After reading that last line, Moon could not help but stare at the writing for a moment.
’...What the hell?’
His expression remained completely calm, but internally, Moon was genuinely stunned.
’Isn’t this utter bullshit then?’
After all, he had only entered this place a few minutes ago before encountering the Response Unit.
If the writing was telling the truth, then the staircase was claiming that people could spend millions or even billions of years inside this place without ever encountering another person.
Yet Moon was standing right here...
He had encountered a Response Unit team of Aegis almost immediately.
That meant there were only two possibilities.
Either the person who had written this was lying, or the Neverending Staircase itself had written it to instill fear within those trapped inside.
Moon wouldn’t be shocked if it were either of the two options...
After all, everything within the universe of [Arcana] was always terrifyingly morbid.
Still, one thing bothered him.
If the writing was fake... Then why did it sound so convincing for some reason?
Why would someone go through the trouble of carving all of this into the wall?
And why did the writing look like it had been carved with someone’s own fingers?
Moon’s gaze briefly fell toward the reddish stains around the words.
Marcus and the others, however... had different thoughts.
’Once you come here, you’ll never be able to encounter anyone else...?’
Marcus and the others froze.
— "Could the person who wrote this have been lying?"
Jonathan asked through the secret communication device.
Since the first rule about never being able to encounter anyone else had already become false due to the appearance of Mr. Moon, that must mean everything else written here was false... right?
Such an absurd amount of time being spent inside this space was absurd in the first place...!
Elias and Clara were about to agree, but Marcus said something different.
— "No... it must be true..."
Elias asked immediately.
— "Why do you say so?"
Marcus paused.
— "It is another one of ’those’ feelings again..."
Elias and the others immediately fell silent.
Within their team, they had a certain agreement. Marcus had a very "high" probability of discerning truthful situations from false ones.
None of the team had ever pried deeply into it, but every time a situation arose where everyone was confused, it was always Marcus who solved it or came up with a miraculous solution to fix the problem.
Of course, to Marcus, these were just acts.
Marcus knew about his special condition. His team seemed to have a grasp of it as well, but Marcus knew better than anyone how "special" his condition actually was.
It was a condition that made the absurd possible, and the possible absurd.
Seeing that Marcus did not explain himself as to why he thought the text wasn’t lying, Clara continued to read.
"Rule number two. At the start of every staircase, on the first step, there will be a string of words and numbers separated by commas."
Moon glanced back at the staircase they were about to continue climbing.
Marcus and the others had already noticed it the moment they entered this supernatural space.
They had examined it briefly, but after finding no apparent use for it, they had simply ignored it.
Clara continued.
"You might think it is just a random string of words and numbers, or perhaps some hidden code... but no. It is actually a destination... rather, an address. Absurd, right? But I am not lying.
"For as long as I have been here, I have also seen the writings of other people. And countless ones have also claimed this to be true. I, myself, have confirmed it as well. I once saw a staircase that depicted this... : "
["akjdwlkadjs, 121929121dskaw, eeeeere232, Hell Continent, 923182aaa."]
"It sounds absurd at first, but the words ’Hell Continent’ depict a place. It took me 132 million years to find this. To find these two fucking words that were comprehensible enough to the human mind... hahaha."
"According to the writings on the walls written by others, these strings of words, letters, and numbers are addresses to every possible location you could think of, every possible location that one has randomly made up, every possible combination of words that would make up a random street..."
"And the only way to escape this place would be to find an address linked to Earth..."
"There were writings of other people on the walls that said they found a string of words depicting things such as... [kldsakd323 3333, Province of Insertion, St. Malignant, Mount Everest, dsakdlwk2]."
"I was jealous. How long would I have to search to find seven comprehensible words that would once again give me home to escape this place?"
"At first I thought to myself... perhaps in 100 million years I would be able to... perhaps a billion years... hahaha. How hopeful I was to think that way..."
"How hopeful I was to think I could exit this place within a billion years.
"A mathematician who had entered this place once attempted to calculate how long it would take to find an address that could possibly lead back to Earth..."
"Assuming that every address could consist of any combination of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and the ten numerical digits, with each address containing only twenty characters, there would already be approximately 362?, or 13,367,494,538,843,750,000,000,000,000,000, possible combinations."
"Even if one could examine a single address every second without sleeping, eating, or stopping for even a moment, checking every possible combination would take approximately 4.2 × 1023 years."
"That was roughly 420 sextillion years. And that was only for twenty-character addresses. The number would increase exponentially with every additional character, especially once spaces, punctuation, longer names, multiple words, and other possible forms of an address were taken into account."
"The mathematician eventually concluded that searching for Earth’s address was not a matter of patience. It was a matter of probability."
"There were simply too many possible addresses for a human being to meaningfully search through. Even if the correct address existed somewhere among them, finding it by chance could take longer than the lifespan of civilizations, stars, and perhaps even the universe itself..."
"And that calculation assumed that the address could be recognized immediately upon seeing it. In reality, nobody even knew what an address to Earth was supposed to look like."
"I used to say things like ’I will love you forever’ to the people I loved. But now, I wonder if I ever truly understood what forever meant."