161: The Secret Beneath the Clock Tower
An An walked along, making a whole bunch of "An" character marks along the greenery belt.
Finally, she added an arrow pointing toward the clock tower.
"Alright, this should work!"
An An tossed aside the stone she had picked up, then poked half her head out from the greenery, cautiously looking toward the direction below the clock tower.
She saw that Sauron had already entered the clock tower together with the black-robed figures. It seemed he hadn't noticed An An's presence at all.
"...Mmm, the marks are done... Little Luo Xin knows I went out tonight. If I don't come back... she'll definitely be able to convey the information to Big Sister Evelia and the others... right?"
An An remembered clearly that before Evelia left today, she had left a phone number for her. Luo Xin had also asked for a copy out of curiosity.
After hesitating a while longer, An An silently pumped herself up in her heart. Then, after confirming there was indeed no one else watching nearby, she slipped into the clock tower's interior like a nimble little cat.
However, in a place she couldn't notice, there was another person who had taken everything in.
"Mmm? It seems... a cute little guest has arrived uninvited~"
At the top of the clock tower that An An couldn't notice, a young man wearing a black coat was casually sitting there. A pair of sinister pitch-black eyes were filled with amusement.
"How should I put it? I was just considering where to find another body with good material conditions. This really is... searching everywhere with iron shoes, only to find it effortlessly..."
……
Inside the clock tower, the moment An An entered, she was surprised to discover that this clock tower, which had just had several people walk into it, was currently in a state with no one inside!
Where did Sauron and the others who just entered go?
"So strange... there's no one up there either, where did they go?"
An An even specifically looked up at the spiral staircase, but the result was still empty.
This was really strange. So many living people couldn't have just vanished into thin air, right?
"Right! On TV, in situations like this, there should be a secret passage or something..."
With this thought, An An hurriedly started searching through the storage room at the bottom of the clock tower.
This clock tower was cleaned and maintained once every month or so. Therefore, the miscellaneous items piled at the bottom were mostly various boxes filled with parts, brooms and rags for cleaning, and things like that.
These miscellaneous items were piled up one by one, nearly filling the entire bottom floor of the clock tower.
From this perspective, with so many miscellaneous items to use as cover, it was indeed very suitable for building a secret passage.
And the result was indeed so.
After simply moving a short distance along the pile of miscellaneous items, An An felt something like a handle on the ground. The box covering it was only half-pressing one corner, clearly having been moved by someone recently.
An An tried pulling this handle with force. A rectangular iron hidden door immediately opened, revealing a pitch-black hole nearly a meter wide below, as well as a straight ladder standing to the side.
This was unmistakably a cellar.
"So dark... do I really... still need to go down?"
Looking at the cellar below where she couldn't see her own hand, filled with the smell of dampness and rot, An An's heart quietly started to retreat. But with the mindset that since she was already here, she had to figure out what Director Sauron and the others were doing no matter what, An An still summoned her courage, carefully grabbed the straight ladder, and began to move downward bit by bit.
"Squeak! Squeak!"
Perhaps because the underground was too damp, the structure of this straight ladder was clearly somewhat rusty. Every time An An moved down a step, the straight ladder would simultaneously emit a teeth-grinding "squeak" sound. This made An An even more nervous. Would those people detect her presence because of this?
However, the facts showed that An An was overthinking. Until she reached the bottom of the cellar, she hadn't seen Sauron and the others.
The bottom of the cellar didn't look unusual. Inside, apart from some old equipment of unknown purpose, there was only a wooden table that had long been eaten full of holes by insects, and several chairs covered in dust.
On the wooden table, a candle that had clearly just been lit not long ago was emitting a faint glow. It was thanks to it that An An was able to see the interior of this cellar.
But these weren't the most important things.
The most important thing was that on the moss-covered green brick wall directly facing the straight ladder in this cellar, there was unmistakably a narrow, winding passage leading downward with torches along the path.
Undoubtedly, Sauron and the others must have gone inside here.
An An cautiously looked into the passage. This passage kept winding downward, and she couldn't see the end at a glance.
In the next instant, a pungent stench rushed toward her from the passage. It was a piercing smell of damp soil mixed with dust, simultaneously wrapped with the stench of corpses and blood.
"So... disgusting..."
An An was just a child. How could she withstand this smell? She crouched down with a pained expression, dry heaving a couple of times in discomfort.
Only when the smell in her nose had mostly dispersed did An An stand up again. At the same time, she pinched her nose with one hand, determined not to smell that odor again.
But at the same time, as a lucky survivor who had once escaped with her life from demons, An An also smelled a scent from this nauseating smell that was quite familiar to her, yet one she never wanted to smell again.
That was... the smell named [Death].
"Gulp..."
An An looked at this winding, bizarre passage. Her heart started to retreat again. No matter how rich her experiences were or how mature her psychology was, she was ultimately just a seven or eight-year-old little girl. When truly facing danger that could threaten her own life, saying she wasn't afraid was impossible.
"Anyway... I'm already here. Next time I just need to... bring Big Sister Evelia and the others here, right?"
After hesitating repeatedly, An An felt that what came next was already beyond what she could handle. Therefore, she took a small step back and was just preparing to turn back. However...
Her foot suddenly stepped on the moss on the floor, and her entire body just slipped like that.
Under the effect of inertia, her body also began to rapidly slide downward toward the passage.
"Ah! Mmm..."
An An first cried out in alarm, then she quickly realized one thing.
That was, in this situation, she absolutely could not make any loud noise. Otherwise, once she was discovered by Sauron and the others below, she would definitely have only one path: death.
Therefore, no matter how intense the pain on her body was, she tightly covered her mouth, determined not to make even the slightest sound.
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