“Designed by the devil?” I looked at the girl, and she smiled proudly. The sound around us slowly died down and then disappeared. I could still see a hint of fear in her smile; she was obviously very afraid of the sound just now.
“Too close.” She said. “It’s all your fault. If it finds us, I don’t know what will happen.”
I really didn’t understand what she was saying, but she was still dominating the situation, both emotionally and linguistically. I looked back at Xiao Hua, and he looked back at me, as if he were watching how I would handle it.
Ever since Black Glasses publicly told others that he was going to teach me something, everyone acted like they were my mentors. It seemed that everyone wanted to teach me, as if they wouldn’t be considered high-class people if they didn’t teach me something. It really bothered me, but I really couldn’t do anything about this kind of girl.
Fatty was especially good at dealing with this kind of situation, but unfortunately, he wasn’t here.
“I’ll tell you what.” The girl glanced at Xiao Hua, and then said to me, “Have your friend stay here, and I’ll take you to a place and tell you about it along the way. Then you can go quickly.”
I looked at her, she looked at me, and I said, “It sounds like you’re going to play tricks.”
“You could tie me up. It’s very comfortable anyway.” She said: “Don’t tell me you can’t afford to do so.”
I really couldn’t, but how could I tell Xiao Hua if she ran away? Unexpectedly, Xiao Hua gave me an encouraging expression.
“We don’t have time to mess around with her here. I’ll stay here to check her phone. I’ve already searched her. She’s unarmed. You can familiarize yourself with this kind of situation, since you’ll certainly encounter it in the future.”
When I glanced at Xiao Hua, he gave me a seemingly meaningful look, but I couldn’t figure it out.
Since Xiao Hua was the one that said it, I couldn’t be terrified anymore. I slung her over my body, then lowered the rope down with a winch, and went back to the corridor. When the girl saw the rope pulled back up, but Xiao Hua didn’t come down, she was obviously relieved.
She looked at me, I looked at her, and she sniffled. “Let’s go.”
“Don’t play tricks.” I said sternly.
“Can you stop nagging? I’ve never seen a man like you. If you hadn’t run after me so fast earlier, I would’ve thought you were a coward.” She jutted her chin out at me.
The phone’s screen lit up, and I saw a text message had been sent by the garbled number again. This time, however, it wasn’t sent by her, but by Xiao Hua.
“Untie her rope, but don’t explain why. If she runs away, it means she wanted to from the beginning. I’m watching you from above, so she can’t get away. If she doesn’t run, it means she really has something to tell you. –Xie Yu”
I put the phone away and untied the girl’s rope. She was a little surprised and shook her hands out: “Why?”
I ignored her and made her keep walking.
“You’re not afraid of me running.” She blinked her eyes.
“I’m in a hurry.” With that said, I continued walking forward. She pouted and quickly followed.
I inwardly sighed. It really turned out to be like this. In order to deal with girls, you had to loosen the reins a bit.
We reached the back tunnel entrance where we had originally come in at. From the inside, this mechanism wasn’t so magical. It only made the stairs on a certain floor a little thicker, and used gas lamps to create a difference in brightness between each floor, thus hiding the thickness. I climbed up, pushed the stair slab open, and went back to the stairs.
It had actually only been an hour from the time I started chasing her up to here, but it felt like a lifetime ago.
“What’s this stairwell for?”
“This is the devil’s lair.” She said. “Tell your friend to enter #deck–room all–c # on the phone and send it to 03498.”
I typed what she said and sent the text.
“I’ll let you see why I call him the devil.”
Xiao Hua returned an “Ok”, and after a second, the gas lamps on the floor went out one by one. The code just now apparently controlled the lamps here.
The whole floor was plunged into complete darkness, and only the light from the phone screen was left.
A fluorescence slowly started to glow in the space, and lines began to appear on the concrete walls. The walls were very dark, but that just made the fluorescence that much clearer. I rubbed my eyes and covered the phone screen so that I could see more clearly. Slowly, various geometric patterns began to appear on the stairwell walls.
I looked up and was surprised to find that these were all design drawings, and they had been painted all over the concrete wall with fluorescent paint.
“My grandfather designed this place because of the tense situation with the Soviet Union at that time. He was ready to avoid the world here and hoarded a lot of food, but then the situation didn’t deteriorate, so this place was abandoned. A long time ago, a fool accidentally entered here. At that time, it was absolutely dark, and no one knew how he got in. He lived here almost completely blind for fourteen years. He painted all these pictures. My grandfather carefully analyzed them and said that at first, the fool tried to draw the original layout here. Two years later, he finally succeeded, but he was completely crazy at that time, and didn’t leave. Instead, he continued to work on my grandfather’s structure and drew these designs. Then, he began to draw the internal structure of a building that even my grandfather couldn’t imagine.”
A fool accidentally entered? Was she referring to Lu Sha?
The fluorescence was getting brighter and brighter, and there were countless complicated lines and numbers. I said stupidly, “Why did you use fluorescent paint?”
“It’s not paint, it’s blood. It was preserved after using a fluorescent treatment.”
I sat down, staring at the whole space filled with complicated halos of light.
This was a tower with winding stairs and only a wall-wide stairwell in the middle. The whole space was filled with yellow cement, and based on the iron railings and decayed sections, it had obviously been built very early.
There were no distinguishing features, decorations, or aesthetics here, and the only adornment on the wall of this stairwell was a giant structure a fool had drawn in his own blood after thinking in the dark for more than ten years.
“My grandfather started to expand this place according to these design drawings, but then he disappeared.” The girl said, “In the middle of the project, he entered the building and never came out again. Come on, I’ll show you something. You’ll find it interesting.”
In the dark, she took me up to the top of the stairwell, where there was a bare wall. I saw that someone had drawn a huge design that was about as tall as a person, and looked very rough.
It was a huge and complex space; so complex, in fact, that it looked like a high-intensity integrated circuit board. At the bottom, I noticed that a door had been drawn.
Although it was small, I realized that this was the bronze door.
I took a step back and almost fell straight down the stairwell.
This was the design behind the bronze door.
“I didn’t lie to you, did I?” She asked.
MereBear's Translation 