Being chased by Gao Ming, the visitors overperformed. Their adrenaline shot through the roof.
After the ramming of the door stopped, the visitors collapsed to the ground. The horrid images from earlier were branded into their brains. They shivered just thinking about it. They wouldn’t forget this afternoon, no matter what.
Hugging Gao Ming by his arm, Dong Guo, who returned to the intersection, was rather scared of Gao Ming. Gao Ming accurately crawled along the rails earlier. It left a huge impact in her heart. But how could a haunted house actor be afraid of the guest? Dong Guo also couldn’t let Gao Ming wander too far away from her because she was worried that he might get injured. The two emotions gripped Dong Guo’s heart as she held onto Gao Ming’s arm.
“Let go. We should head to the director’s office.” Gao Ming shook Dong Guo off. He bent down to pick up the patients’ last effects on the ground. He slowly placed the death portraits back into the box. He looked serious.
“Those are just props. I hope they didn’t trigger you.” Dong Guo was not afraid of messing up the atmosphere anymore. She was just afraid that Gao Ming might do something crazy again. After scaring away all the guests, Gao Ming walked towards the end of the corridor.
“Wait for me.” Dong Guo jogged behind him. She didn’t even try to crawl on the ground. Using the key Dong Guo found at the classroom door, Gao Ming opened the door to the director’s office. A chill waft came out as if the room had its own air-conditioning system.
“A wine cupboard, a coach, office table…” Gao Ming’s eyes scanned all the items before landing on the bookshelf. Other than a bunch of foreign books, there were thirty mud figurines the size of one’s fingers. The heads of every child were placed inside a shrunken altar. Their faces looked out of the open altar doors.
“Most children have their eyes closed. Only this one is smiling at me.” Gao Ming removed a figurine from the top shelf. The child’s altar had the number two.
“Does every child have their own number? Why does only Child Two have his eyes open?”
“That is a secret path that leads to the second floor, but we’ve been there already. What we need to do now is to find the black box.” Dong Guo was dropping a lot of hints. “See. Doesn’t this safe look suspicious? The director liked to keep the most important thing in here. The password should be hidden somewhere in this room. Perhaps we can find a clue by looking through the books.”
Gao Ming didn’t hear Dong Guo. He stood before the secret path as he studied the steps that were made with the children's names.
“There are other patients being tortured by the doctors. Your teammates might return at any moment. We need to hurry!” Since Gao Ming didn’t react, Dong Guo walked to the bookshelf and looked through the books. “Huh! Look! There are notes inside the books that have times on them. We can reconstruct the events by using them!” Dong Guo basically handed the clues to Gao Ming. However, Gao Ming still didn’t react. The voice in Dong Guo’s earpiece was getting so loud that even Gao Ming could hear it.
“The path to the open zone has been triggered! The second floor is not open to the visitors for now! Quickly bring him back!”
To push things along, Dong Guo decided to go for it. “I’ve solved it!” She tapped on the safe’s keys, and the safe opened easily. She took out a black metallic box. “Found it!”
Before Dong Guo could say anything else, the siren blared through the first floor. Red lights glowed in every corridor. There were footsteps everywhere. The nurses, monsters and doctors were moving to the office to hunt down Gao Ming. Based on the original plot, he needed to keep the black box and evade everyone. His challenge was to bring the black box out of the mental hospital.
“We don’t have time now! I’ll help you delay them as long as I can! You need to go!” Dong Guo forced herself to act as she handed the box to Gao Ming.
Gao Ming exerted force, and the hollow box cracked.
“This is not the black box I’m looking for. How can something contain the despair of the whole city?” Gao Ming didn’t hide. With Dong Guo looking on in shock, he stepped on the bloody steps and entered the zoned-off area of the second floor.
“Wait!” Since she couldn’t stop him, Dong Guo had to go along with him.
The end of the bloody staircase was a very strange room. Dong Guo had never been there before. The decoration on the wall, tiles and ceiling was completely different from the other places. The room was covered in strange patterns. There were wrinkles of differing depths along the walls, making the place look like the inside of someone’s brain. The room was dark. However, touching the wall would get one some reactions, as if the room was communicating with them.
Dong Guo didn’t see anything ostentatiously scary, but a chill ran up her spine. It felt like the things inside the room were real, unlike the other props.
Gao Ming stood in the corner, his fingers caressing the grooves on the wall. At the spot where all the patterns converged was a test chamber that looked like a surgical table.
Gao Ming recognised this thing, not from his nightmare, but because he had seen something similar in Immortal Pharma Brain Realm Game Lab.
“The boss here really does know certain things about Immortal Pharma. But why is he doing this?” Gao Ming opened the chamber door. Inside, there were three black boxes bigger than human heads and three bottles of medicine.
“Medicine to enter the dream?” Gao Ming picked up a random box. A sentence was written on it. “Drink the black and crawl into the box I’ve prepared for you. You’ll enter the most despairing nightmare. The chance of obtaining the black box is 50 percent.”
“Is the black the medicine?” Gao Ming picked up the box in the middle. There was a sentence on it too. “Drink the white and crawl into the box I’ve prepared for you. You’ll enter the most beautiful dream. The chance of obtaining the black box is 5 percent.”
Gao Ming hesitated as he turned to the last box. “Drink the red and crawl into the box I’ve prepared for you. You’ll enter my nightmare and see the truth.”