As he fell from the Fifth Floor window with Little Black Cat tucked in one arm, Su Bai saw the guest rooms below.
Plummeting past the fourth and third floors before slowing as he descended toward the second, Su Bai saw "people" standing at the windows of those guest rooms. They wore all sorts of clothes and varied in age and gender. Their eyes were vacant and bewildered, and some of their bodies were even translucent.
They were no longer people. They were ghost creatures, wandering souls with barely any power at all.
Su Bai had heard the others mention that, although every floor of the hotel had more than twenty rooms, only a few keys on each floor were available to the players. At first, he had assumed the game was deliberately scattering the players across the floors.
But as Su Bai fell past all those figures crowding the windows, he suddenly realized that the hotel's other rooms...
Had been fully occupied all along.
The wandering souls standing numbly at the windows wore somewhat strange clothes. They resembled Western attire from a century ago in the real world, yet looked oddly incongruous, with elements of styles he had never seen in reality.
Their clothes were not important, of course. What mattered was that, when Su Bai opened his umbrella and descended to the second floor, he saw a wandering soul standing at a window, dressed formally and adorned with jewelry. She was an elderly woman who looked very stern. Apart from her clothes, she looked exactly... exactly like the Number Five Waitress who had been in charge of the Buffet Restaurant!
At that moment, Su Bai suddenly understood.
This was the Nightmare World, a world filled with uncanny beings and departed souls.
In Su Bai's previous experiences in the