Chapter 21: A Disconnect Between Mental And Physical

There wasn't an exit to the stairwell that I could see. The bottom of the stairwell was just sealed off by a normal looking office wall, cork board included. There was a single piece of paper pinned to the board, it looked like a child's drawing of a dog. I think the only reason I could tell it was a dog was the fact it said 'woof' in all caps beneath it.

I was confused though, did it want me to act like some sort of demolition man and break through the wall? I wasn't opposed, but there was a lot of energy required to break through walls enough to fit me and my bag through. Destruction had yet to be the answer, so I was sure that it wasn't the solution.

I reached towards the wall, aiming to feel how hard it is in case I actually have to break through it, but my hand just slips through the wall. I didn't feel a single thing from the wall, my arm was inside the wall, causing a sense of oddness to develop inside of me.

I stared at my arm floating inside the wall while feeling like I was just holding it in the air, and it was weird. My eyes didn't match what I was feeling. I just went all in and walked through the wall without holding back.

The other side of the wall just looked like a normal office to me. There were desks and chairs all in their proper places. Nothing seemed out of place, that was until I stubbed my small toe on a desk at a speed walk. I almost keeled over immediately, but I was more confused about what I had run into.

I was walking down the aisle between desks, I shouldn't be so clumsy that I would unknowingly walk into a desk when I thought I was walking well away from them. That's when it hit me. I did walk into a desk, but not one I could see.

The way it moved when I crushed my poor toe against it, made me know it wasn't a wall, but a heavy desk. There was something deeper wrong with this floor than I had initially thought. I should have honestly realized it when I had to walk through a wall to get in here.

What I see isn't what is actually there. I was in a different room than what I was looking at. Reaching in front of me, I could feel the cold surface of a wooden desk. However, in my vision, I was looking at the air, with a light brown rug on the floor. There wasn't a desk here.

I was stuck. I could close my eyes and forgo vision entirely, or I could keep them open but realize they are completely useless here. I decided that keeping them open was going to be the better option. I had no way of knowing if this was the only gimmick I was going to encounter.

So instead of just cutting myself off from potentially important visual information, I would just take what I see with a grain of salt. Not like I haven't navigated blind before, but that was a straight set of rooms where it was easy to orient myself. I could do this, it wasn't going to be too hard.

I would just be going slow. I was curious how I was going to actually find the exit, as I had been relying on my sight to find them. That green glow that nothing else on these floors let off. I wondered if I would pass by one before I had even noticed.

Well, I'll cross that road when I get there. One thing I did worry about was how I was actually going to navigate. I could always use my ax like a cane and use it to navigate. Actually, that sounded like an alright idea.

This floor was interesting. I eventually found a walkway of sorts, and just kept my wits about me as I used the ax handle to navigate through the floor like a blind person. There wasn't much to really look at while I walked, as paying attention to anything too much made my head hurt when I bumped into something I didn't see.

One thing that kept happening that was messing with me the most, was walking through random walls and then finding walls where it seemed like a wide open room. It was slow going, and I mean, really slow. I would run into something, reposition, then run into something again.

My right foot was hurting a lot, and I think I had probably broken my small toe, but there wasn't much I could do for it other than bandage it anyways. For some reason, I didn't think about splints small enough to fit my small toe. Wait, can I use splints on a toe and is it even worth it?

Then I proceed to hit my small toe on another thing I didn't see, but somehow missed with my sweeping ax. I doubled over in pain. It was definitely broken, and now I had to look at it, there was no other choice, especially if it hurt that bad from just another light hit.

One thing I was thankful for was that I could still see myself and interact with myself. My bag and its contents were somehow still visible too. I wasn't expecting this place to be so nice as to let me see my own tools. Either way, I sat down on the ground and took off my boot, making sure to keep it between my legs in case this floor tried to pull something funky.

The small toe was purple and swollen. Broken for sure. Not much I can really do for it other than just try not to put any weight on it. I did have to see where it was broken, as if it was broken more towards the arch of my foot, I was going to have issues, but if it was in the toe, I could just shift my weight so I wouldn't use it.

I started from where I knew the base of the bone connected to the arch, and no immediate pain. I think checking for awkward grinding and shifts was better than checking for pain. I've had too many injuries and while this did hurt, it wasn't really all that bad. The real danger was it healing improperly, or getting some kind of weird bone infection.

At the base of the toe itself, I felt a little grinding as things shifted around. It didn't hurt too bad, but I could feel the unpleasantness from the shifting and grinding bones. Now, what am I supposed to do for first aid on a broken small toe? I don't know this one off the top of my head like I do other strange medical things.

Well, I could maybe stop it from moving by bandaging it to the other toe and then just do my absolute best to not move them until it is healed. Yeah, that seems like it is going to have the highest chance of success, so I got to work. I pulled out my medical 'kit' and got some of the tape I had and some torn pieces of cotton.

Masking tape was horrible as something to hold onto skin, especially in a closed space like a boot where I was bound to sweat a lot. It is what I had though, so away we go. With my small toe taped and bandaged, I put my sock back on and then my boot. It feels a bit better, but I downed two acetaminophen just to numb it for a bit while I tried to forget about it.

I was once again on my way through the odd floor that had been presented to me. I was getting used to not trusting my eyes though, it felt weird at first, but it felt natural after a while. That was until something horrifying entered my vision as I rounded a corner in my eyes.

Almost directly in front of me was a Rotting Angel. I jumped backwards with the timing that would save my life from floor two after blinking, but the Rotting Angel stumbled forwards slowly. I was staring at it, but it didn't move, but then I realized that I wasn't actually seeing anything correctly.

This Rotting Angel wasn't actually there. It sure scared me like it was real though. This is the first time I've actually been able to look at one like this though. Its gray rotted skin was putrid, and thankfully, I couldn't smell it.

It looked even more rotted than when I saw them on floor two, and I wonder if that's because so much time has passed, or if they just rot more the further down I am on these floors. It was interesting, the more I went down, the more rot there was, it was extremely noticeable.

I watched as the Rotting Angel just wandered around, not really caring for the environment it was in. It kept running into walls and desks as it wandered around. It was kind of dumb, to be honest. I wondered if they acted like this on floor two, but I just never saw it as they would walk more purposefully once I had seen them.

I was a bit worried that maybe they weren't just in my vision, but also in the physical area that I felt. If I looked at them in the physical sense and I couldn't see them, did that count towards their aggression? Was I going to get attacked at some point and not even know when it was coming.

I couldn't worry about things like that, I would just get stuck forever on the same problem without a solution. I was just going to deal with it when it happened, putting the thoughts of dread out of my mind for the time being.

While I walked through the halls and rooms I couldn't actually see, I started to wonder if I really was going to find an exit like this. I couldn't see at all, and I had no way to tell if a door was the exit until I went through it, if I even managed to find any doors.

This was an issue that actually needed solving and thinking about. I could always try and skirt the walls of every room to see if there was anything that seemed like a door. I couldn't think of anything else that might work to find the door, another dead end.

This floor wasn't hard, nor is it particularly dangerous. It was complicated, more so than I had imagined it was going to be once I initially figured out the gimmick. There was no way to tell where I was going, or how far I had gone.

A logistical challenge to be sure. I think my only method to find the exit on this floor is just feel along every wall and try to find a door of some type. I have no choice but to do it, my hand is going to hurt by the end of this, but I'll do what must be done to get out of here.

My left hand was now sliding against the wall as I held my ax in my right hand, still using it as a cane of sorts. I was managing pretty well to keep my toes from running into new obstacles. It was even slower going now that I had to search along the wall, but I seemed to have the time to get through here.

I had enough resources to last a week or two if used sparingly. I would probably need to head back up to The Hub and restock soon, but I'll leave that for after the next floor. One thing I would like to know is why I haven't found any guides to the floors in a long time. Were they more rare lower down, or did they not exist on these floors due to their difficulty?

I could see not wanting to go to a few of these floors, but if you knew the gimmick already, there's no way you would struggle with a floor like this. A lot of the previous floors would have been a lot easier if I had more information, but it seems to be something consistently lacking down here.

Okay, the boss floor is a bit rough, but that one doesn't really need a guide. Just get through it as fast as you can. At least I managed to keep my resources through the boss floor this time, but if I was any unluckier, I might have lost them on a few different occasions.

Something that had actually slipped my mind until now was that this certainly wasn't another hub floor. I was hoping for another one, but deep down I knew that it was going to be like this. If there even is another hub, I'm going to have to work a lot harder to get there.

Was there even a need for a second hub though? I mean, there are elevators connecting everything to the first hub, so a second one would only promote a splitting in population and valuable information would stay deeper. If I go back and give people the methods to get through…

Why hasn't anyone done that? Was I stupid in wanting to just give out my information? Maybe, but in my mind, if there were more people exploring down here, there could be more sharing of information on special areas and resources.

This floor didn't have anything special about it, but even just floor sixteen had an armory. If people went down just a single floor with the sole purpose of collecting weapons, there would be the chance to trade for specialized weapons for people to defend themselves with.

Were people so demoralized by the time they made it to The Hub that once there was any semblance of safety, they tucked their tails between their legs and cowered away from the challenge ahead of them?

Did they have nothing to try and escape for? I have very little waiting on me back in the real world. I have a family that supports me, but that's about it. I just know I don't want to stay here. I can't stay here.

If what drives me forward is so little, what reason do they have to stagnate on the first hub floor? Some of them must have motivation stronger than me. Then I remembered something I was told, not by one of the people in The Hub, but on floor seventeen.

'Most that come to this place are from the dimensions that have rotted and fallen.'

They didn't have anywhere to go back to. They didn't want to leave simply because they can't. For a lot of them this is most likely the case. I was asking the wrong questions when I was at The Hub before. I should have asked where they came from.

That is what the person at the entrance of The Hub was trying to figure out. They asked me how I ended up here. They knew something more than they told me, and knew that the people of that place had come from various dimensions and places.

I wanted to go back and talk to them. I had to know what was actually going on here, there was something going on behind the scenes, and it seemed like a lot of people stuck in The Hub knew about it. When I went back to The Hub, I was going to pay Kacey a visit. Let them know what floor twenty was like.

For now, I had to focus on the floor I was on. My hand was already feeling numb from running along the wall so I switched it up and started to use my right hand. I hadn't found a single door frame yet. The corners and room transitions all seemed to be smooth corners, so if I found a door at all, I was probably right to assume it was the exit.

I was traveling calmly through the halls, right up until my ax hit something soft. I thought maybe it was a potted plant or something, so I moved around it, but then my shoulder made contact with something soft and slightly wet. It was a Rotting Angel.

Well, it turned out that looking at them in what was actually real didn't set them off. They added a monster here that didn't work due to the gimmick of the floor. This floor is super easy compared to the previous floor, it is just taking a decent amount of time to find an exit.

If I had lost all my resources on the boss floor, I am pretty sure that I might actually be in serious trouble because finding resources here was insane. I had managed to find a single bottle of water a while earlier. I accidentally ran into a desk with my hip and I heard it fall over.

The Rotting Angel was following me, or maybe it was just traveling the same direction as me, but I kept hearing it run into things. I was just going to leave it be though, there's no sense in attacking a creature that wasn't going to do anything to me.

The natural behavior was interesting to me. Why does a creature like this exist, and why does it just wander into walls and other objects as it continues to rot alive. Unless it wasn't really alive and was just a creature made entirely of rot, but there's no way anything like that could exist.

I just laughed it off as I continued my journey through the odd rooms. They all mostly looked the same in my eyes. Just a simple repeating office space. There were doors here and there in my vision, but physically, none of the doors existed, at least not that I could feel and I had been walking along the walls for a while now.

Where was the exit?

I had to be doing this wrong. There had to be some easier way to find the exit, or maybe there wasn't and I just needed to be patient. If I go along this wall for maybe one more day, I'll give up and try something new. Two days checking the walls was a long time, but maybe I'd miss the exit if I just stopped now.

My hands were sore with how they had been dragged along the wall looking for an exit. Stopping to sleep was important, and other than The Hub, this was probably one of the nicest floors to sleep on. I was only woken up once when a Rotting Angel stepped on me.

A chill goes down my spine as I remember the feeling and smell of rot waking me up. Thoroughly unpleasant, wouldn't recommend. I was getting used to waking up abruptly though. I used to feel groggy if I was forced to wake up and do something immediately, but now I could just wake up and I was ready to go.

I looked down at myself. I had changed. I was fit, almost incredibly so. All I did was walk around and run, sometimes climb, but the change was spectacular. I was a slightly overweight guy, nothing to really say about it. But now, I was quite proud to say I was covered in a good amount of muscle.

I guess nearly starving myself, then eating nothing but high density rations while exercising for several months will do that to a guy. Awful, horrible diet plan. Don't try it ever, while I'm sure it might work, for me there was no other choice than to make it work.

Before coming here, I would walk for maybe a total of one hour a day, now all I do every day is walk around. I don't feel tired from just walking all day anymore. My body had become used to it slowly over time, and I just now paid any attention to it.

I remember some saying about how if you place a frog in boiling water, it'll jump out immediately, but if you place it in normal water and slowly raise the temperature, it'll just boil to death. That saying does apply here, I never really noticed any change until it had already happened.

I'm happy. This was a weird floor, and it isn't over yet, but a nice place to just decompress and have a good time. The Rotting Angels were a weird pick for this floor, but I guess not everything needed to make sense, and I'm willing to bet even less is going to make sense from now on, so I'll take this respite from it all.

I was starting to get a little frustrated as I laid down at the end of day three here to sleep. I couldn't figure it out, both my hands had been rubbed raw from the walls, and I was hesitant to waste clothing to protect it, cause my skin could heal if I gave it time, but finding new clothes that fit was a hassle.

I was doing something wrong here, and it was finally time to admit it. I had fallen for the sunk cost fallacy. I was so caught up in the idea that what I was doing had to work, that I never considered that maybe something was specifically preventing me from progressing like this.

I took care to make a mental map and prevent myself from walking in circles, but it seems even that might not have been enough. If I had been walking in circles for three days I was going to be unhappy. I had one week left of resources, and that was if used fairly sparingly.

I no longer needed to just find a normal exit, I needed an elevator. What else can I do down here? I struggled to find anything because what was in my eyes didn't match what was actually here. What if they didn't match, but I need to find where they do?

It was so simple, I couldn't even get too upset if this was the right way to do it. I was supposed to rest now, but I wanted to know if this was the correct thing to do at all. I got myself ready to walk and started using my eyes instead of just mostly tuning out what I was seeing.

Eventually, I managed to find a hallway that lined up with what I was seeing and what was physically there. It was nice to actually walk down a short hall that matched what I was seeing. It had been a few days since anything even lined up this nice.

Once I had made it to the end of the hall, it opened up into another room, but it didn't look like an office space this time. It was an auditorium. I had been walking in a straight line for so long, but I had been ignoring the true gimmick of the floor. My vision was disconnected from reality, and I had to realign them to get through here.

With a slight amount of frustration, I set myself up to sleep. I was tired, but now I know how to get through this floor. I could have easily tested it after I rested, but I knew myself. I wouldn't have been able to properly rest with an idea like that in my mind, no matter how tired I may be.

…

After waking up, it was time to get on with the floor.

I lined up what I could in the auditorium. It was a push door, the door felt heavier than it should, but that just meant I needed to push harder and it'll open anyways. My vision shifts heavily and I am forced to close my eyes. I nearly fell down from the shift in my vision that had thrown my senses off balance.

Steadying myself and opening my eyes, I found myself in a familiar concrete stairwell. My hands immediately reached for the smooth concrete surface to make sure it was real. The cold sensation of the stone told me it most likely was.

The door I had come through looked to be made of a yellowish stone, much different from the thin auditorium door I thought I had just opened. The door was closed behind me, and I didn't intend to open it. I will just find an elevator on the next floor then. I can only imagine the pain in trying to find an elevator.

Whatever. It was time to head to the next floor. I can do this, I'm ready to go down.