Chapter 133

"Damn!"

On the second-floor landing of the emergency stairwell, Guan Suixing, who had been leading the way, suddenly stopped short.

"What's wrong? More skeletons?" Kou Lin asked, alarmed.

"No! I can't go up!" Guan Suixing cried, her hand pressed against what felt like an invisible barrier on the steps.

Meanwhile, the employees behind Lin Tu skirted around the blocked Guan Suixing and dashed up the stairs. One of them shot her a glance as he passed, as if she were an idiot.

Guan Suixing: "?"

"You can get up!" Kou Lin stepped forward and followed the employees.

Guan Suixing refused to believe it and tried to follow, but her foot wouldn't step up no matter how hard she tried.

"I can't get up either!"

"Me neither!"

Yi Ying and Hei Mawu both tried and found themselves trapped on the second floor.

Lin Tu walked around them and easily stepped up the stairs.

"Department!" The group said in unison, understanding dawning.

Yi Ying, Hei Mawu, and Guan Suixing were all in the After-sales Department, which occupied the second through fourth floors. And their workstations were on the second floor.

"What do we do if we can't go up?" Yi Ying was on the verge of despair.

The skeletons were multiplying. After finishing off the first floor, they'd surely try to come up to the second. How could she handle that if she couldn't escape upstairs?

"Stay calm!" Lin Tu pulled the group over to the escalators and gestured for them to look down through the gap.

Below, they saw the fire from where Hu Lulu's body had been thrown, after eerily licking across everything, had stopped at the first-floor railing. A clear line divided the area: the charred, blackened floor on one side and the normal concrete of the stairwell on the other.

"Huh?" Kou Lin was puzzled.

She pulled out her phone again, but the skill [Camera Intrusion] she had used earlier had already failed—the fire had destroyed the cameras.

"Wonder what it's like downstairs now..."

Kou Lin was only halfway through her sentence when she saw Lin Tu squeeze through the crowd and head downstairs.

"Hey..." Kou Lin started to call her back, but then spotted a skeleton chasing an employee at full speed. The employee shouted, "Brother Feng, I'm so sorry!" as he stumbled up the stairs.

Lin Tu sidestepped to let him through.

The skeleton he'd called "Brother Feng" failed to follow, stopped by an invisible wall at the first-floor landing.

"They can't come up either."

Everyone who saw it understood.

The skeleton lingered in front of the barrier. Lin Tu tentatively stretched a finger through, then quickly pulled it back before the skeleton could grab it.

"Sister Lin! Get up here! Let's find a safe place!" Yi Ying shouted from above.

Lin Tu nodded. About ten minutes later, the players gathered by the first-floor elevator lobby.

The stairwell was empty now, and the people on the first floor were all dead. The skeletons were densely packed, crowding against the invisible wall.

They kept a close watch on the barrier, but for now, nothing changed.

"I think this wall will disappear," Lin Tu said. "Logically, the fire consumed the first floor, so it will continue to burn upward. And since the skeletons came with the fire, they'll keep coming up too."

Strictly speaking, that reasoning wasn't entirely sound—this was a nightmare space, after all, and her intuition came from surviving so many disasters.

But the other players nodded. Having weathered this many disasters, they all had a similar feeling.

Guan Suixing asked the fatal question: "What if we still can't go up by then?"

"That shouldn't happen..." Yi Ying said miserably, her face a perfect picture of an awkward grimace.

"Let's drag desks and chairs over to block the stairs?" Lin Tu suggested.

It might not help, but what if it did...

Without further ado, they started hauling company furniture. Since this was the After-sales Department, there weren't just phone lines upstairs—there were also consultation rooms and lounges for in-person guest reception.

So they moved the tables and chairs from the lounge and piled them in front of the invisible wall on the first floor. Then came filing cabinets, printers... everything they could find, determined to pack the entire stairwell from the first to the second floor.

"There's some food here!" Guan Suixing said happily.

She had found the biscuits, tea snacks, tea, and milk that the lounge kept for entertaining guests.

"Collect it all," the other players said. "We can bring it to Luo Yongzhi and the others to appraise when we get back to the Black Night."

Speaking of Luo Yongzhi and the others in the Black Night, they seemed to have been summoned to the first floor as well, though there was no great danger. Everyone was too busy dealing with their own crises to worry about them.

"What are you all doing?" At that moment, a few employees appeared, looking at the players moving furniture with puzzlement.

"We're blocking off the monsters downstairs so they can't get up," Yi Ying said.

"It's useless. The fire will probably reach the second floor by noon," an employee said with a sigh.

The players exchanged silent glances, realizing this was an extremely important clue.

"Then why don't you run?" Lin Tu asked.

"Run? Why would we run?" The employee looked at her as if she were ridiculous. "Look at the time, will you? We need to clock in at six! Even if there's a fire, we're still part of the company, and we have to work for it. If everyone just clocked out and ran, who would do the work?"

His little speech left the players silent for a moment.

Just a short while ago, during the funeral, Yi Ying had chatted with employees passing by, and they hadn't been like this...

Lin Tu tried asking: "Do you remember what just happened?"

"Just now? Hmm... Seems like Xiao Hu's parents came to the company to make a scene, saying we didn't even leave her a complete corpse for burial. And then?" The employee scratched his head. "I can't really remember. Weird. But seems like they set the company on fire, is what happened."

Sure enough—Lin Tu exchanged a look with the other players. Her guess was right. These employees' experiences seemed to differ from the players'.

"When the fire spreads up here later, can we escape upstairs?" Lin Tu asked again.

"If the fire spreads, we'll only run if we absolutely have to! Are you crazy?" The employee gave Lin Tu a baffled look, as if the mad one wasn't himself, but the woman in front of him.

"Anyway, I don't have time to mess around with you lot. I see you've been rifling through things for a while—found any food? Give us some. We're all starving."

Yi Ying handed over a biscuit.

The employee took it, stuffed it into his mouth, swallowed it in a few bites, and turned to leave.

"What do you think?" Guan Suixing asked.

"What's there to think about? Didn't Sister Lin ask it clearly enough?" Kou Lin said. "He meant that the fire will spread up here by noon, and that wall will break. That's when we can escape upstairs. Before that..."

Kou Lin couldn't help but swear. "We still have to clock in! What the hell!"

The players were truly done with this. They could only hope that during this time, no family member would come up to them with some request and get them tangled up in helping out.

Speaking of Luo Yongzhi's group—they had received a temporary assignment to clean up the first floor. The moment the two of them arrived, they were greeted by a pile of corpses. Fortunately, the bodies showed no signs of "stirring," but even so, it scared the daylights out of both of them.

When the two teams compared notes, they realized that the place Luo Yongzhi had gone to was exactly the already-burnt first floor.

"The second floor is locked now. They said we can only go after lunch."

It seemed everything would have to wait until noon to be decided.

After clocking in twice—at six in the morning and nine—it was eleven o'clock by midday.

During that time, no shortage of employees came to the players asking for food. For some inexplicable reason, in what seemed like a short span to the players, these people looked as if they hadn't eaten in days, their eye sockets visibly sinking in, like people in a famine.

So much so that when they turned their hungry gazes on the players, who looked healthy and rosy-cheeked, there was a strange gleam in their eyes that sent a chill through the players from deep inside.

Yi Ying, who had been reluctant to part with her biscuits and only ever handed out one thin slice at a time, generously gave out an extra slice now.

Lin Tu seized an opportunity to talk to one of the employees and discovered that time flowed much faster for them than it did for the players.

From the players' perspective, they had only clocked in twice and hadn't even reached mealtime yet. But from these employees' perspective, two full days had passed, and they had gone hungry for six whole meals.

If that was the case... Lin Tu thought about the situation upstairs, and the uneasy feeling only grew stronger.

Finally, Kou Lin's voice came from behind the emergency exit door: "It's coming!"

The players, alerted, scrambled toward the stairwell. Thick black smoke was forcing its way out through the gaps in their stacked desks, cabinets, and printers, and the flames, like a giant tongue, licked everything up in an instant.

"Can we go now?" Lin Tu and Kou Lin stood first on the stairs—they had already clocked in on the sixth and seventh floors earlier, so they were certain they could walk up.

The remaining three were not so sure.

Yi Ying tentatively stretched her foot toward the stairs—

"Can't make it!" she wailed.

The fire continued to devour the second table, and a searing heat suddenly pressed in, as if the players were being strung on a skewer and roasted over an open fire.

"Could it be because the employees don't know yet?" Connecting this to the morning's interrogation, Lin Tu—who had a growing feeling that these employees were living through a story, a plot—began to consider a possibility.

The players were only outsiders; the ones truly inside this disaster's narrative were the employees. Therefore, only when the key information reached the employees would the next phase of the plot be triggered.

"Fire's coming!" Lin Tu dashed out the emergency exit and shouted into the office.

Screams erupted everywhere.

At the same time, Lin Tu heard Yi Ying's voice from behind: "I can get up now!"

"Go!" Seeing the flames swallow the obstacles in an instant and skeletons appear at the middle of the stairs, the group sprinted upstairs ahead of them.