In the pitch-black world, gray mist began rising all around me.

  Or rather, “around me”—except I couldn’t locate my own body anymore. In this domain filled with drifting gray fog, I felt like a spectator in a first-person shooter after dying: no sense of limbs, no ability to speak or move, no breathing, no blinking. I couldn’t smell anything, couldn’t hear anything.

  I wasn’t even sure whether the absence of a physical body was the reason, but I felt no emotional fluctuations at all. I should have been shocked, terrified—but somehow I had already accepted it all, facing this mysterious space with an unexpected calm detachment I had never known before.

  After a brief pause, I tried willing my viewpoint to turn and move forward.

  Without any reference points, I had no idea whether I was actually moving. I simply focused every scrap of attention on the thought of advancing. Maybe I was progressing. For now, I had to believe that.

  I don’t know how much time passed before something new appeared ahead.

  Roughly what felt like dozens of meters away—though again, without references, it was only a feeling—I saw eight chairs carved from white stone. Seven of them were larger than ordinary armchairs, arranged in a straight line; the eighth was twice as big as the others and stood alone, facing them directly.

  Seated upon the largest stone chair was a colossal humanoid figure, godlike in scale. Shrouded in mist, its exact features and attire remained unclear—just a hazy black silhouette.

  As I drew closer, I noticed that two of the other stone chairs were also occupied by shadowy figures, while the remaining five stood empty. The two occupied seats were the leftmost ones. The figure on the far left was tall and unnaturally thin; the one right beside it was small, almost child-sized.

  Compared to the godlike giant, these two at least appeared to be roughly human in proportion.

  Gradually, curiosity stirred within me—who were they? Why were they sitting here?

  Even though I shouldn’t have been capable of emotion in this state, the curiosity was impossible to suppress.

  Suddenly, I felt myself on the verge of waking. It was as if this place were nothing more than a dreamscape, and regaining normal cognition meant the dream would end.

  At that exact moment, the tall, thin shadow on the far left seemed to notice me.

  He jerked his head around and let out a low, rasping voice: “Who’s there?”

  “Hm?” The child-sized shadow beside him also turned.

  The godlike giant remained utterly still, like a statue.

  I tried to answer—but the words never formed. I realized I shouldn’t even be able to feel a mouth. In the next instant, all eight stone chairs, along with the surrounding mist, vanished completely from my sight.

  I had woken up.

  My eyes opened. The fog-filled space was gone. I was still standing in front of the basement wall, the black jade stone resting in my palm.

  —

  Only then did the delayed shock hit me, sending goosebumps racing across my skin.

  What the hell just happened? I’d been standing there… dreaming?

  No—not dreaming. More like I’d been pulled into some kind of hallucination.

  Was it the black jade that did this?

  I immediately set the stone down on the floor and backed away several steps, watching it warily. This time, though, it displayed no further supernatural behavior. It simply lay there like an ordinary rock.

  No reaction? Yet earlier it had clearly seized control of my consciousness… or rather, not control—nothing harmful had happened. It had simply dragged me through a bizarre illusory experience for no apparent reason.

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  What did that vision even mean? The fog-filled domain, the eight stone chairs, the three eerie figures… Were they human? Or some incomprehensible beings that dwelled in that phantom realm?

  There were too few clues. I couldn’t analyze anything meaningful yet. For now, I picked the black jade back up.

  I knew it might still harbor other unknown dangers, but I had come this far—I wasn’t about to discard it. If it were clearly toxic or immediately lethal, that would be different. Since its true nature remained unclear, I had to take it back and study it properly.

  If I avoided every anomalous object out of fear, I never would have come down here in the first place.

  I decided to keep exploring the basement a little longer. Honestly, I suspected tonight’s haul was mostly over—this place was depressingly empty. Everything was in plain sight; nothing hidden. My “Fireflies” were scattered everywhere, observing every corner in meticulous detail. Still, the mere fact that this was a space that didn’t exist in reality was enough to keep me captivated.

  Then I noticed something off.

  Compared to when I first entered, something about the basement had changed. Something crucial—

  I whipped around.

  The staircase I had descended was gone. The ceiling above was perfectly smooth concrete—no opening, no trace of an entrance!

  In that instant, icy dread surged through me, as though a swarm of frozen cockroaches were crawling up my spine from tailbone to skull.

  The exit had vanished. Why?

  I had been monitoring the staircase and the opening the entire time through the “Fireflies.” When had it disappeared?

  During the hallucination?

  I rushed to where the stairs had been and inspected the spot frantically. No matter how closely I looked, there was no sign that stairs had ever existed here. The ceiling too—even the faint texture of the concrete seemed to insist it had always looked exactly like this.

  This was absurd. If there had never been an entrance, how the hell had I gotten down here?

  Calm down. Think carefully about what to do next.

  The cave’s appearances and disappearances must follow some fixed pattern. If I could figure it out, I should be able to reopen the exit.

  But “everything follows rules” is a human assumption about the natural world. What I was facing now was an anomaly that existed outside ordinary rules. Maybe there was no pattern at all, and all my reasoning would be useless.

  True, the cave appeared within a man-made ritual array. But Agent Kong had also said the array itself wasn’t what opened the cave. This might be an unknown phenomenon beyond even the Fallen Demon Hunters’ understanding—something truly independent of human design.

  And tomorrow morning, the Huntress woman would arrive at the fifteenth-floor apartment. Whether she planned to erase the ritual array or break through the floor, she would ultimately put an end to this anomalous event in her own way.

  If that happened, I would never see the cave reopen. I would be trapped forever in a space that didn’t exist in reality.

  A true dead end.

  But this was the bed I’d made for myself.

  I refused to whimper anything like “I should have known…”—at least not yet. I had to think positively. Maybe this was a trial. Sometimes a person only truly knows themselves when pushed into absolute desperation. Hadn’t I always wondered how I would behave when facing hopeless peril? Well, here it was—the critical moment.

  Let’s analyze the pattern of the cave’s appearance first. What had I done that caused it to disappear?

  No—maybe I should flip the perspective. Was it not something I did, but something I failed to do?

  When I fell into the hallucination, I temporarily lost the ability to monitor the cave and the staircase—and that was exactly when they vanished… So… could the answer be that the cave disappears when no one is observing it?

  The hypothesis felt plausible.

  During the day, when Agent Kong knocked and Chang’an temporarily covered the cave with the carpet, the cave was gone the next time we looked. Undoubtedly, both of us had lost visual contact during that interval.

  And the first time Chang’an encountered the anomaly, he had left the fifteenth-floor apartment briefly to check whether the cave led to the room below—meaning he too had lost observation. Then he called the police, and by the time they arrived, the cave had disappeared… Though he never mentioned whether he checked it again before calling.

  Even if my hypothesis was correct, I only knew why the cave disappeared. What I needed was how to make it reappear.

  And on that front, I had zero ideas.

  If the condition for the cave to reappear couldn’t be fulfilled from inside the basement—if it required someone outside—then I was completely helpless. Was I supposed to hope someone else entered the fifteenth-floor apartment and accidentally triggered the right conditions? The problem was, no one was coming—except the Huntress, who planned to destroy the anomaly entirely.

  Perhaps I needed to shift my thinking again. Broaden the scope.

  Why did I have to crack some clue-less pattern to escape? I wasn’t an ordinary person without special abilities—I was a superhuman. Maybe it was time to look for an outside-the-box solution, a brute-force breakthrough.

  Unfortunately… my abilities really weren’t suited for this kind of situation.

  When it came to killing or destruction, my powers were top-tier. But for solving puzzles? It would be like trying to perform delicate brain surgery with a chainsaw—messy at best.

  Speaking of brute force, there was one question I’d never properly considered before.

  This basement was a “space that doesn’t exist in reality.” So what exactly lay outside it? Not the fifteenth-floor apartment reachable through the entrance—but the literal other side of these walls.

  I didn’t believe breaking through the wall would lead back to the real world. Still, with no other leads, any new discovery might become the key to breaking the deadlock.

  More importantly—I was curious.

  With that thought, I walked up to the wall and raised my right hand.

  I activated my ability.