NOVPUBZhang Qing, who suffered from the Pendulum Clock curse, and Wan Tong carried the pale severed head of Liu Baimu past the eerie steps and opened the rusty iron door to enter an unknown room.
Rather than calling it a room, it was more like a peculiar place.
A silent, dimly-lit corridor.
Along both sides of the corridor were rusty iron bars, and these iron bars were separated from each other, forming individual small rooms.
It looked like... a prison.
"How can there be a prison in this ancient mansion?" There was surprise in Zhang Qing's eyes.
"I've never heard of a prison inside the mansion before. This is a strange place that has not been discovered by anyone. And judging from the size of this place, it seems to be even larger than the entire mansion," the ghost master named Wan Tong observed with puzzlement.
Of course, he was not the only one with such doubts.
Now just a severed head, Liu Baimu was in bad shape; he would often close his eyes as if to fall into a stupor, but upon hearing any noise, he would immediately open his eyes and scrutinize his surroundings.
The pale face of Liu Baimu slightly moved, "This is a chamber within a chamber, very secretive. The master who built this mansion definitely did not want this place to be discovered, so the prison here is not for detaining people but for...imprisoning ghosts."
"This is a prison specifically for imprisoning ghosts."
"A prison for imprisoning ghosts? Impossible, without Gold, without supernatural items to suppress, how could this kind of prison ever hold ghosts?" Zhang Qing felt Liu Baimu's conjecture was very illogical.
"I think this might have originally been a prison for detaining living people, maybe there were some secret experiments that should not be seen," guessed Wan Tong.
Liu Baimu immediately said, "Look carefully at the gaps between those iron bars, a grown man could squeeze through sideways, and all prison cells lack built-in doors."
With this reminder, the two of them immediately noticed these subtle clues.
Indeed, these rusty iron cells had no prison doors, and the gaps between the iron bars were very large, allowing an adult man to slide in and out sideways.
The conjecture of detaining living people was immediately disproved.
These rooms, which resembled cages, could indeed likely be for imprisoning ghosts.
"But I can't figure it out, such a slapdash prison, how could it possibly contain real ghosts." Zhang Qing frowned, he tentatively reached out and shook a rusty iron pillar.
The entire stretch of iron bars shook, indicating that the structure was not very solid.
"Perhaps these cells were previously maintained by some kind of supernatural power, and now that the supernatural power has vanished, these things have become ordinary," said Liu Baimu. "Don't waste too much time here, hurry up and investigate to see if the Pendulum Clock can be found. Nearly every part of this ancient mansion has been searched already; there aren't many places left unexplored, and that Pendulum Clock might just be here."
"I suspect the mansion's Pendulum Clock can control the restart of events within the mansion. If we can understand it a bit, not only can I come back to life, but you also won't have to worry about being killed by Yang Jian outside," he guessed.
Zhang Qing and Wan Tong nodded their heads.
Whether they wanted to or not, at this time there was no turning back, they could only grit their teeth and move forward.
They continued to explore forward, down the corridor sandwiched between two sides of prison cells.
The lights overhead were yellow and dim, the air filled with the faint smell of decaying bodies—this smell, mixed with coldness and humidity, was pervasive and rather uncomfortable.
Along the way, besides the area near the walkway covered in light, the depths of the prison cells on both sides remained hidden in darkness.
The surroundings were eerily silent, so quiet that it felt suffocating.
In such an environment, the nerves of all three were tightly wound.
Because it wouldn't be surprising if a supernatural event occurred in such a place.
"Wait, what's that?" Suddenly, Wan Tong's eyelids twitched, and he pointed to a cell on the side in a suppressed voice.
Zhang Qing, holding Liu Baimu's head, turned to look and his face immediately changed.
Inside the cell where the light shone, a pair of withered, cold, corpse-spotted dead feet lay quietly, motionless. They showed no signs of decomposition, as if abandoned for many years, yet the other end of the legs was obscured by the darkness.
The dim light failed to penetrate the darkness, so the corpse within remained indistinct.
"No movement... but one thing's for sure, it's definitely not a normal corpse."
Zhang Qing's eyes flickered: "There's a high probability it's a vengeful ghost caught in a deep slumber."
"I agree. A normal corpse would have long decayed, only bodies eroded by supernatural powers could last so long without decaying, or rather, the corpse itself is the vengeful ghost." Wan Tong also nodded his head firmly in agreement.
"Since there's been no movement for a long time, there shouldn't be any issues for now. Let's keep moving."
The two withdrew their gaze and continued forward.
The further they went, the more spine-chilling it became.
They witnessed many odd situations in the cells.
In some cells, there was even a wooden stool smeared with red paint, which looked like a supernatural object, almost as if it were a medium to trigger vengeful ghosts, placed there to be kept out of reach.
Some cells were so dark that not even the lights could illuminate them; beyond the iron bars darkness reigned, exuding an abnormal eeriness.
Others were completely empty, but the rust-covered bars were twisted and distorted, with several snapped in half, as if something that had been confined there before had escaped.
And from some cells came strange noises, like someone pacing back and forth, yet nothing could be seen inside.
...
"What kind of place have we come to?" Zhang Qing felt a chill in his heart.
Without a doubt, most of the cells housed inexplicable supernatural phenomena, as if ghosts could appear at any moment, and yet, despite the abundance of supernatural occurrences here, they had not encountered any ghost attacks on their way.
It was terrifying, yet they were completely safe.
Could it be true that the cells have actually trapped the ghosts inside?
But how was all this possible?
Despite their confusion, they could only bury these questions in their hearts; they hadn't forgotten their purpose.
To find the Pendulum Clock that had cursed everyone.
However, it wasn't long.
The succession of prison cells came to an end.
There stood a thick wall of green stone bricks.
But before the wall there was an old wooden desk, resembling an office desk.
On the desk stood an old desk lamp, currently lit, its yellow, dim light barely illuminating the area around the desk.
Besides that, there was a bottle of black ink, with a fountain pen inserted, and next to it lay a few notebooks with yellowed pages, seemingly with notes that hadn't been finished.
"Someone seems to have lived here." Zhang Qing walked over with hesitating steps.
He examined the desk.
His gaze finally settled on the notebooks on the table.
But the handwriting in the notebooks was strange, like symbols, or as if strokes were missing, nowhere near complete, impossible to make out.
However, one thing was certain: the writing was that of a living person, and judging by the most recent handwritten notes, the last entry was made recently, at least within the past month.
"What kind of person would live here?" Zhang Qing frowned.
"Wan Tong, take a look around, see if you can find anything new."
The two began to sift through the desk.
Meanwhile.
Yang Jian's team continued their hunt.
Accompanied by a desperate scream, the last ghost hunter hiding on the second floor was taken out by him.
The process was as simple and smooth as before.
"Next, we'll have to go up to the third floor," Yang Jian said with a slight lift of his head looking upstairs.
There were only a few surviving ghost hunters left.
He remembered there was someone named Zhang Qing who had not yet appeared, and Wan Tong, also known as Ghost Crasher, had also disappeared.
Additionally, Liu Baimu's body had not been found.
These three were most likely hiding on the third floor.
"Look, that ghostly thing has appeared again," Feng Quan suddenly pointed ahead.
Next to the staircase in front, a door had eerily appeared out of nowhere, and in front of the door stood a middle-aged man with a deathly pallor, his facial expression stiff, gazing numbly in their direction.
"It's the same ghostly thing we saw before," Yang Jian's gaze shifted subtly.
"Is this ghost fixated on us?"
Tong Qian suggested, "Let's deal with it, so it doesn't follow us when we leave this place."
Just as Yang Jian was contemplating this, he saw the middle-aged man standing in front of the room disappear swiftly.
Like an illusion, the man was gone, and so was the door to the room.
Everything returned to normal again.
"Xiong Wenwen, use your foresight to check if this phenomenon will occur again," Yang Jian immediately instructed, "and if it does, pinpoint the locations where it appears."
"What are you thinking?" Feng Quan asked.
"Nothing much, I just need to confirm something. This might be a signal, not a supernatural phenomenon," Yang Jian speculated.
Xiong Wenwen began his foresight.
He closed his eyes to foresee events that would occur within the next ten minutes. In fact, with the Supernatural Object, Ghost Talisman in his possession, he could extend this foresight even longer, possibly up to an hour if necessary.
However, the longer the foresight, the more supernatural elements involved, leading to greater deviations in his visions.
Soon, Xiong Wenwen opened his eyes and pointed, "That thing also appeared over there, and there... But it appeared more frequently on the third floor."
"Let's go to the third floor," Yang Jian immediately went into action, leading his team upstairs.
Xiong Wenwen pointed again, "Right there, and then the ghost's location never changed."
The direction he pointed to was a wall, where there was clearly no room, but someone had marked the outline of a door on the wall.
It seemed that there once was a real door there, but now, the door was gone.
"Are you sure it was there?" Feng Quan asked.
"You might not trust others, but don't you trust your own Daddy Xiong?" Xiong Wenwen returned arrogantly as ever.
As adults, naturally, they wouldn't quibble with a child.
The others turned their gaze towards Yang Jian.
However, Yang Jian was looking down at the pocket watch in his hand.
He was comparing the time on the watch with the actual time.
Something eerie happened.
The minute hand on the real-time clock had to complete two full circles for the pocket watch to advance by one minute.
"The time here is distorted; the time inside this manor doesn't align with the outside world. We haven't suffered from the Pendulum Clock's curse, so we can't see this door," Yang Jian speculated, "If I'm not mistaken, this door doesn't exist in the present but existed in the past."
"It only appears when the manor undergoes a reset, and the appearance is brief. Once the timing is off again, the door will disappear once more."
"Is it really that sinister?" Feng Quan, Tong Qian, Huang Ziya, and the others widened their eyes in disbelief.
A door that doesn't exist in the present, only in the past.
The idea was too strange to contemplate.
"If the Pendulum Clock is in the manor, I think it must be in this room. No wonder the ghost hunters couldn't find the Supernatural Pendulum Clock; because it has manipulated time, making it nonexistent in the present. You know the Pendulum Clock is inside the manor, but you just can't find it," Yang Jian continued. "How could something from the past be discovered by people in the present, just as you can't eat yesterday's food?"
"After countless resets by the Pendulum Clock, it's unclear during which time period it actually exists. This supernatural item has been influenced by its own supernatural power, completely lost in time. Perhaps one day, if we're lucky, the item might reappear. Of course, it's also possible that it may never appear in this world again."
Yang Jian combined the memories of others with his own understanding and the clues in his hand to boldly come to a conclusion.
"If that's the case, the Supernatural Pendulum Clock capable of manipulating time is truly terrifying," Feng Quan fell silent.
Tong Qian said, "Since we can't find that supernatural item, let's not bother looking for it. There's no need to waste time on this. We've already searched the entire manor and there should be no one left. I think we should leave now and notify Wang Chaling to handle the bodies to prevent any supernatural events."
"That's the end of it? No more fighting?" Xiong Wenwen said in surprise.
Huang Ziya glanced at him, "We've fought our way here, and everyone's dead. What's left to fight for?"
"Not everyone is dead; still, two are missing, no, actually three. Liu Baimu's body hasn't been found," Yang Jian glanced at the door drawn on the wall.
He had a vague feeling.
Big secrets were hidden behind this door that didn't exist in the present.
The three missing individuals were most likely inside this door.
"Keep contacting Li Yang. Leave here after finding him. If we can't find him, then after the next manor chime sounds and we're sure no one else has come back to life, we'll leave," Yang Jian withdrew his gaze, restraining his curiosity and impulse, not attempting to open the non-existent door.
"Okay," the others nodded, feeling that this was the safest course of action.
Yang Jian didn't want to take too many risks either. As the team leader, he had to consider the overall picture. Now that things were almost settled, it was natural to quit while ahead.
Otherwise, if they faced real danger and lost teammates, it would be a great loss.
"The next reset is in ten minutes," Yang Jian checked the time.
This was the manor's time.
The only thing capable of accurately keeping track of time here was the pocket watch given to Yang Jian by Wang Chaling.
The watches and mobile phones brought from the outside could only display the normal time outside the manor.
Without knowing the internal time of the manor, one couldn't grasp the moment of each reset.
