Chapter 1869: Chapter 1869

The four of them headed downstairs together. In the stairwell, Jenkins brought up the female nurse again. Mr. Robinson and the boy, Lark, had much the same opinion: it was best not to go testing the patience of anyone locked away in the hospital's rooms.

"Some truly terrifying people reside here," the middle-aged man remarked cautiously. "We shouldn't go looking for trouble."

He was exceedingly careful.

They returned to the first-floor lobby at 9:19. The middle-aged female doctor was still seated, speaking to the empty space where Miss Ross had been. She would pause at appropriate moments, as if listening to a response, before offering her own opinion.

Time was short, so Jenkins ignored her, leading the group to the end of the corridor, to the door behind the staircase that led to the basement.

"Let me reiterate our plan," Jenkins began. "The only hope of saving everyone is to understand what happened in this hospital's basement. Once the door is open, I'll hold off the two people inside. You three are to immediately head into the basement and search for anything suspicious. You've all had contact with the mysterious and the extraordinary, so you should have a keen sense for anything out of the ordinary. You'll have less than three minutes. I'll join you as soon as I can, but we have to seize this chance."

None of them knew what awaited them in the basement. According to Mr. Robinson, the hospital had several basements, each with a different purpose.

It was a bit like the labyrinth of basements beneath the Sage Church.

The other three listened to Jenkins's instructions with grave caution. They were, after all, about to face the complete unknown. Jenkins, who had secretly left an illusion of himself on the rooftop, might be able to activate the ritual at the last second. But for the three souls who had been trapped for nearly ten thousand years, this was quite possibly their only chance.

At 9:41, he pressed the key to the lock. He twisted his wrist with all his strength, but the key didn't budge. It was as if it were fused to the door.

Even at Pops Antique Shop, when the space had been sealed by both Papa Oliver and that evolved sprite, the key had only been repelled—it hadn't failed to work entirely. In the strictest sense, this was the first door Jenkins had ever encountered that the Key of Doors could not open.

"Perhaps your approach is flawed,"

Miss Ross suggested from the side.

"I don't know what that key of yours is, but I can guess the function of a key-shaped numbered item. The reason this door won't open might not be because it's locked, but because at this specific moment, under the rules of this place, it simply isn't allowed to be opened."

Of the four of them, only Miss Ross was an Enchanter native to this era's system of power. Aside from Jenkins, she had the best grasp of the situation. Jenkins understood her meaning. The events of the first ten minutes in the basement were the very foundation of the Cursed Item's existence. Therefore, those ten minutes were an "essential" part of the time loop and could not be interfered with. To do so would be to negate the loop itself.

Trying to open this door was, in essence, trying to destroy the Cursed Item, Bigges Hospital, at its very root. That wasn't something a single Bestowal in the shape of a key could accomplish. If it were, the Church wouldn't have investigated so many times without ever managing to resolve the time loop at its source.

"Then we have no choice but to wait for the tenth minute,"

He withdrew the key and glanced at his pocket watch—the one from Alexia. Only a dozen seconds remained.

"Once you're in the basement, you must be careful."

"Don't you worry about that,"

the middle-aged man replied.

"I'm still hoping to get back to the outside world and see my wife and son."

He was the only one who didn't understand the time loop. The expression on his face as he spoke left his three companions at a loss for words. In the end, no one told him the truth. There was no time.

At precisely the ten-minute mark, the Dead Silence Doll tucked against Jenkins's chest, which had seemed inert, suddenly shuddered violently. From behind the door, terrified screams erupted, mingled with curses in a language Jenkins didn't understand. The most update n0vels are published on NovelHub(.)net

Jenkins glanced at his companions. They were all on edge. Even though the boy, Lark, was not on the second floor where he was supposed to be, his face was still a mask of terror.

Miss Ross asked urgently.

"We have to escape! If we don't get out now, we'll never get out! I see a clock! I see a great river! I see..."

Blood was streaming from the boy's eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. Before he could finish the sentence, Jenkins brought his palm down firmly on the top of his head.

"Don't think about anything. Just count. Quietly."

His composure was contagious, and the others' panic subsided. Lark followed his instructions, muttering numbers under his breath as Miss Ross translated for the others. Just as he finished the number nineteen, a violent blow struck the door from the inside, hard enough to shake dust from the walls.

Jenkins stood facing the door, his hands hanging loosely at his sides. As the boy began counting again and reached five, Jenkins raised his fists. The moment Lark said ten and a crack appeared in the iron door, Jenkins clenched his fists and drew his elbows back.

The door burst open, and two terrified men stumbled out, one after the other. The first thing they saw was the unfamiliar young man, followed by two fists that shot forward like cannonballs, sending them flying right back down the basement stairs.

Jenkins yelled to his companions, plunging through the doorway first. Faintly glowing candles lined the sides of the dark staircase. The man with straw-colored hair, dressed in a white lab coat, was already dead. The other, a tall man with prominent knuckles, was pushing himself up against the wall, struggling to his feet.

"Damn it, who are you? Do you have any idea what's happening? Run! We miscalculated the time."

"Sorry," Jenkins said. "It's already too late."

The look of astonishment that crossed the man's face was even more profound than when he'd been sent flying moments before.

"You mean...? Oh, God..."

His astonishment instantly twisted into terror. He curled into a ball on the floor and, without Jenkins having to do a thing, stopped breathing.

"He was scared to death. Do you have some kind of fear aura?"

Miss Ross asked as she passed behind Jenkins.

"I do, but I didn't use it. Oh well. I was hoping to keep one alive for questioning, but now..."

Jenkins shook his head and proceeded into the basement with the others.

The room wasn't large. It didn't seem to be a storage cellar for the hospital, but rather a private workshop, smaller even than the basement in Jenkins's own home.

They descended the narrow staircase. The basement's flat floor was covered with candles of varying heights, arranged in a precise, step-like pattern. All manner of strange objects were scattered about—lizard tails, a tiger pelt, even human bones—but there was no sign of a ritual circle.

The boy, Lark, pointed upward. All four of them looked up and saw it clearly: a massive, complex, circular ritual array was sketched across the low ceiling in continuous chalk lines. Jenkins knew with a single glance that whoever had designed this did not follow the ritual conventions of his era. He'd only ever gleaned fragments of similar knowledge during the Month's End Whisper, and it wasn't nearly enough to deconstruct the entire thing.

In addition to the chalk marks, small holes had been gouged into the ceiling, with ritual components embedded inside them. These included human eyeballs, the petals of some flower Jenkins didn't recognize, and small, brass-colored gears that spun of their own accord. In theory, the radiance of divinity should have far outshone the aura of the Bigges Hospital Cursed Item, yet Jenkins's eyes could still not perceive any golden light.

The middle-aged man stood on his tiptoes, reaching up to pry one of the embedded objects from the ceiling, but Miss Ross and Jenkins stopped him at once.

"The ritual is already active," Jenkins warned. "We have no idea how it works or what it does. The slightest alteration could cause it to spiral even further out of control."

Jenkins's real fear was that disrupting the ritual would simply trigger the next time loop. They were already approaching the longest loop duration the Church had on record, and the Dead Silence Doll had been growing more agitated ever since he'd entered the basement. Every passing second filled Jenkins with a profound sense of dread. He even began to wonder if this was truly the first time he had experienced these events.

"Which of the objects on the ceiling gives you the strongest feeling?"

His voice echoed in the minds of the other three. Jenkins had considered the possibility that the divinity lay somewhere other than the ritual on the ceiling, but it seemed unlikely. Without the involvement of divinity, he didn't believe a time-based Cursed Item of this magnitude could ever be formed.

"Perhaps the pocket watch in the center of the pentagram in the upper-left corner,"

Lark answered at once, the blood still not wiped clean from his face. He seemed to have shrunk into himself, all his earlier energy and enthusiasm gone. "It has to do with time."

"The skull directly above us,"

the middle-aged man added. "It doesn't look human. Canine, maybe?"

Miss Ross hesitated for a few seconds before giving her answer. Because she understood their predicament better than the others, she was also the most tense.

"Perhaps it's the human eyeball. It seems to be staring right at me. I'm sorry, destiny offers me no guidance here. I can only guess."

"No need to apologize," Jenkins's voice returned in their minds. "Destiny doesn't always show the way. But this time, I think it will for me. To me, the path ahead is not unknown."