Human bones…
This was indeed the bone of a human.
Sitting on the ground, Lin Sanjiu stared at the pile of broken bones before her.
She did not know when she had attained the ability to distinguish a human bone from an animal bone. Perhaps she had seen too many of them.
Singling out the bones from the mass of garbage was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Lin Sanjiu had to maintain a high degree of concentration in order to complete such a feat. As she was looking through the garbage, she stumbled upon a blackish item stuck in the crack of the wall. Piqued by curiosity, she pulled it out only to realize it was a lock of hair. The hair was a very strange object. It could be considered as one of the most beautiful things when it was on people’s heads, but it was particularly disgusting after it fell on the ground, not to mention that the lock of hair in her hand was tangled up in a confused mass and caught lots of dust, soil, bugs, and grass in it. The owner of the hair was obviously dead. The realization did not soothe the swelling discomfort in her heart but made it even worse.
“There’s too much hair for it to have come off naturally from someone’s head,” Lin Sanjiu said. Then, she remembered the thing that had grabbed her hair and what it said before she entered this pocket dimension. She began to wonder what the relationship between the two was. “Bones, dead man’s hair, inside a pocket dimension…”
She tossed the hair aside and rubbed her hand on her trousers.
The pocket dimension had said that there were many posthumans who starved to death since they could not crack the secret room. She figured it was normal to find some human bodies or remains here, so…
Even though that was what her rationality kept telling her, she still could not shake off the strange feeling that kept niggling her. What was more, the strange feeling was getting stronger with every passing minute. She had a very sharp sense of intuition, and something within her was screaming at her, telling her that there was something wrong about the bones and hair.
What was it though?
A shade of vermillion was smeared across the sky as the west-bound sun began to descend. Her shadow was getting longer and longer, and it eventually looked like a dead body on the ground. She surmised that there must be plenty of posthumans who lay on the ground like this, waiting for death to claim their lives.
“Only if the grand prize were here. He would have already cleared the secret room.”
Lin Sanjiu sighed as she gazed skyward into the sun. The sun had gotten so much lower that darkness began to seep in from the other side, and she reckoned that she would not have much time left. She peeled her eyes from the fiery sky and gazed down at the card in her hand. The words on the card [Hey, Sis?] caught the final bit of sunlight from the setting sun and glimmered in her eyes.
“Let’s call him and ask for his advice,” Mrs. Manas encouraged, “Besides, you are worried about him as well, aren’t you?”
The card disappeared and a communication device appeared in its place.
Lin Sanjiu stared at the communication device, unable to make up her mind whether she should call Ji Shanqing or not. After wrestling with herself in her mind, she sighed and placed it on the ground, not turning it back into a card.
“That is why I can’t contact him right now.” She stood up and walked towards the patch of grass. “He’s probably in danger, and I can’t distract him because of something like this. Anyway, what else did you get over there?”
“Plenty,” Mrs. Manas replied, “There is a truncated thick barbed wire, which I don’t know how to use, and several pieces of clothing. For example, there’s a jacket and a pair of trousers…”
Lin Sanjiu inspected the ground as she listened to Mrs. Manas’s report. She just wished that she could rebuild the other half of the warehouse before the sun completely went down.
Crouching in the glass and looking for something was an exhausting and time-consuming job. As the day became darker, the soil was consumed by the darkness. By the time twilight receded and was replaced by the night, Lin Sanjiu had already called out her [Polishing Ability Agent]. Looking at a metal frame with the help from the silvery bottle, she heaved out a long sigh.
“Hold on for a second, Mrs. Manas,” she called out, “Look at this. What is this for?”
In front of her was a rusty metal frame, which had previously been embedded deep into the ground. It still had several chunks of concrete slab latched to its bottom. It spread intermittently across the grass, and she could not tell how large the frame was due to the missing part.
“Does this look like a door frame to you?” Lin Sanjiu said doubtfully. Putting everything aside, the metal frame did look like the bottom section of a gate.
“This is weird,” Mrs. Manas replied, “Look here. There are chunks of concrete on both sides of the frame, and they are all made from the same material. Does this mean that the same type of flooring is used both inside and outside of the warehouse? In general, shouldn’t there be a sidewalk or asphalt after coming out of a building?”
However, no matter how much she scrutinized the ground, there was only soil in front of her at the moment.
“Well, if we want to know if this is a door or not…” An idea popped up in her brain, and she decided to test it out. She rose from the ground and continued, “There is only one way to find out.”
With that, she stepped over the metal frame and strode towards the patch of grass before her. No sooner had she made her second step, her boot fell on the concrete slab. Once again, she was sent back to the secret room full of rows of racks.
She turned her head and looked at the grass in the distance. The light from the [Ability Polishing Agent] outlined each blade of grass with a halo of silver.
There was the main entrance of the warehouse.
If the main entrance was the final stop of the “secret room”, she would be sent back to the secret room if she did not clear the pocket dimension in the right way. It seemed to her that the pocket dimension could move or fold space.
“So, now we know where the main entrance is.” Lin Sanjiu heaved out a relieved sigh as a big grin spread across her face. “That was one significant breakthrough.”
“So, what now? Should we go and find the key?”
“Maybe…But what we found was just a frame. There’s no lock, so how are we supposed to open the door and go out?” She walked over to pick the [Ability Polishing Agent] from the ground. With the silvery bottle in her hand, she spun around and took in her surroundings. Now that the sky had completely darkened, it was difficult to look for a key with a single light source.
All of a sudden, Lin Sanjiu had a brainwave. She realized that the sequence was wrong. There should be a wall first, then a door and a lock, and finally the key, which would be then used to unlock the door.
Most of the grass disappeared after she used the [Power Of Word Picture] to spread the concrete slab around. The warehouse began to take shape and looked more like a storage place. With the two walls as her premise, Lin Sanjiu tried to rebuild another two. All four walls should be made from the same material. She had no idea why, but no matter how much description she came up with, the remaining two walls just would not appear.
“Why is this pocket dimension so stingy with clues?” Lin Sanjiu grumbled as she kicked the pile of rubbish next to her feet. “It didn’t give me any clue on the size or shape of the key, so how am I supposed to…”
Before she could finish her sentence, she heard a jangle as a small object dropped on the ground.
Lin Sanjiu and Mrs. Manas fell silent. Lin Sanjiu looked over to the source of the sound and saw a key the size of just half a thumb lying on top of the mass of garbage.
“No, no way…” She quickly went forward and picked the key from the ground. Mrs. Manas stammered, “The pocket dimension gives the key to us just like that? How is that possible?”
As a person that bad luck particularly had a fondness for, Lin Sanjiu was skeptical. Using the [Ability Polishing Agent], she measured the key. It was very small and rather thin. If she brushed the layer of rust off, she was certain that it would become even smaller.
“This is strange. I didn’t see this key just now. Where did it come from?” Mrs. Manas asked.
It seemed like the key dropped out from the pile of garbage she kicked just now.
Lin Sanjiu looked at the heap of rubbish that lay haphazardly on the ground. An idea flashed across her mind as she crouched down to grab the corner of a cloth next to her feet. She yanked her arm upward and sent a puff of dust billowing. She covered her mouth and nose with her palm and then began examining the cloth.
It was the jacket that Mrs. Manas had mentioned in her findings just now.
Due to the jacket being left in the wild for such a long time, it had deteriorated far beyond recognizable. Lin Sanjiu did not know what kind of color it was. After a short bout of rumination, she pulled the jeans out. She wiggled them and sneezed several times as the dust irritated her.
The reason she was doing this was that since she could not find the key when she ferreted through the garbage for the first time, thus it could only mean one thing—the key was stored somewhere. Amongst the garbage, it could have only been in the pocket of a shirt or a trouser.
“This warehouse is full of female clothing and all of them are nicely packed,” she explained to Mrs. Manas as she patted the dust from the cloth, “Don’t you think it’s weird that these two are separately packed? Not to mention that they are menswear.”
‘Of all the clothes in here, why would the key drop from this?’
With that thought in mind, Lin Sanjiu raised the jacket. It seemed like a windbreaker as it had a coarse texture. Its pockets were not as deep as those in the jeans, so it was more likely for the key to slip from one of these pockets.
The night without any artificial light source was dark as ink. Even with her [Ability Polishing Agent], Lin Sanjiu still had a hard time studying the time-worn jacket. Besides, it was black in color, so…
“Hold on a second.”
Lin Sanjiu came to a mental halt when she realized something. She flipped the jacket over and began scrutinizing the shoulder and the back with her [Ability Polishing Agent].
Upon closer inspection, she found that the shoulders, the collar, and the hem of the jacket were actually a deep blue. Only the back and the abdomen area had a patch of irregular black and were far harder than any other spots. Besides that, she also found a hole at the back.
“So, it isn’t black…” Lin Sanjiu mumbled, “The owner of this jacket had bled profusely and soaked the jacket with his blood. The hole on the back was probably caused by a knife of some sort.”
The secret room escape pocket dimension would not kill with a knife, so there was a huge probability that this unfortunate guy had been killed by his companion. Although it was hard to imagine that a posthuman could die from a single wound, it could have been possible if the deceased had been weak and wounded.
The explanation seemed reasonable, but Lin Sanjiu’s brows did not relax.
