Chapter 39
Chapter 39
“Are you going up?” Lin Yinxi asked.
Yang Shu glanced at her. “We’ve found the passage. Let’s go,” he said coolly.
That meant he was coming with her.
Lin Yinxi glanced at his abdomen out of the corner of her eye, wondering whether smooth, defined muscles lay beneath his black shirt.
Her long lashes lowered. “Want a bit of a workout?”
Yang Shu raised an eyebrow. “Can’t make it up yourself?”
Lin Yinxi touched the base of her ear and started making things up again. “Well… think about it. Employees usually use this passage to move goods. If we head up empty-handed and run into someone coming down, it’ll be hard to explain.”
Yang Shu said nothing.
He was about to turn back and find some odds and ends to carry as cover.
Lin Yinxi stopped him. “How about this? Carry me up on your back. If we meet any other employees, you can tell them I’m an exhibit that was shipped to the wrong place and needs to be taken back for reclassification.”
“You’re covered in sewage. You stink of fish.” Yang Shu frowned slightly.
“But I’ve got your jacket between us, haven’t I?” Lin Yinxi could always come up with an excuse on the spot. “All the entities here smell fishy, pretty much like the sewage on me. If we do run into an entity on the way, that smell will make it easier to fool them.”
Yang Shu gave a quiet laugh. She couldn’t tell whether he had seen through her little scheme.
But there was no chance he would leave his back exposed to an extremely dangerous unknown being.
Yang Shu stepped forward, slipped his strong arms beneath her knees and behind her back, and scooped her up.
“Hey, wait…” Suddenly lifted off the ground, Lin Yinxi instinctively grabbed the collar of his shirt. “Your back will do.”
She had a fiancé, after all. Sure, he’d run for the hills when she went bankrupt, but being face-to-face like this was a little too close.
Please don’t test her resolve like this.
Yang Shu ignored her protests.
He lowered his head, his warm breath close to her forehead. “Hold on tight. You owe me one,” he said in a low voice.
Getting back to the floor above came first. Lin Yinxi stopped protesting and held on to him.
Yang Shu raced up the stairs with Lin Yinxi in his arms.
The narrow staircase rose without railings on either side, lit only by a very dim light. The higher they went, the steeper it became. One wrong move would send them plummeting to their deaths.
Lin Yinxi turned on her phone’s flashlight to light the way for Yang Shu.
His stamina was nothing like an ordinary person’s.
They climbed nearly ten thousand steps. With her ear against his chest, Lin Yinxi could still hear a steady, powerful heartbeat. Even his breathing hadn’t changed.
But once they were past the halfway point, Lin Yinxi grew increasingly uneasy.
She could hear two sets of footsteps behind them.
The two things were deliberately imitating their steps.
Whenever Yang Shu moved upward, they moved upward too.
They kept to a particular rhythm, trying to make Lin Yinxi mistake their footsteps for echoes.
They weren’t echoes at all!
Lin Yinxi had a keen sense for danger.
The two things behind them apparently didn’t know Yang Shu was carrying her, so every time, two sets of footfalls came from below.
That was what gave them away.
“Something’s following us down there,” Lin Yinxi warned.
Yang Shu’s arms tightened abruptly around her, squeezing hard enough to hurt.
“Don’t shine the light down there,” he said in her ear. “Hold on to me. We need to move faster.”
Lin Yinxi gripped his shirt tightly.
Yang Shu stretched his long legs and began taking two or three steps at a time.
With stamina like that, he really wasn’t human.
They climbed for at least two hours.
At last, Lin Yinxi spotted a concealed door at the top, disguised as a louvered air vent.
This was their destination.
Lin Yinxi jumped down from his arms.
She tried to push open the vent.
The footsteps below were rapidly approaching.
“Those things are catching up.”
“Move!”
Yang Shu was about to kick the lock off the vent.
“No need. I can pick locks.” Crouching there, Lin Yinxi pulled a black hair clip from her hair, poked it into the keyhole, and had the lock open in no time.
Once they had climbed through the vent, Lin Yinxi locked the undamaged lock again and pushed a cabinet from nearby against it.
Thud!
Something slammed into the other side of the cabinet. It rocked a few times, then everything went silent.
They had emerged into a storage room off a corridor in Zone B.
It was past three in the morning. The corridor in Zone B was deserted, with only the deathly white motion-activated lights blinking on and off.
Most of the entities on the night shift were at their workstations, and there were fewer guards on patrol.
“I’m going back to my room.” Lin Yinxi was desperate for a shower.
Yang Shu caught her wrist and looked down at her, his gaze unfathomable. “Let me hide in your room for the night.”
Hmm… even one eye could be unfathomable.
Lin Yinxi refused without hesitation. “No. There’s a rule. Each employee rents a room alone, with no roommates. If you come in, you’ll violate that rule and trigger contamination.”
Yang Shu kept staring at her face, trying to see through her disguise.
“Here’s your jacket.” Since he had just helped her, Lin Yinxi softened her tone and returned his dirty jacket. “The fishy smell can give you some cover too. Don’t be so picky.”
Lin Yinxi really didn’t want another jacket to wash.
She continued, “It’s late. Some of our colleagues in Zone B work nights. Running into them would be dangerous for you. Find a way back to the café. That’s where you came from, after all.”
Yang Shu frowned but didn’t insist on staying. Enduring his discomfort, he put the jacket on backward, turned up the collar to cover half his face, and quickly disappeared into the shadows of the corridor.
Lin Yinxi dragged her leaden legs slowly back to her employee dorm room.
Yes, she hadn’t climbed the stairs herself. But after everything she’d done before that, she was still exhausted.
There were no entities nearby. Lin Yinxi took out her key, opened the door, slipped inside, and locked it behind her.
A faint fishy smell filled the room.
She looked straight at the balcony.
The spiderweb cracks in the balcony’s glass door were longer than they had been during the day. Dried white salt crystals had built up in a thick layer.
Beyond the glass, everything was still deathly silent and as black as the deep sea. Lin Yinxi could just make out an extremely faint bubbling sound, as if something were pressed against the outside, quietly watching the room.
Lin Yinxi glanced at Song Qianli’s bed.
The bedding was perfectly neat. The fake roommate who wanted to take over her room hadn’t managed to get in tonight either.
Reporting her to the fishhead had worked wonders. The Fishhead Supervisor was probably paying her a little investigative visit right now.
Great. One less danger to worry about.
Lin Yinxi stripped off all her filthy clothes. Naked and barefoot, she went into the cramped bathroom and gave her face a quick splash of cold water.
In the mirror above the sink, her face was pale, with heavy dark circles beneath her eyes. She looked more like a ghost than the entities outside.