This Spiritual Energy is Lethal!

Chapter 42: Chapter 042: The Disappearing Door

“Ding-dong”

The elevator door slowly opened, casting white light into the dark corridor, which wasn’t much different from the lower level. Chen Ke looked at the elevator indicator with suspicion, as the orange LED numbers flickered, showing that it was currently on the first floor.

Damn it…

Chen Ke intended to go down to the first-floor lobby to see if he could encounter more dogs, and he did press the button for the first floor.

When the elevator started, he felt surprised. Although it was supposed to go down, it felt like it was ascending. He slowly walked out of the elevator, took out his PPK.45, slowly attached the silencer, then scanned the entire corridor.

There was no one, and no sounds either.

...

On both sides of the corridor, there were four sets of double glass doors. Chen Ke mumbled to himself, guessing they were similar to the office rooms on the eighth floor. Through the glass, he could see rows of computer workstations.

He reached out to try one of the glass doors by his side and, unexpectedly, it was unlocked. He opened the door just a crack and peered through the gap, where a scene defying logic presented itself.

Through the crack, he saw another corridor, with four sets of double doors on each side, leading to an elevator at the far end.

Chen Ke moved his gaze away from the crack and looked through the glass door again. It was a normal office room, rows of computer workstations, unlike what he had just seen.

Unwilling to give up, he opened the door wider to look from the inside out, and it was pitch black.

Chen Ke now realized that within the Black Box Space, physical distances and spaces were a chaotic tangle. Although he wasn’t sure if this was the norm.

The silence around him was unnaturally still; not even gunshots could be heard. He hesitated whether to enter the corridor behind the glass door, fearing that he might get trapped.

Better check the other doors first!

Chen Ke closed this glass door and pulled open the other three, only to see his uneasy expression reflected on his face each time—behind every door was a corridor that looked identical.

For some reason, he had a bad feeling and retreated to the elevator to press the button.

Huh? The button’s light wouldn’t light up. He furrowed his brows, repeatedly pressing the button to no effect.

He picked up his gun, surveying the surroundings. The quiet, empty corridor seemed dangerous to him now.

He didn’t sense any killing intent, nor could he hear any movement, as though he had fallen into a paradoxical trap.

Chen Ke saw the emergency exit next to the elevator, its yellow wooden doors slightly ajar. The first time he had come here, he had used the emergency exit to go down to the first-floor lobby.

He quietly walked over to open the doors, only to find a wall behind them…

The bolts from the double doors jutted out from between the wall’s cracks, pressing down on Chen Ke’s shoulder, and the other door fell to the ground with a loud “clang,” the sudden noise echoing through the corridor.

He propped the other door against the wall and examined the wall closely. It was made of red bricks, which seemed old by the look of them.

They sprouted abruptly from where the door frame should have been, taking up the space meant for the door, causing the bolts to break out of the frame and the door to fall.

So under normal circumstances, this door could not possibly fit into this frame. A cold sweat trickled down Chen Ke’s forehead; these bricks had formed in the instant he had opened the door.

Something was toying with him.

The current situation might have gone beyond the scope of the Black Box Space. The Administration Bureau wouldn’t play such a trick on the investigators, there was no reason for this.

Most likely, the corridor behind the glass door had also formed in the instant he had pushed the door open, something wanted to trap him here.

Damn it, why?

This chapter is updat𝙚d by freeweɓnovel.cøm.

Could it be that it was some kind of protective mechanism set up by the Administration Bureau within the Black Box Space? Detecting an unauthorized entry, it used this trap to catch the intruder?

Thinking of this possibility made Chen Ke’s hair stand on end. If that were the case, he feared it might be over for him.

He wouldn’t be able to fend off an assault by the Administration Bureau, at least not the him in his current state. Moreover, in a world with a sound legal system, even if Chen Ke managed to kill people from the Administration Bureau, the entire country wouldn’t let it slide; they might even send “superhumans” to deal with him.

Attacking others at sight wasn’t wise; unless someone got in his face, Chen Ke wouldn’t kill indiscriminately.

With no other options, Chen Ke had to turn back into the corridor. With the elevator unresponsive and the emergency exit blocked, his only remaining paths were through the four sets of double glass doors.

He pushed a door to look inside; the passageway was eerily silent, no different from the corridor he was in. Yet, the elevator at the end had its floor indicator blinking.

Was the elevator working?

Chen Ke looked back at the elevator at the end of his corridor, where the indicator light was unlit. Looking towards the door, Chen Ke hesitated—should he go in?

“Snap.”

Just as he was standing still, someone seemed to push him from behind, and he stumbled into the corridor through the glass door.

Chen Ke’s mind exploded with tension, his hair standing on end. He immediately turned around to aim his gun, but there was nothing behind him.

Not even the glass door.

Chen Ke looked again; he was now in the middle of the corridor, behind him was the elevator with lights indicating the floor.

This made no sense!

He reached the elevator door, pressed the button to go down, and looked up at the floor indicator. The number was stuck at 99999.

Chen Ke glanced at the emergency exit next to him, the yellow wooden double door still slightly open…

It was pitch black behind that slit. He walked over and gently closed the door.

“Clang.”

He was abruptly “expelled” through the door, falling stiffly onto the floor, with a concrete wall now facing him from inside the doorframe.

Chen Ke kicked the wall, then turned and walked toward the nearby glass double doors, which reflected only his own image. Behind the door, there still appeared to be the normal office space, but he knew that as soon as he pulled open the door, it would change into a hallway.

What if he didn’t touch the door?

Chen Ke took a few steps back and raised his pistol, firing repeatedly at the glass door.

A bizarre thing happened: the Flame .45 ACP bullets passed through the glass door, shredding the computers, office chairs, and cubicles behind it to pieces, and ignited the A4 paper on the copier, creating a blazing fire. However, the glass door remained perfectly intact, without a single bullet hole.

Chen Ke stroked his chin and theorized two conclusions: either the door ignored the existence of the bullets, or the bullets ignored the existence of the door.

Although the two sounded similar, in reality, they were vastly different.

If the door ignored the bullets, it meant the door had sentience, able to decide who to let into the true space “behind” the door.

If the bullets ignored the door, it meant the goddamn door didn’t exist at all.

If the door had sentience, then it was either a mutated object or simply a monster. But Chen Ke saw no informational frames in his field of vision, nor did he sense any killing intent.

So he concluded that the “door” didn’t exist. Something wanted to play a “game” with him. That thing had just pushed him, sending him deeper into the trap, and now, Chen Ke intended to draw it out.

Chen Ke stood and slowly opened the door again, all the while staying alert to any movement behind him. Whatever appeared behind him at that moment, he would fire the entire magazine of Flame Bullets into its body.

However, the moment Chen Ke opened the glass door, the life-span countdown on the corner of his eye began to jump wildly.

“+1 hour”

“+1 hour”

“+1 hour”

“Life-span has reached the maximum…”

“…”

In the corridor behind the door, a large dog about 1 meter tall sat crouched on the ground, glaring angrily at Chen Ke, seemingly enraged that he tried to step into its territory.

Its lower jaw split into two halves, and a viscous red liquid—either blood or saliva—dripped onto the floor from the split.

Its muscular, hairless, pitch-black body was covered with scar-like cracks, exuding a purple liquid from within.

Chen Ke felt instinctively that it was best to avoid those liquids.

A blue outline enveloped the bizarre dog in Chen Ke’s vision, with five blue and two red phrases arrayed around it:

[Administration Bureau Monster Rating: ??]

[Poison Spray]

[Strength Enhancement]

[Dark Energy Damage Increase]

[Corrosion Immunity]

==================

[Discipline Weakening]

[Flame Weakening]

Chen Ke surmised that the blue phrases represented the monster’s buffs, while the red phrases were its weakness attributes.

This was a new ability he acquired after hastily browsing through the appendix of “Jack Meyer’s Investigator’s Guide: The Path from D to S Rank!”—the automatic labeling of attributes compiled by the Administration Bureau next to the monsters.

The labeled attributes were likely limited to those listed in that booklet, perhaps those were all of them.

The two types of monsters Chen Ke had encountered during this period, mutated beings and creatures from the Spirit Explosion Space, had no names. This was also because he hadn’t looked at anything like a Monster Manual, and the Administration Bureau’s monster rating displayed question marks because he hadn’t browsed through any Monster Manual.

He decided to call this ability the “Life Archive.”

Since he didn’t know the names of the monsters due to never having seen a Monster Manual, then why could he see the names of the Holy Relics?

Now wasn’t the time to think about this. Although Chen Ke knew that the mutant dog was weak to Flame and Discipline, and he happened to possess weapons of both types, this still wasn’t a game where he could see his own DPS or the monster’s health bar.

He wasn’t sure how many Flame Bullets it would take to kill the dog. There were only six Discipline bullets remaining, and he was in the Black Box Space, risking alarming the Administration Bureau by randomly using the Spiritual Ability Pistol, with nowhere to run.

The dog was quite challenging. Judging from the life-span increase after absorbing its killing intent, this dog and the toad god in the sewer were somehow of the same tier… And as an indigenous creature of the Black Box Space, it was possibly even more formidable than a mutated individual.

Chen Ke decided to quietly close the door, not provoking the dog, while also constantly monitoring any movement behind him to prevent being shoved into the corridor.

“Let’s pretend you saw nothing,” Chen Ke muttered to himself, slowly closing the glass door.

Just as the door was about to be closed, Chen Ke felt it slip from his hand. Suddenly, his face was overtaken by surprise and confusion.

His hand was empty.

“The fuck… Where’s my door?”

“Huoh… gurgle gurgle gurgle…”

The black dog stood up on all fours, growling low at Chen Ke. The sound was like an old man sighing. Chen Ke crouched and aimed his gun; almost simultaneously, the beast lunged at him with an unbelievable speed.