Inside Room 1408, the cold pierced their bones.
Outside Room 1408, ash and embers from the explosions lay everywhere. The intense heat had been brought under control, but beneath the flickering corridor lights, shambling nurses and Withered Branches were everywhere.
Cracks had already appeared in the ward's walls. Xu Rui, Tian Yue, and the others stood battered and disheveled against the ward door, their backs pressed tight to it. They dared not sit down or let their hands touch the floor again.
Feng Xuelan had already regressed five years in age. Now she looked no older than fourteen or fifteen, and her clothes no longer fit.
Xu Rui and Tian Yue were showing signs of regression too, as though they had returned to the most vigorous years of their youth, but this clearly brought them no joy.
Not far from the three of them, a boy who looked five or six lay on a hospital bed, his body covered in scrapes and bruises, his face as pale as paper.
That was Xiang Feiyu, already pushed to his limit by the rules. If those "nurses" got near him one more time, he would likely fail the game outright and vanish forever into some corner of this world.
The ward was silent and oppressive. None of them could say how much time had passed.
Ever since Su Bai and the others had stepped onto the stairs leading to the Fifteenth Floor, their figures swallowed by dense fog and the unknown, every moment had become painfully slow.
Earlier, in the stairwell, Tian Yue and the others had tried to climb the stairs to check on Su Bai's group, but dense fog had suddenly appeared and blocked their way. They had not dared go any farther.
At the same time, the stairwell had begun