Sealing the Keys

Xia Shou remembered the unfinished sentence Liu Guangyao had left behind: "That person once went up to the top floor, but there actually is no top floor."

What did that mean?

He had been to the top floor.

Yet there was no top floor at all.

Wasn't that a contradiction?

For now, though, the most pressing problem was their lack of hearing and sight. Although he could use Alice to access Su Weiyu's field of vision, that was still what Su Weiyu saw, not what he saw. Moving around remained extremely difficult.

On top of that, only one of them could hear at a time, which would make the battles ahead even harder.

If only he could devour the Doctor. Perhaps that would give him a corresponding skill to counteract the current side effects.

Unfortunately, the Doctor had turned to ash the instant he died, leaving only a key behind.

...A key?

Could he devour a key?!

"Weiyu, give me the Hearing Key."

A moment later, a key was pressed into his hand.

Xia Shou gripped the key, considering two possibilities.

The first possibility.

Their blindness and deafness were simply curses inflicted by killing the Doctors and had nothing to do with the keys. The keys were merely temporary remedies.

The second possibility.

The curses they had acquired did not actually come from the Doctors, but from the keys. After the Doctors died, their anomaly had condensed into these physical objects. The mere existence of a key caused everyone in the Sanatorium who was not a staff member to lose one of their senses, while only its holder could temporarily escape the curse.

"Let's test it a little." Xia Shou turned his shadow into Black Swamp again and carefully touched the handle of the key to the dark shadow.

The instant the key touched the shadow, text appeared before Xia Shou's eyes.

[Devouring progress: 0.95%]!

Keys could be devoured too!

Back at the hospital on the other side, Su Weiyu had already seen Xia Shou use his shadow to devour anomalous patients, but she still did not know exactly what the shadow did.

"What does that accomplish?" Su Weiyu asked in confusion.

Xia Shou tossed the Hearing Key back to Su Weiyu. "Eating certain Anomalous Entities lets me acquire related skills and things. Honestly, I don't fully understand it myself, but the shadow might be able to eat this key."

"But without the key, wouldn't we lose our one chance to be exempt from the negative effect?"

"Not necessarily. There are two possibilities. The first is that we really do lose that exemption. The second is that the key itself is what's cursing us. It gives us one exemption while imposing the curse. If we devour it, the curse might disappear altogether."

"But we need the key to open the door. If you eat it, how are we supposed to open that door on the first floor?"

"That's why I want to go back to the first floor and study the door's structure. Let's head down."

When they returned to the first floor, Wang Long was leaning against the wall, staring blankly ahead as though he had nothing left to live for.

He was now both blind and deaf, and had not even noticed Xia Shou and Su Weiyu's arrival.

Xia Shou did not disturb Wang Long. He walked straight to the door fitted with the enormous disk-shaped lock and inserted the Vision Key into its keyhole.

Click!

The key turned.

A faint sound of precision machinery rubbing together came from within the keyhole. Certain mechanisms sprang open, and gears turned inside.

Xia Shou could clearly feel that part of the mechanism inside had been unlocked.

He pulled the key back out. The unlocked section of the disk-shaped lock showed no sign of returning to its original state. In other words, they did not need to insert all five keys at once. Each key only needed to be used once to unlock its corresponding section.

"Looks like we can undo part of the seal with a key first. That means I really can try devouring it," Xia Shou muttered to himself.

Devouring a key outright carried enormous risks, but when he thought about fighting another three Doctors while blind and deaf, Xia Shou felt that taking a chance might not be such a bad idea.

To be safe, however, he planned to devour the Auditory Key first. That way, even if something went wrong, they would at least still have the Vision Key. After all, being unable to see was far more dangerous than being unable to hear.

After unlocking both the ear and eye sections, Xia Shou bent down and placed the Auditory Key into the dark shadow at his feet. A progress bar appeared before his eyes again.

[Devouring progress: 23%...41%...]

[Devouring progress: 100%]

[Unable to devour...]

Xia Shou's heart lurched. How was that possible? It actually could not be devoured!

A second later, the text before him blurred and changed again, and new words appeared.

[Beginning sealing...]

Two chains of multicolored flame suddenly shot out of the pitch-black shadow. They wrapped around the key, which was half-submerged in the shadow, and slowly dragged it into the depths.

[Sealing complete!]

[You have sealed an Anomalous Item-[Idrisu's Auditory Key]]

[Description: Human organs are like doors. Whether they open or close is beyond their owner's control.]

[Anomaly Level: 2]

[Effect: When unsealed, all living beings that are not Idrisu's Kin will lose their sense of hearing within the area covered by Idrisu's Domain, or within a hundred-meter radius of the key. Only the key's holder is exempt from this effect.]

[Note: Sealing Items are like lead weights strapped to your body, accelerating the speed at which you sink into the "sea." The more Sealing Items you carry, the faster you sink.]

It seemed that sealing merely suppressed an Anomalous Item's effects. Unlike devouring something, it did not grant the holder a new ability.

"I can hear! Did Xia Shou win?!" Wang Long, who had been sitting on the floor all this time, was the first to react.

Xia Shou replied coolly, "Not yet, but the good news is that I'm still alive."

Xia Shou switched his left eye to Deep-Sea View and saw the changing depth gauge. Its reading had already passed 1,200 meters, and the centimeters were changing rapidly.

By his rough estimate, the gauge would cross the red line at 1,300 meters again in another two hours.

If he sealed the Vision Key now, his sinking speed would increase even further.

And he still had many more keys to seal, so the time he actually had to act would be even shorter.

Although accelerated sinking was a frightening price to pay, there was no denying that the shadow's sealing function had greatly improved their chances of survival.

Xia Shou

tilted his head slightly and looked toward the stairs they had just descended. "Weiyu, let's go."

The two returned to the second floor. At the entrance to the third floor, Xia Shou finished sealing the Eye Key. Its effects were much the same as those of the ear key. Once Xia Shou and Su Weiyu regained their normal vision, Xia Shou's sinking speed increased again.

Xia Shou reached out and slowly pushed open the tightly shut door in front of him, revealing a long, narrow corridor.

The corridor was littered with corpses.