The ultimate blue sea

Chapter 5- The Grey House

This was a building designed by some wicked person. As soon as Su Qing walked in, his unusually active imagination started incessantly heading to strange places—this was an old house with an antiquated look, whatever it had been used for before. It was grey from the outside and grey from the inside. The corridor was particularly long, with a small window at the end, not even south-facing. The lighting was extremely poor. The walls and the floor were all grey.

This place gave a person an extremely oppressed feeling. It might have been Su Qing's mistake, but it seemed that after the scream and the gunshot, this place was even quieter than before. There was no one else in the long hall, only him and Chen Lin, one in front and one behind, their steps echoing in the emptiness. Su Qing walked fearfully, looking back twice with each step, afraid that some rare creature like a vengeful ghost or a Sadako would suddenly come up behind him.

Chen Lin looked back, smiled, and said to him, "Everyone should be in the main hall eating now, so it's fairly quiet."

Then Chen Lin took him around corner after corner, and at last Su Qing saw the so-called "main hall." There were two men with loaded guns standing at the door of the "main hall." Su Qing suspected he had arrived at some prison concentration camp and subconsciously searched the walls for the indicative "Leniency to those who confess, severity to those who resist." Some faint voices came from inside, indistinct with the door closed.

There were many rooms next to the main hall. Even the doors to these rooms were grey. Su Qing looked closely and found many marks on the doors. With his shut-in's eyes, he couldn't really tell what had made these marks. He only thought they were chaotic and had a very sinister look.

Chen Lin said, "If you want, you can pick one of those rooms to stay in. They're all the same. If you make friends with another 'little grey,' you can live with your friend."

When Chen Lin said the word "friend," the smile on his face seemed unusually secretive in this grey space, facing the two guys holding machine guns. Su Qing shuddered. Before he could say anything, Chen Lin pushed open the main hall's door and took him inside—once inside, Su Qing was stunned.

The main hall was dimly lit, with a row of crude and simple tables and food on the tables. The quality of the food actually didn't seem so bad, and there was a pot of fragrant soup cooking. There was also a row of men with machine guns monitoring the situation at all times.

In the main hall were all kinds of strange and grotesque...humans.

A fat man with heavy black bags under his eyes was tearing at his own face, contorting his features for all he was worth. When he was ignored again and again, he suddenly jumped onto a small table. The other end of the small table tilted up when he stepped on it. The fat man plopped down onto the ground, and a pile of food overturned onto his head, painting him all colors—really as though he'd come out of a circus troupe. But the merry gentleman was still very unperturbed, as though it wasn't food that had spilled on his head but holy water. He was so pleased he began to dance with joy, even singing a tune.

Su Qing listened carefully and heard that he was singing, "Doll and bear dance, one, two, one..."

And this wasn't all that horrifying. The next moment, a woman not wearing any clothes openly came up in front of him. Su Qing had forgotten about the concept of see no evil. His already large eyes became even rounder. He looked foolishly at the arrestingly beautiful girl boldly crawling in front of him—she was "crawling," on all fours like an animal. She made a few circles around him, even sniffed his feet, then rubbed his calf with her head.

Su Qing nearly jumped. In a moment of desperation, he rambled out: "Oh, holy crap, th-th-this lady's too hardcore..."

Wherever he looked, there were people bashing their heads against the wall, wailing as they bashed; people shoving food up their noses; people smiling foolishly as they sat on the ground hugging table legs; people dipping their fingertips in sauce and imitating Picasso on their own bodies... Su Qing tearfully thought, Is this a lunatic asylum?