Chapter 22 – The Wall

The video began in chaos—soldiers fighting something massive, the very thing Wei An had just seen leaving scorched, melted marks on the cargo truck.

The footage was blurry, flickering with static. It was unclear why the high-tech skull hard drive had degraded like this. It didn’t seem like physical damage but rather erosion from some unknown force.

Still, despite the poor quality, the thing’s shape was discernible.

It crouched on the roof of a vehicle—a gigantic, ghastly white humanoid silhouette. Its head was only half there, limbs unnaturally elongated. It watched in eerie silence as soldiers desperately fired at it.

The shaky camerawork resembled something out of an avant-garde film, but the subject matter was pure nightmare-fuel.

The deformed white shadow suddenly moved. Its speed was impossible to track. The owner of the storage drive was shouting data—its velocity had reached 300 meters per second and was still climbing.

The commanding officer remained composed, directing the soldiers to hold their formation and counterattack. For a moment, they even seemed to gain the upper hand. Their weapons and tactical discipline were top-tier.

But then, something else happened.

Throughout the battle, there had been a faint, indistinct radio noise in the background. It was impossible to make out what it was.

Two minutes in, the video abruptly dissolved into static. Wei An checked the progress bar—just as the screen flickered back to life.

This time, the perspective had changed. It was more distant, and the battlefield looked different.

Four or five soldiers stood with their backs to the camera, staring at something unseen in the frame.

Then, without warning, one of them raised his gun and shot himself in the head.

A clean headshot. The footage had no sound.

He collapsed. A second later, another soldier in the corner did the same.

They shot themselves in the head. The entire scene was unnervingly quiet, the deaths so simple and plain they lacked any dramatic impact, but their very plainness felt grotesquely wrong.

The sequence lasted barely three seconds before static swallowed the screen again.

Wei An stared at the display for a while longer, but there was nothing but snow.

Everything felt like a cursed broadcast from some archaic era, with events buried in a grave of static, only vague ghostly impressions left behind.

After a moment of thought, Wei An stood and walked in a certain direction.

He had spotted several corpses earlier but had been too distracted by the Space Lock to investigate.

Now, he moved toward them. The area was strewn with discarded weapons and vehicles, shell casings littering the ground. He didn’t have to walk far before he saw the bodies he’d glimpsed earlier.

Immediately, he realized what had felt off.

A dead soldier lay sprawled on the ground, gun still clutched in his hand, head tilted to the side, blood and brain matter sprayed outward.

He had killed himself.

Wei An stared for a few seconds, then pressed forward. More bodies lay ahead, scattered haphazardly.

All of them… had committed suicide.

From the moment Wei An arrived, the battlefield had appeared roughly tidied up. But here, it was clear they had completely abandoned any attempt at order.

Walking through this eerie battlefield, the surroundings made his skin crawl.

The corpses… showed signs of decay. Their faces bore expressions of something deeply unsettling—almost like smiles, but also twisted in agony.

The area was deathly silent.

No—not silent. The radio noise hung in the air.

Louder now, as if someone was speaking on the other end, but the connection was unstable, making it impossible to decipher.

Wei An unconsciously strained to listen. It sounded like a person, but the voice was so distorted, as if something was choking it—

The more he focused, the clearer it became. He couldn’t explain why, but something about the voice made him deeply uncomfortable—

A sudden realization struck him like lightning.

This was what Gui Ling had warned him about—never listen to “the voice from the other side.”

Once you started listening, it would only grow clearer, and then that thing would worm its way into your mind. There would be no return.

Wei An stopped in his tracks, forcing himself to tune it out.

He assessed the situation. The ancient civilization’s horrors were beyond his comprehension, but he had mostly pieced together the conspiracy at play.

That military unit must have encountered something far beyond what they expected—something so dangerous they couldn’t stay, yet couldn’t abandon their “treasure” either. So they had sealed the area with a Space Lock.

Judging by the Flâneur Hotel incident, they were still working on long-term plans in the periphery. They would definitely find a way to deal with this place eventually—

Wei An’s phone video was still playing. A sudden scream erupted from it—someone shrieking hysterically, “Kill yourself! Kill yourself now!”

He lifted the phone to look.

After an extended stretch of static, the footage jumped again—likely not long after the earlier incident.

It was unclear how the madness had spread, but the battlefield had plunged into hellish chaos.

The image was unclear, but the horror was unmistakable. Soldiers had lost all sanity—some gouged out their own eyes or organs, others devoured their comrades’ corpses—

In the corner, someone witnessing this raised a gun to their head and fired.

Wei An realized he was now standing amid a grotesque collection of corpses. These people had suffered unimaginable torment before death, their bodies half-desiccated but still bearing the marks of unspeakable horrors.

The nightmarish footage on his phone flashed by again. The next segment was out of order, jumping erratically.

The point-of-view character screamed, “What is that?! What is that—?!”

The voice was completely without reason, shrill and terrifying in this environment.

Strangely, the video stabilized at this moment.

The thing that had provoked the scream was a wall.

It had appeared abruptly, as if from an old black-and-white film, standing colorless in front of them. A crack ran through it—less than a person’s height—impossible to discern clearly, as if caused by age or accident.

Wei An had a feeling the noise was coming from the other side of that wall.

He stared at the crack. It was just an ordinary fissure, extending silently into the structure.

But as he kept looking—there was something inside it.

Something was moving toward this side.

He faintly glimpsed a speck of light—like static—then realized it was the reflection of an eye. It stared at him, inching closer.

The crack was barely two centimeters wide, yet whatever was inside it pressed forward bit by bit. There seemed to be a body beneath it, but at this resolution, it was just shifting static—squirming closer, growing clearer. Its shape was impossible to imagine—

A gunshot cracked from the phone. The screen flashed—the owner of the storage drive had killed themselves.

Wei An’s hand trembled. The phone clattered to the ground.

He realized the earlier footage had shown the wall from dozens of meters away, steady and unmoving. But now—somehow—it had drawn closer in the frame, barely a meter away!

He could see the crack in the wall clearly now, so close it felt as though the wall had moved toward him the moment he noticed it.

Wei An’s hands shook. He took a step back, refusing to look at the screen. He knew better than to keep watching—

Then his body froze.

He lifted his head.

Directly in front of him, a wall had appeared out of nowhere. A black crack—less than a person’s height—ran through it.

Wei An’s lips parted slightly. He wasn’t sure if he should make a sound. This was exactly the kind of unsolvable horror-movie scenario he dreaded.

From behind the wall came the sound of nails scraping against its surface—as if countless voices whispered, begged, and screamed. But it was all deception, dripping with malice, desperate to breach the boundary.

It was the same sound that had haunted his worst nightmares since childhood, inescapable.

Terror reached its peak. The nightmare had become real, manifesting right in front of his eyes.

Wei An stared fixedly at the crack, as if ensnared.

At the same time, the sound of The Horn grew more urgent, calling for something. The electronic voice announcing “Deep Domain System is Offline” repeated faster and faster.

A round eye slowly emerged from the crack.

It looked almost human—but embedded in flesh that was all wrong. It fixed on him with ravenous hunger and an indescribable malevolence.

Then—the radio noise stopped abruptly, as if the connection had suddenly cleared. A single syllable tore through the silence—something no human throat could produce. It was the cry of a thing from hell, beyond human comprehension or hearing.

Wei An suddenly understood why those soldiers had gone mad. His brain registered it—a tangible force, an external invasion, a crawling madness rising from the depths of his consciousness—

As if this was what he was meant to do. As if losing his mind was inevitable—

Then—darkness.

Someone covered his eyes from behind.

Gui Ling’s voice spoke softly in his ear:

“Don’t look.”