Tan Ziheng turned the corner just as a figure disappeared at the end of the corridor. The color of those clothes looked somewhat like what Lin Shilan was wearing today. With this thought in mind, he walked back to his private room.

She wasn’t in the room.

Her bag was gone too.

On the table sat two used teacups.

Frowning, Tan Ziheng had an indescribable feeling.

He chased after her, pushing open the door to look down the corridor… but it was empty, the figure having long since vanished.

Tan Jin held Lin Shilan’s hand as they walked out of the seafood restaurant.

They didn’t take the direct elevator—he chose to take her down the stairs instead.

Having just begged him to quickly take her away, Lin Shilan was still caught up in that sense of awkwardness. He clearly knew what kind of person she was, yet he still acted shamelessly by hugging her and threatening her to make her yield.

So, Lin Shilan didn’t want to take the initiative to talk to Tan Jin.

The emergency exit was very dark, the only light source being the exit signs glowing with faint green light.

Their hands, at some point, had changed from simply holding hands to the more intimate gesture of interlocked fingers.

They descended two flights of stairs this way.

His footsteps stopped. The fire exit door of the mall was tightly closed—logically, they shouldn’t be able to enter.

Yet a barbecue cart appeared abruptly beside the door, half stuck inside the wall and half positioned in the stairwell.

This cart was something only they could see—a cart from Yan County.

Tan Jin finally released her hand.

He gripped the cart’s handle, completely pulling it out and pushing it down toward the lower stairs. The wall beside the door immediately revealed a narrow passage wide enough for a person to pass through.

He bent down and entered the mall first.

The mall inside was terrifyingly dark. Lin Shilan couldn’t contain herself and asked him, “Where are we going?”

Tan Jin’s voice softened all at once, clearly laced with coaxing undertones: “Follow me, you’ll know when we get there.”

—This is really absurd.

Seeing that he had already gone in, she could only steel herself and follow.

The moon cast a bleak, miserable white light.

Through the mall’s glass, Lin Shilan saw rain drifting outside in the sky.

The usually lively mall slept quietly under the moonlight.

Mannequins dressed in fashionable summer clothes struck exaggerated poses, standing in the darkness like mute, frozen people, silently watching the intruders.

Neatly arranged dolls and walls full of sneakers had lost their original colors. The space was vast and empty as they walked through the stuffy air, as if something might dart out from the shadowy corners at any moment.

Walking further inward, away from the moon’s illumination, Lin Shilan couldn’t see anything anymore.

She turned on her phone, barely using its light to illuminate the path beneath her feet.

Her phone suddenly vibrated.

Someone was calling her.

The caller’s name displayed on the screen in large characters: Brother Ziheng.

Just as Lin Shilan was about to answer, Tan Jin snatched the phone away.

“…”

He continued walking as if nothing had happened.

She chased after him: “Give me back my phone. I disappeared suddenly again—I should at least explain to Tan Ziheng.”

She couldn’t see Tan Jin’s expression.

He effortlessly deflected her words.

“No need to explain. You’re not anyone to him—what right does he have to control you?”

The phone kept vibrating, disconnecting and ringing again.

Lin Shilan naturally retorted: “He does have the right…”

Tan Jin laughed softly.

“Oh, then I’m not returning it.”

Her breath caught in her throat—Lin Shilan was truly infuriated by him.

Neither of them spoke.

The darkness magnified the suffocating silence.

Passing through the mother and baby section, going around a small exhibition hall of old records, walking straight past the skincare counters, they arrived at the clothing section.

His footsteps were light, and she followed at a distance behind him. Sometimes she would feel that Tan Jin hadn’t returned at all, that she was walking alone in the pitch-black mall. This illusion gradually made her footsteps hesitant.

Without warning, a force grabbed her arm.

There was a glass door in front of her—if Tan Jin hadn’t grabbed her, she would have crashed into it.

“Enough, stop playing around.”

Lin Shilan’s emotions were on the verge of collapse, precariously balanced.

“Can we go outside to talk?”

“We’re here,” he said.

The phone’s light illuminated the space to their right.

It was a fitting room.

Tan Jin led her over.

Behind the fitting room curtain, light faintly seeped through. He lifted it.

A bizarre alternate dimension space slowly unfolded before Lin Shilan’s eyes.

They entered the fitting room, and as the curtain fell, they arrived in an entirely new world.

It was a strange amusement park.

To the right was a “Descending Staircase” sign glowing with five colors of light. In the distance, she could see several workers holding welding tools, gathered around the sign performing maintenance work. Waterfalls of flowing light poured from their hands.

The sparks fell all the way down, illuminating the entire area.

To the left stood a residential building that looked quite aged. The exterior walls were old, emanating a grayish-green hue, the wall surfaces mottled, with large red characters crawling across them.

No households had their lights on. It was probably a building awaiting demolition.

Connecting the residential building and the amusement park were two thick cable lines.

They looked up to see green sightseeing cars traveling along the cable lines with creaking sounds. It was unclear whether anyone sat inside the cars—their windows were opaque.

The escalator was directly in front of them.

It was running, continuously moving downward.

Tan Jin stepped onto the escalator and extended his hand toward Lin Shilan.

She hesitated a bit. The escalator led to an unknown destination—from where she stood, she couldn’t tell how deep it went below.

Tan Jin looked at her.

His eyes held some fragile, tender light.

The young man’s expression was dejected, still resembling the sweet, silly little puppy from before.

If she abandoned him, his eyes would droop listlessly.

He stood on the escalator, waiting for her with anticipation, like a sweet trap.

Lin Shilan must have been possessed.

She chose to take a step forward and board the escalator.

Tan Jin had won.

He stood beside her, a smile hanging on his face.

The escalator carried them downward as even more bizarre scenes came into view.

To the right of the escalator, vacant roller coaster tracks twisted and spiraled like a parading snake.

To the left, the residential building’s walls were covered with large-scale graffiti—countless large and small red ghostly eyes, interspersed with many warning signs of danger.

Lin Shilan turned her head, looking back toward where they came from.

They had already descended quite far, and within her line of sight, there was no ascending escalator.

This alternate paradise was a deformed monster created by the disorderly piecing together of misaligned spaces.

The escalator headed toward endless darkness, the monster unhurriedly consuming them into its belly.

“I don’t like this place.” The surrounding atmosphere made her feel a bone-chilling dread.

He asked innocently, “Why?”

Lin Shilan rubbed her arms: “It’s very dark here, and there’s no one.”

“I’m here,” Tan Jin repeated his old trick, wanting to hold her hand again.

She dodged: “I want to leave.”

He stared at her fixedly: “Isn’t it good to stay here with me?”

“This is an amusement park that belongs exclusively to just the two of us. It will never be completed. After I discovered it by chance, I’ve always wanted to bring you here. Why don’t you like it?”

A sense of foreboding grew stronger. Lin Shilan walked up two steps in the opposite direction, creating distance between them: “My phone—can you return it to me?”

Tan Jin smiled brilliantly.

“The phone was left in the mall.”

“This way, no one will disturb us.”

On that familiar face was that familiar smile. Lin Shilan looked at him and suddenly understood in this moment.

Tan Jin was the monster that wanted to devour her.

“Lin Shilan, I want to spend a happy rainy season with you.”

“No academic pressures, no family troubles, no other people. A summer with just the two of us…”

The escalator reached its end.

Tan Jin disappeared from view. Lin Shilan’s mouth opened wide in surprise.

Immediately after, her feet left the ground, her body lost balance, and she fell downward.

She resignedly closed her eyes, preparing to welcome the pain of being shattered to pieces before death.

“Splash—”

A tremendous sound rang in her ears.

Her hands and feet flailed twice, but the anticipated pain didn’t arrive. She touched some round plastic balls.

Given the previous momentum, Lin Shilan had thought their “descending staircase” would lead all the way down to hell.

She hadn’t expected that at the end of the ultra-long escalator, there would actually be an ocean ball pit from a children’s playground.

Tan Jin climbed up first, clutching his belly, laughing heartily.

Lin Shilan lay in the soft bed made of ocean balls, staring blankly at the distant ceiling.

She didn’t say a word, waiting for him to finish laughing.

“Then what?”

Suddenly, she asked.

Tan Jin wiped the tears of laughter from the corners of his eyes, still excited from teasing her, not yet calmed down: “What?”

“You want no one to disturb us, just like now. Then what—what do you want to do?”

It turned out Lin Shilan was responding to what Tan Jin had said before she fell.

He couldn’t answer for a moment.

“Coward,” she called him contemptuously.

“You lie to deceive me—nine times out of ten, I see through it.”

“You clearly know more things than I do, yet you let me lead you by the nose.”

“You noticed that your brother and I have feelings for each other. You’re powerless, eating vinegar by yourself.”

Lin Shilan was full of provocation, completely unafraid of him, angering him sentence by sentence.

“Do you think that trapping me here now is your capability? Tan Jin, it was me—I took the initiative to come to this rainy city to find you. It was me who just now voluntarily came with you.”

Tan Jin sat huffing and puffing in the pile of ocean balls, gasping for breath.

Her sharp tongue left him unable to retort.

Not giving him any face, not letting him off, Lin Shilan continued relentlessly exposing his shortcomings.

“You watched as your brother and I reconnected, and you got angry. Then what, I ask you—what do you dare to do? Will you destroy my future, destroy my life, or… kill me in reality…”

The ocean balls rustled as he crawled over and grabbed her collar.

In the faint light, Lin Shilan saw eyes filled with raging fire.

He yanked her up, and she calmly asked.

“Tan Jin, do you dare?”

The end of her words was cut off.

Lips descended, and he recklessly kissed her.

Blocking the only light source, his tears silently rolled down.

She was right—he didn’t dare.

Lin Shilan’s hands lifted. Tan Jin thought he was about to be pushed away, but he wasn’t.

Quietly, her arms wrapped around him.

He didn’t know how long she had searched for him, how much courage she had mustered to appear here. Just as she didn’t know how many rainy seasons he had waited for her.

This was a space that only they could see, that only they could enter. This shabby, broken-down paradise was just right to accommodate two people with nowhere else to go.

She pulled him into the ocean balls.

Finally, only the two of them remained.

They contentedly stayed in this small corner, silently embracing each other.