Chapter 162: Disordered Space

As Lin QiYe and the others quickly ran up the stairs to the second floor, they came to a sudden stop upon seeing the scene before them.

"What's wrong? Why did you stop?" Cao Yuan asked in confusion.

Lin QiYe stared blankly at the scene before him. After a long pause, he stepped aside to clear half of the space, allowing the others behind him to see ahead clearly…

"What… what is this?" Li Shaoguang widened his eyes, speaking in disbelief.

Usually, staircases spiral upwards, leading to higher floors. After finishing the stairs of one level, you would come to the second floor, entering the hallway. If you turned around, you would see the stairs leading up to the third floor…

But strangely, after they had climbed the last step of the first floor, instead of entering the second floor hallway, they found themselves facing… a dorm room.

Yes, after climbing the final stair, they were in front of an ordinary dorm room for two people.

The dorm room was clean and tidy, with the bedding and pillows arranged neatly. From the skincare products and clothes placed on the desk, it was clear that two women had been living there for a while, but there was not a single person in sight.

This eerie scene made it seem as though the stairs had been intentionally constructed to end right at the dorm's door. As soon as you went up the stairs, you would be forced to pass through this dorm room.

"Could this be the design of the female dorms?" someone in the crowd asked suspiciously.

They were all male soldiers and had never been inside Building Three, so they had no idea what the interior looked like.

"Impossible." Lin QiYe crouched down and gently ran his fingers along the place where the staircase met the dorm room. The two different tiles met perfectly, "The junction is too smooth. Although the base builders of this camp are incredibly skilled, there's no way they could have achieved this level of precision…"

"It's almost as if someone took two places and cut them out separately, then stitched them together," Lin QiYe muttered.

"Is this related to space?" Cao Yuan furrowed his brow.

"Yes, there's definitely some mysterious existence in this building skilled in spatial manipulation," Lin QiYe said confidently. "If I'm not mistaken, the layout inside this building has been completely messed up, like a Rubik's Cube that someone scrambled."

He stood up and walked straight into the dorm room, opening the door on the other side…

Outside the door wasn't a balcony, but a T-shaped corridor. The reason it was T-shaped was because it was created by misaligning two originally connected corridors.

It was like when a player in a building game accidentally misdirects a section of road, causing it to be perpendicular to the previous section, making the whole thing look very awkward.

Cao Yuan walked over to the window, but couldn't see anything outside—only a deep blue expanse. He pushed the window hard, but it didn't budge.

"So, this is the mysterious force? It's too bizarre…" someone in the crowd couldn't help but exclaim.

Because of the T-junction, two completely different paths appeared in front of them. The group hesitated at the junction.

"Which way is the path up?" Li Shaoguang scratched his head. "How about we split up?"

"With a mysterious presence in this building, splitting up is definitely not a wise choice," Lin QiYe shook his head, continuing, "The left path leads to another dorm room, and beyond that is a bathroom, then a staircase leading down."

"And the right path?" Li Shaoguang asked.

"The right path passes through two consecutive dorm rooms, then leads to an upward staircase."

"You can sense the path?" Li Shaoguang asked in surprise.

"Yes, but the range is limited. I can't sense too many rooms," Lin QiYe said calmly.

"So, we should go right?"

"No," Lin QiYe shook his head, then pointed at the wall in front of them and slowly spoke, "Behind this wall, there are several upward steps that would take us directly to the fourth floor."

When they first entered Building Three, he had noticed that while his spiritual senses couldn't penetrate the building from the outside, they worked normally inside.

This meant that from the outside, the building seemed to be spatially isolated, but from the inside, the rooms were simply misaligned—there was no actual spatial separation.

This meant… the walls inside the building could be broken!

"Break this wall?" someone asked.

"Yes, but be careful not to damage the building's structure. Even though the space is disordered, it doesn't mean the supporting pillars are useless. If the structure is damaged too much… the building might collapse," Lin QiYe said seriously.

A young man stepped forward, a grayish light appearing in his palm. "Leave it to me!"

He slammed his palm onto the wall, and the gray light quickly spread across it, corroding the surface until it formed a circular passage large enough for three people to pass through, without damaging the other parts of the structure.

The group entered the circular passage in order, with Lin QiYe and the others at the front. Just as they passed about one-fifth of the way through, something unexpected happened!

The surrounding rooms and walls suddenly began to move on their own. The straight path from the T-junction was instantly shifted, replaced by another dorm room. Meanwhile, the upward stairs that had been behind the wall were misaligned, like a rotating Rubik's Cube, and moved to some unknown location.

At the same time, Lin QiYe, Cao Yuan, and the others, who had just entered the first section of the stairs, suddenly felt the environment change. The walls on their left and right turned into two empty dorm rooms. The stairs ahead became a wall, and the corridor behind them turned into a downward staircase…

"What's going on?" Li Shaoguang asked in surprise.

"The space has shifted again," Lin QiYe frowned and murmured, deep in thought, "Why? Was it our destruction of the wall that caused the shift, or does it happen periodically…"

Cao Yuan looked around helplessly and sighed. "We're separated from the others."

"There's nothing we can do. No one knew the layout would change again…" Li Shaoguang shrugged.

"Anyway, we should stick together as much as possible and not split up," Lin QiYe said calmly. "If the mysterious force hiding in Building Three can only do this much, it's more of a hassle than a real threat. Its Forbidden Ruin seems to be more focused on trapping enemies, not causing harm."

"That's right. As long as enough people enter Building Three, breaking through will just be a matter of time," Cao Yuan nodded in agreement.

"The problem now is… if this mysterious force can only do this much, then what about the scream we heard earlier?" Lin QiYe thought for a moment, then shook his head and continued walking forward.

There was no point in dwelling on it now. Without decisive evidence, all they could do was speculate.

The three of them continued forward, passing through the many rooms that had been pieced together. After about five or six minutes, they finally stopped in front of a door.