Top-secret experiment

The Person Overhead

The long staircase stretched downward without end, as if leading to hell. Captain Bao walked down the stairs, and it took him a full half minute before he reached the first corner.

"This staircase is unexpectedly long, almost equivalent to three or four regular floors. What kind of bizarre basement design is this?"

He muttered, then turned the corner.

To his surprise, the anticipated "negative one" floor didn’t appear. Instead, another downward staircase lay before him, seemingly endless.

"Hey, now I really want to see where this staircase leads!"

With that, Captain Bao made up his mind and continued descending.

After another half minute, he finally reached the first basement floor, but the door leading to it was tightly locked.

The meeting spot was on the eleventh floor, but no building would normally have eleven underground floors. This meant that the "eleventh floor" mentioned on the note likely referred to nine floors above ground, meaning the true destination was probably the second underground floor.

Well then, looks like he had to keep going down.

After a brief calculation, Captain Bao pressed on, descending further.

Fortunately, this time the staircase seemed normal. Just a few seconds later, he arrived at what he thought was the destination, but instead of the second underground floor, he found himself on... the first floor!

The yellowed posters, the eerie woman, the branching paths—staring at the familiar sight before him, Captain Bao could hardly believe his eyes.

He had been walking down all this time, and by pure height calculations, he should have been at least seven or eight floors below ground, so how had he ended up right back where he started?

Captain Bao felt something was wrong, and a trace of unease began to grow in his heart. But now he was in a difficult position—who could guarantee that retracing his steps would lead him out of the Tianyang Building?

"Calm down, calm down!"

Logically speaking, since he had been descending, this couldn't be the same staircase as before. It was very likely another space arranged to look identical.

Finding a relatively reasonable explanation, Captain Bao felt slightly more at ease.

He picked up a shard of stone, scratched a mark on the wall next to the poster, then opened the basement door and walked down again.

However, what he didn't notice was that as he made the mark, the woman's eyes on the poster suddenly turned into real eyes, staring intently at his every move with an inexplicable, eerie intensity.

Oblivious to the danger ahead, Captain Bao continued down. He reached the end of the stairs in just a few seconds. As he turned the corner in haste, he was again shocked by what lay before him.

The first floor, still the first floor!

The same old poster loomed on the wall, and this time, beside it, was the mark he had just scratched.

"How can this be?! No, no, something's definitely wrong."

Captain Bao began to recall the details of what had happened since he entered the Tianyang Building. He started to panic, beads of sweat forming on his forehead. But the more he tried to think, the more his mind became muddled.

Just as he was at a loss, he suddenly felt as if someone was watching him. The feeling was like a gazelle being stalked by a lion—an eerie sense of impending danger made his spine tingle, and a cold sweat broke out.

"Who is it?"

Captain Bao scanned the surroundings. The narrow, pitch-black stairwell was silent, but in infrared vision, there were no blind spots.

There was no one there. Nothing—except for the woman on the poster.

Wait... the woman on the poster?

Captain Bao finally realized that the strange feeling was coming from the poster. Could the woman in the poster be watching him? It sounded absurd, but ever since he entered this strange building, what in this place could be explained by common sense?

Captain Bao stared at the poster in front of him and suddenly noticed a detail he had missed before. The pupils in the woman's eyes were empty. From a distance, the two black holes looked like eyes, but it was hard to notice them at first.

He frowned, then tore the poster off the wall. Behind it, a black iron door stood out, with the words "Eleventh Floor" written in bright red paint.

"So the eleventh floor is here..."

He gently pushed the iron door, and it creaked open.

Behind the door was a narrow passage, not very long—about six or seven meters.

Captain Bao tossed the poster aside, swallowed hard, and stepped into the passage.

At the end of the passage was another fork. On the left was an iron door, and on the right was another staircase.

Captain Bao had developed a psychological aversion to the stairs, so he instinctively moved toward the iron door.

But the iron door was locked. It seemed like he had no choice but to use the stairs again...

At this moment, Captain Bao noticed something on the floor—a half-smoked cigarette. Unlike the other cigarette butts, this one was fresh. The end still had some warmth, and the filter had remnants of saliva, meaning someone had recently been here.

Could it have been the mysterious person he was supposed to meet? Where had they gone?

While he was pondering, the feeling of being watched returned. Captain Bao turned sharply and saw a shadowy figure quickly pull its head back from the stairway at the other end of the passage.

"Hey! Who are you?"

Captain Bao shouted, and immediately, the sound of hurried footsteps echoed from the stairwell.

He quickly chased after the figure, but by the time he reached the next landing, the person had disappeared around the corner of the floor below.

"Hey, don’t run!"

Captain Bao continued to chase, descending two more floors, but he didn’t see the figure again. Just as he hesitated about whether to continue, a loud thud echoed from above, like a large piece of furniture falling to the floor.

"You're upstairs!"

Captain Bao immediately turned and ran back up the stairs. As he reached the landing, he heard a woman's shrill scream, full of desperation and terror. It was chilling.

His heart skipped a beat, and he slowed his pace, cautiously moving toward the source of the sound.

The noise was coming from a room. As he got closer to the door, he could clearly hear a series of loud, chaotic crashing sounds. Among them, his enhanced hearing made out two heavy breaths.

There were at least two people in the room, and their breathing was rapid—indicating they were in a state of extreme excitement...

Captain Bao carefully crept up to the door, analyzing the situation inside, and cautiously peered in.

In the instant he saw what was inside, his pupils shrank, and he quickly covered his mouth. He had only looked for three seconds, but then he recoiled and pressed his back against the wall, breathing heavily.

Cold sweat poured from his forehead, and his eyes were full of disbelief.

In the brief moment he had seen inside, the room was drenched in blood, just like the bedroom on the 25th.

In the center of the bloodstained floor, a man was pinning a woman down, frantically hacking at her with a long machete. The woman struggled desperately, trying to fight back, but the man lunged forward, viciously sinking his teeth into her throat, like a mad dog.

What was even more horrifying was that the man, covered in blood, his eyes full of fury and madness, wearing a long coat and thick glasses, looked just like Captain Bao himself.

"I... I killed her... How could this be? There's another me? I... I killed someone?!"

His mind was in chaos, and the extreme shock and fear left him paralyzed. He instinctively felt that this was absurd, but it was happening right before his eyes.

Terrified, Captain Bao scrambled to the stairwell, now desperate to escape this hellish place.

But just as he rushed into the stairwell, he heard a faint noise from the other side of the corridor. It sounded like someone was crouching in a corner, watching him.He fearfully poked his head out to look down the corridor, and his pupils contracted again.

There was indeed someone at the other end. The person was wearing a coat, short in stature, crouching on the ground, holding a cigarette butt and seemingly studying it in confusion.

This scene felt somewhat familiar?

That's right—this was exactly what he had seen half a minute ago.

"Another me?!"

He felt as though he were trapped in a dream, an absurd nightmare he couldn’t understand.

"Hey! Who are you?"

The Captain Bao at the far end of the corridor suddenly turned around and yelled.

The other Bao was startled and hurriedly fled upstairs.

"Hey, don't run!"

The Captain Bao in the corridor yelled again, chasing after him.

Captain Bao was too terrified to pay attention to him; all he cared about was escaping.

He had no idea how many floors he had climbed, but it wasn’t until he could no longer hear the pursuing footsteps that he darted into the corridor of the floor he had reached.

At the end of the corridor was an iron door, and it was locked.

Captain Bao crouched by the door, trembling, and lit a cigarette, hoping to steady his nerves. But after just two puffs, his anxiety overwhelmed him, and he angrily tossed the cigarette to the ground.

He tried to calm down, but fear and shock had muddled his thoughts, making it nearly impossible to think clearly.

Everything in this building had gone beyond his understanding and imagination, and countless terrifying hypotheses flooded his mind, making him even more nervous.

As he was lost in these thoughts, Captain Bao suddenly felt that the floor he was on seemed strangely familiar. After a careful look, he realized—it was the eleventh floor!

He was overjoyed and quickly rushed toward the entrance.

The black iron door was tightly shut, with a large bolt across it.

Captain Bao hurriedly pulled open the bolt, preparing to escape, but at that moment, he felt something outside.

He was startled again. In his panic, he noticed that the black iron door had two small holes through which he could see outside. Without hesitation, he pressed his face to one of the holes.

Outside, there was a stairwell. A short, slender man in a coat, wearing glasses, was holding a small stone and scratching a mark on the wall, then turned and descended into the basement.

A few seconds later, that man returned from the upper passage to the first floor.

"That’s... me from ten minutes ago... the fourth me..."

If all went as expected, in half a minute, the fourth version of himself would tear down the poster on the black iron door and open it.

Captain Bao slapped his forehead and immediately turned to rush into the stairwell.

For some reason, he was terrified at the thought of meeting himself. Perhaps, in such a bizarre and absurd situation, everyone would instinctively reject and fear it.

He climbed up the stairs, thinking that since he had been going down after entering the eleventh floor, climbing up would help him avoid meeting any of his other selves.

He climbed about four or five floors before swiftly ducking into the corridor of that floor.

He plopped down onto the ground, and the sudden relaxation from his tense emotions made him feel a wave of exhaustion.

Out of fear, he remained vigilant, scanning the area with infrared vision, and unexpectedly spotted a note on the floor.

He picked it up and read: "The situation has been exposed. Take the things and leave quickly. Two more tips for you: first, always watch your head; second, the blue bottle on the shelf can help you."

"What is this nonsense?"

He couldn’t make sense of the note and casually crumpled it into a ball, throwing it into an empty room nearby.

The crumpled paper hit the wall and bounced into the visual blind spot, where, behind it, several hundred identical crumpled papers had piled into a small mound.

Of course, Captain Bao didn’t see any of this. He took a few deep breaths to steady his emotions but then suddenly froze, a realization dawning on him.

The handwriting on the note just now looked eerily similar to the one on the note that had invited him to meet.

Could the person who wrote the note be the one who arranged the meeting?

Wait...

The note said to always watch his head. Did that mean...

Captain Bao shuddered and nervously looked up.

To his horror, less than ten centimeters above his head, a human head was already waiting there!

It was a woman, her face deathly pale and covered in rotting flesh. Her expression was blank, and her pure black, hollow eyes were locked onto Captain Bao, while her long hair nearly reached his head.