness and chooses an approach that fits him: investigating while preparing to face the danger.
• His extensive collection of Sin Objects highlights his resourcefulness and strong capacity for survival.

Character interactions

• Xue has no direct encounter with another character. His central interaction is with the apparent rules of the floor, the ominous coffin, and the locked entrance to Room 1424.

Significant themes

• Fear and adaptation: Xue’s progress comes from understanding his fear and working with it, rather than pretending it is gone.
• Rules as a form of danger: The threat may lie not in an immediate ghost attack but in actions that trigger a hidden death condition.
• Uncertainty and escalating tension: The corridor’s looping layout, the unmoving coffin, and the unsettling sensation of unlocking leave the true nature of the danger unresolved.

Key events

• In apartment 1424, Xue Tingtao experiences a sudden supernatural vision: a child is held underwater in bloody water by a swollen, pale, inhuman hand.
• He suspects the child may be the corpse lying in the coffin outside—the Tower Suppressing Ghost of the Fourteenth Floor—and that the vision may reveal how it was killed. The ghost, usually known only as a child in a coffin, may once have been a victim rather than a threat.
• The vision leaves no immediate physical or mental impairment, but its vividness stays with him. He cautiously searches the cold, damp apartment, where furniture is covered in white dust sheets.
• He considers two possible sources of danger: the Restroom, sealed behind layers of dust sheets and a plausible place for a basin, and the secondary bedroom, whose ajar door sways as dampness seeps from within.
• The chapter ends with Xue Tingtao weighing the two rooms, aware that one may be a deadly trap.

Character development and interactions

• Xue Tingtao is frightened but controlled: he pauses to assess the vision, gathers clues, and proceeds carefully rather than retreating.
• He questions what he thought he knew about the Fourteenth-Floor ghost and recognizes how little reliable information he has.
• No other characters appear directly; Gu Xingjian is mentioned as Xue Tingtao’s limited source of information about the ghost.

Significant themes

• Unreliable knowledge: The ghost’s presumed identity and history may be incomplete or mistaken.
• Victim and monster: The vision suggests that a feared supernatural entity may have originated as a helpless child.
• Choice under uncertainty: Xue Tingtao must decide which warning to trust when logic points to the Restroom but the strongest supernatural signs come from the bedroom.
• Atmosphere and dread: Cold, dampness, darkness, and the scraping from the coffin build tension around an approaching danger.

Su Chenghe was dragged back into Room 1604 just as he tried to escape with Li Guanqi, while Wei Guang and Xue Tingtao faced deadly threats on other floors. A white light swept through the Black and White Building and reset it, erasing the horrors and consequences across all eighteen floors.

• Su Chenghe used the Bone-Chilling Dagger to drag the unconscious Li Guanqi toward the exit of Room 1604, but a sinister voice seized his right leg and pulled them back inside.
• Wei Guang realized that the eyeless substitute was Ruan Xiao'ao, who blamed Chen Binbin, while a ghost rose behind Wei Guang and someone knocked at the door of Room 1518.
• Xue Tingtao chose to break into the sealed Restroom in Room 1424, but a pale, swollen arm burst through and grabbed his neck.
• A brilliant white light swept through all eighteen floors of the Black and White Building, erasing the horrors and resetting the building to zero.

Luo Xian used the Feather Pen Sin Item to erase supernatural power throughout the Black and White Building, then investigated Room 1001 and developed a theory that Old Madam Hu had died and the incident had become malformed. She found clues in the room but had not yet confirmed her theory when she discovered Old Madam Hu facing a strange Spirit Shrine.

• Luo Xian used the Feather Pen Sin Item to erase supernatural power throughout the Black and White Building for four hours, unknowingly saving people on the upper floors.
• Luo Xian reentered Room 1001 and suspected that Old Madam Hu had died by her own hand, leaving the killing process distorted and disorderly.
• Luo Xian examined Xie Zheng's corpse and reasoned that he might still be alive because the malformed incident had caused his corpse to appear too early.
• Luo Xian found that the Cheongsam Woman had turned into a human-shaped tallow candle with an Incense Stick piercing her body.
• Luo Xian entered Old Madam Hu's bedroom and found her facing a kneeling porcelain figure in a Spirit Shrine, their postures strikingly alike.

Luo Xian discovered that Xie Zheng’s severed head had been stuffed inside Old Madam Hu, confirming that the Tower Suppressing Ghost had been killed. As she realized Xie Zheng was the key to the distorted deaths in Room 1001, the waxen Cheongsam Woman grabbed her wrist and warned her to run.

• Luo Xian touched Old Madam Hu’s padded jacket and experienced a terrifying vision of the moments before Old Madam Hu’s death, then returned to the instant before she had made contact.
• Luo Xian circled around Old Madam Hu and found Xie Zheng’s severed head lodged in her abdominal cavity.
• Luo Xian concluded that Old Madam Hu had been killed and that multiple Xie Zheng deaths from different timelines had appeared in Room 1001.
• Luo Xian decided that Xie Zheng was the key to understanding the deaths and began retreating toward the exit.
• The waxen Cheongsam Woman seized Luo Xian’s wrist and told her to run.

Luo Xian realized room 1001 was a supernatural trap built around a monstrous face in the red fog, while Xue Tingtao uncovered how the drowned boy in room 1424 had become the Fourteenth Floor’s Tower Suppressing Ghost. The chapter left Luo Xian facing the face as it began to open its mouth and Xue Tingtao soaked in supernatural water after smashing the bathtub.

• Luo Xian saw her face change as the red fog surged, and she recognized that the room’s corpses, objects, and doorways formed an eerie human face.
• Luo Xian realized that the face was the source of the incident and that room 1001 had been a trap aimed solely at her.
• Luo Xian saw Old Madam Hu straighten up as the Bedroom doorway twisted open like the face’s mouth.
• Xue Tingtao recalled discovering a drowned, limbless boy in the second bedroom and a swollen ghost hand in the Restroom.
• Xue Tingtao concluded that the swollen ghost hand had turned the drowned boy into the Fourteenth Floor’s Tower Suppressing Ghost.
• Xue Tingtao smashed the dry bathtub and drenched himself in supernatural water, seeming to repeat what had happened to the boy.

Wei Guang rejected Chen Binbin and Ruan Xiao'ao's accounts and waited for the ghost to break into Room 1508, where he recognized a crucial part of the supernatural incident. Meanwhile, Su Chenghe fled the building carrying the injured Li Guanqi, torn between his desire to save him and the hatred growing within him.

• Wei Guang concluded that Chen Binbin and Ruan Xiao'ao had misled him and decided that only the ghost could be trusted.
• Wei Guang waited for the knocking to return and realized the ghost did not follow the rules Chen Binbin had described.
• The ghost broke through Room 1508's security door, and Wei Guang saw a familiar figure that revealed the three of them were central to the story.
• Su Chenghe carried the badly injured Li Guanqi down from the sixteenth floor during the cooling-off period.
• Su Chenghe struggled with resentment toward Li Guanqi over Wang Da Chui's death and the collapse of Branch No. 2, unaware that another hand was resting on his shoulder.

Gu Xingjian watched the Black and White Building’s survivors through the surveillance system as Wei Jiande arrived at the building. Gu Xingjian promised to take Wei Jiande to meet the Ultimate after he completed his task.

• A guesthouse owner watched Wei Jiande wait on Temple Street, then saw him vanish after hearing a faint message in his earpiece.
• Gu Xingjian monitored the building from Room 0215, where an unconscious woman with a strange second face lay behind him.
• Gu Xingjian focused on the silent Eighteenth Floor, where he believed at least two people were still alive.
• Wei Jiande pushed open the building’s front door and told Gu Xingjian he had arrived as agreed.
• Gu Xingjian told Wei Jiande that he would take him to meet the Ultimate once he had done what was required.

Wei Jiande, acting as Gu Xingjian’s final executioner, climbed to the Eighteenth Floor of the Black and White Building to photograph Room 1818. In the darkness, he was attacked by what appeared to be White Wolf’s skin and foot.

• Wei Jiande accepted Gu Xingjian’s request to serve as his final executioner, driven by his desire to keep living and search for his missing daughter.
• Wei Jiande armed himself with White Wolf’s cross shotgun and climbed through the Black and White Building while Gu Xingjian warned him to prioritize the Eighteenth Floor.
• Wei Jiande reached the Eighteenth Floor and headed toward Room 1818 to take a photograph for Gu Xingjian.
• As Wei Jiande stepped onto the floor, his right foot was crushed and something limp pressed against his back.
• Wei Jiande tore the thing away and shot it, discovering that it was White Wolf’s skin and foot.

On the Eighteenth Floor, Wei Jiande encountered supernatural visions that stirred memories he could not identify, including a red shoe and a photograph. The photograph revealed a smiling little girl, and Wei Jiande’s reaction suggested she was deeply connected to him.

• Wei Jiande shot White Wolf’s skin again, then discovered that his injured foot had become a red women’s shoe.
• Wei Jiande tore off the shoe, painfully stripping skin from his foot, and found a photograph stuck to its sole.
• A pale, frail figure in padded clothes approached Wei Jiande with a white handkerchief, but fled after his attack failed.
• Wei Jiande realized his communicator was missing and continued toward Room 1818 as a child’s cries began and stopped with each step.
• Wei Jiande fired into the empty corridor, and the gunfire revealed the photograph’s image of a smiling little girl with two braids.

Wei Jiande abandoned his mission and entered Room 1818, choosing to embrace the daughter he had searched for despite knowing she was a ghost’s false vision. He held the terrified girl as danger crept up behind him, no longer caring what happened to himself.

• Wei Jiande chose to enter Room 1818 and see the girl, even though he knew the scene was false.
• Wei Jiande rushed through the doorway, while his action camera recorded what was inside.
• Wei Jiande found a little girl chained to a heating pipe beneath a table, with moldy food and water nearby.
• Wei Jiande called the girl Xiao Ran and pulled her into his arms.
• The frightened girl struggled and bit Wei Jiande’s shoulder as he held her, ignoring the danger behind him.