CHAPTER 66: CHAPTER 66: THE STAIRCASE

"Taking the stairs will let me leave?" Sun Hang asked again.

No response.

"Then why should I listen to you?"

No response.

"I have a question, are you afraid of me?"

No response.

Sun Hang stopped asking questions and directly swung his short knife, slicing open the elevator door as if cutting through tofu. But just as he was about to leap out of the elevator shaft, the foot he had thrust forward drew back.

In the elevator shaft, the steel cable suspending the car was nowhere in sight. In its place was an abyss of darkness just like the one outside the glass curtain wall.

In Sun Hang’s subconscious, this kind of darkness was extremely dangerous. Once fallen into, escape might become impossible.

"I’m very curious, why don’t you just use this darkness to devour me?" Sun Hang asked once more, "Or is it that you can’t control this area of darkness, and I have to stumble into it by myself?"

The building didn’t respond to Sun Hang’s question, and the display screen next to the elevator door had returned to normal.

Is taking the stairs really the only choice?

The entrance to the stairway was in the corner of the elevator lobby, and there was a green "Safety Exit" sign hanging near the baseboard... As for whether this exit was really safe, that was another matter.

Sun Hang noticed that the doorway to the stairway was locked — as a rule, these normally closed fire doors should never be locked, and they weren’t even supposed to have locks installed, all to ensure that people could escape smoothly in the event of a disaster...

But then again, since it was inside a haunted office building, the so-called rationality was naturally just nonsense.

The shape of the keyhole on the door seemed familiar to Sun Hang. After thinking for a moment, he took the vintage key he had just retrieved from "Bing 634" out of his pocket, inserted it, and turned gently.

"Click," and the lock opened.

Sun Hang gently pushed open the fire door, and a musty, decaying wooden smell wafted out of the gap immediately.

He found the hallway behind the door extremely cramped and narrow. The wooden stairs spiraled downward, one circle after another. A few rusty kerosene lamps were fixed on the walls, emitting dim light— hallways and staircases like these should never have appeared in such a modern office building.

"The abnormal may be the key to breaking the situation... but more likely, it’s a trap set by the other side." Sun Hang calculated in his mind, "But the problem is that conventional means can’t solve this, so I might as well go along with it and see what this eerie thing intends by trapping me here..."

Sun Hang stepped forward.

The wooden stairs were severely decayed, their load-bearing planks riddled with wormholes, and creaked ominously underfoot, as if they might collapse at any moment. The interior of the hallway was covered with the marks of time— peeling lime walls, signs of water seepage in many corners, covered in large patches of damp moss.

In the tooth-gritting creaks, Sun Hang descended a dozen or so steps when he faintly felt something amiss.

The places where the wall plaster had peeled seemed to be fewer than at first glance, and the wormholes in the staircase planks weren’t as many...

"I think I understand why I was made to use the stairs," he said.

Checking his phone, Sun Hang saw indeed, the screen displayed the date as March 25, 4717 on the lunar calendar.

Sun Hang had merely descended a dozen steps, yet the time he was in flowed two years backward.

He tried descending one more step, and the time on his phone jumped two months forward, to January 5, 4717.

"The very bottom of this staircase must be some time point 65 years ago, right? Bringing me here was to trap me in the time anomaly as well."

Sun Hang turned to retrace his steps, only to find his path completely blocked; not only had the normally closed fire door vanished, but even the upward path had been entirely engulfed by darkness.

Sun Hang tried to switch on his phone’s flashlight, but the beam couldn’t illuminate even a centimeter ahead.

"Cheating, are we... then don’t blame me for not playing by the rules." Sun Hang had already thought of a way to break the impasse the moment he realized the time changed with the staircase steps.

However, this method didn’t rely on himself but rather on the power of another unknown entity.

The last time that power destroyed an eerie object, it was that crystal sphere with hardness comparable to a diamond.

"Time reversal is a good thing." Sun Hang suddenly muttered to himself, "I really have to thank you now... Not long ago, I lost my memory. With this opportunity, I can just go and see what kind of person I was two years ago, maybe I’ll discover some clues..."

Before he could finish saying "clues," a dramatically strong, uneasy feeling surged up in his mind.

He scanned the surroundings, and quickly pinpointed the source of the uneasy feeling.

The staircase railings were also wooden. At intervals, there would be a protruding posthead. These were originally simple oval shapes without adornment... but now, the three nearest to Sun Hang had turned into three monkey-shaped wooden carvings.

One covering its eyes, another covering its ears, and a third covering its mouth.

In the next second, everything around began to rapidly "age," the wooden boards of the staircase under Sun Hang’s feet crumbled into ash, and without support, he started to fall, gradually enveloped by a strange sense of weightlessness...

In a daze, Sun Hang found himself standing on the rooftop of the office building. Inside, it seemed to have turned into a sea of flames, with dense smoke billowing out of every floor and open window.

The darkness shrouding the office building had vanished, and when Sun Hang looked around, he saw the towering buildings of Tianfu City’s commercial district. Not far away, the highway was clogged with cars, their horns blaring incessantly.

The repeatedly blasting evacuation alarms still echoed over the city. When Sun Hang checked his phone, the date and time had already been restored to normal, yet the signal remained zero bars.

Walking to the edge of the rooftop, Sun Hang looked down to find the helicopter he had previously taken now wrecked and lying across the road, with a half-broken rotor blade embedding through the mascot statue outside the Golden Arches Restaurant opposite.

Sun Hang couldn’t help but feel a twinge of fear.

"Did those eerie things do this?" Sun Hang glanced at the burning office building beneath him; its appearance and that of Bing 634 here suggested that more uncanny entities had likely broken through the southern city’s defenses and infiltrated the bustling areas of Tianfu City.

"Things just got a whole lot more interesting."