Chapter 1 Jack Spencer

Heavy footsteps echoed in the darkness. As the footsteps gradually stopped, suddenly a beam of light pierced through the blackness—the light came from a cell phone.

The phone's glow illuminated a fairly handsome face. He looked exhausted and haggard, clearly in a bad mood.

"Recording number four begins, the time is 3:51 p.m." Jack Spencer started the screen recording.

"I still haven't found an exit. Everything here is surrounded by metal—even the floor and the ceiling." Jack Spencer reached out to touch the wall beside him, his fingers feeling that unique texture: cold, smooth, hard.

Next, he turned on the phone's flashlight toward the metal wall, trying to capture as much of the unwelcoming silvery-gray as possible.

"These metal corridors are all square-shaped, connected to form a huge metal maze. There are lots of metal doors in the walls, but most of them won't open. I crawled out of a freezer in one of the rooms."

"I don't know where this is. I've never seen a place like this before, not even online, and I haven't found any information here."

"I also don't know how I ended up here. My memory is blank—my last memory is from the summer after the college entrance exam."

"I remember everything before that: my family's big yellow dog, my parents, every game I played—it's all clear. But after that... after that, it's all gone."

"Something must have happened after that, that's why I was stuffed into a freezer and sent here. But what exactly happened, I can't remember at all!" As Jack Spencer said this, his tone grew anxious. He took a breath and continued,

"The time on my phone says it's 2030. If that's real, it means I might have lost five whole years of memory."

"What happened in those five years? Where am I, really?"

Just then, there was a beep, and a notification appeared on the phone screen: "Battery too low, unable to use flashlight."

Jack Spencer knew he couldn't waste any more time. No matter what had happened before, he had to get out of here first. If he died trapped in here, then everything that happened before would be meaningless.

Jack Spencer pressed his lips together, pulled himself together, and continued speaking to the phone: "Didn't I just say there are some metal doors in the walls? The weird thing is, some doors aren't just on the walls—there are doors in the ceiling and the floor too. And in one of those doors, I heard something, some unusual noises. I'm going to check it out now."

With that, he felt his way along the cold metal wall, moving to the left. After a minute, he stopped, looked up, and raised his phone toward a pitch-black door above his head.

"Can you hear it? There's a sound coming from the door in the ceiling—a very faint beeping, like it's coming from far away."

"My phone's almost out of battery. I'll go in first and talk later." With that, Jack Spencer exited recording mode.

Estimating the height, Jack Spencer slowly stepped back a few paces, then jumped with all his might, hooking his fingers tightly onto the edge of the doorframe.

Using every ounce of strength, Jack Spencer scrambled up and finally managed to climb through the door.

Standing on the doorframe, he craned his neck and shone his phone's light into the room, discovering all sorts of high-precision machinery he couldn't understand, many with their casings fallen off.

Strange mechanical arms, like tree branches, stretched out from the walls on both sides, forming a metallic forest. At the end of the upper mechanical arms, another new door appeared directly above Jack Spencer's head. The beeping sound was coming from deep within.

"Why is this place so weird? Where the hell am I?" Jack Spencer stepped onto a mechanical arm, carefully climbing upward. When Jack Spencer crawled through this door, he finally found the source of the faint beeping—a small red dot, blinking in time with the beeps, like a standby indicator on a computer.

When Jack Spencer shone his phone's flashlight around the red dot, he found the place was actually an arched, curved room, with nothing inside but a few chairs.

Jack Spencer started recording again, aiming at the red dot. "Look, there seems to be a screen above this red dot. I'm going to record everything that happens next on my phone. If I lose my memory again for some unknown reason, these recordings will be my—"