Chapter 352: The Fountain of Youth (9)
The contents of the very first diary entry shocked Everly.
She had assumed that the other people she had encountered in the corridor were also treasure hunters who had come to the island. How could someone have simply tripped and fallen straight into this place?
If the diary was telling the truth, then Emil was unbelievably unlucky. Even Everly found the corridor she was currently in difficult to deal with. She could hardly imagine how terrified an ordinary person would be if they had to go through everything she had encountered.
There was another strange detail: the corridor Emil had fallen into had its lights on, whereas the corridor Everly was in had nothing but wallpaper on the ceiling. There were no lights in sight.
Who knew why…? Everly had encountered far too many inexplicable things since arriving on the island. She had long since given up trying to figure out such trivial details.
She continued reading the diary.
Just as Everly had expected, Emil experienced a considerable amount of confusion on his first day after falling into the corridor.
At first, convinced that “as long as I pick a direction and keep charging forward, I’ll definitely make it out,” he randomly chose a direction and started walking. Along the way, he encountered all sorts of bizarre things, some terrifying and others simply bizarrely out of place.
Incidentally, not a single one of the things he recorded in his diary matched anything Everly had encountered. Whether that was because the two of them had traveled in different directions or for some other reason, she had no idea.
Before he knew it, it was already late that night.
His phone still had no signal no matter how many times he checked, and its battery was almost dead. After walking through the corridor for so long, Emil was exhausted. He ate a little of the food in his backpack, leaned against the wall to rest, and vented his fear and anxiety by writing in his diary.
Once he finished writing, a powerful wave of drowsiness washed over him. He could no longer keep his eyes open and soon fell asleep.
When he woke, it was already the next day.
Not long after getting up, Emil encountered the first problem of the day:
He had lost his sense of direction.
The situation was somewhat amusing when you thought about it, but for some reason, it seemed perfectly reasonable when it happened to an American college student.
Since he had slept sitting against the wall, Emil woke up with a sore back and aching muscles. Before setting off, he put on his backpack, stood up, did a few stretches, and spun around in place several times.
After finishing his turns, Emil looked down the corridor in both directions and froze.
He had forgotten how many times he had spun around, and the scenery at either end of the corridor was exactly the same.
[…I remembered that the last thing I passed before going to sleep yesterday was an old supermarket shopping cart. As far as I remember, I stopped to rest not long after leaving the cart behind. I figured that as long as I found the shopping cart, I’d know which direction I had come from.
But no matter whether I looked ahead or behind, there was no sign of the shopping cart…]
Emil suspected that he had misremembered the distance between himself and the shopping cart.
So he left a food wrapper on the ground as a marker, randomly chose one direction, and started walking without stopping.
He walked for nearly an hour.
Along the way, he encountered all sorts of random things—a ball, a doll, a dead crow, and other assorted objects—but he never saw the shopping cart.
That meant he had chosen the correct direction.
Relieved, Emil continued forward.
He walked for another entire day.
By evening, he had eaten all his food, finished all his water, and his phone had automatically shut down after running out of battery. Yet the exit from the corridor still hadn’t appeared.
That night, he sat against the wall, clutching his aching legs, and cried as he wrote another desperate and despondent entry in his diary.
On the third day after falling into the corridor, Emil encountered another person—a fellow unfortunate named Paul, who, just like him, had accidentally entered the corridor after taking an ordinary fall.
[…Paul came in three days before me, and he seems much more familiar with this corridor than I am.
Paul told me that the vast majority of things appearing in the corridor were harmless. They were things forgotten and discarded by the real world, and this place was the final destination for all the world’s refuse.
“But if you encounter something alive, be careful. They’re dangerous.” Paul’s expression was solemn as he lowered his voice and warned me.
I didn’t understand what he meant, so I asked him curiously. Paul shook his head, seemingly unwilling to say more, and only added vaguely, “It’s hard to put into words, but I think you’ll know it when you encounter one.”
Was it just my imagination? There was something strangely mysterious about the way he spoke.
Aside from information about the corridor, Paul also told me something else: this corridor was endless. Whether we walked forward or backward, we would never find the “exit” we imagined simply by walking.
“I thought about it afterward. Actually, we were all wrong. If we want to leave this place, the real solution isn’t to wander around aimlessly. We need to stay where we are and find the section of wall we originally ‘fell through.’ There’s a gap hidden there connecting reality and the corridor. That’s where we came from, so naturally, that should also be the way back…”
“But I realized this far too late. After all this time, I’ve already forgotten where I came from.”
He covered his face with both hands, his expression filled with anguish.
After hearing what he said, my heart sank as well.
Because the area where the “gap” is located looks exactly like every other section of wall to the naked eye. Unless we marked it with something immediately after falling into the corridor, after all this time, who could possibly find one tiny section of wall hidden somewhere in these endless halls?
…]
After meeting, Paul naturally joined Emil’s group.
The two decided to retrace Emil’s path and search for the “gap” through which he had entered. Although the chances of success were extremely slim, at least this was more effective than wandering around aimlessly.
On the way back, Emil was surprised to discover that the “foreign objects” appearing in the corridor had all changed. None of them were the same things he had seen on his way in.
Paul told Emil that this was perfectly normal. The things in the corridor were constantly changing. Unless you kept your eyes on them the entire time, they would either disappear on the spot or turn into something else as soon as you looked away for a while.
This made Emil break out in a cold sweat, and an ominous feeling surfaced in his heart.
A day earlier, he had been stretching in the corridor and accidentally spun around a few too many times, losing his sense of direction. His solution at the time had been to randomly choose a direction and see whether he encountered the shopping cart he had seen before.
Emil had been very “lucky.” He walked in the first direction for a long time without ever encountering the shopping cart. From this, Emil concluded that he had chosen the correct direction and continued walking that way.
Now, however, it seemed that his choice might have been wrong.
Because his decision had been based on the assumption that the supermarket shopping cart was still there.
The frightening part was that by the time Emil realized this, he and Paul had already traveled a long way on their “return journey.”
In the enclosed corridor, the only source of illumination was the lighting overhead. Both of their phones had run out of battery as well. Without any landmarks to use as reference points and no way to keep track of time, the human perception of time became hopelessly distorted. Emil had no idea where he currently was.
For various reasons, Emil didn’t dare tell Paul about this.
He had thought that the possibility of having taken the wrong path was already enough to drive someone insane.
But something even more frightening was waiting ahead.
As they continued walking, Emil gradually realized that there was something wrong with his new companion, Paul.
[…We encountered a refrigerator in the corridor. Inside it was a dismembered corpse, and tucked into one of the corners were some packaged bread and water.
I swear, if I hadn’t been so hungry and thirsty, I absolutely wouldn’t have touched them, but…]
But Emil was practically starving.
His desire to survive overcame his fear and disgust. After hesitating for a moment, Emil reached out, carefully avoiding the remains of the corpse, and took the food from the corner of the refrigerator. He placed it on the floor, intending to split it with Paul.
But Paul waved him off.
“No need. You can eat it yourself. I don’t need it…” Paul said vaguely.
At the time, Emil simply assumed that Paul had food of his own and didn’t want to eat anything that had been stored alongside a corpse. So he ate the slightly spoiled bread and drank the water himself.
Those provisions kept him going for another two days in the corridor.
Two days later, the food was gone, and Emil once again began worrying about where his next meal would come from.
He was about to ask his companion Paul whether he had anything to eat when Emil suddenly realized something:
Paul didn’t have a backpack.
From the moment they met, Paul had been empty-handed. Other than a phone, he hadn’t brought anything with him.
Paul was dressed for summer—a T-shirt on top and casual pants below. The only pockets were on either side of his pants, and they looked completely flat, as though they contained nothing resembling food.
Thinking about it more carefully, Emil realized that it wasn’t just food.
In the past two days, he hadn’t even seen Paul go to the bathroom once…
“What’s wrong? Why are you making that face?”
A voice came from beside him.
Emil suddenly turned his head and saw Paul staring directly at him, his back to the light.
The fluorescent light spilled down from the ceiling, casting heavy shadows across Paul’s face and making him look sinister, almost like a ghost floating in the darkness.
Until now, Emil had been too focused on feeling along the walls for an exit to pay much attention to his silent companion.
But now, driven by a powerful premonition, Emil carefully examined Paul from head to toe.
Only then did he realize that, without him noticing, Paul’s body had already changed completely—
His eyes had unnaturally bulged outward, the bridge of his nose had collapsed, and his teeth had become pointed. His features had subtly changed, while the surface of his facial skin had also developed tiny bumps, much like a toad’s.
But none of that was as horrifying as Paul’s hands.
When they had first met, Paul’s hands had still been perfectly normal human hands—fair, slender, and with a few light calluses. Yet in just two short days, they had transformed into something resembling a frog’s limbs. His five fingers had become short and thick, while his fingertips and palms were covered in sticky lumps of flesh.
Those were not hands a human being should have!
Perhaps Emil’s stare had been too obvious. Under the light, Paul suddenly pulled the corners of his mouth apart into a horrifying smile. “You noticed?”
“I-I…”
Emil was so frightened that he fell onto the floor. He had expected Paul to attack him, but the anticipated attack never came.
Paul simply stood there, silently looking at him with an expression filled with pain, self-mockery, sorrow, and despair.
“Looks like the longer this goes on, the faster the changes become… I think it won’t be long before I turn into a complete monster. I’m sorry, Emil. I think you’ll have to walk the rest of the way by yourself.”
“W-what do you mean?”
“Haven’t you noticed that something is wrong with you yet?” Paul reached out, pointing one of his short, thick fingers at Emil’s cheek.
Prompted by him, Emil raised a hand and touched his face.
What he felt wasn’t soft, smooth human skin, but a somewhat coarse, sandpaper-like texture. As his fingertips brushed over it, powdery particles kept flaking off his face.
When Emil pulled his hand away, he saw a thin layer of blue-green mold clinging to his fingertips.
A faint stinging sensation came from the cheek he had touched. Emil’s breathing quickened as he stared at Paul in shock and terror. “W-what’s happening to me…?”
“This corridor is contaminating us.” Paul looked at Emil with pity and spoke softly. “The longer we wander around here, and the more often we come into contact with those strange things, the faster our bodies will mutate. Until eventually, we become complete and utter monsters… Emil, remember when you asked me what those ‘living’ things were that you needed to be wary of? I can tell you now. They’re us.”
“They’re us, Emil… Once our mutations are complete, we’ll become the extremely dangerous ‘living’ monsters I told you about. The people who came in before us were the same. You and I are the same. And the people who come in after us will be the same…”
……