Artifact Report

Chapter 261 Mai Minghe: Blind Spots in Clearing the Level

After Aimee Li turned into a nut, although she felt that she was still walking on her own two legs, her speed was still affected a little.

According to her, after she left the "third floor checkpoint", she only walked down one floor in two or three minutes and met Li Sidan.

"Of course, this is also because I was observing the environment as I went downstairs." Ai Meili added, with a layer of cold defensiveness in her voice.

...She is probably the type of person who is afraid of being seen as weak, Mai Minghe thought.

Li Sidan remembered that he had walked down two floors when he heard Ai Meili's footsteps behind him - even though Wuzhi didn't seem to have feet.

Li Sidan's second floor
Ai Meili's third floor
The floor where Li Sidan and Ai Meili met
"Is this the order?" Mai Minghe said thoughtfully. "Strange, Li Sidan didn't run into Ai Meili when he went down to her level... Did he just miss her?"

"Maybe the floor order doesn't make sense. Everyone is randomly assigned to a floor when they push the door open after clearing a level." Suo Beihua sighed and muttered to herself, "Why is it so difficult... It shouldn't be like this."

Not to mention that everyone is confident enough to come to the Kai family for an interview; being able to be a hunter, and a hunter who continues to live, in itself shows that they either have good abilities or good luck, and are not ordinary people.

As a result, all five people were trapped in the checkpoint and the mission failed together. Mai Minghe couldn't help feeling a little guilty when he thought about it.

Could it be that because of her, this warehouse has become a place of no return?
As for failing the interview, how to get the lipstick back...

Mai Minghe closed his eyes and cut off his thoughts.

Get out of here first and don’t torture yourself with future problems.

"Hurry up and find a way out. Can we find one just by standing here and chatting?" Robert suddenly pulled out a pistol from his waist and ordered several people, "Get out of the way."

"What are you going to do?" Mai Minghe asked.

"Have you heard of the Möbius strip? Maybe everything above and below is an illusion, and we're just traveling back and forth on the same few floors. To know if there really are infinite floors here, we have to try it."

Before he finished speaking, he fired several shots at a railing under the handrail; although everyone hid on the stairs in time, no one was hit by the stray bullets, which was a bit of luck - the gunshots exploded and vibrated, and were quickly swallowed up by the monotonous cement-colored waterfall.

Robert broke off the broken railing and threw it down into the stairwell that looked like an endless abyss below.

Everyone held their breath and waited quietly for a while.

There was no sound.

The iron railing circled repeatedly in the void, constantly breaking through the air and falling, as if plummeting into the bottomless space, until its shadow disappeared from sight. It wasn't until a minute or two later that Suo Beihua was the first to straighten up and whispered, "...I guess we can't wait any longer."

I've been falling for so long and still haven't heard any sound of landing. Even if this stairwell has a bottom, it's probably so deep that it's difficult to hear any sound.

"It seems the infinite floors are not an illusion."

Li Sidan lowered his voice, as if afraid that if the railing fell to the ground at that moment, the sound would be drowned out by his own voice. "Even if it's not truly infinite, there should be many layers."

"The fact that bullets can cause damage to stairwells is a significant discovery."

Robert held the gun in one hand and subconsciously wound himself a few more times with the other hand; he looked around as if looking for the next target to shoot.

His eyes fell on the wall of the landing between the two stairs.

"...Can the wall be broken?" he asked.

Of course, even a novice hunter like Mai Minghe would not think that he could break through the nest trap by brute force - but whether the wall can be broken, how to break it, and what will happen after it is broken are all "information".

If there’s one thing missing most in this monotonous, endless cement stairwell, it’s “information”.

Suo Beihua shrugged. "Since I don't have any better ideas right now, let's give it a try."

Construction is not an easy task that everyone can do, but destruction seems to be a talent deeply buried in every human being.

Following Robert's instructions, they each knocked down a few handrails, then used bullets to punch holes in the staircase. They then used the iron railings to dig and widen the holes, chopping off chunks of cement from the steps—the whole process was so fast it seemed out of place—and soon they had something to smash the wall with.

Mai Minghe's ears were ringing from the gunfire. As he took over a large piece of broken concrete steps, he only asked a stupid question in a daze: "...Can bullets even crack concrete?"

Li Sidan's facial antennae shook a few times, and no one knew what it meant.

There were also several bullet holes on the wall; everyone held up broken pieces of cement, looking for cracks that were not under stress, and focused on smashing at only two places - although Aimeili looked like a nut without hands and feet, the broken pieces of cement could still fall from the air above her head and onto the wall one by one, looking like some kind of movie special effects.

"It's broken!" Aimeili suddenly shouted, "The sky—I can see the sky!"

If they could not break through the wall even after hammering for half an hour, or if the wall seemed to be infinitely thick, Mai Minghe would not be surprised. But when a beam of sunlight really leaked in from the crack in the wall, she was surprised.

Several people crowded around Nut.

The crack was very small, not even half the size of a palm. It might be more appropriate to call it a "hole". Even if their faces were squeezed together, they had to take turns to look at it. For a while, the stairwell was filled with words like "It's my turn", "Don't squeeze me", "Move your antenna away".

When Mai Minghe saw the outside world clearly, he took a deep breath.

Outside the wall was the street where they had gathered. From the gathering point, this endless stairwell seemed to be several dozen meters to the right of the gate. Next to the gate gathering point, a person was standing there, looking down at his watch.

The one hour allotted for the interview had already passed, and the other two were not there. Had they come in to rescue?

“Tianxi!” Mai Minghe couldn’t help but shout, “Can you hear me, Tianxi?”

"It's impossible to hear it," Li Sidan muttered.

However, the next second, Tianxi raised his head.

He seemed unsure where the sound came from; he walked towards the sound, looked around, and finally raised his head and met Mai Minghe's eyes two or three stories up.

"Why are you..." He was stunned. "Who is there? What are you doing?"

Encouraged, everyone worked faster and enlarged the hole a few more times. This time, it was like a small window, allowing several people to look out together.

"What's wrong with you?"

Tianxi raised his head and shouted, "Since they can dig a hole to call me, why can't anyone come out?"

This is a difficult question to answer.

Several people talked one after another and tried to explain the matter of being trapped in the stairwell as clearly as possible; Tianxi listened for a long time with his arms folded, seemed to understand, and nodded.

"From the inside, it looks like an infinite stairwell, but from the outside, it's only about ten meters high. In my opinion, instead of trying to break out from the inside, we should just try to climb down from the outside... Well, I'll call them back and figure out how to get you down."

"Is that all?" Li Sidan seemed to find it incredible. "Is it that simple to get out?"

From a distance, one could vaguely hear Tianxi sighing.

"What else? This is the shortest route in front of us. Before you guys come out, throw something down to explore the way."

That's easy; they have plenty of iron railings and cement blocks.

Unlike the first railing, this time the objects they threw landed squarely on the sidewalk outside the building; Mai Minghe squinted his eyes and looked carefully, and could even see that the road bricks were damaged.

"I'll find a way to climb higher and throw a rope up. You guys can see if you can catch it. If you do, come down one by one. Be careful." Tianxi ordered.

The problem was resolved so suddenly and easily that everyone was in disbelief and at the same time, they could hardly contain their joy.

No, the problem was not solved easily all of a sudden; after all, they put in a lot of effort, chiseling the wall one by one - the skin on Mai Minghe's palms was worn out.

"Some traps require brains and reflexes, so it's not surprising that some rely solely on brute force." Robert said as he wound up the spring. "Perhaps this is the blind spot of the stairwell trap."

Even if the interview failed, at least everyone could go home safely - the atmosphere was relaxed and the mood was bright, as if even the surrounding cement was no longer gloomy and gray.

“…I’m not going out.”

Suo Beihua suddenly spoke quietly.

　Actually, the hardest thing is not to keep updating when you're not feeling well. The hardest thing is to keep updating when you're stuck... I'd rather be uncomfortable and not stuck...

　　The reason I'm saying this suddenly is because I have a feeling I'm about to get stuck...

　　Moreover, my recent streak of discovering good novels has been interrupted, and my weakness hasn't improved. To put it simply, I'm not very happy. When I get stuck, the world becomes dark and unhappy.

　　
　
(End of this chapter)