The wardrobe door was not only locked but also sealed with tape around the edges as if the person outside the wardrobe also felt it was an ominously unsettling item.
"It seems like just an ordinary bedroom outside the wardrobe, no blood, no corpses, no strange things, kind of like... reality."
Pressing against the wardrobe door, Han Fei strived to adjust his viewpoint as his heart pounded relentlessly.
After lingering behind the closet door for a long time, the outer room remained very quiet, with no one coming in.
"No matter what place is outside, having come this far, we must go out and take a look." Han Fei didn’t leave on his own; he went back the way he had come and brought the woman and the middle-aged man down with him.
The woman did not believe when she first heard that Han Fei had found a way out, she even suspected that he was possessed by a ghost, but when she truly saw the closet door inside the monster’s body, she realized that this man hadn’t lied to her.
"So the exit is inside the monster’s mouth, no wonder I’ve never been able to find the way." Recalling her experiences over these days, the woman’s hand holding the fruit knife turned somewhat pale.
"Can we really go back just by opening the closet door?" The middle-aged man’s tone clearly showed excitement. He looked at Han Fei with grateful eyes, "My wife and kids must be worried sick! Let’s hurry up and open the closet door!"
The man was impatiently fixated on the closet door. This time, he was smarter and didn’t act rashly. Instead, he sought Han Fei’s opinion with a glance before taking action.
Looking at the middle-aged man, Han Fei didn’t have the heart to tell him that ninety percent of the people pulled into the Deep World by the Butterfly were already dead in reality.
Even if the outside of the wardrobe were truly reality, the middle-aged man was probably just a segment of consciousness that could dissipate at any moment.
"The outside of the wardrobe is probably not reality. A regular wardrobe is just a channel that connects two places. Amongst the countless wardrobes, there’s likely only one that can lead us out of the nightmare."
Han Fei was very clear in his mind that the real wardrobe connecting the dream and the Deep World was most likely in room 4444. Once they went out, they just needed to glance at the door number. If it wasn’t room 4444, then it meant this was just a regular wardrobe passage.
Sliding the Rebirth Saber through the crack of the wardrobe, Han Fei gradually sliced through the tape on the closet door. If someone outside saw this, they would probably find it extremely terrifying.
The lock on the wardrobe was hard to remove, so Han Fei simply dismantled the door.
White light shone on his face, and the middle-aged man knelt greedily beside the wardrobe, as if just being illuminated by the light made him feel very happy.
The woman next to him instinctively avoided the light. She had lived in the blood-red wardrobe for too long and had grown unaccustomed to the brightness.
"We’re back, the nightmare is finally over!" The middle-aged man was emotionally charged, wearing his horrific Blood Clothes as he lay on the ground, touching the tiles: "I escaped from the jaws of death, from now on I want to live well and love my wife and children deeply."
"Don’t be in a hurry to plan for the future, the nightmare hasn’t ended yet." After putting the dismantled door back in place, Han Fei walked to the window and pulled back the thick curtains.
The pitch-dark night sky allowed not a single ray of light through, devoid of stars or moon, just endless darkness.
Mist obscured the view, and Han Fei could only faintly make out the silhouettes of three tall buildings not far away.
"We are still inside the Death Building complex; I have not left the Deep World."
For some reason, upon confirming this fact, Han Fei actually breathed a sigh of relief: "The wardrobe is a passage and an entrance, I’ve run from room 1144 to another room within the Death Building complex of the Happiness Residential Community."
The immediate priority was to ascertain his location. Han Fei was about to leave the bedroom when the last woman to leave the wardrobe suddenly spoke up.
"What is this you see?"
The woman discovered a black-and-white photo in the corner behind the left side of the wardrobe. In the picture was a tall and thin middle-aged man.
It was clearly a memorial photo, yet the man in the photo was smiling happily, his face filled with bliss. He was gesturing with his hands toward the camera as if he had just finished cooking a meal, standing at the door of his home waiting for his wife and children to return.
"The deceased seems even younger than me," said Feng Ziyu’s unlucky neighbor, who also passed the photo to Han Fei.
The moment Han Fei saw the photo, his gaze changed.
Though much younger than in reality, Han Fei recognized him immediately.
The memorial photo captured Zhuang Ren’s happiest moment, at a time when his family had not yet met with tragedy, and he led a life that others envied.
"Zhuang Ren said his family was locked in the Death Building; could it be that this room belonged to Zhuang Ren’s family?!" Han Fei took a deep breath to maintain his calm, "Where did you find this photo?"
"Next to the wardrobe." The woman pointed to the corner of the wardrobe where there was a brazier with a large amount of ashes left from burning paper money.
Han Fei was familiar with the scene before him; he’d seen a similar brazier in the ninth floor of Happiness Residential Community while performing duties as a manager, except the brazier then held his own memorial photo.
"There’s something else written on the back of the photo!" the middle-aged man exclaimed. He flipped the photo over, revealing a strange diagram of a human body on the back, each part marked with complex archaic characters and bloodstained symbols: "Can you make sense of what’s written here?"
Han Fei shook his head, regretting his lack of education and resolving to strive and learn more for better survival in the future.
"I can understand some of it; it seems to be some kind of ceremony that can summon the soul of the deceased on a specific day," said the woman, examining the photo for a long time, her complexion slowly turning ashen as she subconsciously moved away from the wardrobe in the bedroom.
"The photo says the first step of the ceremony is to dismantle the Coffin that holds the deceased and craft it into furniture that the living can use, to be kept in the home so that the aura of the living and the dead mix indistinguishably," the woman’s face grew paler: "The wardrobe facing the bed seems to be made from a Coffin."
"A soul-summoning ceremony? What’s the next step?"
"After the coffin-made furniture has been in the room for a long time, you might hear strange noises and footsteps at night. That’s when you have to be most careful because it may not be a family member coming back, but something else." The woman frowned as she looked at the photo, the text behind it was too esoteric, mixed with a large amount of eerie symbols, utterly indecipherable, making even guessing their meaning difficult.
Someone taught Zhuang Ren’s wife and daughter to perform soul-summoning, but the reality was that Zhuang Ren wasn’t dead; it was his wife and daughter who had died.
There was a hint of confusion in Han Fei’s eyes. What would happen if ghosts in the Deep World summoned souls every day? Was Zhuang Ren’s failing health also related to this?
He silently memorized the text and patterns on the back of the photo, intending to consult someone knowledgeable after exiting the game.
If the soul-summoning ceremony truly worked, he’d like to try it himself next time.
If he managed to summon something special, the Death Building would undoubtedly become even livelier.
What was a horrific and sinister summoning for others turned into something like opening a mystery box for Han Fei. After all, no matter what was "unboxed" in the Death Building, Butterfly would ultimately foot the bill.
All the scares were surprises for Han Fei; all he needed to do was find a safe corner to exit the game.