pdf-ebookys Chapter 27 Telephone
Chapter 27 Telephone
Having confirmed that Quaid was indeed gone, the two jumped out of the ventilation shaft one after the other. After a brief moment of adjustment, they resumed their original plan.
Basement level.
The light from the elevator shone into the dark room. After exchanging a glance with Su Zixu, Lao Zeng stepped out of the elevator, his figure quickly disappearing into the darkness.
Without lingering, after Lao Zeng took action, Su Zixu quickly shut down the elevator and pressed the button for the first floor.
Old Zeng lowered his height slightly, trying to blend into the darkness, but the basement level wasn't completely dark.
There was light from the instruments and equipment inside, but it wasn't enough to see everything clearly.
But Lao Zeng could roughly sense that the space was relatively small. On the left was a glass wall divided by several white frames, and the control panel was against this glass wall. On the other side were several pieces of equipment that he didn't know what they were.
Without disturbing anything, Lao Zeng carefully avoided the equipment and continued walking a short distance forward. A door appeared on his left, also made of transparent glass.
Looking through the door, Lao Zeng saw that the space inside was much larger than he had imagined. To the left of the door was the office area, and to the right was the experimental area.
What impressed him most was the huge hourglass embedded in the ceiling of the experimental area.
The hourglass resembles a giant 3D painting, with the black sand turning white as it passes through its slender waist.
Quicksand is flowing from the top of one side of the elevator wall, where it meets the ceiling, towards the other end of the ceiling.
The water flowed down the wall and into a small, circular pool embedded in the ground. The pool was located in the middle of the ground.
The pool shimmered with a gentle white light and subtle shimmer, just like... just like the liquid highlighter that his female colleagues at work used.
Not far from the pool was a huge control panel with a communication surface in the middle. Touching the surface with a finger made the screen light up instantly.
Old Zeng was pleasantly surprised to find that this didn't require a password.
He didn't know how to use the buttons next to him, but he knew one thing: this communication console should be able to send messages to other floors.
He noticed a row of vertically arranged floor numbers on the left side of the large screen.
Old Zeng pressed the button on the first floor, and a dialog box popped up on the screen. "Are you there?" Old Zeng thought for a long time, not knowing how to start. Also, out of a sense of testing, he sent a simple greeting.
After a moment's thought, Lao Zeng decided to send a message to each floor, hoping to contact Su Zixu and thus determine his location.
Old Zeng sent messages to the tenth, ninth, eighth, and seventh floors in turn. After finding that he could not send messages below the seventh floor, he waited for a while.
Seeing that there was no reply, Old Zeng thought that Su Zixu was probably looking for other clues, so he stopped watching and decided to go back and check on him later.
After a cursory look around the experimental area, Lao Zeng went to the office area, hoping to find a usable computer to look up information.
It wasn't that he didn't want to look for more clues in the experimental area, but rather that everything he looked at seemed the same, like a monkey visiting a museum—too complicated for him to understand.
After trying to start several computers, which did boot up, Lao Zeng had to give up because they all had passwords.
However, it wasn't entirely fruitless. Searching through the row of workstations against the wall, when Lao Zeng reached the last workstation, he discovered a black telephone embedded in the wall next to it.
He took the receiver off the phone, and a "beep" sound came from the other end. "It still works! Maybe this can be used to contact Su Zixu!" Old Zeng was overjoyed to have finally discovered something new.
However, he was unsure of Su Zixu's current situation. If he was in danger at this moment, this phone call could cost him his life.
"I should go check the communication station." With that thought in mind, Old Zeng put the microphone back.
He decided to check the communication desk again to see if there was any information. If not, he would go back downstairs and they could discuss the rest later.
Just as Lao Zeng had reached about the middle of the office area, the loud ringing of the telephone shattered the silence of the basement, sounding quite abrupt.
The ringing startled Old Zeng, sending a shiver down his spine and breaking out in a cold sweat. He quickly ran back and snatched the receiver from his hand.
After the call was connected, he didn't say anything; instead, he held his breath.
After a moment of silence, the person on the other end spoke first: "Don't make a sound, just listen to me. Now quickly leave the basement level. I'll be waiting for you on the first floor. Hurry up!"
"Negative... hiss... hiss... there's... a... hiss... hiss... something on the lower level, I don't know... hiss... hiss... hiss, hiss..." The voice on the phone sounded like it was being interfered with by something, and the rest of the sentence was broken and intermittent.
"Hello, hello, Xiao Su, I can't hear you very well." Old Zeng lowered his voice to the lowest possible level.
"Sizzle...sizzle...fuzz—Daddy...Daddy...Xiaotian misses you...Daddy...why won't you save me...Daddy...why won't you save me!"
"Why didn't you save me! You..." A sound of breathing came from the microphone, followed by Old Zeng's daughter's voice.
Xiao Tian's voice gradually distorted in the microphone, turning from a child's voice into a deep male voice, then becoming increasingly shrill, and finally turning into a roar.
Terror filled Lao Zeng's face. Besides fear, there was also some lingering reluctance in his eyes. He knew in his heart that Xiao Tian was already dead, and what he was encountering now was a ghost.
Without hesitation, he quickly hung up the phone. But the phone rang again immediately after he hung up.
The phone call sounded particularly jarring and eerie at that moment.
Old Zeng got goosebumps on his arms, not because he was afraid of the phone call, but because he had a premonition of an impending crisis.
He knew that ghosts were around; it was an instinctive physiological reaction from a veteran player.
Quickly distancing himself from the phone, Lao Zeng crouched low and scurried under a desk in the center of the room.
He had considered running to the elevator to escape, but he didn't know the ghost's methods of killing, and it would be terrible if the elevator was a trap.
It seemed that no one would come to answer the phone, so the ringing stopped abruptly after a few moments, and the room fell silent again.
Old Zeng minimized his movements, carefully turning his body to face the phone. From this angle, he could glimpse a bit of the view from the other end of the line.
The room was almost completely dark, and he could barely make out the objects around him.
The corner where the phone was located was pitch black, and Old Zeng strained his eyes but couldn't see anything unusual.
However, he could feel a kind of inexplicable feeling, as if something was affecting his emotions. He felt afraid, a fear that came out of nowhere.
"bite--"
The elevator notification sounded in the distance. Old Zeng shifted his body slightly, using the partition under the table to cover himself, only revealing one eye as he looked at the elevator.
A familiar figure stepped out of the elevator. "Old Zeng, where are you?" It was Su Zixu who spoke.
He called out to Lao Zeng as he cautiously walked into the room. "Lao Zeng, come out quickly! There's a ghost here. I found some clues upstairs before I called you, but you hung up before I could finish. Hurry, it's not safe here..."