# 162
Chapter 162 – Twisted Space
Just as Lin Qiye and the others sprinted up the stairs to the second floor, he suddenly stopped at the sight ahead.
“What’s wrong? Why’d you stop?” Cao Yuan asked in confusion.
Lin Qiye stared blankly at the scene. After a moment he stepped aside, giving the people behind him a clear view…
“What the hell… is this?” Li Shaoguang’s eyes bulged in disbelief.
Normally, stairs spiral upward: finish one flight, enter the second-floor corridor, turn around, and you’d see the next flight leading to the third floor…
But when they finished the first flight, what greeted them wasn’t a corridor at all—it was a dorm room.
Yes, at the top of the stairs stood an ordinary two-bed dorm. Neat and spotless, quilts and pillows perfectly arranged. From the skincare products and clothes on the desks it was obvious two girls had lived here a long time, yet not a single person was in sight.
It looked as if, during construction, someone had deliberately built the stairs to open straight into this dorm; the moment you reached the next floor you had to pass through it.
“Is the girls’ dorm designed like this?” someone muttered skeptically.
They were all male soldiers and had never entered Building Three; they had no idea what it was supposed to look like.
“Impossible.” Lin Qiye crouched and ran a finger along the seam where the stairs met the dorm. Two completely different tiles met in a perfect fit. “The joint is too clean. Even if the camp’s construction maniacs are top-tier, they couldn’t manage this… It’s as though someone sliced two places apart and stitched them together.”
“Space-related again?” Cao Yuan frowned.
“Definitely. There’s a mysterious entity inside this building that excels at spatial displacement.” Lin Qiye was certain. “If I’m right, the interior layout has been completely scrambled—like a Rubik’s cube someone twisted at random.”
He stood and walked into the dorm, pushing open the door on the far side…
Beyond it lay no balcony but a T-shaped corridor—T-shaped because two originally connected passages had been misaligned and forced together.
Like in a building game when you accidentally rotate a road segment ninety degrees; it looks jarringly wrong.
Cao Yuan tried the window: deep blue nothingness outside, the pane immovable.
“This is the power of the mysterious? Creepy…” a rookie murmured.
Because of the T-junction, two opposite paths now lay before them. The group hesitated.
“Which way leads up?” Li Shaoguang scratched his head. “Split up?”
“There’s something mysterious in here; splitting up is the worst choice.” Lin Qiye shook his head. “The left path leads to another dorm, behind which is a toilet, then a flight of stairs going down. The right path passes through two dorms and ends at stairs going up.”
“You can sense the layout?” Li Shaoguang exclaimed.
“Yes, but only within a limited range—just a few rooms.” Lin Qiye kept his voice calm.
“Then we go right?”
“No.” Lin Qiye pointed at the wall in front of them. “Behind this wall are several consecutive upward flights that can take us straight to the fourth floor.”
The moment they’d entered Building Three he’d discovered that while his mental perception couldn’t penetrate from outside, it worked fine inside. That meant the building was spatially isolated from the exterior, but internally its rooms were merely displaced, not sealed off.
Which implied… the interior walls could be broken!
“Break this wall?”
“Mm. But we mustn’t damage the structure. The space is scrambled, yet the load-bearing pillars still matter—if we compromise them too much, the place could collapse.” Lin Qiye’s tone was grave.
A young man stepped forward, gray light swirling in his palm. “Leave it to me!”
He slapped the wall; gray light spread, corroding a circular hole big enough for three people side by side, without harming the surrounding structure.
They filed through. Lin Qiye and Cao Yuan led. When barely a fifth of the group had passed, everything changed—
Rooms and walls shifted on their own. The straight arm of the T-corridor vanished, replaced by a dorm. The upward stairs behind the wall twisted away like a spinning Rubik’s cube, flung who-knows-where.
At the same time, Lin Qiye and Cao Yuan, now on the first segment of stairs, found the walls on either side had turned into empty dorms, the stairs ahead had become a solid wall, and the corridor behind had dropped into a downward flight…
“What’s happening?” Li Shaoguang cried.
“The space twisted again.” Lin Qiye frowned, thinking. “Was it triggered by us breaking the wall, or does it shift at set intervals…”
Cao Yuan looked around and sighed. “We’re separated from the others.”
“Nothing we can do; no telling when it’ll shift again…” Li Shaoguang shrugged.
“From now on we stick together, don’t drift apart,” Lin Qiye said evenly. “If the mysterious hiding in Building Three can only manage this level of interference, it’s troublesome but hardly lethal—its Forbidden Ruins focus on trapping, not killing.”
“Right. As long as enough people enter, breaking through is only a matter of time,” Cao Yuan agreed.
“The real question is… if that’s all it can do, what caused that scream earlier?” Lin Qiye pondered a moment, then shook his head and kept walking.
Speculation without decisive evidence was pointless.
The three pressed on, weaving through stitched-together rooms. After five or six minutes they halted before a door.