Rules-related weird stories: 4016

But Lin Yi wouldn't. He wore a watch and would glance at the time on it from time to time.

It was only a three-minute walk, but when he looked back at the iron gate of the clock tower, he found that it was no longer visible. Above the staircase was only a section of spiral steps extending into the Fibonacci sequence, ending in dim mist and floating smoke, like the entrance to an abyss.

Below him was the same kind of realm. Walking here, it was easy to feel a sense of loneliness, isolated from the world, and a sense of panic from not seeing the end.

He continued downwards, glancing at the time on his watch from time to time.

According to Old Mo and the Night Watchman, one hour was "theoretically" enough time for him to start from here and reach the watchtower. Based on his understanding of this route, there were four stages from the watchtower to the clock tower: the stone bridge area, the art building lobby and corridor area, the gallery area, and the passage and stairwell area.

The stone bridge area and the art building area were very short. Adding them together, it would only take him about 10 minutes to run through them. The most crucial were the stairwell and gallery areas, but even at most, 40 minutes would be more than enough...

"Don't rush, stay calm, don't be impatient..." Lin Yi was a little anxious, but at this moment, he had to convince himself that he wasn't.

Suddenly, a phantom, transparent hand of a grinning angel reached out from the wall, grabbing at Lin Yi's old kerosene lamp.

Lin Yi was startled, but he still reflexively dodged. After dodging, he found that a baseball bat had somehow appeared in his hand, as if he was about to smash the wall along with the painting that sealed the grinning angel...

Lin Yi shivered, quickly dismissed the baseball bat, and repeatedly muttered in his heart: "Don't do this, instinct... I'm just a dormitory manager now, and I need to go back to the dormitory step by step, that's all..."

Although I know I've become very powerful now, please be low-key.

He composed himself and hurried downwards.

But as he walked, he began to hear some inappropriate calls in his ears. He heard the sound of rapid wind accompanied by heavy rain constantly seeping through the cracks in the wall bricks, and some rustling sounds. Something was wrong, but he couldn't quite put his finger on what it was...

He instinctively felt a sense of discomfort, but he carefully observed and confirmed that this staircase was indeed a staircase...

He glanced at his watch again, the time was 3:05.

He left the clock tower at approximately 3:00, or perhaps 2:59. Overall, this time was still quite normal.

But his heart immediately sank.

Because the time on the watch had become sluggish and was faintly stuck at 3:05 and 23 seconds.

"Sigh..." He rubbed his temples, a wry smile appearing on his lips.

As expected, something strange happened, but the weird thing is, why isn't he surprised at all that something strange happened, damn it!

Has this unlucky guy already accepted the fact that he's unlucky?

"If time doesn't change, it means I'm 'dreaming,' and the depth of the dream's layer is still increasing..." Lin Yi pondered with unparalleled calmness.

Of course, rather than saying he was bold because of his skill, it would be better to say that he had already raised his threshold for fear. These "small things" were no longer enough to make him panic, or rather, things that could make him feel frightened now hadn't appeared yet.

But just as he was comforting himself, the change that made his spine tingle "unexpectedly" appeared...

The rustling wind in his ears had somehow turned into the gurgling of water, and the faint streams of water seeping from the cracks in the wall bricks had also turned into streams of water, flowing across the dark green moss on the walls and all the way down into the completely invisible dark abyss of the stairwell...

When Lin Yi stared at the abyss, there seemed to be layers of mist floating in the abyss, as if faces were staring back at Lin Yi.

"Splash..."

"Splash..."

"Splash..."

Below, there seemed to be the sound of water...

In the air, there also seemed to be a breath floating up, salty, rotten, turbid...

Lin Yi suddenly shuddered. He thought of it!

"It's... that 'well'?"

This layer is the layer where that well is located!

His hallucination, no, he was indeed dreaming. He didn't know how his consciousness came to be in that well!

He looked at the surrounding walls and couldn't help but notice that the walls had changed. His surroundings were no longer a stairwell, but the inner wall of that deep well!

The well wall was covered with damp, sticky moss. The bottom of the well surged with the low sound of ocean waves, mixed with the breath of the sea breeze, making one's spirit tremble like the roar of some unknown behemoth.

"Shasha... Shasha..."

The well wall trembled slightly, and some black, viscous liquid mixed with sediment wriggled upwards from the mist...

And this time, Lin Yi seemed to have noticed something. The trajectory of those viscous liquids looked like the natural downward slide of some viscous liquid after gravity had been reversed...

Like some kind of black, stinky, viscous... blood?

Was it blood?

That cold, terrifying, chilling feeling slowly eroded into his mind.

His ears were filled with the sound of the sea breeze whistling and echoing in the hollow, the sound of the waves constantly lapping against the well wall, the sound of those viscous liquids slowly wriggling...

In this combination of mixed, soul-numbing sounds, there seemed to be a deeper level of information flowing slowly...

That sound was both long and ethereal, like it came from the abyss. The strange syllables were hoarse, dry, and elusive, but when it fell into Lin Yi's ears, it seemed to be calling his name...

"...Lin... Yi..."

"...Lin Yi..."

"Splash... Splash... Splash..."

"Shasha... Shasha..."

The sounds were endless, like some kind of call.

Lin Yi suddenly felt the steps under his feet loosen. He looked down and was shocked to find that there were no steps under his feet at all. He reflexively reached out to grab at the void, but he didn't grab anything, and his body began to fall helplessly towards the surging mist!

The mist below flowed slowly in the darkness, as thick as a pool of ink, as if possessing life, wanting to devour him.

As he fell, the sound of the waves seemed to change, as if beneath the ancient well abyss, there was a hidden, invisible vortex, and a pair of invisible palms were stirring that vortex.

"...Lin Yi... you're back..."

"I... miss..."

"...miss you to death..."

Intermittent sounds came from within the surging mist, as if calling his name and talking to him!

"Clang clang clang—clang clang clang—"

Lin Yi's vision flickered rapidly. His perspective approached the floating mist at a speed exceeding that of a fall. He seemed to see the surface of the sea at the bottom of the well, and a large section of dark, gleaming iron chain emerged from the sea.

One end of the chain was nailed into the inner wall of the deep well, and the other end was locked to something unknown, extending into the sea.

The entire chain was chiseled with mysterious secret patterns, and some areas, such as the contact surface between the chain and the sea, were already covered with rust.

Beneath the turbulent waves, something seemed to be surging, like a snake's head or a tentacle of an "angel", or something else...

The eerie call came from it.

[Lin... Yi...]

[...Take... me... away...]

[Take...]

The gray mist surged more and more terrifyingly, like a huge face incorporating wind and sand, ferocious and evil, exuding an aura that made one's heart sink.

Lin Yi's mind trembled violently, and his approaching vision suddenly withdrew from the mist, and his brain instantly cleared.

"I am not Lin Yi, I am not Lin Yi, I am 'Dorm Manager-33-X0221119003'!"

"I am in the stairwell! I am in the stairwell!"

He tried to clench the dorm manager's card, but he couldn't hold anything at all during "Dreamweaving".

"That's right! Dreamweaving... dreams can trace back to the source!"

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"As long as I trace back, I can go back!"

He thought of the method that the Night Watcher "02" had taught him, and quickly began to feel the fluctuations of the extraordinary power in the dream layer.

Although the original method of tracing back was to trace back to the "Sanctuary" through the fluctuations of the air waves, he couldn't use the "Sanctuary" as the point of tracing back now, but don't forget, his watch could reflect the passage of time.

The closer to the surface dream layer, the more normal the flow of time, so as long as he found that the speed of the hands on the watch was close to reality, it meant that his consciousness was closer to reality.

This was the benefit of the "anchor", which could help Lin Yi eliminate some wrong options.

Sure enough, as he traced back, he quickly stopped the downward trend and began to float upward.

"Effective! Good!"

At first glance, Lin Yi was overjoyed, but then he immediately suppressed his joy and quickly traced back.

Gradually, he found that the surrounding well walls became more and more blurred, and the environment of the stairwell began to become clearer little by little.

The walls around him seemed to split and repeat, turning from well walls into stairwells.

And he suddenly realized that the root of his tracing back didn't seem to have changed at all...

In other words, at this moment, he was on a certain step of going down the stairs, but suddenly it was as if he was still, and his consciousness fell into the layer.

If he went back, he would also return to that point.

Realizing this, he suddenly thought of another question:

"The sinking and floating of the layers should have some kind of pattern... If my current situation is different from when I was in the clock tower, then that is to say, my consciousness has not been transmitted out with the fluctuations at all, but is only sinking here..."

These were two completely different situations. The one in the clock tower was that his consciousness followed the air waves of the "Sanctuary" through the layers of the art building, and if Lin Yi's speculation was correct at this time, his consciousness had not left, only the layer had changed!

This is to say—

"This stairwell... is the deep well?!"

The stairwell is a well.

When he first came to this conclusion, Lin Yi instantly felt his scalp tingle, and his whole body was numb as if electrocuted.

【The stairwell is a well】, this initial impact on cognition was no less than when he first came to the conclusion that 【the tomato is the heart】.

"The deep well... is the unfolding of the layer!"

"Like the giant egg to the city wall...?"

"If I fall down, will I really fall into the sea?"

As if to reward him for answering the question correctly, the surrounding temperature suddenly dropped, the surging mist became a piece of pale white, the original split and sufficient walls stopped changing, and dense frost spread on the walls little by little, making a "crack... crack..." sound.

【You... why... did you stop...】

Lin Yi's ear rang with a voice that made him feel terrified.

His pupils shrank violently.

"This voice..."

"I... didn't I float up?!"

His mind trembled violently, and the corner of his eye slowly moved, and suddenly found that a piece of sticky liquid had been stained on his shoulder at some point - the kind of black sticky liquid that was originally spreading upward on the inner wall of the deep well, exuding a fishy smell!

"This...?"

[...Lin Yi...]

[Take me... away...]

The low voice was floating, very close, so close that it seemed to be close to his ear, and very far, so far that it seemed to be separated by thousands of mountains.

He didn't dare to look, didn't dare to trace the trace of the sound, but his perception expanded uncontrollably.

So he saw...

He saw the crumbling walls, saw the deep well walls, saw the moss like spider webs intermittently connected between the layers.

He saw the most terrifying scene - an iron chain appeared on his back, one end of the chain was connected to the inner wall of the deep well, and the other end was connected to his spine.

The fishy black sticky liquid was flowing on his body, not that they spread to his body along the wall, but that this black sticky liquid was constantly secreted and exuded from his body, and then these liquids flowed along the iron chain to the well wall, and little by little it penetrated out...

"How... how could this be...?"

"I... 'I'...?"

"What's going on?!"

[Go... why don't you go...]

The voice was still ringing, low and resentful, intermittent, rampant and crazy...

However, at this moment, Lin Yi also found that the voice was not a call drifting from a distant place, but from his body, from his bones, like a resentful whisper echoing like a return from an empty cave...

"Whirr la la... Whirr la la..."

Lin Yi's body trembled, the iron chain swayed, and the faint light flickered.

His heart trembled, and his whole person seemed to be buried here. He completely couldn't understand and completely couldn't accept this scene.