It soon grew light. After resting for an hour, everyone began the second round of luring the monster.
This time, they placed the sound item on the eighth floor. Peng Fengnian and Lin Zhenhuai took up positions at opposite ends: one watched the rooms at the end of the hallway, while the other waited by the stairwell.
The others split up and hid in different rooms, with two more posted on the tenth and sixth floors.
After Miss Gao activated the item, rhythmic pounding echoed through the hallway. Just seconds later, a beast's roar came from downstairs!
"How could this be?!"
The people there all paled. The monster had disappeared on the eighth floor before, so if there was a passage on that floor or nearby, it should have appeared in the vicinity. How could it be downstairs? Judging by the sound, it seemed to be between the third and fourth floors!
Xu Huo was the first to react. Grabbing the Strings, he leaped downstairs, climbed in through a fifth-floor window, and rushed out of the room. All he caught was a glimpse of a shadow darting through the stairwell. That instant was enough for him to make out the monster's appearance—the fur that had been burned off seemed to have grown back, its skin, which had been electrocuted, had fully healed, and even its other injuries were gone.
He didn't chase after the monster. Instead, he went down to the fourth floor and opened his Spiritual World to search for any spatial passage that might have appeared. Before he could get halfway through, Lin Zhenhuai came down too, carrying the item that could detect spatial fluctuations.
Following the traces left on the ground, Xu Huo had already checked the likeliest place for the monster to have emerged. Before Lin