A bizarre and terrifying experience; I messed up the dungeon world.

This ghost has gone through too many reincarnations. Each reincarnation deepens its resentment, like tree rings, accumulating layer by layer, until today, it's almost overflowing.

That forum post is correct.

This copy is in a loop.

The woman with the human skin lantern tilted her head and looked at him for a few seconds, then suddenly opened her mouth. She had no tongue; her mouth was empty, but she made a series of indistinct sounds—

"run--"

Zhou Lang was stunned for a moment.

Is something eerie telling him to "run"?

This is the first time.

The woman on the ceiling suddenly began to shake violently, her floral dress rustling loudly. Then she loosened her grip and fell—not towards Zhou Lang, but back into the paper lantern.

The lantern went out.

The hall returned to darkness.

But Zhou Lang's oil lamp was still burning, its green light illuminating something else—a thin layer of water spreading from the backyard onto the floor. The water was black, gleaming oily in the moonlight.

A face was reflected in the water.

It's not a reflection. It's a face looking up from underwater.

Her facial features were blurry, but it was clear that she was a woman—she had a large frame and broad shoulders.

The proprietress.

The face smiled in the black water.

Zhou Lang retreated to the stairwell and put away the oil lamp. He didn't continue exploring—not out of fear, but because he already had enough information.

I returned to my room, closed and locked the door.

He sat on the edge of the bed and wrote three lines in his notebook:

1. The dungeon is in a loop, and its strangeness far exceeds that of a C-level dungeon.

Second, the fact that the human skin lantern made me run away indicates that at least one of the strange creatures still retains its rationality.

Third, the seventh strange thing did not happen tonight.

He drew a line and added a new line at the bottom:

The seventh one is in the pipe.

Its daybreak.

To be precise, it was exactly six o'clock when the sky was "forced" to light up—just a second ago it was pitch black outside the window, but as soon as six o'clock arrived, the light seemed to have been turned on, flooding the entire room in an instant. There was no gradual change, no transition, the darkness turned into light.

Zhao Qiang woke up at 5:30, or rather, he hadn't slept at all. He went out with dark circles under his eyes and ran into Ma Dong and Fang Xuewen in the hallway; Ma Dong's eyes were red, and Fang Xuewen's lips were trembling.

"Did you hear it last night too?" Ma Dong asked.

"There's something at the door." Fang Xuewen lowered his voice. "I saw it through the peephole—there's a person in the hallway, dragging one leg, walking back and forth."

"I saw it too," Ma Dong swallowed hard. "It was a woman, her hair was dragging on the ground, her face—"

"Stop talking," Zhao Qiang interrupted him.

When Han Yingying came out, she seemed alright, at least better than the other three. Chen Ming and Song Xiaonan, the couple, opened their doors almost simultaneously. The girl's eyes were swollen from crying, and the boy was holding her hand, his fingers trembling.

Lin Yuanshan was the last to come out. His expression was grave: "Let's all talk on the first floor."

Eight people went downstairs. Everything in the hall was as usual; sunlight shone on the wooden floor, and the black water from last night had completely disappeared. The paper lantern sat quietly in the corner, and the woman in the painting of ladies had returned to her standing posture.

The boss was already behind the counter, smiling and acting as if nothing had happened.

"Good morning. There's breakfast in the kitchen. Help yourself."

Lin Yuanshan ignored him. He pulled everyone to sit down at the stone table in the courtyard, looked around, and said, "Tell me about what happened last night."

Fang Xuewen and Ma Dong first mentioned that there was a strange limp in the corridor. Chen Ming added a detail: around 2 a.m., the faucet in his room turned on by itself, and red water flowed all over the floor, but he didn't dare to get up to turn it off. After waiting for ten minutes, the water stopped by itself.

As Song Xiaonan spoke, tears streamed down her face: "Something was scratching at my door, scratching for a very, very long time..."

After listening, Lin Yuanshan summarized: "For C-level dungeons, as usual, they can't enter the room on the first night. So as long as the doors and windows are closed tightly, there shouldn't be a problem. In the following days, their mobility will gradually unlock; this is a general rule for C-level dungeons."

"What you say makes a lot of sense."

Everyone looked at Zhou Lang.

He was eating a steamed bun, dipping it in chili sauce. When he said "That makes sense," his tone was flat, making it impossible to tell whether he was praising or being sarcastic.

"Do you have a different opinion?" Lin Yuanshan asked.

"Your experience applies to normal C-level dungeons." Zhou Lang took a bite of his steamed bun. "This isn't normal."

"What's wrong with it?"

"I went out last night."

Eight pairs of eyes stared at him simultaneously. Zhao Qiang almost spat out his porridge—"You went out?!"

"Um."

There was a three-second silence.

Lin Yuanshan's lips twitched slightly: "You... went out?"

"I took a walk around, went downstairs for a bit, and then went back to my room." Zhou Lang said this in a tone similar to saying, "I went downstairs to get a bottle of water."

"You're crazy—" Lin Yuanshan stopped mid-sentence, realizing something: this person had gone out and returned alive. He had faced the bizarre on a C-level night and come back alive.

"What did you see?" Han Yingying asked.

"The intensity is weird." Zhou Lang finished his steamed bun in a few bites, patted the crumbs off his hands, and said, "There's a limit to the concentration of C-level weird resentment. The two I encountered last night far exceeded that limit."

He didn't go into many details, didn't mention the word "run" from the human skin lantern story, and didn't mention the things in the pipes. Some information, if shared now, would only create panic and is meaningless.

"You mean, this dungeon is more difficult than C-level?" Fang Xuewen pushed up his glasses.

"How much higher?" Lin Yuanshan pressed.

"Uncertain. But based on their performance on the first night, by the fourth or fifth day, their attack power might be close to B-level or even A-level."

There was a long silence around the table.

Song Xiaonan started crying again. Chen Ming held her, his own hands trembling. Ma Dong repeatedly rubbed the back of his neck until it was bright red.

"What should we do then?" Zhao Qiang asked the question that everyone wanted to ask.

"Investigate." Zhou Lang stood up. "It's safe during the day. Figuring out these bizarre pre-death experiences might be the key to survival."

Lin Yuanshan stared at him for a few seconds, but ultimately did not refute him.

On this day, the eight people split into several groups and conducted investigations throughout the town.

Lin Yuanshan took Fang Xuewen and Ma Dong to the other end of the town to inquire about the history of Jufu Inn from the local residents. Chen Ming and Song Xiaonan stayed in the guesthouse, not daring to move around.

Zhou Lang, Zhao Qiang, and Han Yingying stayed inside the guesthouse.

Zhou Lang's focus is on the third floor.

The fire on the third floor was even more severe than Zhao Qiang had described. Half of the ceiling in the entire corridor had collapsed, charred wooden beams lay haphazardly across the floor, and the whitewash on the walls had peeled off, revealing the brick surfaces licked by the fire underneath. A lingering, musty smell of burnt wood remained in the air, not strong, but impossible to get rid of.

Three rooms. The first room's door was ajar, the furniture inside reduced to ashes. The second room's door was locked from the outside with an iron chain—this was the one Zhao Qiang was referring to. The chain was thick, secured with an old-fashioned brass lock.

Zhou Lang took out the scissors.

*Snap.* The lock broke.

Push the door open and go inside.