Hidden Dead Ends - Chapter 13: People (III)

“You’re not a staff member? Stop joking. Help me find the exit. I’ll give you two thousand!” The woman increased the pay.

“How did you get in?” Li Chengyi didn’t respond to her request but instead asked a question.

“I don’t know.” The woman’s eyes were full of frustration and uneasiness. “I just finished shopping, took the elevator down to the garage, and was about to drive home. When I came out, I realized that this garage wasn’t the mall’s garage.”

“Where’s the elevator? Is the elevator still there?” Li Chengyi quickly asked, his eyes lighting up. If he could follow the way the woman came in and go back in the opposite direction, maybe he could…

“I don’t know!” The woman tightened her damaged trench coat, looking terrified. “I couldn’t see it when I turned around. I was in a big elevator. It shouldn’t be like this… It should be very conspicuous and easy to find…”

“Ddidn’t you have any omens?” Li Chengyi already roughly knew her situation after hearing what she said.

“What omen? Are you referring to the dream I had?” the woman asked doubtfully.

“Dream…” Li Chengyi was speechless. She clearly didn’t take the omen seriously at all and thought that it was a dream.

He thought about it and told her what he knew about Dead Ends.

As he explained, the woman’s expression became more and more impatient.

It wasn’t until Li Chengyi said that a two-meter-tall human face monster had appeared that she finally couldn’t hold it in anymore.

“Sorry, has anyone ever told you that your story is very interesting, but it’s not appropriate to say it now?

“I know the rumors about Dead Ends, but those are all fake folk tales. In my opinion, the so-called Dead Ends are more like secret survival experiment games. Okay, now isn’t the time to talk about this.”

She stretched out her palm and spread her five fingers. “Five thousand to take me out. How about it?”

“…” Li Chengyi didn’t say anything else. He thought for a moment and made a gesture of ‘go ahead’.

He had nothing to say to this person. Before seeing it with her own eyes, she probably wouldn’t believe that Dead Ends really existed.

“Ten thousand!” the woman said seriously. “Don’t be too greedy. This place is just a bit big. If I find it myself, you won’t even be able to make this money!”

“You can try.” Li Chengyi glanced at the small door of the maintenance room where the monster had just tried to come out. “By the way, the monster comes out from these small doors. Let me give you a piece of advice. Don’t touch these small maintenance room doors. If you see a door open, run.”

He knew that he couldn’t waste any time. He didn’t know when the Flower Language Ability would lose its effect. Once it lost its effect, it was very difficult to imagine how he would handle the following situation.

Without another word, he picked up his bag and walked in the direction where the woman had appeared.

Since the woman said that she came down from above, then he would go up and take a look!

“Hey!” The woman in black didn’t expect him to run away. She chased after him, but her too-thick and heavy platform shoes hindered her running. After a few steps, she could only see Li Chengyi disappearing around the bend.

“Is he crazy? Why is he running so fast?!” Panting, she stopped moving and reached out to support herself on a pillar.

She looked around. There was no one around again, making it eerily silent.

The woman stood alone by the stone pillar, her heart beating like a drum again.

But she didn’t have to wait long before Li Chengyi returned from the bend not far away.

He had gone up to the next floor to check the situation above, but he didn’t find the elevator the woman had mentioned. Instead, he found a bend going higher up.

He didn’t dare to continue. Who knew how many floors this place had?

Therefore, he quickly returned. At least with a living person here, he would have some peace of mind.

From afar, he saw the woman leaning against the pillar and cursing, but he couldn’t hear what she was saying. He sped up and approached.

“Let’s find a way out together,” Li Chengyi said directly.

“You really don’t know the exit?” the woman asked in surprise. Only now did she notice the appearance of the man in front of her.

He had black hair, black eyes, and two faint bloodstains at the corners of his eyes, which looked a little scary.

He was a little thin, but he gave off a rather steady feeling. He was holding a bag of items in his hand, and through the translucent bag, she could see that it was all food and water.

This man seemed to be prepared!

A hint of speculation flashed in the woman’s eyes. But immediately, this speculation changed into slight panic.

She saw the knife in his hand!

At night, in an empty underground parking garage, a young man with bloodstains beside his eyes and a calm expression was holding a bag in one hand and a knife in the other as he stood in front of her and looked at her.

Almost all the elements of a horror thriller were present!

The woman took a few steps back, looking increasingly nervous.

“Let’s cooperate to find the exit as soon as possible and leave.” Li Chengyi was still talking and didn’t notice the threat his appearance gave her.

“Stop right there! Don’t move! Assuming… assuming what you say is true, how are you going to prove yourself?” The woman’s internal alarm reached its limit. 

Prove? Seeing her retreat, Li Chengyi looked down at himself and immediately realized that this woman had misunderstood.

He thought for a moment, took out his phone, turned it on, and looked at the time. “It’s nine-aftetwelve now. I was pulled into this damn place about half an hour ago. I was walking in the park. I bought a lot of snacks and prepared to go back to store them.

“You don’t have to be afraid. My eyes were injured after encountering the monster earlier. It’s just external injuries, so it shouldn’t be a big problem…”

Toward the end, he was a little uncertain.

“Is that so?” The woman squeezed out a smile, but she was still retreating. She only stopped when she was more than ten meters away and stared at Li Chengyi vigilantly.

“Listen, with two people here, we can take turns to rest and guard against monsters appearing,” Li Chengyi said in a deep voice.

He truly hoped that he could convince this woman. It was too tiring for him to stare around alone.

He could no longer hold on. His eyes felt dry, and waves of fatigue and sleepiness were washing over him.

If someone could help him guard the surroundings and give him ten minutes, no, five minutes…!

Even just five minutes of rest could allow him to recover a lot!

Moreover, what puzzled him was, did this woman not encounter an omen or anything unusual when she came in? It was the second time he had come in, and he had encountered the human face monster.

Seeing the woman deliberately putting so much distance between them, he knew that she didn’t believe him.

“The shopping bag you’re holding is from Kanemina Mall in the city, right? I remember that it’s the most upscale mall in Suiyang City. When I was young, I played in the Blue Charm Park near there. Standing on the highest rocker in the park, you can see the Colonel Cornman model in Kanemina.”

He tried his best to look as gentle as possible when talking about the memories of his predecessor.

Colonel Cornman was a childhood cartoon that everyone their age had seen when they were young. The cute and naive Cornman in it represented fond memories of many people’s childhood.

As expected, after the woman heard his detailed descriptions, her expression gradually eased.

Clearly, her fear of him had subsided a little.

After some thought, she asked. “Are you also a local? What’s your name? You don’t have to tell me your real name, just a convenient name for me to call you.”

“Cheng Yi, please call me Cheng Yi,” Li Chengyi replied. “What about you?”

“Meng Dongdong,” the woman replied. “Okay, I believe you won’t lie to me for no reason, but can you put down the knife in your hand first?”

“…” Only then did Li Chengyi notice that he was holding the fruit knife in his hand.

He had been so nervous that his attention wasn’t on this detail at all.

He lowered the knife and took a deep breath. Then he took out a wet wipe from his pocket and carefully wiped the blood on his face.

After quickly wiping himself clean, he looked up again, looking much more normal. “Is it alright now?”

“Okay…” Meng Dongdong nodded, her expression softening. “Let’s check the situation first. You said that you’ve been here for more than half an hour and haven’t found the exit, right?”

“Yes.”

“Which floor did you come up from?” she asked.

“The lowest floor. It’s three floors down from here… But I’m not sure if there will be any changes,” Li Chengyi replied.

“Okay, let’s not talk about monsters first. Let’s just look at the exit.” Meng Dongdong took a deep breath and gestured for Li Chengyi to listen to her first.

“Usually, the entrances and exits to underground parking garages are on the uppermost floor, so you went up.

“But what I want to tell you is that you won’t be able to find an exit if you go up,” she said solemnly.

“Before I met you, I went up five floors at once. They were all the same garage environment. That’s why I chose to go down and see if I could find a new breakthrough point.”

“Then, why did you think I was a staff member here?” Li Chengyi asked.

“I thought I was kidnapped,” Meng Dongdong replied, looking a little tired.

“Kidnapped?”

“Yes, some weirdos like to capture people for experiments. For example, isn’t this just like the plot of the movie Lift to Hell?” she replied. “Catch people together and observe and record what they will do to survive.”

Li Chengyi was speechless.

If he hadn’t really encountered a monster, he might have had the same guess.

Seeing that Meng Dongdong’s emotions had stabilized, he began to chat about Suiyang’s local scenery, customs, public news, and so on.

This exchange of real day-to-day information stabilized Meng Dongdong’s emotions, and she was no longer afraid of him.

But in fact, although Li Chengyi looked stable on the surface, his eyes would still glance at the small door of the maintenance room from time to time.

Behind the small door was an unknown monster that he had stabilized with his Flower Language Ability.

Once the ability failed, the monster could rush out of the door at any time and attack the living.

So he only looked stable on the outside, but his heart was tense and couldn’t relax.

After chatting for a while, he felt that Meng Dongdong’s emotions had stabilized, but his mental state was getting worse and worse.

Finally, he brought it up.

“Can you do me a favor? I’ll find a place to rest. Help me keep an eye on the surroundings to guard against any monsters that may appear!”

“You really don’t look good.” Meng Dongdong frowned. She could tell that this young man named Cheng Yi was very tired.

“How long do you need to rest?” Her words were an agreement that she would help watch the surroundings.