The cave had reappeared!

  I still hadn’t figured out the pattern behind its appearances and disappearances, so there was no telling when it would show up or vanish again. I’d already braced myself for the possibility that I’d have to spend hours—maybe days—trying to coax it back out. For it to resurface on its own like this… how could I not feel a rush of excitement?

  If Chang’an or Alice were here, they might see the cave as an extremely ominous sign. To me, though, this felt like the best possible start.

  I lifted the wooden cover. Once again, the dim, fathomless entrance lay open before me.

  This time was different. I was alone in the middle of the night, staring down into it with a completely transformed state of mind. Chang’an had once worried that something “unclean” might crawl up from below, and back then I couldn’t relate at all. During the day, with him beside me, this place had felt saturated with the ordinary smells and sounds of everyday life—ghosts would never come here.

  But now, standing here alone at night, the entire space seemed to have transformed into a forbidden realm that didn’t belong to reality. The distant clamor of the city faded completely from my awareness. Whatever happened here would be my own private ghost story—no second witness, no way to convince anyone else even if I tried to tell them. In other words, this was already a playground for demons and spirits to run wild.

  And this time, there was no Chang’an to hold me back, no Agent Kong suddenly knocking at the door to interrupt.

  What would happen, I wondered with growing curiosity, if I went down to the apartment below right now and punched a hole through the ceiling directly under where the cave sat? The thought thrilled me. But if doing that made the cave disappear again, it would ruin everything—and besides, people lived down there. I didn’t want to shatter the delicate sense of mystery that only existed in solitude. I was afraid that if I startled outsiders, the cave itself would panic and hide once more.

  I set my backpack down on the floor and pulled out a wired endoscope camera and a selfie stick. I connected the camera to my phone, secured it to the stick, and carefully lowered it into the cave. Then I looked at my screen.

  Contrary to what I’d expected, nothing appeared.

  So even a wired camera didn’t work. Whatever signal-blocking mechanism existed inside the cave had nothing to do with wireless or wired connections. If that was the case, then why didn’t a human body get blocked the same way? Was it really because living flesh held some special status in anomalous events?

  A scientist might demand a stricter, more empirical answer, but I was perfectly fine accepting a conclusion tinged with mysticism.

  I retracted the camera and selfie stick, then switched my phone to video recording mode, turned on the flashlight, and sent it back down on the stick.

  After about a minute of recording, I pulled the phone back up and checked the footage.

  I’d half-expected electronic devices to fail completely inside a haunted space—plenty of horror stories followed that rule. But this time my expectations were overturned: the phone had successfully captured what lay below.

  The scene matched the first impression Chang’an and I had shared—it really was a basement.

  And quite a spacious one. Rough estimate, it looked about two-thirds the size of a classroom. Naturally, there were no doors or windows in the walls. The place hadn’t been finished at all; bare concrete floors and walls, gray metal shelves scattered around like the abandoned racks of a failed convenience store.

  Most of the shelves stood empty, coated in thick dust. The few that held anything contained only gutted yellow cardboard boxes, flaps hanging open. There were basically no hiding spots. No monsters, no ghosts, no trace of anything anomalous at all.

  Then again, who knew? Maybe electronic devices simply couldn’t capture ghosts. Or maybe there were tiny creatures the size of insects or rats. You couldn’t apply common sense to the uncanny.

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  Suddenly, something odd caught my eye in the footage.

  At the far end of the basement, near the base of the wall, something was reflecting light.

  I pressed my eyes closer to the screen, trying to make it out. No luck. It wasn’t an issue of angle—the object was simply too small, and too far from the camera. I couldn’t identify it.

  I could at least tell it probably wasn’t a shard of glass or anything like that. There were no other glass objects in the basement, no other reflective surfaces at all.

  Whatever it was, it stood out starkly in this place.

  Before I noticed it, I could ignore it. But once I had, the thing carried an inexplicable sense of presence. It was just a small, unclear object sitting in a dim basement, yet it felt like a single drop of black ink spilled across a pure white sheet. The moment I registered it, my attention was completely captured.

  What the hell was that?

  I replayed the feeling over and over, savoring the sheer strangeness of it, then finally put the phone away.

  I’d seen enough. Time to head home—yeah, right.

  This was barely an appetizer. It had only whetted my appetite, left me practically drooling. No way was I walking away now.

  Next step: I was going in.

  —

  I had already considered the dangers I might face down there.

  The least threatening kind, to me, would be purely physical threats.

  In the most extreme scenario—even if ten Godzillas suddenly spawned in that basement—I still had my “second form” as an ultimate trump card. I’d be untouchable.

  But if what waited below was a vengeful spirit wielding incomprehensible supernatural power, that was another story. Mental attacks, curses—I had no idea whether I could resist them. I’d never been hit by anything metaphysical before.

  And the single most dangerous possibility? The entrance vanishing the moment I went down, sealing me inside forever.

  There were probably smarter, safer ways to investigate—ways that didn’t require risking my own body. But was there really any method that could let me experience this cave more directly than stepping into it with my own two feet? Words, pictures, videos… I didn’t want to understand another mysterious spacetime through such dull mediums. I wanted to measure the space below with my own steps, to breathe the air of this unreal realm with my own lungs. That was exactly why I’d come here.

  To put it bluntly, I knew full well that my rationality had taken a serious hit right now. To the version of me that craved “adventures beyond reality,” this cave possessed an irresistible allure. No amount of reason could make me turn back. I had to see this through.

  I stared down at the stairs leading into the darkness, then took a step forward. My right foot landed on the first step.

  It felt like stepping into thick, murky swamp mud. That single foot had already crossed into a spacetime that didn’t exist in reality. A wave of pins and needles rushed through my body. I took a deep breath, lifted my left foot, and continued downward.

  One step. Another. Another… I descended slowly along the stairs while the surrounding floor level gradually rose until it swallowed the ceiling above my head.

  I couldn’t help glancing up. The real world had become nothing more than a square opening overhead. Forcing my gaze back down, I raised my right hand and summoned the “Fireflies.”

  Orange-red points of light flickered into existence in the air, giving off a bright glow. As expected, the “Fireflies” weren’t prevented from being summoned below the cave—they were only prevented from existing here while I remained outside.

  More and more appeared, quickly reaching twenty or thirty. Under my direction, they spread throughout the basement, their light growing brighter until the whole space was illuminated as clearly as daylight.

  My feet finally touched the basement floor. I scanned the surroundings. No monsters, no ghosts, no other anomalous phenomena for the moment. My perception covered the entire area—there wasn’t even a single insect. This place was utterly devoid of life.

  After a brief pause, I walked straight toward the far wall.

  Soon I could clearly see what the reflective object from the video actually was.

  Lying at the base of the wall was an irregularly shaped, hard substance, entirely black and roughly the size of a ping-pong ball. Though its color was dark, the material had a jade-like quality—when light hit it, it gave off a faint, subtle gleam.

  I picked it up and turned it over in my hand, examining it closely. This black jade didn’t just look like jade; it felt like it too—smooth and warm to the touch, though the edges were sharp enough to cut if I wasn’t careful.

  From what I could tell, it wasn’t a complete object. It looked more like a broken fragment chipped off something much larger.

  I scanned the area again but found no sign of a larger piece, nor any other fragments.

  My focus returned to the black jade. The concrete floor felt ice-cold under my fingers, yet this stone transmitted no chill at all—nor any warmth. It was as if the very concept of temperature didn’t apply to it.

  What in the world was this thing?

  I examined it even more closely.

  And at that moment, something impossible happened.

  The instant I poured all my attention into the black jade, its darkness seemed to seize my gaze like a black hole capturing light.

  By the time I realized something was wrong, I could no longer look away. My eyeballs wouldn’t even twitch. The black jade began to expand in my field of vision—whether it was actually growing or my face was unconsciously drawing closer, I couldn’t tell.

  In the blink of an eye, the black jade filled my entire vision. My mind felt like it was falling, crashing straight into the heart of the stone.

  Then, in pitch-black darkness where I couldn’t see my own hand in front of my face, gray mist slowly began to rise.