Chapter 2 Next Morning

The next morning, ten players gathered in Room 0908.

The door to the room was open, the floor covered in bloodstains, the furniture scattered.

Bob, the resident of Room 0908, was nowhere to be seen.

Bai Haozheng stood in silence, using his psychokinesis to pick up a pile of black and red substance from the ground.

The object looked somewhat like sheets of paper covered in messy writing, but the surface was coated in a thick layer of dried blood, grime, and hair, and it emitted a strange, foul odor.

The players present had already shared their experiences from the previous night.

Hei Shengzi, 13mArk, Plague Doctor, Li Ang, and Wanli Fengdao were the ones who didn't receive a note last night and were thus exempt.

Bai Haozheng, Yu Yi Xinzhong, Mule, Liu Wudai, Ω, and Bob received notes.

Shortly after the curfew began, Bai Haozheng received a note.

The note read: [Pass through the stone door].

After seeing the note, a stone door suddenly appeared in the living room of his room.

After passing through the stone door, he arrived at a maze resembling a hotel corridor, winding and twisting with complex terrain.

Every so often, it would fold and rearrange itself.

Bai Haozheng spent several hours using his mathematical knowledge to deduce the maze's operating rules.

Using his extraordinary abilities as a player, he escaped from the maze before the curfew ended and returned to the normal Room 1408.

During this process, he also discovered a dried-up corpse in the maze.

The corpse had been dead for many years, and from its clothing, it appeared to be a hotel guest who had strayed into the maze.

In the pocket of its jacket, there was a palm-sized diary.

The diary's owner identified himself as Martin Anderson, an American insurance salesman who, while camping in a nature preserve with some friends, had strayed deep into the forest.

In the forest, they saw a very abrupt wooden staircase.

One of Martin Anderson's friends, driven by some unknown impulse, ignored their warnings and climbed the wooden staircase, then disappeared.

The others panicked and ran out of the forest, trying to seek help from the outside world.

As a result, Martin Anderson tripped and hit his head on a rock, losing consciousness.

When he woke up again, he was already in the Dolphin Hotel.

Large portions of the diary that followed were torn, smeared, and altered.

Through the increasingly chaotic, disordered, and nonsensical sentences,

one could clearly feel the insurance salesman Martin Anderson's panic and nervousness—shortly after arriving at the Dolphin Hotel, he entered the maze corridor that Bai Haozheng had experienced.

He was trapped inside for nearly a month, relying entirely on food from the corridor trash cans that appeared in the maze to sustain his life.

As for Martin Anderson's cause of death, Bai Haozheng guessed that it was likely heart disease caused by prolonged mental exhaustion followed by extreme mental stimulation.

Leaving Martin Anderson's cause of death aside for now,

Yu Yi Xinzhong's note read: [Eliminate the pests].

Suddenly, a large number of insects poured out from every corner of her room: flies, cockroaches, mosquitoes, fleas, lice...

Dense and omnipresent, they roared toward Yu Yi Xinzhong like a black wave.

She barely managed to block the sea of insects with area-of-effect attacks and splash damage, leaving behind a mountain of insect corpses as high as the ceiling in her room—those insect corpses immediately transformed into handcrafted works of art made of pen caps, paper clips, cigarette butts, and so on.

As for Liu Wudai and Ω, the notes they received said: [Keep the doors clean].

Having the previous cases in mind, the two dared not neglect it and spent the entire night cleaning everything in their rooms that could be considered a "door" until 03:28 in the morning.

That's right, at the same time as yesterday, the ethereal, deep voice saying, "One is missing," echoed in the hotel once again.

Ω, who lived on the first floor, saw six figures in bamboo hats coming from the right side of the corridor and entering the stairwell.

Wanli Fengdao on the second floor and Liu Wudai on the third floor also saw the figures in bamboo hats—the difference was that the elevator did not open at all tonight, and the old woman in red did not appear.

At 3:30 a.m., Li Ang, Hei Shengzi, and Mule were still in Room 0408, interrogating the planchette spirit for information.

Through gentle threats and coercion, Li Ang successfully convinced the planchette spirit to cooperate.

He used alchemy to transform the pen into a typewriter, allowing the planchette spirit to type on it for faster communication.

Anyway, both pens and typewriters are tools for writing.

It was perfectly normal for the planchette spirit of the new era to reside in a typewriter or keyboard.

In short, with the typewriter as a carrier, the efficiency of communication with the planchette spirit increased dramatically.

Accompanied by the clatter of keys, it typed out information about its life.

Like Martin Anderson, who died in the fourteenth-floor maze, the planchette spirit was also an American. His name was Carter Murphy, a successful professional manager.

Once, while he was skiing, he felt tired while passing through a forest, so he decided to rest by a tree.

He didn't expect the tree to be a fir, whose umbrella-shaped crown could hold the snowflakes falling from the sky.

This caused the snow under the tree to be filled with a large amount of air, broken branches, and powdery snowflakes.

It looked solid, but it was actually extremely loose.

As soon as Carter Murphy sat down, he sat on nothing, fell backward, his feet facing the sky, and his hands plunged into the deep snow under the tree.

Panicked, Carter Murphy tried to move his body and get up from the snow.

However, his hands couldn't grasp anything to hold on to, nor could he feel the ground.

The more he struggled, the deeper he sank.

Soon, Carter Murphy was buried by the snow. His vision gradually darkened, and when he opened his eyes again, he had arrived at the Dolphin Hotel,

becoming one of its residents.

According to Carter Murphy, the Dolphin Hotel at that time was located in a forest.

The hotel seemed relatively normal, with accommodation guides posted in the lobby (identical to the version seen by Li Ang and others).

The staff and residents were all ordinary humans.

Most of the hotel residents were people who had disappeared in the real world. They were told by the hotel staff that

they were already dead, and that their ability to stand, run, and breathe was due to the special effects of the hotel.

Hotel residents usually enjoyed the customer service of a star-rated hotel. They could freely socialize, exercise, network, and even develop feelings and live together—provided they did not get pregnant.

But they also had to follow the rules: they could not be outside their rooms during curfew, they could not open their doors at will during curfew, and they could not leave food at the door.

Hotel residents didn't know what would happen if they broke the rules. The staff kept silent, only responding with a smile to the residents' questions.

But from the constant changes in the resident population, it could be seen that people would disappear or even die.

Carter Murphy only stayed at the Dolphin Hotel for three days. One night, he fell asleep in Room 0408 and never woke up again in human form.