Alternate Dimension Game: Happiness is all that matters!
Chapter 37 - 36 The Terror in the Stairwell

Chapter 37: Chapter 36 The Terror in the Stairwell

"That’s truly terrifying. There can’t be much oxygen inside a coffin, right? Will I just suffocate to death?" Lu Tianming shrugged.

"The coffin indeed doesn’t have much oxygen, and there might be corpse fluids or something. But given your vitality, you shouldn’t suffocate to death."

Continuously climbing upward, when he reached over a hundred floors, Lu Tianming saw another corpse, its body had been desiccated by the wind, looking like a gnawed chicken claw.

"There’s a corpse here, it wasn’t here last time. Dressed in the garb of a cardinal, it resembles that from the West... This scene is truly eerie!" He deliberately feigned shock, "It makes me think of some strange things."

"Was this thing here the last time an Investigator came in?"

"Forget it, I can’t be bothered with it. Maybe it popped out from one of the parallel worlds? I can’t tell if it’s a person or a ghost, so I’m not investigating."

Lu Tianming easily stepped over the corpse.

The electronic voice was silent for a moment, unsure whether to say, "The last time someone came in, they also saw this corpse..."

As his assistant, he keenly knew the real challenge hadn’t started yet and stopped joking around, "You need to stay focused on your ultimate destination and not be swayed by your environment."

"I know, it’s just a corpse. It’s trying to scare me, isn’t it? There are so many unsolved mysteries in the world, it’s really too much to investigate."

Next floor.

Lu Tianming laughed and said, "This is my home, it says Unit 101 on the third floor. The door is exactly like my own."

The voice in the headset said, "If it’s not your ultimate destination in your heart, then that’s not your home. Or perhaps you’ve inadvertently developed a desire to go home."

Lu Tianming replied, "Of course I know. This stairwell is meant to create many distractions, to sway the purpose in your mind."

"If I opened it, I might find some terrifying things in my home."

"A past Investigator went mad like that, right?"

The electronic voice was silent again for a moment before responding, "Indeed, that Investigator became slightly anxious during the investigation, feeling a deep-seated desire to go home, and under his wavering conviction, that door led to a fake ’home.’"

"Upon entering the room, the Investigator claimed the interior décor matched his own home with the tables, chairs, television, and refrigerator all identical, even the clothes yet to be laundered matched perfectly."

"But he found his wife’s corpse under the bed, and his daughter’s corpse in the refrigerator."

"The main reason was the strains in the marital relationship, and his daughter’s poor school performance. Consequently, in the ’fake scene,’ these two were turned into corpses."

Lu Tianming furrowed his brow and asked, "The corpses in this fake scene were fake, right?"

"Yes, the corpses were indeed faux, merely composed of organic material; his wife and daughter are still alive in the real world. But the Investigator’s sanity was greatly damaged, and even after he regained his composure, he could not find the right path inside the stairwell again."

"Hell is other people... Having some dark thoughts about family issues isn’t really a big deal," Lu Tianming sighed. "How many people are truly saints?"

He lit a cigarette and leisurely blew out a smoke ring.

After finishing the cigarette, he stopped dawdling and began to climb rapidly.

With the "thud thud thud" of climbing stairs, after more than two hundred floors, the surroundings plunged into total darkness, and he had to use a flashlight to see.

After more than four hundred floors, the stairwell turned into a wooden staircase, and it constantly felt like someone was following him.

Almost every Investigator had experienced this illusion; it wasn’t clear yet what caused these paranoid delusions.

Further on at one thousand floors, there was another change; it turned into a flesh-like staircase. каждый felt like walking inside a monster’s stomach.

The flesh-like stairs would also secrete an acidic liquid, causing itchiness on his skin.

The air was both stifling and hot.

It wrought tremendous devastation on the human spirit.

After the one thousand five hundredth floor, the fleshy stairs disappeared; the background turned into a dim starry sky, and the staircase transformed into a single-log bridge spanning the cosmos. The "door" had turned into a bizarre object embedded in the void.

Eyes appeared all around, mocking and jeering at the helpless humans, eager for him to fall off the log bridge and into the Etheric Abyss.

"What are you looking at, never seen a lively human before?"

Lu Tianming was sweating all over, incessantly smoking.

Every star in the sky represented an eye, billions of eyes were fixedly staring, squirming hurriedly—it was an unbearable sensation.

Compared to Lu Tianming, who was in the midst of it all, the corresponding operator was even more frightened.

The current environment had already become grotesque beyond the mental bounds humans could endure, and even an S-level Investigator was human, with own limits.

...

At floor 1576, a wooden door appeared, and upon seeing this door, Lu Tianming paused slightly.

"I just had some hallucinations, remembered some past events... I was thinking, if I enter this wooden door, maybe I could investigate the Blood Demon’s domain. Should I investigate it along the way?"

"But, I can differentiate that this wooden door is not my target."

The operator immediately said, "You need to rest. Your recent mental fluctuation index exceeded the normal range; you need to firm up your objectives. Random thoughts are not helpful."

"I, of course, know that." Lu Tianming wiped his sweat with a towel from his bag, took out a piece of beef jerky, chewed it, and shook it at the eyes in the sky: "Ever eaten beef, bro?"

He threw the beef jerky down the log bridge.

Then, the beef jerky disappeared, and chewing and swallowing sounds emerged from the void.

"I was thinking about something, we’re already at floor 1576, and the target hasn’t appeared yet... This is already the boundary of a Secondary Demon God. From here on out, each floor is going to take a tremendous amount of effort. I need to take it slow."

"If the ’Game’ I want to meet is more ferocious than the ’God’ on floor 2390, wouldn’t the situation become interesting? Would the Westerners lose their temper?"

...

...

The main culprit, Wang Hao, was fast asleep on his bed, his legs clamped around a soft Kabigon pillow.

He suddenly woke from his dream, scratching his head somewhat baffledly: "Why did I have a nightmare? Was someone calling me?"

When he woke up, it was broad daylight, just ten hours had passed.

"Overslept until nine o’clock again, damn it!!"

It was a bright, pleasant Saturday, and the beautiful day had begun anew.

After school, the twin-tailed classmate would return home, where he could see his cute cousin again, and thinking of this brightened Wang Hao’s mood.

"Today is a good day to air out the bedding."

"Then go grocery shopping, and have a good meal."

Recalling a week of idleness, Wang Hao couldn’t help but feel a sense of shame.

He hated his degenerate self!

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