Chapter 336: The Only Answer
After starting up the gramophone, Delicious Wind Goose first ran to the basement and released Angelo.
Then, he came to Level 5 and moved the gramophone back to Level 4 because the cops would be there in ten seconds. Before the gramophone was turned off, the cops would hear that the gramophone should be on Level 4; when they got up, they certainly saw a gramophone on that particular level.
In other words, before the police arrive at Level 5 and see the “second gramophone”, the gramophone on Level 4 briefly disappeared for less than a minute. That was the time it took for Amos to carry the gramophone to Level 5 during the Level 4 nightmare.
After Amos finished these tasks, he returned to the rooftop and waited to turn back time.
Then, he pulled the trigger from behind and killed himself in one shot.
At this stage, there were 10 seconds left before the police arrived on Level 4 and confirmed the location of the gramophone.
Then, it would take two minutes before the police arrived on the rooftop and found Amos dead.
There were still five minutes left before the massive “Angelo” burst out from the ground.
Then, all the events were connected.
Amos’ fear on Level 6 also represented the deepest fear in his heart: Self-doubt.
Would it all have been better without me in the first place?
He denied his existence and value, erasing what he sacrificed and persisted in the past.
This was the sinner Amos’s final “redemption”, which was to stop himself from appearing in this world.
This was actually a hint to the true ending.
“Piecing everything together”. That was the true essence of Level 1.
At Level 3, Amos once puked out Elle’s eyes.
Annan thought that maybe Amos vomited different things on each level and finally vomited Elle out. However, he didn’t encounter similar events since Level 2 and Level 4.
Then, another clue popped into his mind: Amos’ left eye was Elle’s left eye too.
At this time, Elle was long dead. So, where did her fresh eyeball come from?
Without hesitation, Annan reached out and dug out his left eye.
He didn’t feel intense pain but experienced severe dizziness with strange hallucinations appearing before him.
But when he looked closely, he could see the item in his palm was an emerald green eyeball.
Then, Annan put it on the display cabinet on the first floor.
“I have found the final answer,” Annan whispered.
He refused to swallow Elle’s eyeballs.
After Annan put Elle’s eyeballs into the display cabinet on Level 1, the cabinet was firmly locked. However, the rest of the displayer cabinet on the other five levels opened with a click.
Annan put on his coat and skillfully took out the silver coin from Amos’s pocket.
He pressed the coin to his stomach and eye socket. As the light flickered, his wounds quickly healed. But the left eye he had lost remained empty.
He took out the tomato, full of blood and called “homeless man’s hunger”, and put it in his coat pocket. Then, he inserted the turbid blood bullet into the silver revolver and swallowed the umbilical cord.
Indeed, he had made use of the items which the players couldn’t help but choose to ignore.
The essence of Level 1 seemed to be “establishing connection”.
Then, there would be the requirement of “coughing out the eyeball”, which happened at Level 2. Similarly, he was required to “cough out the umbilical cord,” which occurred at Level -1!
Annan would have to piece all the events correctly!
Then, he quickly found the empty painting, rotated the frame clockwise to 180°, and slowly turned the mechanism inside.
Under the “clanging” metal noise, a small section of the wall beside him began to bend inward, revealing a narrow and dark passage.
A wooden door was located at the end of the narrow passage.
It looked the same as the wooden door at the end of the corridor.
Pushing the door open, Annan was faced with a pale, rib-like staircase.
The staircase was also filled with flawless frost.
Since the steps here were already narrow, it was even harder to traverse through them now, with the ice filling up the gaps between the steps. Annan would have fallen easily if he had tried.
Thus, he didn’t go down the stairs at all.
The wound on his abdomen had been healed, and he no longer had to worry about tearing open his wound back again. Thus, he had the opportunity to exercise highly skilled movements.
For example, he squatted down and slid down with his body facing sideways!
The greasy corpse oil was utterly frozen in the basement. Annan slid down the ice slope to the bottom with ease.
Moreover, Annan couldn’t stop in time and slammed onto a table because the bottom layer was filled with frost. Then, he finally stopped.
At this time, the basement door was also pulled open from the outside.
A huge shadow was cast from above, like a twisted monster, like a sharp blade; the tip of the shadow reached Annan.
But the man above didn’t speak.
He stood at the top in silence and looked down, but he did not go down.
In his hand was a hammer with a long handle.
Sure enough, that was the [Barrier Destroyer’s Right Arm].
“Tsk…” Annan struggled up from the ground.
Amos’s body wasn’t well trained. The body could hardly adjust itself from the fall.
Annan just grinned and smiled back, “Why don’t you come down, Mr. Joseph?”
In the previous dungeon instance, “Brother Sledgehammer”, Joseph should be walking down step by step while giving out tremendous pressure.
Supposedly, when Joseph was halfway through, Annan would enter a plot. Although he fell terribly, he still had to get up from the ground, tossing a cheeky line, “You shouldn’t have come” and then Illidan Stormrage’s [1] iconic voice line “You are not prepared.”
It was a pity that the opponent didn’t catch his joke.
What a waste.
But it’s different this time.
The nightmare was distorted because Annan was injected with “Frostwhisper’s Eternal Frozen Blood”. The immediate change was that the floor was full of ice.
Thus, Joseph was unable to walk down to him.
If Joseph fell down the ice slope more than 20 meters high, he couldn’t sustain the injury even if he was a Silver Rank Wizard.
This also led to the CG cutscene failing to trigger.
Annan put both hands in his pockets, a tomato in one hand and a gun in the other. Then, he said leisurely, “I think you can also see that something is wrong, right?
“I’m not Amos, and Amos can’t make the whole gallery covered in frost. That’s something only the Old Grandmother can do.
“Actually, it’s just a nightmare, Mr. Joseph. I don’t intend for you to die on the spot, but I hope you’ll keep your cool in what will happen next and preferably maintain a decent combat prowess.”
Annan said, holding the glass bottle full of wine.
Looking at “Angelo” in the glass bottle, Annan said calmly, “Because I don’t know what will happen next.”