Mystery: Mr. Witch and Ms. Hunter

Chapter 279 Human Cage
The elevator creaked as it moved upwards, and the two people standing in the middle of the elevator remained silent.

Although Qiao Qiao temporarily put aside her suspicion of Adele, it was obviously impossible for her to completely trust Adele. In fact, in this world where difference equals danger, she was lucky that she did not open fire immediately.

Adele still needs Qiao Qiao's knowledge and experience, otherwise it would not be easy for her to summarize the survival rules for the next three levels by herself.

"Do we need to continue confirming?" Adele suddenly asked when the elevator stopped on the second floor.

Compared with the first floor, the situation on the second floor looked extremely tragic. The walls were covered with black liquid spilled like ink. It was as if a huge creature had squeezed through the corridor, leaving sticky blood on the damaged corridor.

The wallpaper that was originally pasted on the wall to cover the mirror has been scratched off, revealing pieces of translucent brown glass, forming countless mirrors that can be eroded.

Before they even stepped into the corridor, Adele and Qiao Qiao felt the familiar feeling of dizziness, as if they were being stared at by something strange.

"From the situation on the first floor, the indigenous people in this hotel are in grave danger. If we continue to confirm, we may even be killed."

Qiao Qiao was silent. She knew that Adele was telling the truth. Although this strange lady showed special abilities that ordinary people did not have, she was still at a disadvantage in the brief contact just now, not to mention herself.

As a selected on-duty personnel, although she has a sense of selfless responsibility, she cannot ask others to take the same risks as her, not to mention that she is not the main force of the team now.

After thinking it over again and again, Qiao Qiao sighed.

"Okay, let's go straight to the roof..."

As she spoke, she pressed the button on the elevator. The numbers on the button had been changed to Roman numerals, destroying its meaning as a symbol of spiritual numbers.

The elevator continued to rise, and there was another suffocating silence. After three or five seconds, the elevator stopped and the glass door slowly opened.

"I didn't press pause on the third floor?"

Qiao Qiao looked outside with some doubt, but what she saw gave her a fright:
What appeared in their eyes was the corridor they had seen once before, which was covered with sticky black liquid, mirrors were everywhere, and the wallpaper was damaged, like fallen dead skin.

At the end of the corridor, at the staircase, lay a shrunken corpse, with his back against the iron door. Beside him was a dark red mass of dirt that had been trampled on, spreading across the carpet, forming a shocking mass.

"This is still the second floor?"

Adele quickly glanced at the elevator buttons. Originally, the four buttons were "I", "II", "III" and "IV". However, now they have become "II", "II", "II" and "II".

"Leaving the elevator, we go up the stairs at the other end of the corridor."

Adele thought about it for a moment and discussed it with Qiao Qiao, who readily agreed.

To be on the safe side, Qiao Qiao followed the regulations and threw a stun grenade into the corridor that was causing dizziness and nausea. The two of them walked out of the elevator only after the sonic boom faded.

The two men held red and blue police lights and walked carefully through the corridor, reminding each other not to touch the black slime and not to look at things around them that could reflect images.

"Let me ask you first, what would happen if you kept looking into the mirror and didn't get help?"

In order to ease the awkward atmosphere, Adele had to find a way to ask.

“You might see things you shouldn’t see and become like your reflection in the mirror.”

Qiao Qiao replied, "When we were covering the mirror before, a curious young man pasted a poster of Alain Delon on the mirror. It happened to be not stuck very firmly. One time, he stared at the photo for about five minutes while brushing his teeth, and then he realized that the poster was under his feet, and there was nothing pasted on the mirror."

"What bad luck! How is he now?"

Adele shrugged, then asked curiously.

"Before I left, he and that poster were posted on the wall of our base's lounge... Of course, if it hadn't been blown up by the explosion just now, it should still be there now."

Qiao Qiao replied, "But he is lucky. What he transformed into is not so postmodern, so we can still put it in the lounge to appreciate it. Some people simply become a source of pollution, and some people look at the broken mirror, and then the brokenness appears on them as well."

"Well, we have to be careful then."

Adele moved her eyes quickly, not letting her gaze stay on one point for too long.

Unlike the first floor, this time Adele and her friend did not knock on the door next door. Instead, they carefully walked through the corridor and headed straight for the stairs at the other end of the room. Therefore, no other accidents happened along the way, and the two of them arrived at the stairs smoothly.

The corpse lay quietly beside the two of them. From the strips of matter spreading out of his mouth, it could be seen that he seemed to have been stared at by that strange gaze for too long, and under the influence of a strange feeling of nausea, he vomited out all his internal organs.

Adele wrapped a layer of silk thread around her hands, grasped the thick door handle, and pulled the security door open.

Fortunately, none of the traps she was worried about appeared, and the stairwell was just a stairwell. The green light sign flickered in the dark, making the stairwell look a little eerie.

The two looked at each other, Qiao Qiao entered the stairwell first, followed by Adele. They quickly climbed two flights of stairs and arrived at the staircase on the fourth floor.

However, after the two pushed open the door, they found that they were back in the corridor on the second floor again, and the scenery in the narrow passage seemed to have not changed at all.

"How is this going?"

Qiao Qiao was a little panicked, "Are we trapped here?"

"Not only that." Adele's tone was a little heavy. She pointed to the damaged wallpaper in the corridor in the distance, "There are more mirrors now."

Indeed, every time Adele and her partner passed through the corridor, the signs of damage would increase, creating new mirror surfaces on the walls.

"If this continues, after a while, we won't be able to avoid looking directly into the mirror even if we want to. Moreover, we currently have no means to correct the symptoms mentioned in the manual..."

Qiao Qiao thought quickly. The manual required teammates to stand in the other party's mirror image and execute the contents of the last page. However, the subsequent processing was handled by professionals among the on-duty personnel. Neither Adele nor Qiao Qiao knew about this.

"Wait, there seems to be a new figure in the mirror..."

Adele suddenly murmured, her eyesight was better than Qiao Qiao's, so she could see clearly what was in the mirror at the end of the corridor. Staring at the mirror for a short time would not cause loss of control, so she was able to notice the movement of those things before Qiao Qiao.

“Is it a flat surface like a photograph?”

Qiao Qiao asked nervously, "Also, don't stare at the mirror for more than ten seconds!"

Adele quickly looked away and answered based on her memory: "No, it looks no different from a normal person, but what I can be sure of is that it is definitely not our mirror image!"

"Where did they come from? Did they appear all of a sudden?"

Qiao Qiao also looked at the mirror in the distance for a few seconds, then closed her eyes and lowered her head. She only opened her eyes after making sure that she would never see the mirror again.

Ten seconds is a life-and-death line verified by the life of the on-duty personnel. After continuously staring at the mirror for more than ten seconds - note that it is continuous staring at the mirror for more than ten seconds, not staring at the same mirror for more than ten seconds - the observer will show obvious abnormality. Although this abnormality may take a long time to cause an accident, no one wants to put themselves or their companions at risk when they are isolated and helpless.

"Probably not. They seem to be coming from the far side of the mirror world."

Adeleme counted ten seconds, then looked up again into the distant mirror.

"They moved!"

This time, before Qiao Qiao could ask, Adele exclaimed, "It's much closer than before. Although I can't see its face clearly, I can be sure that it is moving towards us!"

Qiao Qiao also looked up and found that those things did appear in the surrounding mirrors as Adele said. Moreover, those black shadows appeared in not just one mirror, but all the mirrors.

At first, those figures were connected together to form a black line. As they got closer to the mirror, the line gradually became wider and surged towards the two of them like a wave.

However, no matter how fast they moved, when Adele and the others looked at any of the mirrors, the shadows in all the mirrors would stop moving.

If this continues, the shadows will probably gradually get closer and closer, and eventually enter the real world directly through the mirror. No one knows what will happen then; however, if you don't want them to enter the real world, you have to keep staring at the mirror, which is extremely dangerous for those who stare at the mirror.

"Take turns looking in the mirror first."

Adele responded immediately, "Based on the current situation, those things should reach the surface of the mirror in about ten minutes. Of course, it may take some time to break through the mirror, but we have to prepare for the worst."

"During this time, we need to think of a way to leave here or stop them." Adele spoke quickly, "Think about it first. Before we arrived, those things were not being watched and did not move. What was the reason? What changes did we bring that activated them?"

"There are two possibilities. One is based on us. In other words, as long as we are on the second floor, this change will continue to be activated. The second possibility is that some of our actions caused the mirror creatures to change."

"Let me observe." Qiao Qiao raised her head and pressed Adele's head down. "Even if the first hypothesis is true, we can't solve it for now, so let's verify the second hypothesis now."

“What have we done that might cause change…”

Adele and Qiao Qiao thought for a moment and exclaimed almost at the same time.

"It's that stun bomb!"

"Considering the feeling of being observed and spied on that we had before, there should be some kind of creature recorded in the manual in the corridor on the second floor, and their ability to observe all creatures just happened to suppress the appearance of the monster in the mirror."

"And the stun bomb scared the creature. Even though we can't see it, it would be frightened by the sound of the stun bomb or the sound of the door opening, and flee to the other end of the corridor, scraping against the wall on the way, thus creating more mirrors..."

Qiao Qiao concluded with a heavy face, "The repetitive second floor is most likely a certain environment created by the creature in the mirror, which inadvertently trapped the peeper on the second floor, thus achieving a certain balance and allowing them to seal each other."

As for how this seal was formed, the two of them tacitly did not say it out loud. The body of the police officer on duty, who was lying at the foot of the stairs and wearing the same uniform as Qiao Qiao, had already explained everything. The escape route on this floor was pulled inwards instead of pushed outwards, and now it seemed that it was not a so-called architectural mistake.

The corridor itself is a cage built by humans for monsters, but every time a new prisoner is introduced, the cost is painful.

"May...May he rest in peace."

Adele sighed and dropped her hands. She wanted to say "May the goddess bless him", but she thought that these people did not believe in God, and such prayers would be an insult to them.

Now that she knew how to deal with it, Adele also knew how to deal with it. Since the creatures in the mirror began to move, then those eyes that were spying on others must have hidden in a place without a mirror, that is, they were still staying in the elevator on the second floor.

Adele stretched out her hands and lifted them slightly upwards. Black flames rose from the elevator at the end of the corridor with a "pop" sound, and a black wall of fire formed in front of her.

Then, a sharp, inhuman cry came from the end of the corridor, and a transparent creature burning with black flames rushed out of the elevator, stopped in front of the wall of fire in front of Adele, and let out a scream between anger and pain.

Adele immediately extinguished the flames on it and raised the same wall of fire again behind it, trapping it in the middle of the corridor.

"The monster in the mirror stopped moving!"

Qiao Qiao exclaimed in surprise, "We can leave now!"

"Wait a moment."

Adele called out to Qiao Qiao, then she squatted down, covered her hands with silk thread, and took out his duty personnel manual from the pocket of the shriveled corpse.

Opening the manual, I saw a photo of a handsome male soldier on the title page, with his name written in the lower left corner.

"Thank you for your sacrifice for humanity...Mr. John Joyce."

Adele bowed slightly, then walked into the escape passage leading directly to the roof with Qiao Qiao.

Behind them, the weirdness still lingered in the corridor, and perhaps it would not end until thousands of years later.

(End of this chapter)