Chapter 14 Got a Signal

  The familiar voice by my ear grew fainter and fainter until it became quiet. My heart tightened once again.

  "Hey, you two, say something! Why are you so quiet? You can even sing a song."

  It's still quiet, with only the sound of my footsteps echoing in this empty corridor. Have we already dispersed? Have we exceeded the Bluetooth communication range? I remember watching a Taiwanese TV series "X Storm MIT" where the male and female leads ran around the school with these things on, but they never disconnected, but that was fictional after all. Back to reality, we still have to adhere to the scientific development view.

  I took off my headphones and quickened my pace, hoping to get out of here as soon as possible. Suddenly I was tripped up, the flashlight was flung far away, and in an instant I plunged into total darkness, possibly because the battery had been knocked out. I pulled out my phone and used its faint light to search for the flashlight.

  But I still took a look at the thing that tripped me, and it was still a corpse. You can imagine how tragic this massacre was. I kicked the bones blocking my way to one side, clasped my hands together in respect, and hoped he could rest in peace.

  The phone suddenly rang, an unfamiliar number. This shouldn't be possible, we're underground and can't receive signals! But it kept ringing, I pressed the answer button with a trembling hand:

  "Hello?"

  The other party did not speak.

  "Who is it?" I could feel my own voice trembling.

  "Don't speak, follow my instructions." A very calm middle-aged man's voice.

  "Who are you? Why? Where are you?"

  "Stop talking nonsense and listen. At the place of death, take ten steps, stop, turn back, take another ten steps, seven to the left and eight to the right. You can get out."

  The phone hung up immediately.

  I stared blankly at my phone for a long time, the screen still showing no signal, but someone had just called me. Who was it? However, he told me how to get out, so he shouldn't be a bad person.

  I found my flashlight and started counting my steps silently, as he had said. I should be at the spot where I tripped over the corpse. After ten steps, I turned around and thought to myself, wouldn't walking another ten steps bring me back to the original place? If so, why do I need to walk forward for another ten steps? I walked on with doubts, and when I stopped, I realized that this was not where I stood earlier. The corpse had vanished without a trace.

  Wow, that's amazing! I thought to myself, could this be the legendary Nine Palaces Eight Trigrams Step? I immediately followed the method of seven steps to the left and eight steps to the right. Originally, I thought I would bump into a wall, but it just so happened to be empty space.

  I gritted my teeth and kept repeating the process, gradually seeing a door-like object. I really had an urge to rush out, but I knew that at this moment, I couldn't afford to mess up the steps. If I messed up the sequence, everything might have to start all over again.

  Walk eight steps to the right and just as I finished counting, I arrived at the exit. There was a person with their back to me, a very familiar figure.

  "Friend, you're out too." I said excitedly.

  It was just a short ten or so minutes, but it felt like we hadn't seen each other in years. Pengpeng turned around and smiled at me too.

  "Did you receive a strange phone call?" I asked.

  "Yes, I don't know who told me about a strange way of walking, and I walked out. Coming here to see that you haven't appeared yet, waiting for you here. Has the coffin not come out yet?"

  "I came out early and it's embarrassing to interrupt you when you're having such a lively conversation." The thin figure of the coffin also appeared before our eyes.

  That saying is right: "Part when you should part, reunite when you should reunite." Finally reunited again.

  "But who was it that made the phone call after all? Why did he get through to us in that situation and tell us a way out?" The coffin was thinking.

  "I suddenly thought of something: 'Do you still remember that person who disappeared out of thin air before we found the entrance? Could it be that he was guiding us all along, leading us to this place?'"