That line written in his own handwriting carried the ultimate provocation.
The absurd and eerie ssage struck him with such force that he felt his cerebral cortex twitching.
The "Doppelgänger" wasn't hiding or ambushing;
instead, it was showing Lin Jie its core terrifying ability: the power of mimicry, infiltration, and manipulation of information itself.
Fear transford into slimy tentacles trying to worm their way into his pores.
But his hunter's heart, tempered to steel-like hardness through countless life-and-death trials, forcefully suppressed the fear in the shortest possible ti.
Panicking was the absolute worst thing he could do now;
any fluster would beco a weapon for the enemy to dismantle his ntal defenses.
His first reaction was clear and correct: seek backup.
He couldn't face this bizarre enemy alone. He needed William's reliable protection and Julian's encyclopedic wisdom.
He had to imdiately send out the alarm about this escalated threat.
Lin Jie hurriedly turned around, not bothering to deal with the ominous postcard on the floor.
He rushed toward William's door in the next room, so close it was within arm's reach.
The straight-line distance from his doorway to William's doorway was no more than five ters, a distance he could cover in three seconds at a normal walking pace.
Yet this ti, as he took a step to cross that distance, a bizarre transformation that overturned his understanding of physics and spatial perception abruptly descended.
The mont his right foot stepped out and his left foot was about to follow, the scene before his eyes, that short, straight corridor, was viciously stretched by an invisible, massive stretching machine.
The corridor, only five ters long, was elongated in an instant in a geotric progression.
William's door, which should have been within reach, receded into the distance like a fast-rewinding film shot, shrinking into a distant, blurry little black dot, as if it wasn't at the end of the corridor but atop the peak of Heidelberg Castle.
The evenly spaced Gas Wall Lamps lining both sides of the corridor also seed to be infinitely copied and pasted, turning into rows upon rows of dim yellow light points stretching endlessly into an unknown, profound darkness.
Lin Jie's brain short-circuited on the spot from this sight that completely defied visual inertia and spatial logic.
But his body's instinct, honed through a thousand trials, still drove him to take a second step, a third step.
He began to run, sprinting madly forward down this endless, infinitely stretched, bizarre corridor.
The carpet under his feet felt familiar and soft;
the walls beside him had the real texture of wallpaper.
Everything seed unchanged;
the only thing that had changed was the fundantal physical concept of "distance" itself.
He ran with all his might, but the speed he had trained for so long in simulation exercises seed laughably weak in this strange corridor.
He felt like a stupid hamster trapped on a running wheel, watching helplessly as the finish line maintained an eternally constant relative distance no matter how hard he tried.
How long had he been running? One minute? Ten? Lin Jie could no longer tell.
He only knew his lungs were beginning to scream in pain, and the lactic acid from the intense exercise was building up in his leg muscles.
And that door, at the distant, unreachable end, silently mocked him.
No, he couldn't keep going like this.
Lin Jie stopped, propping his hands on his knees as he gasped for breath.
He forced his brain to calm down again.
This wasn't Alchemy at the physical spatial level. If it were simply stretching space, there would be a limit to how far he could run.
But now, whether he ran fast or slow, the finish line always maintained a seemingly constant visual distance.
This ant the problem wasn't with "space" itself, but with his "perception."
His brain was being deceived;
his "spatial perception ability" had been rewritten by the bizarre UMA using a law he couldn't comprehend.
It was as if an invisible funhouse mirror had been forcibly inserted between him and that door.
No matter how he advanced toward the "entity" in the mirror, the distance between him and the "entity" was being distorted in real-ti by this damned "mirror."
Understanding this, Lin Jie twitched the corner of his mouth.
This ant any attempt to break this barrier through conventional thods based on vision and linear movent would be futile.
But he didn't give up. His brain, in this desperate situation, instead erupted with a paranoid thirst for knowledge and fighting spirit.
He decided to conduct an experint.
He would try to counter this abnormal law with a completely abnormal logic.
He closed his eyes, completely abandoning the visual sense, the most easily deceived.
Then, relying on his mory of this distance and muscle instinct, he began trying to walk backward.
One step.
Two steps.
Three steps.
He counted silently in his mind the distance that should only take five or six steps to cover.
Yet when he had counted to "ten" in his mind and his back still hadn't touched any "entity," he knew this path was also blocked.
The UMA's "cognitive alteration" didn't just affect "vision";
it affected even his most fundantal subconscious understanding of "space" and "distance."
Next, he tried a more cunning thod.
He took out a small pencil sharpener knife from his pocket, leaned his back against one wall, and began a slow, sideways shuffle toward William's door.
Simultaneously, his right hand used the knife to carve a long, continuous, deep mark on the wallpaper of the wall.
He wanted to use this thod to provide his brain with the most direct, absolutely unfakeable "evidence of displacent."
However, the result was even more bone-chilling.
He had carved out a clear mark at least ten ters long, but the "visual distance" between his body and the distant target door hadn't shortened by even a milliter.
This section of wall he was on seed to have a "life" of its own, continuously extending and growing backward at a speed perfectly synchronized with his movent.
This was a cognitive closed loop without any physical flaw.
Lin Jie gave up completely.
He knew he wasn't trapped in a physical corridor;
he was trapped inside his own "mind."
He wasn't truly "isolated" in the real sense;
William was likely just a few steps away, on the other side of the wall.
But he could never "reach" there.
He was almost like Achilles in Greek mythology, forever unable to catch the tortoise, imprisoned by a "Zeno's paradox" from the cognitive level.
Finally, dragging his body, heavy with exhaustion and defeat, he trudged step by step back to the only open "prison door" of his own room.
Just as his body fully crossed the threshold into the room in the final mont, his highly alert brain caught a detail.
The mont he made the decision to "return," the corridor behind him, stretched to "infinity," began to shorten at a speed visible to the naked eye.
When he stood back on the room's carpet and looked back, the corridor had already returned to its familiar, normal length of only five ters.
That absurd, futile "long-distance sprint" just now was truly just a ridiculous nightmare conjured by his own imagination.
Utterly exhausted, Lin Jie closed the heavy wooden door again and turned the lock with a "click."
He leaned his back against the cold door panel, his body slowly sliding down until he sat helplessly on the carpet.
His mind was occupied by a sense of powerlessness and defeat.
Checkmated.
He hadn't even truly t the enemy face-to-face yet.
Had he lost just like this?
He raised his eyes, bloodshot.
His gaze instinctively traveled over the room's furniture and landed on the large oval dressing mirror directly opposite the room.
Lin Jie froze.
Because he saw that the "Lin Jie" in the mirror wasn't sitting dejectedly on the floor like he was.
The him in the mirror was standing there, perfectly composed.
On that identical, handso face in the mirror, an expression of contempt and mockery was hanging.
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