If someone tried silently counting off one number every second until they reached 1,200...
Most people would end up with a wildly different number.
Perhaps some unusual people could try keeping time through an [unchanging heartbeat], or, over shorter periods, with a [blood-drop clock].
But did you remember what had been said before?
[Here], every second had a different length.
A day had 24 hours, 1,440 minutes, and 86,400 seconds, but each second deviated from the corresponding second in the original world.
Fortunately, according to Ziwu's own measurements, those deviations were almost all greater than zero. In other words, every second was longer than in the original world, never shorter.
Ziwu had spent five years compiling statistics before determining the range of those deviations. Then Cheadle had figured it out through testing in half an hour.
Afterward, Ziwu had spent a full twenty years memorizing that numerical sequence, 86,400 entries long and actually representing 86,400 deviations, before he completely forgot [the true length of time].
So-
"I won't lose-they were just lucky-"
Ziwu sat rigidly in place, that sentence alone buzzing through his mind.
For twenty-five years, he had stayed at this hotel, eating the dried human flesh cured from the corpses of its former guests, counting time every day beneath the unchanging moon.
Because Druha had told him that, sooner or later, he would find a way back.
Back then, he had patrolled the enormous hotel through the endless night, with only corpses for company.
In those cold, dead hours of night, Ziwu was always frightened by the footsteps of those guests in his hallucinations, too afraid to look back.
He feared he would once again see those people standing there, whole and unharmed, in the pale moonlight.
With their stark white feet, nothing but bones, they pounded the