Fifth Floor

Back in the room, Zhou You picked up the candle and walked out through the door for the third time.

The Bone Cleaver, Meat Grinder, and Electric Soldering Iron were right in front of him, but he still had no intention of touching them. After all, he hadn't explored the Fifth Floor yet. He planned to check it out first.

After all, unless they had no other choice, nobody in the world would willingly cut open their own body.

After searching himself for a while, Zhou You found a box of matches in his jacket pocket. He relit the candle and headed for the stairs.

One step, two steps, three, four... The candle showed no change all the way to the Fourth Floor. But the moment he stepped onto the stairs leading to the Fifth Floor, the candle flame—which had always burned so meekly—suddenly flickered. Then, as if someone had added an accelerant, it began to blaze fiercely!

But Zhou You didn't rush ahead. First, he turned around and looked behind him.

The deformed hand and face had already emerged from the Couplets. But unlike last time, they seemed unable to see Zhou You, though he stood right beside them, and simply drifted back and forth in confusion.

"Looks like this thing takes effect immediately, and it really can completely block the Couplets on the Fourth Floor from sensing me. I just don't know if it'll work on the Landlady... Never mind, I'll think about that later. The most important thing right now is..."

Zhou You stared at the hollow face and took a deep breath, filling his lungs with dusty air. Then, abandoning his earlier calm, he sprinted toward the Fifth Floor with all his strength!

He covered the stairs, less than ten meters long, in an instant. The Fifth Floor was the attic of the apartment building. There was only one door, with a heavy, old-fashioned padlock hanging from it.

Zhou You shoved the key he'd filched from the Landlady—no, picked up—into the lock. It took several tries before he finally managed to release the nearly rusted-shut catch.

The lock hit the floor with a dull thud. Zhou You didn't care whether the noise would attract the Landlady. By the time it got here, the candle would be almost burned out anyway. Whether he was killed by whatever was on the Fourth Floor or by the Landlady wouldn't make much difference. He pushed hard against the old wooden door.

With a piercing creak, the escape route finally opened before him!

But Zhou You suddenly froze.

No, it wasn't that he'd seen something despair-inducing, like there being no way out. If it really had been a dead end, then given his temperament, he would've spat, flipped off the pages, and looked for another way. He froze for a different reason.

He saw corpses.

And not just one.

There were so many corpses.

Right before Zhou You, layer upon layer of human bodies hung from the attic ceiling. At first glance, there had to be nearly a hundred. Every corpse's chest had been completely cut open, all the organs inside gone, leaving only shriveled chunks of flesh and bones like deadwood.

And somehow, despite the number of corpses, few of them had rotted. Almost all their faces were frozen in the instant of death: fear, pleading, despair, rage, collapse...

Even Zhou You, with his nerves of steel, felt the hairs on his body stand on end under the gaze of so many dead eyes.

There was no doubt that they were all tenants—tenants who couldn't afford the rent and had been dissected alive, torn apart, and sold off by that "Landlady."

Among the corpses, Zhou You even spotted several figures noticeably shorter than the others, with young, immature faces.

How utterly...

Zhou You closed his eyes and silently bit his lip.

But he quickly suppressed his thoughts and continued.

—The candle was almost burned out. He had to hurry.

Zhou You stepped into the attic, but the moment he crossed the threshold, his expression changed again.

A strange smell flooded his nostrils. It was like rotten eggs left out under the blazing sun for three days. Along with it came a slight dizziness and a feeling of suffocation.

Having grown up in the countryside, Zhou You quickly recognized what it was.

Biogas—and at a fairly high concentration.

—It looked like it had built up from some of the corpses rotting, but it was still bearable.

Keeping that in mind, Zhou You looked around in the faint light filtering down from the ceiling.

The corpses took up most of the space, but he could make out a pile of miscellaneous objects in one corner. At the far end was the exit he'd been waiting for: a broken skylight set in the attic roof. Unfortunately, there was no ladder or anything like one beneath it. The only way up was to pile the clutter and corpses higher, piece by piece, until they formed a path to escape.

By Zhou You's estimate, this would take about eight minutes. That might seem short, but if he added the fact that he had "only one arm" and would "need to come out for air from time to time," then it would take a little over twenty minutes.

...Exactly how long it would take him to sprint here and burn through three candles.

Suddenly, Zhou You laughed.

"I suppose this really is a 'Novice Dungeon.' The way to beat it is pretty straightforward—and it turns out my earlier deduction was spot-on."

After that, he said nothing more. He glanced at the candle, now little more than a stub, and blew it out without waiting for it to burn down completely.

The next moment, a shrill roar came from the Fourth Floor.

In just a few seconds, the deformed hands had climbed into the attic. As if furious with humiliation, they grabbed Zhou You, whose face remained calm, and dragged him away.

"Bang!"

Blood and flesh flew everywhere.

"You died."

"Your death wasn't in vain."

"The path to escape has been revealed to you. Leave this haunted building constructed by the Landlady, and you will receive a reward."

"Since you are still a novice player, you may use 10 points..."

But this time, before the woman's voice could finish, Zhou You waved his hand and told it to shut up.

Then he didn't say another word. He simply chose to enter the dungeon again.

By some coincidence, when he was transported to the save point this time, the first thing he saw was the self-mutilation toolkit.

He'd more or less figured out the story by now. It seemed that under normal circumstances, there was only one way to beat the dungeon: cut off his arm, use the soldering iron to stop the bleeding, then endure the pain and make two candles before escaping through the skylight...

That was how games usually worked. No matter how you played or what shortcuts you took, you still had to follow the creator's script to its ending.

But then again.

Zhou You had never liked playing by the rules.

Besides, compared to carefully planned schemes and plots, he actually preferred the simple, brute-force approach of kicking down the door.

So he suddenly raised his head and asked the empty space, "Excuse me, I'd like to ask: if I cut off my arm here and beat the game, will my injury carry over into reality?"

A few seconds later, the woman's voice sounded beside his ear.

"Esteemed player, all injuries and losses you suffer in the game will be restored when you complete it. Please don't worry about pain or disability. Feel free to play however you wish."

It was a clear answer and a clear hint, but Zhou You didn't use the self-mutilation toolkit as expected. Instead, he picked up the candle and said with a smile,

"Is that so? Then, as you wish, I'll start playing 'however I wish.'"