Chapter 83 - The Institute (24)

"Where is he going-"

Chao Bin strained his head to look back at Chu Yi who was walking in the opposite direction, "Aren't we all going to search the office?" 

Tang Shun's arm naturally dropped from Chao Bin's shoulders to his waist- casually stringing him along to wherever he meant to take him, 

"Although the danger factor is lowered significantly during the day, the office will probably still be heavily watched by the nurses. The three of us searching will increase the likelihood of mistakes and may even end up with us being caught and killed. Therefore in this regard, Chu Yi volunteered to be the one to search the office alone." 

Chao Bin nodded in understanding after a moment of thought, it was the safest decision in any case " But where are we going?"

Tang Shun pulled them around a corner, "The confinement room."

Chao Bin's face blanked momentarily, 

Why?

Tang Shun seemed to sense his incomprehension and without turning his head started speaking, "What's the safest method to hide a secret....Is it through locks, guards, safes or through high tech security? "

"...all of them?"

"Wrong. All of those can be cracked and defied with human intervention."

"There is really only one foolproof method that will always guarantee certain secrecy. "

He didn't wait for Chao Bin to answer again and replied to his own rhetoric, "That method is fear. Blind, crushing fear that instills a certain law into the core of a person's being that will ensure they would never defy the rules carved into their very bones."

"And wouldn't the best place to foster fear be the confinement room?"

"After being beaten once or twice, unconsciously or consciously they would avoid it, the constant mention of punishments, the deliberate orchestra of murder with the residents as the direct victims and witnesses all the while constantly delineating the cruelty of the confinement rooms are all elaborately interconnected fear tactics used by the nurses."

"As such we can conclude that the confinement room also contains the biggest secrets."

Chao Bin almost knelt in defeat at the keen observation done by Tang Shun, all loopholes had been noticed and dissected, and he seemed to almost belittle the difficulty of the Instance with a unhurried grin,

"I'm just curious to see what kind of secrets they've hidden that requires extensive psychological suppression."

Chao followed Tang Shun's lead uneasily, he just hoped they weren't directly locked in confinement to directly face those undoubtedly painful methods.

Da, Da, Da

It's here.

It didn't take long for them to find it, in fact it was so simple that Chao Bin couldn't help but fall into doubt about whether this was conspiracy.

In a narrow side hall near to the dining room was the confinement room.

The corridor itself was very old, and had short chipped pillars that served as decorations dotting the sides of the hall,

There were wooden boards nailed like patches on the stone wall, many places in which seemed to be dented and hollowed out from a few corners that peaked through,

The dirty base of the walls- right along the edge of the narrow strip to the door, was darkened and moldy, Not to mention lofty and bristling with nauseating brown stains that seemed to have been developed from something moist and wet being dragged across the walls, and never cleaned,

"Is this it?"

The door standing before them was large and heavy. It didn't seem to be locked and could be moved away slowly by pushing hard, however the bad thing is, that the door also made of stone and would boom with a huge noise during the process of trying to open the door.

"Should we?"

Tang Shun shrugged, "We don't have to push it open all the way, only enough for us to get through and see."

After nodding, Chao Bin joined their hands to the door and start pushing, the scraping sound of stone dragging against stone made a sound as if an ancient tomb was finally being opened after thousands of years!

"That's enough."

The door was only opened to a third, when Tang Shun signaled a stop, and both of them quickly slipped into the room without preparation,

The instant he caught sight of the room, Chao Bins face turned green. No matter how may times he saw it, he would never get used to the sudden shock of seeing a cold corpse decomposing in its own rot.

With just a preliminary glance, the room actually contained a familiar dead body, Its entire body was rotting, having turned into a repulsive pile of black, foul meat. The stench of its putrefaction was absolutely unbearable, the bones were showing in some places, and the clothes covering the corpse made it difficult to determine the body's original form, but it was most likely a man judging from its skeletal framework.

There was also another corpse that seemed relatively fresh but had obviously been lacerated at the face with a sharp pick leaving nothing but a pile of mushy wet meat in place of what was meant to be his face. His skull had also been severely split open and his brain matter had long dried into sludge like black matter that clung to the skull like a piece of stringy mold,

The corpse was still stuck in a crawling position, and it's hands raised above its head as if it had been reaching for the door in despair when it was alive,

When Chao Bin opened the door, that revolting smell of expired meat permeated his nostrils; at the same time, a strange, nauseating taste filled his mouth. The smell of decomposing molecules had been locked up for so long it had turned into toxic gas, 

Chao Bin stumbled back a few steps feeling woozy, he bumped into Tang Shun behind him and on a whim, turned around and stuffed his head into his chest, greedily inhaling the unique fresh charcoal scent. He genuinely believed that if he didn't, in the very next second, he would have started retching. The heavy toxic smell reeked with a rotten, fishy odor, which made Chao Bin feel unusually queasy; his stomach churning with nauseated disgust.

Tang Shun looked at the boy hiding in his arms and eventually lowered his eyes, but didn't push him away.

After a while, Chao Bin seemed to get a grip and released his tight hold on Tang Shun with an awkward look, and hastily diverted Tang Shun's attention,

"The fresh corpse is one of the more recent players and the other corpse is the first player to get sent to the Confinement room."

It worked, Tang Shun's attention was quickly brought away from the embrace and to the dead bodies on the floor of the confinement room, to which Chao Bin let out a small sigh of relief.

Embarrassing.

"I feel like there should be more bodies but only these two are left in the room for some reason."

Tamg Shun glanced at the suspicious large splotches of brown on the floor, "Maybe these two weren't qualified."

"I don't think we have much time, so with my enhanced hearing, I'll see if I can find a hidden room or door that may hold important secrets of the Institute."

So, against his better wishes, Chao Bin had to step across the dirty floor and examine the this awfully unsightly carcass. This was the first player but the body didn't seem to have fully decomposed into skeletal remains yet; there were still small slabs of putrid meat hanging from the bones and some voracious maggots had somehow spawned and were now crawling in that meat. Chu Yi guessed that this person must have been forcefully folded like a box when he was alive because all the bones in his body seemed to have been fractured and his remaining ligaments had snapped right from the bones in a appalling way!

Maybe he was even alive while all of this happened, although not for long, but the brief moment of soul tearing agony he would have felt in those few seconds must have trumped all the painful things he had experienced in his lifetime,

Chao Bin winced slightly in phantom pain, he could almost feel the breath of death on his tongue.

And he turned away-

Tang Shun swiped his fingers against the walls, slowly stretching his middle and index fingers apart and watching the red string snap in two, falling gently against his knuckles.

Blood,

Fresh blood.

Slowly, Tang Shun started walking around the room, tapping gently against the wall for every step he took.

Chao Bin stabilised his mind a little, walked over to the fresher corpse, squatted down, reached out and made to open the eyelids of the other party, only to realize that its face had completely been mashed to mush,

Its face wasn't even a face anymore, just a rotting pile of flesh.

His death looked to be painful as well. 

He couldn't tell the specific sequence but judging by the sinister nature of the nurses, he had obviously been bluntly scraped of his flesh and tortured before he was given a rough blow, splitting his skull to seek relief in death.

Disgusting...

He tried to turn the corpse over but to his suprise, the body felt as if it had been superglued to the floor,

He tried again this time with more strenght and almost immediately there was the sound of flesh tearing as the skin was ripped of its back!

"Fuck!"

Immediately Chao Bin let go and dropped the body back to the floor, disgust coloring his face all shades of green.

Without waiting for any more disgusting surprises, Chao Bin immediately went to join Tang Shun in finding the hidden door, 

He observed for a while but then couldn't help but ask, "Are you trying to find a hidden button that will make the walls move and switch around to take us to the other side or maybe ask for acess?"

Tang Shun paused as if digesting what Chao Bin just said before throwing him a exasperated gasp,

"No matter how primitive the facilities look, we are still in an interstellar age. Why would they use such easily crackable methods unless they were really stupid..."

"..."

Chao Bin, suppressed a embarassd flush, with only the tips of his ears turning smoking red, and coughed softly, 

"Right, so what are you doing then."

Tang Shun turn back to the wall, "I'm trying to see if I can sync the frequency of my taps to any radioactive frequency from behind the walls that might be accepted as a code or a prompt that we can use to find an entrance."

Chao Bin nodded and left him to it, idly he moved away to the opposite wall to see if he could try for a bit but after a minutes of no results, he sighed and slumped against the wall heavily, 

The embarrassment from before once again rose up in the silence and he couldn't help but slam his hand against the wall beside him-

Why was he so awkward 

[ACTUALIZING...]

[SYSTEM CODE# E0001 START UP>]

[COMMAND INITIALIZING>]

[<PLEASE ENTER ACESS NUMBER>]

Chao Bin froze like a deer in headlights and subconsciously turned to look at Tang Shun standing on the opposite side,

He guessed they really were stupid after all.