Chapter 532: Unexpected Discovery

The room that had changed my destiny was located on Basement Level 4. As I stepped onto the rotting wooden stairs, a familiar creaking echoed in my ears. I knew this place entirely too well.

"Streamer, why do I get the feeling you've been here before? You act like you know your way around." Chu Men followed behind me. I couldn't blame him; anyone would be suspicious seeing how I was acting right now.

This was the Deep Dream Layer, the Third World that no one had ever managed to leave, yet I was acting like I had just come home. It was far too abnormal.

"I can't be sure yet, but I've been to a place very much like this." Using the Live Show Phone for illumination, I headed straight for Basement Level 4. Trailing my hand along the wall, I swept my gaze across the doors one by one. "That's right. All the room numbers start with a four."

Walking down the long corridor, I looked closely and gradually noticed the differences between this place and the Jiangcheng Lightless Road. The most obvious distinction was the heavy damage to the walls and doors. A fierce battle had taken place here.

"There are signs of fighting everywhere. If this place really is the former lair of the Underworld Live Show, who in this world had the ability to face the Live Show head-on?" I crouched down and examined the cracks in the floorboards, pulling one loose. Beneath it, there was nothing but some gravel and rotting sawdust. "I clearly remember that the floorboard gaps in that old house in Jiangcheng were packed with bug corpses, but there aren't any here."

Let alone the living, even the bug corpses seemed to have been erased. The place was wiped completely clean, leaving absolutely nothing behind.

"What exactly happened here? The Underworld Live Show is so powerful—how could it come under attack?" Brimming with doubt, I finally reached the door to Room 444. The rotting wooden door, the loose lock—everything was so familiar.

Creaaak...

The hinges turned as I pushed the door open, inch by inch.

The red carpet that looked as though it were woven from living human hair, the piled-up desks and chairs, the mottled walls—the scene inside the room matched my memories flawlessly. I had undergone professional criminal investigation training, making me incredibly sharp at observing details. Comparing this room to the one underground in Jiangcheng, every single detail matched perfectly. It was as if they were the exact same place.

"Could the Underworld Live Show's lair really be inside the Deep Dream Layer?" Walking further inside, I soon discovered a discrepancy. On the innermost wall of the room, where the four characters for 'Underworld Live Show' should have been, there were now only four patches of uneven, stripped plaster.

I ran my hand over the exposed wall. "The words were definitely here, but someone scraped them off bit by bit with a knife. The cut marks are very dense, and some of the scratches slide down symmetrically. It looks like they used scissors."

"Streamer, what was originally written on this wall?" Chu Men walked over, highly curious about the erased characters.

"I can't say." I had an agreement with the Underworld Live Show not to actively expose its existence. That included the livestream viewers; they only knew they were watching a thrilling and terrifying broadcast, and they only knew my face. They had no idea that the true mastermind manipulating everything from behind the scenes was the Underworld Live Show.

"Streamer, the two of us have gone through life and death together and even entered the Deep Dream Layer, yet you're still keeping secrets from me?" Chu Men didn't really mind. Standing in front of the scraped plaster, he tried to guess what the four characters were based on the remaining traces.

"It's not that I don't know, it's that I can't say." I shook my head, paying his reaction no mind. I didn't think too deeply about why Chu Men had asked me that question.

Walking over to the corner of the room, I pushed open the side door. This was where I had once been interviewed.

A black altar table had been overturned in the center of the room, with a few chairs scattered around it.

"Even this place was destroyed." To avoid unnecessary trouble, I didn't touch the furniture, leaving everything exactly as it was.

"Streamer, this place of yours really isn't bad. The 'thoughts' and those memory fragments don't dare to come in. But what I don't understand is, since we both entered the Deep Dream Layer at the same time, how did you know this place existed?" Chu Men refused to let it go, persistently trying to get to the bottom of the matter.

I shot Chu Men a glance, offering no answer. "Don't touch anything in this room. This place might not be safe either."

I had entered the Lightless District primarily to find clues regarding the Underworld Live Show; taking refuge was only secondary, regardless of whether we could ever get out. Now that I had entered the Deep Dream Layer and luckily stumbled upon a place that looked like the Live Show's lair, I definitely had to satisfy my curiosity. I couldn't make this trip in vain.

"Nothing to be found in Room 444. I wonder if the other rooms hold any clues left behind by the Live Show." This building had three floors above ground, but I didn't know how many floors were underground. Back in Jiangcheng, I never dared to run around recklessly whenever I came in, terrified that wandering off would lead me into some horrifying place.

In the Dream Realm, however, I didn't have any such reservations. It looked like a fierce battle had occurred here, so the 'people' originally stationed in this place should have left long ago.

Stepping out of Room 444, I turned to look at the adjacent Room 443. The person who had previously passed me a note telling me to find Xia Chi was locked up in this exact room in reality.

"Let's go in and take a look." The door was closed. I shook it twice and found that the lock was loose, so I simply kicked it open and barged inside.

"What the hell is this place?" The floor of Room 443 was also covered in a carpet that looked like it was woven from human hair. It felt incredibly strange to step on. Upon entering, I found the walls and ceiling densely painted with bizarre red symbols.

"Streamer, let's get out of here quickly. Blood-red is the worst color in the Dream Realm. We really shouldn't go into this room."

Chu Men offered a kind warning, but I didn't say anything. Utilizing my Judging Eye, I suddenly noticed something reflective on a corner cabinet as the phone screen swept over it. "You stay outside."

This was my first time entering Room 443, and the atmosphere inside felt terribly oppressive. 'In Room 443 in reality, a huge crowd was crammed inside. No, you couldn't even describe them as people.'

Approaching the cabinet, I found the object that had just reflected the light. It was a newspaper stuffed full of glass shards. Because the edges of the shards were sharp, a few had tumbled out of the paper.

"What is this?" Holding the newspaper, I crouched on the floor, not entirely certain. "It looks like a shattered mirror."

I tried to piece the fragments together, but no matter how I tried, they just wouldn't fit. "Strange. What's the meaning behind these glass shards wrapped in newspaper?"

Finding a bundle of glass shards in a place suspected to be the Live Show's lair—no matter how I thought about it, it felt abnormal.

I patiently examined every piece of glass and finally made a discovery. I carefully picked out a fragment the size of a baby's palm. "This piece isn't glass; it's a Mirror Fragment!"

Mirrors were an extremely special existence in the Dream Realm. They could use human eyes to describe events outside the human perspective. They were real, yet illusory. The world they reflected might be entirely different from the world we lived in, and the legends surrounding them had never ceased.

I checked all the fragments and only found this single Mirror Fragment. Mixed in among a pile of regular shards, it was very easy to overlook.

"It's much heavier than an ordinary mirror piece, and the edges are sharp. It must be a part of some specific mirror." I aimed the Mirror Fragment at myself, and at that moment, an astonishing thing occurred—the Mirror Fragment didn't reflect my silhouette!

"What is going on? This mirror is a bit extraordinary!" I quietly wrapped the Mirror Fragment back up in the newspaper and slipped it into my pocket. 'The Live Show's lair in the Deep Dream Layer has been abandoned, and there are traces of combat left all over the place. The Live Show must have been forced to abandon this place after encountering a crisis. It's possible that the original owner of the Mirror Fragment knew they couldn't escape disaster, which is why they mixed the mirror piece with glass and hid it here.'

Relative to the entire underground structure, Room 443 was just a very ordinary room. I could roughly guess a thing or two about why the other party had done this.

'A mirror that can't reflect a person's image is quite strange.' I studied the red text and symbols on the wall. They were extremely messy, making it hard to decipher what was written. I spent a few minutes trying to crack them before finally giving up and walking out of Room 443.

"Did you find anything?" Chu Men asked casually, his hands stuffed into his white coat.

"No. Let's go look elsewhere." I patted Chu Men on the shoulder, casting my gaze toward the stairwell.