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

Just seconds before, he had been standing on the staircase with Dong Fengpo, peering down the second-floor corridor. Suddenly, the tile beneath Li Ang's feet sank violently. He instinctively raised his Triangular Bone Tipped Spear, attempting to use it horizontally to block his fall. However, the speed of the collapse far exceeded his expectations. Li Ang didn't even have time to scream before plunging into the pitch-black space below the collapsing tiles. Immediately, he found himself flying sideways through a wooden door into a bedroom, landing smoothly and lightly inside a huge, cumbersome, cylindrical metal device.

This metal cylinder was 2.5 meters long and hollow, with an internal diameter of nearly one meter—large enough to accommodate an adult male. Beneath it was a stand, also made of metal.

Li Ang's body was firmly trapped within the cylindrical device, his neck and head protruding, resting on a rusted metal plate that extended from the front end of the device.

It looked as though he were lying in a cylindrical metal coffin.

Anyone else would surely have been struggling frantically at this point, desperate to free themselves from this metal coffin. But Li Ang was completely unflustered. After realizing he was in no immediate danger, he shifted into a more comfortable position, rotated his neck, and mentally called out to Miss Chai, "Chaichai, what did you just see?"

"The same as you. The floor caved in, and you flew sideways into the room."

Chai Cuiqiao paused, looked towards the slowly closing wooden door in the corner of the room, and said, "Outside this room is the corner of a horizontal corridor—it doesn't look like the one on the second floor. This house is odd; gravity is abnormal, and so is the spatial structure."

"Hmm."

Li Ang nodded. His neck, still resting on the metal plate, turned left and right as he glanced around the room. "Bookshelves, a small desk, a piano, fabric dolls... This place seems to have been a child's room. To be precise, the room of a child afflicted with polio."

Chai Cuiqiao was taken aback for a moment. "Polio? How do you know that?"

Li Ang didn't respond. He moved his hands, which were trapped within the metal cylinder, groping around in its hollow cavity and quickly finding the valve mechanism.

Li Ang turned the valve. The front end of the cylinder restraining his neck slowly opened to the right, allowing him to slide deeper inside. Once the front of the device was fully open, he crawled out.

After steadying himself on the floor, Li Ang patted the dust off his clothes, knocked on the metal cylinder with his knuckles, and calmly said, "This device, which looks a bit like a tea-leaf roasting machine, is called an 'iron lung.' It was invented to aid polio patients.

Polio is an ancient disease. Affected patients experience muscle weakness and difficulty using their respiratory muscles, often leading to death from respiratory distress or failure.

In the seventeenth century, an English scientist, based on the principles of respiration, proposed facilitating breathing by applying external negative pressure.

By the 1830s, a craze for designing negative pressure respirator prototypes swept the United States. This included a device known as the iron lung, designed to assist patient breathing by artificially creating a negative pressure environment.

In the 1940s and 1950s, iron lungs were widespread across American hospitals, supporting the lifelines of tens of thousands of children with polio.

However, with the advent of the poliovirus vaccine, polio found a truly effective treatment, and the iron lung thus exited the stage of history."

Li Ang glanced at the rusted surface of the device and said tranquilly, "If the background of this scenario's mission is set in Earth's near-modern era, then the time period must be around the 1920s or 1930s, or later."

"Uh," Miss Chai widened her eyes, "You even know about this..."

Li Ang paused for a moment, his fingertips lightly scraping over the iron lung, and said indifferently, "I once had a friend who had this disease. For his sake, I specifically studied the history related to such illnesses."

Li Ang didn't reveal specific details about his friend, but Miss Chai put two and two together—Li Ang had come from an orphanage, after all.

She said somewhat awkwardly, "...Sorry."

"It's okay."

Li Ang casually patted the iron lung, stretched his limbs, and walked straight to the children's bedroom door, pulling it open.

Outside was a dark corridor with an extremely peculiar structure: narrow at times, spacious at others, sometimes ascending, sometimes descending.

Where there should have been windows, a wooden door hung suspended in mid-air; where there should have been a door, there was a semi-transparent window.

It's almost as if hundreds of houses were dismantled and then haphazardly pieced back together.

Li Ang thought silently, not stepping into the corridor. Instead, he returned to the room, closed the door, and began to methodically search the children's bedroom.

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

"I could, but it's not necessary," Li Ang shook his head and replied. "Just now, on the first-floor staircase, I did nothing, yet I was forcefully teleported here. Even with my strength, I didn't have time to react to what had just happened. I have reason to believe that the other teammates probably suffered the same fate at the same time. This manor is vast, and its architecture is bizarre and disorienting. Searching for them now, scattered all over the place, would just waste precious mission time. Remember, there are eight abnormal organs we need to deal with. And even if I found them, it would be futile if we couldn't find the source of this teleportation effect."

As Li Ang explained, he unclipped the tactical high-intensity flashlight from his belt and swept its beam across the room.

Although his Cat's Eye and infrared night vision allowed him to see in the dark, his vision would lack many colors. It wouldn't be good if he missed something because of this.

With the assistance of Miss Chai's eight arms, Li Ang quickly searched the entire children's bedroom but found no particularly special items.

The books on the shelf were all English fairy tales. Judging by their printing dates, none were later than the late 1930s.

"The owner of the room was likely a seven-to-ten-year-old girl with polio. This wasn't her main bedroom, but more like a small room for play and amusement. Her parents were very good to her; they spent a lot of money to have an iron lung custom-made for her," Li Ang said gravely. "At that time, a single iron lung cost as much as 2,000 US dollars. In the 1920s and 1930s, that was enough to buy a standard residential house. Considering this and the rather expensive piano, it can be inferred that the girl's family was well-off, likely direct descendants of the owner of Williams Manor. Moreover, her polio wasn't particularly severe; she could at least play the piano and do similar things."

Most parts of the room had been searched. The only place that hadn't been checked was...

Li Ang's eyes brightened. He raised the flashlight and climbed back inside the iron lung.

Since it had remained in a semi-sealed state, the rust inside the iron lung wasn't too severe. After a careful search, Li Ang indeed discovered an old, yellowed, and dry piece of paper in a corner at the front end of the cylinder.

He crawled out of the iron lung and held the paper under the light. The note read:

"Alice, you must listen to Margaret. We hope you will always be healthy and safe—Love, Mom and Dad."

The moment he saw the note, Li Ang's vision blurred. The rotten floor beneath him looked new again. A warm ray of sunlight shone in through the window, revitalizing the decayed room.

Bell-like laughter rang out. The phantom of a blonde little girl in a simple dress appeared out of thin air, sitting on the renewed floor of the room, doodling in a children's storybook and giggling happily.

Sitting beside her was an adult woman who bore some resemblance to her.

Is this... a reenactment of a past scene from the room?