Back at the Corpse Hiding Hotel, if the footsteps they heard had come from the Mirror Hotel, they wouldn't have been so steady and regular.
As for Peng Fengnian's certainty that no Players had entered before them, that still needed to be verified. It wasn't that Xu Huo didn't trust them; it was simply very difficult to verify in the first place.
But the footsteps they heard in the Mirror Hotel could be cross-referenced with the movements of Players outside... This meant the "footsteps" they heard before entering and after entering weren't the same kind. It also fit the fact that the "footsteps" in the Corpse Hiding Hotel could lead people into the Mirror Hotel, while the "footsteps" heard in the Mirror Hotel couldn't lead them out.
If that assumption was correct, the Players were trapped in a hopeless situation—the Mirror Hotel really was a place you could enter but never leave.
"We speculated before that maybe we simply hadn't heard the right footsteps in the Mirror Hotel." Lin Zhenhuai said, "We shouldn't wander around inside the Mirror Hotel. Maybe the footsteps appear on other floors..."
"That doesn't hold up." Xu Huo replied at once. "The footsteps in the Corpse Hiding Hotel follow the Players. You also tracked the footsteps outside from the Mirror Hotel, and asked other Players to confirm where the footsteps overlapped with their movements. The footsteps in the Corpse Hiding Hotel last for varying lengths of time. You should have run into the footsteps outside at least once."
"Unless you were so unlucky that you missed them every single time. In that case, the footsteps outside must be avoiding the Players in the Mirror Hotel."
"Th-that isn't necessarily true," Gao Xiaoyue said. "We've never encountered Players whose footsteps overlapped on both sides."
They had been willing