"Hey, hey, hey, where are you going? Stop now." Seeing Lu Yanli walking out without looking back, Brain became anxious and wanted to call him.
"It's very dangerous outside. If you go out, you will be eaten by them."
It didn't lie. All the objects in containment were released. Negative states were superimposed and devoured each other. The situation was very chaotic. Otherwise, all the personnel in the institute would not have unanimously decided to abandon containment and go to the new world.
Lu Yanli continued walking without looking back: "You don't need to worry about it. I'll take a look."
It claimed that there was no one else in the institute, but since the outside world had already fallen into doomsday, would anyone in the institute still stay here? Since the brain wanted to keep him, it meant that he must have some special use for it.
"And now I think it's not bad to get along with it." When Lu Yanli said "it", he was referring to the statue.
What he said was that he just wanted to see what else the brain could do besides commanding others.
"You can't have sex with it!" the brain screamed.
Lu Yanli had already opened the door and walked out.
Unlike the way he came in, he entered another different passage, a corridor so white without a speck of dust, with identical doors lined up on both sides of the walls.
"Are you afraid that I will call it over?" Lu Yanli pushed open the first door closest to him and spoke to the brain in a low voice. He knew that the other party should have installed some monitoring devices connected to the entire underground base, so it could hear it. "If I bring you to the surface, guess who will be swallowed first?"
The brain said nothing more.
The room was completely dark, with only the light from the corridor barely illuminating a small distance inside the door. With the weak light, Lu Yanli could see clearly what was behind the door.
There are rows of thin and narrow rectangular cabinets standing upright, which are exactly the same in size and other details. At first glance, they look like rows of upright coffins.
Lu Yanli had seen these cabinets before. When they mistakenly entered the wax museum in the small town, they were trapped in a cabinet with a fierce ghost behind them. Then, they heard a roar similar to that of a wild beast coming from outside the cabinet.
"What are these cabinets? What's in them?" Lu Yanli asked.
His brain didn't answer him, so he asked the question as if it were his own answer. He looked around for a while and then stepped into the door.
As he took the first step, he frowned. The floor of the room was strange. Even with light footsteps, it made a loud noise, creating a shaking effect. He came to the first cabinet by the door, hesitated for a while, and finally reached out and opened the door.
There was nothing in the cabinet. After it was opened, it seemed to lose all its support and collapsed with a loud bang, scattering into a pile of waste on the ground. Because of the special device in the room, every move was particularly harsh, not to mention the sudden collapse of the cabinet, the volume was so loud that he needed to cover his ears.
"Nothing?" he asked again, "What are you hiding?"
As he spoke, he opened the second cabinet, but there was still nothing inside. Just like before, the cabinet fell down as soon as it was opened.
There was no evil spirit, no cold aura, no one hiding in the closet. The brain still did not answer.
The third one, the fourth one... it's still the same.
Amid the huge noise, he suddenly heard a slight vibration coming from somewhere.
There is something there!
Lu Yanli ran over without thinking and followed the sound to the corresponding cabinet. He already had his hand on the cabinet door and was about to open it...
Wait! There's someone hiding in the closet!
Lu Yanli suddenly realized something was wrong.
Back in the wax museum, he hid in the cabinet on the far left of the first row. At that time, he heard an unknown creature rushing in from outside the door. The footsteps sounded like some kind of giant monster, and the monster opened cabinet doors one after another, as if looking for something.
Then, he made a remote call and lured the monster over.
So, his current behavior is...
"You want to tell me that everything was caused by me? That monster is me?!" Nothing could be more ridiculous. If everything was true, what would he see when he opened the cabinet door
A real monster? Or your future self
He kept his hand on the cabinet door for a long time, and finally pulled it open with force.
Lu Yanli didn't believe the suggestion of his brain. He wanted to see whether Men Yuan was there.
The cupboard was empty.
Strictly speaking, it was not empty, as there was a pool of blood that had not yet coagulated and a small candle that was still burning.
At the same time, he heard the sound of another cabinet door being opened not far away, and it seemed that something ran out from outside the cabinet.
He suddenly wanted to laugh, and he actually laughed out loud, but there was no smile in his eyes, only coldness.
"If you want to tell me something else, go on." After that, he turned and left, closed the door, and opened another one.
The moment he pushed open the door, a pool of blood from an unknown creature flowed to his feet. He adjusted to the darkness for a while before he could see the furnishings in the room clearly.
Opposite the room was a stepped exhibition stand, placed against the wall, with each level filled with paper figures, their faces pale, their red lips curled, blood flowing out from under the stand. Looking more closely, the paper figures' empty eyes were staring at the man at the door.
Those paper figures have no eyes.
"Don't you want me to pass?" Lu Yanli lowered his head and looked at the outside. More and more blood was flowing out of the door, but it never flowed out of the door, as if there was some invisible barrier preventing the liquid from flowing out.
But he still walked over, letting himself step on the sticky, wet, cold blood surface, making a crackling sound. Lu Yanli came to the pile of paper figures and slightly raised his head to look in the distance.
The booth was very high, in the shape of a pyramid. The paper figure at the top was no different from the other paper figures. He gestured and found that he could reach it. He really reached out and grabbed the paper figure.
It was no different from an ordinary paper figure, floating lightly, and nothing happened except that it looked weird. Lu Yanli stared at the pair of unlit eyes for a while, then bent down, smeared some blood on the paper figure's eye sockets with his fingertips, and dotted them on the paper figure's eye sockets.
The eyeballs rolled around twice, and after Lu Yanli put them back on the top, they stopped moving again, but the smile at the corners of the lips seemed to become more curved.
After Lu Yanli left and closed the door, the paper man at the top fell down with a "pop" sound, and blood slowly soaked his whole body. Then, he shook and slowly stood up...
Lu Yanli closed the door and found that all the blood on his body had disappeared, as if the action he had just taken when he stepped on the bloody ground was an illusion.
"Are these rooms related to me?" His fingertips were stained with blood and disappeared. Lu Yanli put down his hand and continued to open the third door without hesitation.
The third room was not dark, but bright, and looked very normal. Lu Yanli was stunned for a moment.
The room was filled with clocks of all sizes, square, round, and other strange shapes, analog clocks, electronic clocks... There was a clock the same size as the wall placed on the wall facing the door, covering the wall tightly. The snow-white dial had only a black second hand, and the hour and minute hands were gone. There was a circle of scales, but no numbers.
Lu Yanli took a look at the other clocks and found that they did not have numbers on them either.
But the strange thing is that the time on every clock in the room is different. The ticking of the second hand shows a chaotic time. Lu Yanli tries to count the seconds in his mind and finds that the clocks in the room are not accurate. Some are fast and some are slow, like a bunch of broken clocks.
The largest clock was the most "accurate", but its hands were moving backwards.
Lu Yanli watched the second hand move backwards one step at a time. When it moved back counterclockwise to the top, which should have marked 12, it stopped for one second, and the next circle moved clockwise again.
It's very strange.
Lu Yanli kept staring at it, and before he knew it, he had walked closer, watching the second hand spin without blinking.
Sure enough, when it moved clockwise to the 12 o'clock position, it paused again, and started to rotate counterclockwise from the starting position again, over and over again, round and round, but it never rotated more than one circle in the same direction.
It's like... time has stopped where it was, just going around in a loop.
Lu Yanli stretched out his hand, and when the second hand once again circled clockwise and stopped at the 12 o'clock position, he bent the second hand clockwise with force -
The second hand was stuck, as if in a stalemate, but Lu Yanli had no intention of letting go and tried hard to turn the second hand clockwise.
He didn't believe that everything was caused by himself, and he didn't believe that he couldn't change it. If the clock was like he thought, and was related to that incident, he would make it right.
One grid, two grids, three grids…
Finally, Lu Yanli felt the momentum of the second hand moving clockwise naturally. He let go of his hand and watched the pointer slowly move down one step at a time.
The other messy clocks in the room also seemed to start running on track, moving clockwise one by one. Gradually, the only sound left in the room was the neat ticking of the second hand.
Tick, tick, tick…
He kept staring at the clocks and counting in his mind, and found that there was no problem at all. Although he had succeeded, Lu Yanli was still a little uneasy. After observing carefully for a while, he finally left the room.
What Lu Yanli didn't know was that when he closed the door, the hands of all the clocks in the room suddenly started spinning wildly, and the ticking sound was even more chaotic than before. It was not easy to turn the largest clock straight, and the second hand was moving backwards wildly.
"Hey, listen to me, you did a terrible thing and you can't do it again."
Lu Yanli heard the voice of the brain again, but he ignored it and continued to push open the second door: "If you want to stop me, just tell me what I want to know. After all, what I am best at since I was a child is to cause trouble."
In his memory, there were too many times when his mother took him away to apologize to others because he beat up other people's children, accidentally broke other people's windows while playing football, etc. He thought of the memory that he didn't know whether it was true or false, and smiled slightly.
He was stunned when he pushed the first door open.
Unlike the other three strange rooms, this room looks like an ordinary household's residence, with ordinary furniture, ordinary decoration, sofas, carpets, dining tables... There is also a large wedding photo of a couple hanging on the wall. It is full of home feeling everywhere, narrow but warm.
Lu Yanli stared at the man in the wedding photo for a while. The man seemed to be An Xingyu's father, An Ru, but he looked much younger in the photo.
"Why did the door suddenly open? Boss, please close it." The kitchen door diagonally opposite opened, and a woman came out carrying dishes. She was the woman in the wedding photo, and she was older.
Another man responded and stood up. It was indeed An Ru, who walked to the door and closed it. Neither of them seemed to notice Lu Yanli standing at the door, and An Ru even walked past Lu Yanli as if he had touched air.
The door was closed, and Lu Yanli tried to open it, but found that it would not open at all. He went into the house and watched the couple sit down to eat.
"Xiao Yu took the test today. The teacher said before that he has great talent and he will probably be selected." The no longer young woman smiled, but also had some subtle concerns. "But the investigators are too hard-working, and..."
She hesitated for a moment and didn't say anything.
Others didn't know, but they knew very well that the mortality rate of investigators was very high. The institute's announcement of so-called "external transfer" and "support branch" was actually a disguised announcement of death.
"It's good for him to make some contributions. Let him choose for himself." The man comforted her. "I think he is very suitable. Maybe he can bring some surprises to the institute."
"Besides, not all investigators will have accidents. Look, I'm a 30-year-old, right?"
"I'm still worried. He's so young, not even an adult yet. Even if he's smart..."
Lu Yanli listened to their conversation and looked around, but he didn't find any photos of An Xingyu. After the couple finished their meal, the host and hostess got up and went to work, leaving the house empty.
He lowered his voice and asked, "What do you want me to see?"
He heard a strange laugh from his brain. The other party did not give a direct answer, but just smiled and asked him to wait, which made him even more uneasy.
Not long after, the host and hostess went home, and after waiting for a while, the child of the family came back. The key was inserted into the keyhole and turned for a moment, and the three of them looked at the door together.
Outside the door, there stood a young man in school uniform, but his face was blurry and his facial features could not be seen clearly.
It’s not An Xingyu at all!
The couple didn't notice anything unusual, and naturally asked about the child's well-being. Lu Yanli ignored the unnatural familiarity in his heart and asked cautiously: "What do you want me to see?"
"Haven't you noticed yet? Do they look familiar to you?" the brain said, "You've always wanted to be a human because of them. You said you wanted to try to experience human emotions."
"Especially family love."