"Then, Mr. Moon. Would it be impolite to ask if you’ve seen a purple owl creature fly around this place?"
Elias asked, a bit hopeful.
"Do not worry. You may ask me anything you wish, so long as I have an answer to give."
’So that you don’t fucking think I’m hostile and end up killing me, of course...’
Moon could not help but lampoon himself internally.
"As for whether or not I’ve seen your companion..."
Moon paused as his sentence was abruptly caught off by something unexpected.
The others did as well.
They had just reached the end of the staircase, where the steps flattened into a short stretch of wall before the staircase continued upward again. It was there, carved directly into the wall, that they noticed something strange.
There were writings.
Small, neat words had been carved into the stone, written in the common language...
Clara was the first to step closer and begin reading the writings aloud.
"To everyone who passes by here. To which, I’m sure many will, I have laid out the rules within this strange place after passing by the notes of other travelers. I am sorry for my strange words and writings. I am not in the right state of mind..."
The writing was small but surprisingly neat. However, the deeper they looked, the stranger it became.
It seemed as though someone had used their fingers to carve every single word into the wall. There were even small reddish stains scattered around the carvings, as though the person had injured themselves while desperately scratching the words into the stone.
Clara continued.
"One thing for sure is that you, and everyone else within this place, will eventually escape. However... how long it’ll take you to escape... I cannot even imagine... At every 100th staircase, such as this staircase, you will see an electric clock. Each clock is personalized, and everyone sees it differently. However, it counts the number of days you have been inside the staircase..."
Everyone looked up.
It seemed that whoever had written these words had intentionally carved them at the 100th staircase.
And sure enough, an electric clock was embedded into the wall above them.
To Moon, the clock displayed a simple number. The source of this chapter is g.com.
0.
Perhaps it meant that he had been here for less than a day.
"We saw the exact same clock three times now..."
Jonathan muttered.
Clara, Elias, and Marcus thought the same thing.
They had already seen the clock thrice before. At first, they had assumed it was some sort of clue that would help them escape. They had even tried fiddling with it, touching its surface and searching for some sort of hidden mechanism.
Nothing happened.
Eventually, they decided to ignore it.
Clara paused before continuing to read.
For some reason, the strange feeling she had been experiencing ever since entering this place only grew stronger.
"Everyone who enters the staircase is never alone, I had confirmed this through the writings of others as well. I had initially been here with my girlfriend of two weeks, someone I didn’t know much about. When we entered, we spent over five months together inside the staircase."
"Having intimacy, anger, sadness, depression, turmoil, and longing together. Eventually, we had a big fight, and she went down the staircase while I went up... I never found her again, even when I tried to look for her."
"How many days is five months...?"
"That is around 150 days. It seems like a long time. Think about how many days a year has. 365. It seems like an even longer time.
"But to the me now, they were both small."
"No... such a passage of time is so minuscule to me now."
"An average person only lives for around 27,000 days. The oldest trees can live for thousands of years, surviving for more than a million days. There are creatures in this world that can live for hundreds of years. Some have survived for more than 180,000 days."
"I once thought that such numbers were enormous. I once thought that living for a thousand years would be eternity...."
"But I have been here for so long that those numbers have become meaningless. A hundred thousand days. A million days. Ten million days. Even those are nothing to me now."
The writing suddenly stopped.
A long string of numbers appeared beneath it.
239,521,234,523,123,432,233.
"This is the amount of days I have been here."
Coldness.
That was all everyone felt as they read the final line.
"Impossible..."
Clara muttered out of fear, her voice trembling slightly. The rest of them felt the same.
Marcus could not help but frown. Such an absurd amount of time... he could not comprehend it.
Moon’s thoughts were complicated. He knew that these sorts of supernatural spaces were always morbid and torturous for ordinary people, so he wasn’t that shocked... Still, he was quite speechless.
What sort of person would stay stable-minded enough to be able to write properly after that much time had passed?
"This number of days may seem absurd to you... But do not worry. The passage of time here seems different from the outside world. I will explain to you why I think so by explaining the rules within this place..."
"The first and most important rule that one must know about... If you are with a companion, never. EVER. separate. You are each other’s only company within this torturous and monotonous place."
"Once you and your companion have separated within the staircase, you will never be able to find them again. Not just your companion. Once you have entered this staircase, you will never be able to meet anyone else."
"I have tried for millions and billions... no... haha. If I were to convert the days I was here into years, then I would like to say that I have been searching for 656 quadrillion years for another person..."
"Another person I could talk to, another person I could get angry at, another person I could apologize to, another person I could love and hate... anything... I don’t care anymore whether it was a man or a woman, a ghost or a demon. I just needed someone."
"So I spent quadrillions of years doing so..."
"Even now, I haven’t given up on my search, but it is clear to me now... I was never going to be able to."
"I have been alone here ever since..."
The writing paused for a moment.
"239,521,234,523,123,432,083 days ago, when I separated from my girlfriend."