I am Z.

  I’m not someone who can’t tolerate solitude, but being trapped for a long time in a completely sealed space—without knowing whether I’ll ever return to civilization—makes even me unable to think with my usual mindset.

  There are too few clues in this basement, and almost nothing here that could spark positive associations. Before long, my mind began drifting aimlessly, like a nature documentary about the cosmos. In a way, I was no different from those people who forget their phone in the bathroom and end up contemplating the meaning of life and the end of the universe out of sheer boredom. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to reason my way out of here—who wouldn’t?—but right now, I was literally using the toilet.

  After a while, though, as I lay flat on the floor like a beached fish, staring up at the concrete ceiling in hopes that its texture might offer some revelation, a sudden spark of insight flashed through my consciousness.

  I sat up abruptly and combed through my memories again, carefully examining the idea that had just occurred to me.

  I think I’ve figured out the pattern behind the hole’s appearance and disappearance.

  The hole’s vanishing and reappearing likely follow the same rule. At first I thought “knowing why it disappears isn’t enough,” but I was wrong. Agent Kong and the hunter woman may have believed the hole’s origin lay outside the ritual array, but they were mistaken. The answer is the ritual array itself.

  Agent Kong had said the array’s purpose was “to open an overlapping—an alternate space layered over real spacetime”—and he judged it a failure because it was “missing the final one or two spell symbols.”

  I don’t fully understand how spell symbols work, but since the hole did appear, it means that—through some accident—the missing symbols were somehow completed.

  So what exactly completed those missing spell symbols?

  Right now, my prime suspect is that black shag carpet.

  More precisely—the letter patterns printed on the black shag carpet.

  Not that the letters themselves are spell symbols, but perhaps certain segments of those letter strokes coincidentally matched the required symbols. And I have circumstantial evidence to support this deduction.

  Let’s carefully recall every instance of the hole appearing and disappearing. Whenever Chang'an and I performed the action of covering or uncovering the black shag carpet, the hole’s state switched between present and absent.

  This morning, Chang'an and I uncovered the carpet—the hole appeared. Then we covered it again, and when we uncovered it in front of Agent Kong, the hole vanished. Later that afternoon, Agent Kong casually covered the carpet while inspecting alone, and when I returned at night and uncovered it, the hole reappeared.

  The same pattern occurred the night before last when Chang'an first witnessed the hole. He uncovered the carpet, saw the hole, and called the police. Then, when the police arrived, he “uncovered it again”—he explicitly said “uncovered it again” in his account—which means he must have covered it sometime in between.

  Why did he cover it midway? Because he was afraid. Today, when he was with me, he said he worried something filthy might be hiding below—so the night before last, he chose to seal both the wooden hatch and the carpet.

  In all these instances, the black shag carpet functioned like a “switch.” Every change was directly tied to it.

  Is this deduction correct? Can I be certain now?

  No—wait, wait… I missed one extremely crucial detail!

  Why did the entrance to the hole disappear after I entered it?

  If the hole only changed state after someone covered the black shag carpet, then it shouldn’t have vanished on its own after I went inside.

  Unless… unless an “unknown person” sneaked into the fifteenth-floor apartment while I was down there and deliberately closed the hole.

  I had been monitoring the surroundings the whole time, but I couldn’t monitor the real world outside the hole. And the hole vanished while I was trapped in the black jade’s illusion—so I had no way of seeing whether anyone entered the apartment during that time.

  Moreover, this deduction raises another utterly despairing problem.

  Just as I feared from the beginning—the hole can only be opened or closed from the outside. There’s no way to open it from this side.

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  I really am at a dead end.

  No—I haven’t fought to the very last yet. Giving up so easily would be too pathetic. If I’m someone who yearns for adventures beyond reality, I can’t just sit here and wait for death. Even if it’s my final breath, I have to struggle until the end. That’s my aesthetic.

  So how should I struggle? My current location and the ritual array outside aren’t even in the same spacetime… Wait—Agent Kong did say this異空間 overlaps with real spacetime. If they overlap, they can’t simply be considered “not together.”

  In other words—if I draw the letter patterns from the black shag carpet onto the ceiling here, could they overlap with the ritual array outside?

  There’s still an issue: the ceiling surface and the floor surface aren’t perfectly aligned on the same plane… But the carpet’s letters aren’t perfectly flush with the floor’s array either. If it worked there, maybe it can work here. Though the deviation here is much greater—how thick is this concrete slab, anyway…

  Never mind—thinking too much won’t help. Better to try it once and see!

  I raised my right hand, pointing my finger at the spot on the ceiling where the hole’s entrance had originally been. Flames erupted from nowhere—thin serpents of fire slithering rapidly through the air, climbing onto the ceiling’s surface.

  The black shag carpet’s letters spelled “CARPET”—I remembered that clearly. The font style and size… I recalled them while adjusting the fire serpents’ paths until they matched my memory.

  When it was finished, I let out a long breath and anxiously observed the ceiling.

  Nothing happened.

  My heart sank.

  Still no good? Was it because we’re not in the same spacetime? Or because the slab is too thick, and the planes are too far out of alignment?

  Or maybe it’s because I used fire to draw the pattern? The ritual array was drawn in blood—perhaps I should use blood too… But the carpet’s letters weren’t drawn in blood either. Could it be because that filthy carpet came from a murder scene and had absorbed bloodstains…

  I tilted my head back, examining from different angles, wondering if I’d misspelled something.

  Walking around in this position was making me dizzy. After a short while I felt uncomfortable, so I lowered my head, closed my eyes, and rested for two seconds.

  When I opened them again, something impossible had happened.

  Right in front of me—without warning—stood a set of concrete stairs.

  After a dazed moment, I followed the stairs upward with my eyes. At the top, embedded in the ceiling, was a light brown wooden hatch.

  The entrance to the hole had reappeared!

  —

  Why didn’t the entrance appear immediately after I drew the letter patterns with fire? I only came up with a somewhat absurd explanation afterward.

  It sounds almost comical now: at first, I had been standing directly beneath the original entrance. The concrete stairs later appeared in that exact same spot. Just like how—in some strategy games—you can’t build a new structure if it overlaps with an existing one, perhaps my body had been occupying the position where the stairs needed to manifest. That’s why neither the stairs nor the entrance could appear right away.

  To avoid any more accidents, the moment I saw the entrance I moved immediately—climbing the stairs, reaching the wooden hatch, and pushing it open to return to the fifteenth-floor apartment.

  I was finally back in the real world.

  I looked around and let out a long sigh of relief.

  At the same time, I faintly felt that the near-enlightened state of mind I’d reached while facing loneliness and death down there was slowly receding like the tide.

  That kind of clarity only emerges under extreme conditions. Having narrowly escaped death, I couldn’t hold onto it. But I knew it had left a permanent mark somewhere deep inside me.

  The me now was no longer the same as the me who had never entered the hole.

  I savored that realization for a moment, then turned to look behind me.

  Philosophical questions could wait—let’s deal with reality first.

  When I pushed open the hatch, I hadn’t felt the weight of the black shag carpet that should have been covering it. And now that I was out, I saw the carpet still lying crumpled to the side. That meant—no “unknown person” had entered the fifteenth-floor apartment while I was below and covered the hole.

  Since my actions had allowed me to escape, it confirmed that my deduction about the hole’s appearance/disappearance pattern was correct. But if there was no “unknown person,” how do I explain why the entrance vanished after I went inside?

  I couldn’t figure it out. I turned back to look at the hole.

  This hole—this basement… I thought I’d understood it, but there were still so many unknowns.

  For one thing—I still didn’t know what the black jade I obtained down there really was, or what those misty illusions and three shadowy figures had meant.

  There were still secrets hidden below that I hadn’t uncovered.

  Should I… go back down one more time?

  I knew it was reckless to think about returning right after barely escaping—but this hole would be destroyed tomorrow. If I didn’t finish exploring now, I might never get another chance.

  I really was tempted. But almost immediately, another anomaly made me set the idea aside for the moment.

  All the fireflies I had placed in the real world had disappeared. Naturally—that was because I’d lost connection to them while I was in the basement. The biggest problem, though, was that I had now lost all surveillance over Alice.

  That changed everything.

  Alice kept saying she wanted to leave me. If I only lost track of her briefly, I could accept it—I’d just hurry back. That had been my original plan. But losing contact with her for this long changed the situation completely. If she left during this window, I might never find her again.

  It’s possible—likely, even—that Alice’s jinx constitution was what drew me into this supernatural encounter in the first place. I’m not so foolish that I can’t tell the difference between “one full meal” and “meals every day.”

  I couldn’t explore the basement further while also sending fireflies back home. I had to put this aside for now.

  Before leaving, though, I took photos and videos of the ritual array and the black shag carpet from multiple angles. Maybe someday I could recreate the array elsewhere.

  With that done, I turned and left the fifteenth-floor apartment, walking out of the building entirely.

  Looking up at the moon in the night sky, I finally felt the sensation of “returning to the world of the living.”

  But I hadn’t gone far when—directly ahead in my line of sight—a grotesque shadow emerged in a bizarre manner, blocking my path.