The elevator was still slowing down when Tian Bufan suddenly spoke up, "Old Lin, feel the elevator."
"Huh?" Lin Yi was startled, but his body was honest, already feeling the subtle changes in the decelerating elevator.
When the elevator slowed down, there was an obvious sensation of weightlessness, just like...
"Hold on a second!" Lin Yi instantly spotted the problem, "Weightlessness?!"
Lin Yi quickly realized something, glanced at Tian Bufan, and found that Tian Bufan had already noticed and was signaling him with his eyes to keep thinking.
So he took a deep breath and continued down that line of thought.
"The elevator is going from the 14th floor to the 1st floor. Normally, you’d expect an upward force when the elevator decelerates downward, but weightlessness... that should happen when the elevator slows down from going low to high!"
"But why is it now...?"
"We continuously accelerated from the 1st floor to the 14th floor until we arrived, but now... from the 14th floor to the 1st floor, are we also continuously accelerating forward?" he spoke of his experience.
The elevator came to a stop with a "ding," and a number appeared on the floor indicator.
They had indeed arrived at the first floor.
The elevator doors opened, and fresh air with a hint of coolness rushed into the elevator, re-establishing a wonderful connection with the world for everyone inside.
Stepping out of the elevator, Tian Bufan smiled at Lin Yi: "So, what do you think might be the reason?"
Lin Yi narrowed his eyes, looking at the now-closed elevator door, and hesitated, "Could it be... the entire elevator system is a closed-loop system, with all the elevator cars able to move forward on the track only, returning to the starting point after completing a circle regardless of their position?"
"Like the circular layout of the dormitory building corridors?"
Tian Bufan smiled without a word.
"What’s wrong? Is my guess incorrect?" Lin Yi asked.
Tian Bufan laughed, "I’m just guessing myself, how can I give you an answer? I was just asking you to guess along with me."
Lin Yi: "Uh... okay."
Tian Bufan stroked his chin, "However, I feel like the elevator might not have a circular structure, but it definitely has a closed-loop structure. It may have a separate and special layer that allows it to keep accelerating, but when it slows down, it would slowly ’slide’ out of that layer and into reality."
"Just a guess, we can verify it later. Let’s go have breakfast first. We can talk while walking; we actually have plenty of time."
Just then, the "ding" of the elevator sounded again from behind them. The doors opened and four Experience Students walked out.
However, these four were not the same people who had followed Lin Yi on the 14th floor and taken the elevator.
Lin Yi and his group withdrew their gaze and walked towards the dormitory building’s exit following the corridor, as more and more people appeared around them.
Lin Yi looked down at his watch.
"From leaving the dorm to taking the elevator down, it took a total of 8 minutes."
The cafeteria’s breakfast hours were from 5:40 to 8:00, so they had plenty of time to have breakfast as a group.
Just walking through the dorm building’s stairwell passage, one could feel the fresh air mixed with the scent of soil and vegetation from outside.
Reaching the dorm building’s exit and standing on the steps to look down, they could immediately see a cobblestone path shrouded in a thin morning mist.
The dawn’s early light fell from the blanket-like clouds, sparse and scattered, as if the entire campus were submerged in shallow waters.
The mist in the open areas had mostly dissipated, but it was still dense within the Green Forest Belt.
Walking down the cobblestone path, Lin Yi suddenly turned to look back at the dormitory building.
The 39-story dormitory building stood tall amidst the thin mist that twisted the morning light, resembling a sturdy column holding up the sky. But only the dorm building Lin Yi had seen in Phantom Vision had given him an indescribable, terrifying sense of oppression. The current one, even the one he saw last night when he arrived at the dorm, did not give him that feeling.
On their way to the cafeteria, Lin Yi shared the unfinished story about dreaming of Mao Feiyang with the group, and except for Wei Liang, who was humming a cheesy love song and had sealed off his own hearing, they essentially covered all the information with the team.
After listening, Tian Bufan nodded slightly, "It seems Maozi is all right."
"No, Young Master Tian, this is just my dream, can it really be trusted?" Lin Yi hesitated.
Tian Bufan said, "Dreams... are very mysterious things. Since many details fit together so tightly, it might be that you’ve resonated with Maozi to some extent and then captured his ’memory’."
Lin Yi was taken aback and suddenly thought of the white powder particulate contamination chain centered around Mao Feiyang. He wondered if it was because of that contamination chain that he could sense others?
"Perhaps... So, Young Master Tian, have you dreamt of anything?"
Tian Bufan avoided the question, speaking equivocally, "I dreamt of some interesting things."
"Wei Sang, Kuai Kuai, how about you?"
"Don’t ask us. We didn’t sleep well because of all that trouble last night."