"I am an extremely proud person, but whenever I see you, I always feel inferior. This emotion is rooted deep in my soul, but he has never told you."
"I used to think that kind of twisted love was terrifying, but after getting close to you, I finally understood why he was so deeply entangled and unable to extricate himself."
"Don’t look at me with those eyes like I’m trash. I just voiced all the words hidden in his heart."
The Director did not know what Han Fei was hiding. He indiscriminately revealed all his emotions, exaggerating them in the process.
As a sinister glint flashed in his eyes, the Soul of Evil would stop at nothing to achieve his goals. Such a perfect opportunity was laid before him. He really wished he could force Han Fei into submission, to the extent of wanting to tie Han Fei up and throw him into Xu Qin’s kitchen tonight.
Who eats who, how it’s done, be it braised or fried, didn’t matter. As long as he could hold onto the big leg, that would be enough.
In his opinion, this might be the only use for that mundane soul.
Han Fei, whose soul was heavily damaged, shivered. It seemed some malicious individual was plotting against him.
He embraced the broken blood-colored paperman, attempting to discern what it was trying to tell him. However, due to severe injuries, the blood was swiftly draining from its body.
"Just one glance from the Divine Spirit, and it felt like my soul was being sucked away. Indeed, the gap between me and the Unspeakable is enormous."
Han Fei could completely understand now why Fu Sheng would abandon everything and chose to become an Unspeakable. This power was too seductive. If Han Fei had the chance to wield it, he might also choose to forever dwell in the Deep World, becoming a taboo spoken of by all ghosts.
Several people reached the fiftieth floor together, standing at the boundary made of corpses, gazing at the absurd world created by God.
"What are those paintings on the walls?" Han Fei discovered an interesting scene. The fearlessly reckless Big Evil was cautiously walking down the middle of the corridor on the fiftieth floor, carrying Han Fei on his back, not daring to touch the walls on either side. One must know, Big Evil’s style in the past was to charge recklessly forward, blazing a trail even where none existed.
"It should be a curse left by the Unspeakable. I’ve seen similar patterns on fanatics," Ji Zheng took out a camera and snapped several photos of the wall, "The fiftieth floor has no living people, reverting the building to its original state. I once heard a rumor that anyone who stayed on the fiftieth floor for more than ten minutes would be forever trapped here."
Mr. Mo looked up at the corpses merged with the surrounding walls, "The rumors should be true. Have you noticed that the walls are slowly closing in on us, as if preparing to crush us?"
"Shall we head down now?" Li Rou was very concerned about Han Fei’s injury. As a half-deformed ghost, she had always been treated as a monster by the natives, but only Han Fei treated her as a real person.
"Li Xue’s teacher is currently alone, fighting against the power left behind by the Divine Spirit. I don’t know how he, an ordinary person, obtained such power, but I can imagine the price he paid and the pressure he endured. In this piece of Deep World, the only people who can help him now are us."
Han Fei had too many reasons to continue moving upwards. He could not stop his steps.
Tremendous and terrifying power was growing in the corridors on either side of the building. The taboos were out of control. Han Fei and the others dared not take the corridors. After circling around, they arrived at the elevator chamber on the fiftieth floor.
Han Fei’s elevator card could only take them to the forty-ninth floor. The fiftieth floor could only be reached by those recognized by the Divine Spirit. This level was both the graveyard for all rebels and a transit station for God’s fanatics.
"Our elevator cards can’t access areas above the fiftieth floor..."
While worrying about this, Han Fei suddenly noticed that the door to elevator 19 could not close. Moving closer to take a look, he saw that the elevator door had been violently destroyed, and the elevator car seemed stuck on a certain floor.
With half his body leaning into the elevator shaft, it was the first time Han Fei saw the elevator from this angle. It turned out the so-called elevator was not a "dead object" at all, but a cluster of gigantic heads.
Riding the elevator was akin to walking into their mouths, allowing these giant human head balloons to carry oneself up and down.
Pale cheeks, putrid and decaying mouths, gouged out facial features, and cursed by Divine Spirits all over the body—this was the elevator’s true nature.
The other elevator cars were still as they once were, but elevator 19 seemed to have been "killed" by some force.
"If the Divine Spirit dies, all illusions might shatter, revealing the building made of human bones at its most brutal," Mr. Mo was still sighing as Han Fei had already asked Big Evil to crawl into the elevator shaft carrying him.
"What are you doing?"
"Going up from here," Han Fei came up with an alternative path, finding a unique route.
"Are you sure this path is passable?" even Forbidden-level Night Patrol Ji Zheng dared not follow.
"You already said it’s a path, so what’s there to fear? Follow me, and move quickly!" Han Fei instructed Big Evil to lead the way, crawling into the elevator shaft and discovering a thick scab of blood and strange crawling blood worms within the "well."
Piercing through the blood scab, Big Evil seemed to have poked a hornet’s nest, with countless grotesque worms crawling out from the depths of the blood scab. If any grudge had been there, it could have been eaten clean. Yet, Big Evil was an exception.
All the grotesque worms dared not approach Big Evil. It was as if back on Fu Sheng’s Memory Shrine Lake Divine Island, Big Evil, born from the human-faced pupae, innately suppressed all grotesque worms.
Big Evil pried open the elevator door to the fifty-first floor. Mr. Mo and the others were extremely shocked. Urged on by Han Fei’s calls, they gathered their courage to climb onto Big Evil, entering the fifty-first floor through the elevator shaft.
"This path is not bad, quiet and deserted. We’ll use it in the future."
Once Big Evil had left the elevator shaft, all the soul worms and blood worms slunk back into the blood filth, untraceable to the eye.
"Those below the fiftieth floor say going beyond the fiftieth floor is Heaven, yet there doesn’t seem to be anything special here."
The areas below the fiftieth floor resembled Xinhu Old City District decades ago. Above the fiftieth floor, various elements of the new era began to appear. Technological advancements changed lives, bringing new horrors as well.
One by one, the doors had electronic locks replaced, and eyeballs in surveillance cameras would occasionally blink on their own. Everything moved forward, unchanged was the increasingly missing Happiness Sense and the ever-growing despair.
However, one thing couldn’t be denied, the fiftieth floor and above increasingly overlapped with reality. Perhaps to those in the Deep World, reality represented Heaven.
"Don’t let your guard down; don’t trust anything you see. Those walls made of corpses are the only realities here, merely what the Divine Spirit wants us to see. Do not indulge in them," Mr. Mo attempted to open a nearby door. Traces of habitation remained everywhere in the apartment rooms, but not a single living person could be seen inside, only one paperman after another.
Those paper-made dummies stitched together representing fathers, mothers, and children appeared to be in different parts of the house, seemingly engaged in various activities. They froze the instant Mr. Mo suddenly opened the door.
"The fifty-first floor is all papermen?"
The fiftieth floor marked the burial site for all rebels and also acted as a transfer station for the fanatics of the Divine Spirit.
That pseudo-god seemed to have lost all family, left only with toys he made himself and a few dummies he considered his parents and siblings.
It wasn’t about being worn smooth by life; it meant being absolutely obedient and a paperman.
"Don’t kill them; they’re probably just toys compliant in the hands of the Divine Spirit,"
Han Fei, clutching his blood-colored paperman, could tell that within its body, a child’s soul was trapped. That child was empty and oblivious, merely obedient.
Killing them all was nearly impossible, given they hid countless numbers on the fifty-first floor.
"The Soul of Evil’s expansion is too slow. If I want to live above the fiftieth floor, I must become an absolutely obedient paperman." Han Fei walked the hallway when suddenly a droplet of black rain fell on the back of his hand. In a daze, he looked up, and it felt as if the tear between reality and the Deep World had almost disappeared, as though he were back in reality. If this continued, not only in the Deep World may unexpected things happen, but it seemed even in reality, there might be some unforeseen issues.
Gazing at the droplet of black rain on his hand, Han Fei had a very bad premonition. It wasn’t just within the Deep World; some unexpected situations seemed to be emerging in reality as well.
"If the Soul of Evil expands too slowly, it won’t just affect the Deep World but our reality as well. It’s not merely a physical attack; it’s a kind of despair that’s hard to describe."