Chapter 1 What's Going On?

Li Ang looked at the wooden ceiling and calmly said, "What's going on here?"

Just seconds before, he had been standing on the stairs with Dong Fengpo, peering into the second-floor corridor.

Suddenly, a tile beneath Li Ang's feet abruptly gave way. He instinctively raised his three-edged bone spike, trying to brace himself against the fall.

However, the speed of the descent far exceeded his expectations. Before he could even cry out, Li Ang plunged into the dark space beneath the collapsed tile.

In an instant, he found himself flying through the air, crashing through a wooden door and into a bedroom, landing gently inside a massive, cumbersome cylindrical metal device.

This metal cylinder was 2.5 meters long, hollow inside, with a cavity diameter of nearly a meter, large enough to accommodate an adult male.

Below the metal cylinder was a frame also made of metal.

Li Ang's body was trapped inside the cylindrical device, his neck and head sticking out, resting on a rusty metal plate extending from the front of the device.

He looked as if he were lying in a cylindrical metal coffin.

Anyone else would have panicked and struggled to escape from this metal coffin.

But Li Ang remained calm. After confirming that he was not in immediate danger, he shifted his body, found a more comfortable position, turned his neck, and called out to Miss Chai in his mind, "Chai Chai, what did you see?"

"The same thing you did. The ground caved in, and you flew into the room."

Chai Cuicao paused, looking at the wooden door in the corner of the room that was slowly closing. "The outside of this room is the corner of a transverse corridor—it doesn't look like the second-floor corridor.

This house is strange. The gravity is abnormal, and the spatial structure is also abnormal."

"Mm."

Li Ang nodded, his neck resting on the metal plate, swiveling left and right, scanning the room. "Bookshelves, a small desk, a piano, a cloth doll... this used to be a child's room.

To be precise, the room of a child suffering from polio."

Chai Cuicao was stunned. "Polio? How do you know?"

Li Ang didn't answer. He moved his hands, which were trapped inside the cylindrical metal device, groping around in the hollow cavity of the cylinder. He quickly found a valve.

Li Ang twisted the valve, and the front end of the cylinder, which was restricting his neck, slowly opened from the right side, allowing him to slide into the cylinder. After the front end of the device was completely open, he climbed out of it.

Li Ang steadied himself on the floor, brushed off the dust that had accumulated on his body, tapped the metal cylinder with his knuckles, and calmly said, "This thing that looks a bit like a tea-leaf frying machine is called an 'iron lung'. It's a device invented to help polio patients.

Polio has existed since ancient times. Because the patient's muscles are weak and they have difficulty mobilizing their respiratory muscles, patients often die due to breathing difficulties and respiratory failure.

In the seventeenth century, an English scientist proposed the idea of promoting breathing by applying external negative pressure ventilation, based on the principle of respiratory movement.

Until the 1930s, the United States launched a craze for designing negative pressure prototype respiratory muscles, one of which was an iron lung. It artificially created a negative pressure environment to assist patients in breathing.

In the 1940s and 50s, iron lungs were found in hospitals all over the United States, maintaining the lifelines of tens of thousands of polio patients.

However, with the advent of the polio vaccine, polio had a truly effective treatment, and the iron lung was retired from the stage of history."

Li Ang glanced at the degree of rust on the surface of the device and said calmly, "If the background of this script mission is modern Earth, then the era must be around the 1920s or 30s, or later."

"Uh,"

Chai Cuicao's eyes widened. "You even know this..."

Li Ang paused, his fingertip lightly scraping across the iron lung, and said indifferently, "I used to have a friend who suffered from this disease. That's why I made a special effort to learn about the history of these kinds of diseases."

Li Ang did not reveal the specific information about that friend, but Chai Cuicao automatically filled in the blanks, realizing that Li Ang came from an orphanage...

She said awkwardly, "...I'm sorry."

"It's okay."

Li Ang casually patted the iron lung, stretched his muscles, and walked straight to the door of the children's bedroom, opening it.

Outside the door was a dark corridor, with an extremely strange and bizarre structure. The corridor was sometimes narrow, sometimes wide, sometimes rising, sometimes falling.

Where there should have been windows, there was a suspended wooden door, and where there should have been a door, there was a translucent window.

"It's like hundreds of houses have been dismantled and then reassembled."

Li Ang said silently in his mind. He did not step into the corridor but returned to the room, closed the door, and unhurriedly searched the children's bedroom.

"Hey, aren't you going to look for your teammates?" Chai Cuicao asked softly.

"I can, but it's not necessary." Li Ang shook his head and replied, "I was on the stairs on the first floor, and I didn't do anything, but I was forcibly teleported here by a mechanism.

With my strength, I didn't even realize what happened just now.

I have reason to believe that the other teammates were also treated to the same teleportation at the same time.

This manor occupies too much area, and the structure of the houses is bizarre and strange. Now, searching for them scattered everywhere will only waste valuable mission time.

You have to know that there are eight anomalous organs that need to be dealt with.

And even if we find them, it's useless if we don't find a way to figure out the source of the teleportation effect."

While explaining, Li Ang took off the tactical flashlight from his tactical belt and scanned the entire room.

Although his cat eyes and low-light infrared night vision device could both play a role in night vision,

his vision would lack many colors. It would be bad if he missed something due to the lack of color.

With the help of Chai Cuicao's eight arms, Li Ang quickly searched the entire children's bedroom and found nothing special.

The books on the bookshelf were all English fairy tales. Judging from the printing time, the latest was no later than the end of the 1930s.

"The owner of the room should be a 7-10-year-old girl with polio. This is not her master bedroom, but more like a small room for playing and entertainment. Her parents treated her very well and spent a lot of money to customize an iron lung for her."

Li Ang said in a deep voice, "At that time, an iron lung cost as much as 2,000 US dollars. In the 1920s and 30s, it was enough to buy an ordinary residential house.

Combined with this rather expensive piano, it can be judged that the owner of the room came from a wealthy family. She should be one of the direct descendants of the Williams manor owner.

And her polio is not particularly serious. At least she can play the piano and stuff like that."

Most of the room had already been searched. The only place that had not been checked was...

Li Ang's eyes lit up. He held up the flashlight and climbed back into the iron lung.

Because it had always been in a semi-sealed state, the rust inside the iron lung was not very serious.

After a careful search, Li Ang did indeed find a small, yellowed, and withered note in a corner of the front end of the cylinder.

He climbed out of the iron lung and placed the note under the light. The note read:

"Alice, listen to Margaret. I hope you will always be healthy and safe—Love, your mom and dad."

The moment he saw the note, Li Ang's eyes blurred, and the rotten floor beneath his feet was brand new. A ray of warm light shone in from the window, and the decaying room was revitalized.

A silvery laugh rang out, and a phantom of a blonde girl in an elegant dress fell from the void, sat on the renewed floor of the room, scribbling on children's fairy tale books with a pen, while happily laughing.

And sitting next to her was an adult woman who looked somewhat like her.

"This is... a recreation of the room's past?"