Chapter 67: Exploring the Ghost Building (2)

Chen Hao and Guanzi crossed a lawn, skirted around a flower bed, and followed the base of the wall for quite a while before they found the main entrance of the building.

The main door was wrapped in a chain lock, as if it had been locked casually by construction workers when they finally pulled out.

"How are we supposed to get in?" Guanzi said, troubled. "Boss, do you know how to pick a lock like this?"

Chen Hao did have a bit of a knack for slipping through doors and picking locks. Back when they used to play soccer in the school building's hallways, they had once been caught by the dean. They had their parents called in, and the ball was confiscated into the dean's office. Afterward, in order to get the ball back, he had climbed over a wall and seriously studied lock-picking videos on YouTube. He had a strange talent for this sort of thing and actually managed to steal the ball back.

"Boss, this shouldn't be hard, right?" Guanzi looked at Chen Hao full of anticipation.

Chen Hao didn't respond. He grabbed the chain and gave it a tug, and the chain snapped in his hands. His heart sank.

"Damn," Guanzi exclaimed in surprise. "It was actually broken? A fake lock?"

"Someone cut it," Chen Hao said. "Maybe it was the Third Grade students, or maybe the police cut it. There's nothing worth stealing here anyway, so it makes no difference whether it's locked or not. Looking at the state of this place, the developer probably ran off a long time ago, and nobody cares about it anymore. I didn't think you were actually telling the truth, Pipe."

"Tch, how could I ever lie to you, Boss?" Pipe said with an indignant look, and as he spoke, he stepped forward and yanked the door open.

Behind the door was a lobby of about fifty or sixty square meters. It looked like the building had originally been intended to be sold as a finished property, and the lobby already had some semblance of completion. The floor was tiled, the walls were covered in marble, and even the lights on the ceiling had been connected. Sunlight projected through the open door, the golden patterns formed by the floor tiles shimmered with a deep golden light, and countless dust motes danced in the sunlight.

"Well, are we going in or not?" Pipe asked Chen Hao in a gruff voice.

Chen Hao would rather die than be looked down upon by his subordinate, so he gritted his teeth and stepped inside. The building was deathly quiet. Chen Hao unconsciously lightened his footsteps, not wanting to make too much noise, but suddenly there was a loud "Bang!" behind him that nearly made him jump out of his skin.

He turned back, terrified, and came face-to-face with a bewildered-looking Pipe. He looked at the door that had closed behind Pipe, then turned back and started pummeling him. "Who the—fuck—told you to make so much noise?"

"Ow, ow, Boss," Pipe yelped, though it didn't really hurt; he was thick-skinned enough that he couldn't be bothered to dodge. "My bad, I was wrong."

After beating Pipe, Chen Hao looked around, still feeling a bit stifled. A wide staircase stood at the end of the lobby, spiraling and stretching out toward them as if it were a vortex enticing them to walk into it of their own accord. His scalp tingled slightly. He turned to look to his left, where there was a wide, bright corridor; the sunlight cast bright shadows at equal intervals through the windows. Everything was as ordinary as it was in the rest of the world. As long as you stood here long enough, nothing seemed special anywhere.

Chen Hao raised his head, as if commanding thousands of troops, and issued an order majestically, "Move out! Upstairs!"

"Yes!" Pipe agreed happily, suddenly feeling bold, and followed his boss as they began to climb steadily.

Chen Hao climbed five floors in one breath. At first, his nerves were taut, but as the floors rose one by one, even though there were no floor numbers marked in the stairwell, he could see the scenery outside through the glass, and they were indeed constantly rising. Chen Hao couldn't help but feel a bit smug. "You think those idiots couldn't figure out how to get around just because the stairwell didn't have floor numbers?"

Pipe was stunned for a long time. "Fuck, how stupid would you have to be for that?"

"Who knows?" Chen Hao laughed, his steps becoming more vigorous as he climbed. With his confidence restored, he began to look down on Pipe again and wanted to tease him. "Didn't you say they couldn't reach the top floor or the first floor? There's no point in us walking so slowly. Why don't we try to rush to the top floor in one go?"

"How many... how many floors is it, Boss?"

"Idiot, didn't you look when we were downstairs? It's sixteen floors in total." Chen Hao laughed arrogantly again. "See you at the top!"

Chen Hao ran off as soon as he finished speaking, leaving Pipe sighing in frustration. Climbing sixteen floors was indeed a challenge for a fat guy, but for a sixteen-year-old fat guy, it wasn't an insurmountable challenge, especially since Pipe was a fairly agile fat guy. Pipe cursed a few times and then set off in hot pursuit.

Chen Hao truly rushed up to the sixteenth floor in one breath—the real sixteenth floor, where the stairs came to an end.

"Pipe!" he shouted back. The echo reverberated through the empty building. Pipe's wheezing sounds came from the stairwell; he was too tired to even curse him. Chen Hao laughed out loud. The exercise made him feel exhilarated, and the thrill of rushing to the peak of the Ghost Building made him shriek incessantly. He kept running upward, and his trashy life seemed to be constantly falling away from him, left far behind. He couldn't control his excitement; he made a ruckus, whistled, let out weird, goofy cries, and shouted to Pipe and to the world that he was a ghost, a devil.

It took Pipe a full five minutes longer than him to climb up, panting. Seeing him like this, Pipe joined in, laughing until he was out of breath. He sat on the top step of the stairs, shouting and talking all sorts of wild nonsense with Chen Hao.

Chen Hao still felt it wasn't enough; it was still too quiet here. He wanted to make an even bigger scene. This was a decent building, but it was also ownerless public land, and he could do whatever he wanted with it. In a fit of excitement, he picked up a stone from a pile of construction waste in the corner that hadn't been cleared away yet, weighed it in his hand, walked to the first window pane in the corridor, and sneered twice.

"No way?" Pipe called out excitedly. "You're that bad?"

"Watch this," Chen Hao said, swinging his arm. A stone flew out and smashed into the glass window. The glass shattered on impact, making a huge noise. Chen Hao and Pipe screamed and laughed like two hollow-headed idiots, egging each other on, and soon they went wild. The two of them picked up handfuls of stones and ran along the corridor, each with a stone in hand. As they smashed the huge, intact glass panes, the thrill of destroying the world, mixed with a tiny bit of guilt, sent their heads spinning.

It was at this moment that Luo Qi, on the fifteenth floor, woke up shivering. The world ebbed and flowed before his eyes, and his ears were filled with sounds that terrified him. He looked around but couldn't find a single person. The scene of the Qionglin Underground Interrogation Room became clear again. He cowered in fear, doubting that he was still there and that his memory of escaping was just a hallucination. After all, how could he have possibly escaped from that interrogation room? How could he have suddenly possessed some special ability... and how could someone as cold as Du Zhengyi have wasted his time, energy, and risked his life to come back and save him?