The room looked the same, except for the two missing humans. Everything seemed normal—the living room, bedrooms, and bathroom. Lin Sanjiu had searched the entire apartment, but she couldn't find the siblings.
"Even if they were dead, I should be able to see their corpses, or they would have become duoluozhongs." Lin Sanjiu couldn't make sense of the current situation. "If they wanted to leave the living room, they would need to walk through the corridors. Yet, I was in the corridors."
Each floor had two L-shaped corridors, one to each side of the elevator. It might be possible to miss someone if one person was in the left corridor and the other in the right. However, sounds easily echoed through the corridors, so Lin Sanjiu would notice if someone came from the apartment. The only exception would be the case where the siblings used some sort of method to secretly escape without telling her. Lin Sanjiu couldn't understand how they could have just disappeared.
"They did mention yesterday that they would bring a few nameless visas with them whenever they were traveling, just as a precautionary measure. Didn't they say they could give me one so that I could meet them at Red Nautilus?" Lin Sanjiu mumbled. "It isn't logical that they would just suddenly leave..."
But, if they didn't leave based on their intentions, that would mean that some external force caused them to disappear. However, the alarms did not make any sound. This puzzle also stumped Mrs. Manas. Even though they discussed it for some time, they could not come up with any good conclusions.
'I think I'll go search for them. Maybe upstairs and downstairs,' Lin Sanjiu thought while she slipped out the door again. She didn't only see the two kids as her guaranteed ticket to Twelve Worlds Centrum, but they were also her cherished companions in this extremely lonely world.
If the siblings were in danger, Lin Sanjiu was the only person they could count on now. However, when she entered the corridors again, there wasn't anything unusual. She could still see that faded 15 under the dim yellow lights. Lin Sanjiu looked at the elevator and immediately decided against using it. She turned and headed to the entrance of the stairway. The stairways of any residential building older than three months were nightmares. The stairways were poorly maintained, as people only went there to throw their trash. The lights were usually never replaced, and the stairs were crazily steep. In the darkness, the stairways looked narrower than they were. Even the brain, which floated down the stairs, felt uncomfortable.
Perhaps there was a stench from the trash, but thankfully, her Higher Consciousness form did not give her a sense of smell. As she could scan the area with her Higher Consciousness, she only needed a few seconds to check each floor. Furthermore, it didn't take much time to go down 15 stories to reach the ground floor since she was flying. Unfortunately, she didn't see the siblings even after checking through each floor to the elevator lobby on the ground floor.
"Mrs. Manas, if those two children are playing pranks," Lin Sanjiu grumbled as she flew toward the elevator and decided to take a different route this time, "I will knock their nose into their skulls."
The elevator was still on the 15th floor. Lin Sanjiu pressed the button to call the elevator down, and it slowly traveled downward. 'There must be something wrong with this elevator,' Lin Sanjiu thought as she floated on the spot.
Previously, she had pressed a row of buttons when they were in the elevator. The 15th floor was the first stop, but she was sure that buttons 16, 17, and others lit up. Under normal circumstances, the elevator should continue upward after they get out. Yet, the elevator did not move after they got out. It remained on the 15th floor.
While she pondered it, the elevator arrived with a ding. The doors opened, revealing the elevator with its white light. The brain drifted into the elevator, and a small finger-like tip pressed on the button 16. The elevator traveled upward after the door closed.
As the numbers increased in a normal sequential order, nothing happened, even though Lin Sanjiu was expecting some sort of abnormal occurrence. It acted like a normal elevator and stopped with a ding.
However, the number on the wall was 15.
There was someone on the 15th floor!
Lin Sanjiu raised her guard and gathered her Higher Consciousness. She quickly floated to the top corner of the elevator and watched nervously as the doors opened.
"Huh?"
Lin Sanjiu noticed a sparkling pink wig as the elevator doors cracked open. Next, Rena's eyes widened while Reno said loudly, "Hey! Look, isn't she here?!" This immediately played out in the image that Lin Sanjiu saw in her head.
"Where did you run off to?!" Rena jumped into the elevator, ready to poke the brain with her fingers covered with colorful nail polish. "Weren't you supposed to check the noise? Why didn't you come back? We thought something happened to you. So, you just went downstairs to play!"
Lin Sanjiu, who took quite a while to understand what the girl meant, was so frustrated that she could vomit blood. When she saw Reno nodding his head in agreement, she furiously spelled the words: I WAS LOOKING FOR YOU BOTH. YOU TWO DISAPPEARED. This was the first time Lin Sanjiu spelled so many words.
"No, you were the one who disappeared! Aren't we standing here?!" Rena didn't stop attempting to poke Lin Sanjiu, forcing the brain to evade her while hiding in the elevator's corner. "I didn't see you, so I asked my brother to look for you!"
Lin Sanjiu sighed in relief, though puzzled. She wondered if she had lost track of time and incidentally missed the siblings. But why didn't she hear them walking out?
After avoiding Rena's sharp fingernails, Lin Sanjiu followed behind the siblings and returned to the apartment unit, still perplexed. The apartment unit was the same as when she left.
"It's just a false alarm," Reno said as he lay comfortably in his bed but was pulled up by his sister.
"It's your shift now!"
After being reminded, he dragged his feet and sat on the chair under the grayish brain. By the looks of it, nothing had changed. Lin Sanjiu asked Reno, HOW LONG DID YOU WAIT FOR ME? She was unable to concentrate on her training any longer, as this incident did not make sense.
"Since you're just a brain, we thought nothing would happen to you, so we started playing cards. Erm... I can't tell how long we waited for you exactly, but if I had to guess, we waited for at least an hour," Reno replied. Even though she might have lost track of time, Lin Sanjiu was sure she had been outside for less than half an hour.
'Is there some sort of time warp in Kisaragi Station World? Could we be in a pocket dimension?'
But if this was a pocket dimension, it was too quiet. Lin Sanjiu thought for a long time, but she couldn't come up with an explanation. The living room became silent again. The night seemed to last long, as if dawn would never come.
Reno fell asleep in his chair when he could no longer endure his sleepiness. Lin Sanjiu, the only one still wide awake, couldn't help wandering in and out of the apartment unit. She harassed Mrs. Manas, trying to understand the entire situation. However, they couldn't come up with anything despite their discussions. In the end, Mrs. Manas had enough of her pestering and played dead, no longer replying. The latter entered the bathroom moodily and switched on the light.
Lin Sanjiu thought about it for a little longer and decided to give up. Since she found the siblings, it didn't matter if she couldn't figure out what had happened. She flew straight into the bathtub and converted her corpse back into its original form. Moving to the tap, she began washing her corpse.
Optimistically, she knew she would still need her body in the future. Gathering her Higher Consciousness, she transformed into the shape of a thumb and an index finger. It was harder than spelling words. After some effort, Lin Sanjiu placed the two weird-looking fingers on the tap. A flushing sound came from the bathroom upstairs.