I don't know how long it took. When Ma Yang woke up from his fainting, he found himself still on the ninth floor, still in that elevator.
Although everything seemed normal, he clearly remembered what had happened before he lost consciousness. At this moment, he didn't care about anything else and just wanted to escape from here as soon as possible.
However, no matter how many times he pressed the elevator closing button, the elevator door didn't respond, and even the floor buttons couldn't be lit up.
"Pop." Suddenly, there was a sound from the light on the top of the elevator, and then the light went out. The entire ninth floor was plunged into darkness.
"Ah!" Ma Yang was so frightened by the sudden change that his body trembled, and he almost fell to the ground.
Since the elevator couldn't be used, he resolutely ran out of the elevator, pulled open the white iron door of the safety passage beside it, and got in.
In the safety passage, the voice-activated light seemed to be broken. The entire stairwell was pitch-black, with not a single ray of light. It was truly impossible to see one's hand in front of one's face.
"Damn it. The safety passage light is broken and they don't fix it? Is this really one of the top communities in Shanglu? Does the property management deserve their owners?" Ma Yang cursed, venting his emotions, and took out a flashlight from his backpack.
He turned on the switch, and a beam of light shot out, illuminating a path for him in the dark stairwell.
At this moment, he was extremely grateful for his decision to keep a flashlight in his bag just in case. Without the flashlight, he couldn't even imagine how long it would take him to grope his way to the first floor in the pitch-black environment.
Relying on the beam of light from the flashlight, Ma Yang quickly reached the first floor. However, no matter how hard he pulled or pushed the white iron door on the first floor, it didn't budge an inch. It was as if the door had merged with the wall.
"Damn it. The property management locked the safety passage for no reason? How did they pass the fire inspection? Can they afford to take responsibility if there's a fire?!" Ma Yang cursed in a low voice, as if he were one of the owners of this community.
Since the door on the first floor was locked and the elevator was broken, he had no choice but to continue shining his flashlight and head towards the basement floor.
When he took the elevator upstairs before, he clearly saw that there was a button for the basement floor on the elevator. Since there was a basement floor and he could go down by elevator, it must be the underground parking lot.
"I can still get out in the underground parking lot." Ma Yang thought to himself.
Just as he had this thought and had walked about six flights of stairs, he realized that something was not right.
But when he thought about it carefully, he couldn't remember what it was, so he just put it out of his mind and continued walking.
After walking another six flights of stairs, another white iron door appeared in the beam of his flashlight.
"Finally, I can get out. These stairs are really long." Ma Yang complained and walked up to the iron door and pulled it hard.
Zi——With the sound of the iron sheet rubbing against the ground, the white iron door opened a crack, and Ma Yang's heart, which had been hanging in mid-air, finally settled down.
He was really afraid that the door to the underground parking lot was also locked by the property management of this community. If that was the case, he really couldn't leave and could only obediently wait for the property management to come and fix the elevator in the morning.
He pulled the white iron door completely open. Ma Yang had thought that it would be brightly lit outside, but what greeted him was still darkness.
"The underground parking lot doesn't even have the lights on?" Ma Yang finally felt something strange and turned on the flashlight that he had turned off before and shone it over.
He was shocked when he shone the light. What appeared within the range of the flashlight was not the layout of the underground parking lot at all, but a door that was exactly the same as the ones on the upper floors, with one house per floor! There was even the buffer zone between the door and the elevator!
Ma Yang was stunned by this scene, and after a moment, he was so frightened that he fell to the ground. Originally, he could hypnotize himself, saying that this was just an ordinary underground unit and it was no big deal... if he hadn't seen the number "27" indicating the floor beside the iron door.
"Is this the twenty-seventh floor?!" Ma Yang said in disbelief, his voice full of fear.
Then, he suddenly thought of something, stood up shakily, held up the flashlight, and shone it behind him...
He saw that the safety passage that should have reached the bottom somehow had stairs going further down out of thin air.
If there were only stairs going down, it could be proven that he had really reached the top floor, the 27th floor. But the key was that the stairs going up were still there!
"Damn it. Am I seeing a ghost?" Ma Yang thought. Since he had awakened his superpower, he was no longer sure if there were ghosts in the world. So, he specially bought a small copper Buddha statue and placed it in his shabby rental house, and he worshipped it every day to avoid encountering ghosts.
But now, the fact was that worshipping the Buddha statue was useless.
Although he couldn't be sure if it was the work of a ghost, Ma Yang was at least certain of one thing, that he had encountered a supernatural event, or a paranormal event.
At the thought of this, he took out the electric baton from his backpack and prepared to use it as a weapon.
With his equipment ready, Ma Yang became bolder. Holding the flashlight in his left hand and the electric baton in his right hand, he neither chose to go further down nor go back. Instead, he pushed open the door of the house outside the iron door.
The door opened, and another safety passage appeared, with stairs going both up and down.
Ma Yang didn't hesitate. He walked into this new safety passage and looked at the number representing the floor on the wall beside him - 27, and then started walking upstairs.
I don't know how long it took, nor how many stairs Ma Yang walked. All he knew was that when he returned to the 27th floor for the fifth time, he no longer had the confidence he had at the beginning, and his eyes became cloudy.
"Pop." He sat down on the ground, hugged his head with both hands, and let the flashlight and the electric baton roll aside. He seemed to have completely given up.
After a long time, a soft laugh sounded, and it grew louder and louder, echoing throughout the safety passage.
"Haha! I understand! I understand!" Ma Yang looked up, his eyes bloodshot. Ignoring the volume of his voice, he shouted and laughed like a madman.
"Official superpower users! You're the ones causing trouble, right? You used your superpowers to trap me here and drive me crazy, right? Humph! You almost succeeded! But now I've realized it! Your scheme won't work on me! I'm telling you! I'll keep walking! I don't believe that you can keep using your abilities! That you can make this staircase infinitely long!"
After saying this, he cheered up again, picked up the flashlight and the electric baton from beside the wall, put on his backpack, and stepped on the stairs again.
Outside, on the ninth floor of Building 12 in Binjiangyuan.
Everyone in the "Superpower Investigation Team" except Xu Zhi and Kong Chen surrounded Ma Yang, who was lying on the floor. His body was moving, and his mouth was opening and closing as if he was saying something.
"Sister Xiuxiu, how can we this 'intracerebral illusion' you set for him?" Jiang Yun asked Tang Xiuxiu curiously.
"Wait until he truly believes that he can't get out and completely gives up, or until he can't hold on and commits suicide." Tang Xiuxiu replied.
"It's so cruel. He's just a thief. Do we have to use this kind of mental torture?" Lei Ting couldn't bear it.
"Just because he's a thief, we have to take tough measures! To prevent him from committing crimes again!" Liu Wang had a different opinion. "What's more, he made us run around for so long and made me worried..."
"Alright, everyone, let's not worry about this for now. Let's carry him downstairs. The people from the 'Adjudication Department' will be here soon." Lin Yuexiang said.