"And Young Master Chu and the others never came back out after entering the passage on the left." Fatty first examined the characters for "Chu" and "Qiao" on the left, then ran to the right-hand corner to look around. "If Young Master Chu had come out from the left and gone right, someone as meticulous as him would have left a mark on the right too;
"Like marking the left fork with a one first, then the right fork with a two."
"The bad news is, there's only a one, no two. They haven't come back in all this time, so either they found a hidden passage, or they kicked the bucket and are waiting for us to dig their graves," Gu Mian murmured eerily into Fatty's ear.
Spooked by Gu Mian, Fatty hurriedly dragged him into the left fork to rescue Chu Changge and the others from danger.
Like the corridor before it, this passage had rooms on both sides.
But they found plenty of traces left by people here.
There were lots of empty food wrappers and plastic bottles in the rooms, trash people had tossed onto the floor after eating.
There was also less dust on the floor and inside the rooms here, suggesting that people moved around this area frequently.
Blocks of writing began appearing on the walls. On closer inspection, they turned out to be something like diary entries.
The first one Gu Mian saw read-
"Day 178. It should be the hundred and seventy-eighth day, anyway. Our only watch ran out of battery ages ago, and I can't tell how many days we've been here anymore... Orange said a few days ago that the water in the water storage room was almost gone, and told us to look in the other rooms for more.