Chapter 31: A Worsening Condition

I had decided to rest for five days before attempting this floor. I had lost a lot more blood than I had realized initially. It probably was some sort of miracle that I even woke up in the first place. I guess it’ll take more than that to keep me down forever.

I do wonder what that popping noise was. It wasn’t a natural noise, and I could tell that even five days after hearing it. I could think about it later, as it was time to start the next floor. I was a little hesitant though, as the theme of the next floor had me scared before I even set a single foot into it.

I exited from the stairwell to take in the entirety of what laid before my eyes. The long and dark white hallway intermittently lit by flickering fluorescent bulbs already made it slightly scary. Lines on the floor told me what to expect at the end of them, guiding me based on a color code pasted at almost every intersection and doorway.

After checking a few rooms, I had no choice but to admit this was a hospital. I entered one of the rooms filled with beds that looked to be in near perfect condition. There was not a single spec of dust anywhere, as if there were people going around daily and cleaning everything top to bottom.

I walked over to the large window that was opposite the door to the room. I was extremely high up in this hospital, as if it was some sort of skyscraper. The sky outside was a brown-ish gray. There wasn’t anything surrounding this building, and all I could see all around was either just dirt, or grass that was all dead.

The floor itself was probably just this hospital. I’d either stay on this floor until I find an exit, or I need to get to the bottom. I’ll find out after I explore a little bit. Explore I did, this was a hospital, it was bound to have some medications or other medical supplies I could easily take with me.

I went from room to room, ignoring the obvious flight of stairs that led down. I wasn’t quite ready to leave this top floor just yet. I had to make sure that I wasn’t missing anything important. I would be unhappy if I made it to the bottom only to find out that the exit was easily withing reach this whole time.

Eventually, after circling the same hall for around an hour, I come across a different room. This proved that this was a random floor. It had been a while since I came across one of these. I feel like less and less of these floors are going to be randomized as they get harder and harder to complete.

The room I found was full of cupboards at head height that all had labels on them. The unfortunate part was that the labels weren’t in any discernable language. Underneath every cupboard was either some counter space or a sink that reminded me of the sinks back in high school science classes. I had no way to know what was inside of them without opening every cupboard up and finding out for myself.

Every journey starts with a single door, or was it step?

Inside the first cupboard, I found various sizes of beakers. They were in pristine condition, which almost felt odd. I knew hospitals were kept fairly clean, but these all look like they’ve never once been used or even near anything that could make them dirty or dusty.

The next few cupboards only held more measuring equipment. Scales, beakers and similar stuff. Nothing immediately useful to me. What surprised me was that every cupboard there after, totalling to fifteen cupboards, were completely full of different medications. Pills, powders, liquids. Everything. It seemed like almost any kind of medication was stored here.

Some of the medications were labelled in unknown languages, but some were labelled in English. I found bottles of common medications like acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and diphenhydramine. Standard things you could find at almost any store.

However, I found a dangerous amount of prescription medications, most of them completely useless to me, or with unknown effects. I’ve heard of naproxen before, but I had completely forgotten what it was supposed to do. Then I found some interesting medication, I sound things that some doctors were hesitant to ever give out.

I found morphine, ketamine, and even straight codeine. The painkillers that drug addicts would kill to get a hold of; medications that would send the people of The Hub into a frenzy. I was half tempted to bring some and just expedite the collection of food and water.

I think I will. It was immoral, and I was only going to hurt people, but I don’t really feel like I have time to wander and find resources. I’d give them information for free to make my heavy conscience feel a bit better. Who could have thought I’d stoop so low as to sell medications to people who will only use it to help them forget where they are?

With my bag packed with as many medications as I could reasonably bring with me. Of course, most of them got emptied out of their sealed bottles into lighter bags to save weight, but the ones I intended to sell for items were kept in their original containers. I even decided to grab a few of the ones in other languages.

Call me a bad person, but if the floors kept increasing in difficulty, I was going to need more and more rest time between floors, and that meant less time I could find resources. I was just trying to rationalize it to myself more than anything. Despite being so tired and hardened from this place, parts of me wanted to at least stay a good person.

With all the medication I could ever need in bag, it was time to head down to the next level of this hospital. There wasn’t really much different from the first to the second floor, I even found another room full of medication, so it wasn’t even that rare.

I did however have my ax ready in my right hand, as I knew there had to be some sort of trick up the sleeve of this place if it was so easy to snag some medication. I would be a fool to not ready myself for the worst at a time like this.

As I descended the skyscraper, I noticed a sever lack of elevators, and that I was barely losing any height relative to the ground. This hospital was extremely tall for some reason. I was curious as to why a world ended up like this, but it couldn’t have been so bad if it was reverted to this.

After ten floors, I finally started to notice some changes to the rooms. The beds weren’t always made properly. Some looked as if someone had recently gotten up from them and left. Sometimes the odd divider was in disarray and moved around.

There was also starting to be less and less of the rooms filled with medications, and when I did find them, they were missing more and more medications from the cupboards. Along with some of the beakers being left on the counter and sometimes filled with liquids of varying colors.

I wasn’t brave enough to see what any of the liquids were. I did check if any of the sinks had running water, and some of them did. I didn’t trust the quality of that water though, not even thinking about trying to drink it.

What I did do though, was take stock of my remaining water and food. I was getting a bit low and was most likely going to have to try and find an elevator on this floor. One week with normal usage, two with rationing. I’d ration for now, unless I was going to be incredibly active while descending this tower for some reason.

My ax remained in my right hand almost the whole time I explored the rooms and descended the tower. At this point, I was straight up paranoid at the lack of challenge for taking all that medication. Unless this was just a really long descent down to the next floor, there had to be some kind of enemy waiting for me.

I knew better than to let paranoia control my actions at this point on these floors but being cautious while there were still unknowns was another thing entirely. If I was ready for an attack, I could defend myself, and if there wasn’t, I wouldn’t lose anything.

I kept going down sets of stairs. It was taking a while to get anywhere, as the stairs to go down were never near each other and usually required me circling around the white hallways a few times before one appeared. That and the floors of the skyscraper were getting larger and larger.

The twentieth floor from the top was roughly double the size of the top floor where I had arrived. The walls were still white but were starting to look like they’re no longer taken care of. They were graying in places, and parts of the walls were damaged where it looks like medical equipment might have been torn out.

The lighting was still just as sporadic and was still flickering in places. I had a feeling the lighting wasn’t going to change. One thing I was slightly disappointed about was that some places were so dark it was hard to see. Unlike the previous floor where I could see the same everywhere despite there being not a single spec of light.

I was kind of hoping that maybe I had developed some sort of supernatural power, but that was a bit extreme, even for me. A little bit of imagination and hope had never hurt anyone though. I have to do what I have to do in order to not go insane in this place all alone.

I was beginning to wonder what could be gained from escaping this place other than a lifetime’s worth of trauma. Was there some reward waiting for me at the bottom for doing my best to survive? Was there some sort of congratulations?

I laughed. There isn’t a chance that a place like this will reward me for surviving to the bottom. The little hint I got from the final guidebook was enough to tell me that. The author of the guidebooks had made it all the way to the end, then went back.

Whatever was at the bottom wasn’t worth it. In fact, it was of so little value that the only person I’ve heard of that made it to the bottom refused to leave, and just went back. There was nothing for them to return to though.

Almost everyone, as far as I’m aware from what Kacey told me, has come here from destroyed worlds. Even if there was escape at the bottom, there was nothing there for them. So, they would stay here, where at least they are alive.

The Author chose to stay here over whatever awaited them at the bottom of these floors. So having delusions of grandeur was only going to temper my own expectations in the worst possible way. I was almost setting myself up for an inevitable failure.

So, I would bring my expectations down a little bit. There was probably going to be a choice between escape and something else, and whatever that choice was, very few people were willing to live with it. That is what I will expect going down to the bottom. I still yearned for freedom, but a little extra motivation never hurt.

Back to the current floor, ignoring hopes for things to come later, I was already fifty stories down this skyscraper. Things were starting to look a lot worse off than the top. The walls were starting to peel in places as if the white on the walls was just cheap wallpaper.

The beds inside the rooms were torn, with some of the mattresses completely missing. Sheets and side tables were thrown around the room with reckless abandon. The hallways were filled with tipped over carts that once had medical tools on them. Baskets of cleaning supplies torn and thrown all over the place.

The state of each floor was getting worse and worse. However, it was time to rest. I had been descending for well over ten hours, and it was time to sleep for a few hours to recover. I found a small room without a window and decided to close the door after bringing in two bedframes to block the door just in case.

…

Once I woke up, I heard noises outside of the door. It sounded like people shuffling around. That worried me, I shouldn’t be hearing people, even if I was inside of a hospital. I started to wonder if maybe choosing a room without windows was a poor choice as I had now limited my escape options.

I was still most of the way up the skyscraper last I checked. With more than two thirds of the building left to descend until I made it to the ground floor. This normally would have been fine. But floor size was nearly doubling every ten floors with no sign of stopping, and that didn’t make sense based on my view outside.

As I carefully moved the bedframes aside, the shuffling noises stopped. I was careful to make as little noise as possible, but it seems that whatever was outside of this room had better hearing than most creatures in this place.

I waited for something to happen, but even after standing there for ten minutes, the noises never started up again, and it was silence, with the occasional beep of medical equipment in the distance. I was hesitant, but I decided to slowly open the door and see what was outside in the hallway.

Opening it a small crack, I don’t see anything. I slowly opened the door all the way to only be greeted by an empty hallway. There wasn’t anything in here. Did they all run away once they heard me moving around? I knew I had heard things shuffling around out here, but at least now I had a reason to be paranoid.

I kept on with my journey through the hospital skyscraper. The more I went down, the worse and worse it was getting, but I never encountered anything that shuffled around. I was starting to find bugs around level seventy-five, but that was the only moving things.

Nothing that could make the almost human noises I heard when I woke up. I wasn’t about to test anything. I was safe for now and as long as I stayed vigilant, I was hoping it was going to stay like that. Now, the paranoia was hard to deal with.

I was constantly checking over my shoulder. Something I rarely did as much as I was doing now. I was tempted to call it an effect of the floor, but there was no noticeable control effect down here. Not even the slightest feeling of anything tugging at the back of my mind that I had begun to associate with control effects.

Once I made it to floor eighty, it was already time to rest again. Ten hours seemed to be a good goal to reach for when exploring walking heavy floors like this. I was hoping to find an elevator soon, as I was definitely not going to travel back up to the top.

Not to mention, I had yet to ever see an elevator on a boss floor other than twenty-five. With a kind of fitting resolution to my problem, I just need to keep going down. Based on my height from the ground compared to the top, and the number of stories I’ve descended, there was a total of one hundred and fifty stories to go down.

Now, considering that every ten floors, the size of each story appears to double, I was going to take roughly another week to get through this, cutting my resources extremely tight. I could do this, as long as I kept rationing resources and keeping my energy consumption low.

While planning everything out carefully, I blocked another door with bedframes, and slept for the night. I was going to be careful when I woke up and see if the shuffling was happening again. I hoped it wouldn’t, but I had low hopes.

…

Opening my eyes, I heard the shuffling outside of the room I was in. I didn’t move as I listened to the noise made by whatever was out there. There was a lot of them. They slid their feet on the ground, and most likely only had two. These probably bipedal creatures seemed to be in a large group.

This time I was smart and chose a room with a window just in case I needed to somehow escape to a different room, but there was also a window on the door that I kept unblocked. The door would easily be held shut if something didn’t blow through it, but I had easy, and quiet access to the window on it.

I slowly stood up, not even grabbing my bag as to make as little noise as possible and made my way to the door. I kept my breathing nearly silent as I nervously inched towards the door. I made no noise as I approached the window and was seeing movement outside.

Staying silent allowed me to get all the way to the window and look out of it. I swallowed nervously as I watched the creatures walk around like zombies, but based on how alert they looked, and how they observed their surroundings, they weren’t mindless creatures.

Some of them wore hospital gowns like patients, and some wore dark brown cloaks that covered their faces. The ones wearing the hospital gowns had bright yellow eyes that could be seen from almost any distance. The light reflected off of them in strange ways that almost made me want to stare at them forever.

The creature’s smile was haunting to say the least. Hundreds of jagged pieces of skin that almost seemed to melt together as the creatures opened their mouths. While I was watching the creatures, I noticed one of the cloaked ones was looking directly at me. Despite not being able to see its face, I could tell that it was smiling at me.

It raised an elongated finger up to its mouth in a gesture that was universal. It wanted me to stay quiet. It slowly moved its arms out to the side. It then swung them together as it clapped. The noise wasn’t too loud, but it was loud enough that I had heard it clearly through the closed door.

Instantly, all of the creatures vanished.

There was no longer anything in the hallway. Everything vanished as if it had never been there in the first place. I could no longer hear a single noise. The creatures existed, and I had looked at them, but when one noticed me, it made them all disappear including itself my making a loud noise.

What reason did they even exist on this floor then, if they avoided all contact on their own? Was it just some sort of sick joke? Most likely, I had yet to find a true reason to explain anything. The creatures through some means of their own, are avoiding confrontation.

I was fine with it; it just felt a little underwhelming after being so anxious for most of this floor. I was still going to be cautious, in case things changed as I went lower in the tower. Just because it seemed safe, doesn’t mean it will stay that way. I learned that lesson a while ago.

Without further ado, it was time to continue my descent. I got my things and left the small room. I did a quick look around, only to find nothing. I guess as long as I made noise, I wouldn’t even have to look at the creatures.

Days quickly pass as I make my way down. I start to push myself a little harder, going for thirteen hours each day instead of ten. I should be able to reach the bottom in just five days if I keep it up at this advanced pace.

The lower I got, the more deteriorated everything became. Floors and walls now had holes in them, and they only got bigger as I went deeper. Eventually, I was able to start using the holes as shortcuts to floors below, expediting my descent through the hospital.

There wasn’t anything usable at this point. Floor one hundred and twenty was already almost unwalkable. Going down through the floor was getting riskier and riskier as I was becoming unsure if my landing wouldn’t just give out on me.

Eventually, I make it to the ground floor. All I see around me is ash and dust. Walls are burnt to a crisp and it looks like a miracle that they can support the building still. The floor tiles are cracked beyond repair, almost seeming like sand.

To my left was an elevator, and to my right was the next floor.

The door to the next floor was…

A viscous pain assaulted my head and made me crumble to the ground as I was about to describe it. Any time I looked at the door and tried to think about it, I would double over in pain. The door wasn’t rectangular.

It seemed speaking the opposite of the truth was fine, as long as I didn’t think about it too hard. The moment I tried to describe the true appearance; I would be in pain. The next floor was going to be a lot of fun, said no one.

It was time to go restock first.