Chen Ge let Xu Yin take the lead. Only after she confirmed there was no danger did he enter.
Following the wooden ladder down to the bottom of the hidden passage, Chen Ge hung up the phone and switched on his phone's flashlight.
He crouched and moved forward. After roughly three or four meters, an iron door appeared before him, covered with police sealing tape.
Perhaps due to the dampness underground, the iron door was coated in reddish rust.
Chen Ge tried to push the door open. To his surprise, it wouldn't budge.
The door seemed to have fused with the surrounding earth, becoming part of a single solid mass. No matter how hard he pushed, it refused to move.
"Locked?" Chen Ge examined the iron door. There wasn't even a keyhole, so there was no possibility it had been locked.
"Looks like I'll have to try another approach." Chen Ge took out his skull crusher and roughly estimated the distance between this spot and the ground above. "Making noise down here — the residents upstairs probably won't notice."
He stepped back a few paces, raised the skull crusher, and brought it crashing down on the edge of the iron door!
Rust-colored fragments scattered across the floor, and chunks of earth rumbled down from above, giving the impression that the whole place was about to collapse.
"Bang! Bang! Bang!"
Chen Ge had already steeled himself the moment he'd hung up on Fan Cong. Several full-force swings later, the iron door finally burst open.
Gravel and dirt rained down on his body. Chen Ge felt himself swaying on his feet.
The place was dangerous, but since he'd come this far, not going in to take a look simply wasn't his style.
He gazed at the iron door he'd hammered open and reached out to feel its edge.
Where the iron door met the earth, there were numerous things resembling withered plant roots — most of them gray, with a smaller portion dyed a deep, blood-red.
"Are these blood threads that crawled out from beyond the door? What's the actual difference between an out-of-control 'door' and a normal 'door'?" Chen Ge examined the iron door before him, growing more puzzled the longer he looked. "The whole door is embedded in the passage, making it extremely inconvenient to open. It's hard enough for me, an adult, to move — let alone Little Bu."
Chen Ge suspected this wasn't the door that Little Bu had pushed open inside the secret room, but rather one that the police had installed afterward, likely to prevent anyone from entering.
"There's police sealing tape on the door, and I can't see a keyhole. Rather than calling this a door, it'd be more accurate to call it an iron slab blocking the way."
"If this door was installed by the police, then where is the real door inside the secret room?"
Chen Ge studied the edge of the iron door and soon made a discovery.
Inside the iron door, slightly farther in, there was a blood-red wooden doorframe.
But strangely, the frame was still there — the door itself was gone.
"There should be a second door inside the secret room, but where did it go?"
"Does the door disappear after becoming out-of-control? Or did the police take it away as evidence? Did they find something on it?"