Wu Xiaoming walked towards the main path - which was forward, towards the shadow-covered end of the wide hallway. The doorways on both sides all led to other hallways, open spaces and junctions, some to the same level, some to the upper and some to the lower levels.
There seemed to be no apparent pattern to the way the lanterns and candles were placed - they just showed up every few steps of the way, and on the turns and corners of the walls. He kept straight, while keeping his attention at the far end of the path he was on - the shadow faded as he went in further, yet the shadow was always at roughly the same distance from him, obscuring the layouts of the road and structure.
He looked back after walking straight for a while, and found the shadow covering the road behind him as well. In a way, the shadow was like the "fog of war" in real-time strategy games, where the environment became invisible after his vision had been away from the area.
Wu Xiaoming hesitated for a while, before extending his finger and scratched a mark on the wall to his left - it was the Chinese character "Wu". He then proceeded to press on forward, while trying his best to memorize the look of the walls and structures on both sides.
After a while, the walls on both sides and generally all the structures in sight became somewhat familiar - and strange at the same time. Wu Xiaoming was not that unfamiliar with this phenomenon - it happened quite a lot when he was developing the games from looking at some of the character models or icons/words for a prolonged period of time, and the best way to deal with it was to close his eyes and let his brain rest for a short moment.
He continued forward for around two to three minutes before he found a corner to sit in. He checked around, memorizing all the rough details of structures around him before finally sitting down on the cold hard ground and closed his eyes.
He dared not remain in this position for too long, for one would never know if there were any hostile forces in this place. He counted 30 in his head before taking a deep breath and standing up.
His heart dropped the moment he opened his eyes - many things around him changed - most obviously, he was no longer in a corner, but in the wide open facing a long, wide walkway, with walls on both sides.
Behind him was a wall - just like the moment he first came here.
"Fuck you." Wu Xiaoming shook his head, now he kinda understood why no one was able to get out of this place - this place could change, and if the place would change its structures outside the range of sight, there were always ways to mislead and redirect them back to where they were before.
He turned back and scratched the wall with his right hand a little bit - this time, a little bit of golden light glowed on his fingertips. Another mark was left on the wall, this time a three letter phrase in Chinese characters: "Fuck Your Mom".
He continued his way forward. In a way, this realization actually lifted some pressure off him - now that he knew there was actually no leaving the place through the usual means, he had time and energy to think about how to break out in an "unconventional" way.
As he walked by a corner with a small, apple-sized lantern hanging on the wall, he jumped up and ripped the lantern from the stick on which it was hung.
He looked into it - it was not a lantern, not a "complete" one anyway. It had the right bamboo frame and paper exterior, but inside there was no candle. Yet, light was indeed coming from it, as if there was an invisible candle inside, or as if it was the red paper that was glowing.
Out of curiosity, he held up the lantern sideways up to his right eye and looked through the holes on both ends like a monocular.
As expected, nothing was what it seemed from this "monocular": the walls were gray, cracked and dirty, with patches of paint missing, exposing what looked like tree-root-like texture underneath. The other lanterns were actually ghost fires and glowing pustules or tree knots. The candles, on the other hand, appeared to be human eyes that were still moving around. Everywhere, every corner of the interior of the building was as if it had been abandoned and subject to weathering and corruption for hundreds of years - rot, crooked and mutated vegetation, amalgamated objects and structures made of debris, tree roots and flesh were everywhere. Many of the walls did not exist in this vision, it was much more transparent and simple in terms of layout, but grossly more unsightly.
Wu Xiaoming moved this lantern away and thought for a moment - he could not just go by the idea that what he saw through the body of a lantern was "more real" than what was in front of his naked eyes. It could just be another layer of illusion.
He ripped a few more lanterns and tried with them - from what he could gather, the vision he saw through the lanterns were the same. After some thought, he picked up a candle from the ground and stuck it in a lantern the size of a watermelon.
The lantern's light grew much brighter than he had anticipated. And what was even more surprising, was that as the lantern was "made whole", the light it projected was able to turn the environment around it into the version seen through the bodies of the lanterns.
It thus did not take too much effort for Wu Xiaoming to reach a theory that, both the "normal" looking environment around and the gray and decayed vision were "real" to a degree. For example, a wall would still block his way, even though the light from the lantern showed him that it was not there. But when he stepped on a candle and crushed it under his feet, the squishy and fleshy sensation did convey to him it was more likely to be made of flesh than wax.
So the next question was - what these two different versions of the surroundings were for. They must exist for a reason.
Those who reported having this "Wandering Dream" all suffered sickness or bad luck afterwards, and it was likely the secret was hidden somewhere between the two versions of the environment here.
Wu Xiaoming fixed his eyes on a doorway. In the normal environment, it was a doorway. But in the darker version, there was a glowing red wooden beam blocking the way. So the question right now would be, if he could go through the doorway and pass the wooden beam, or would he be blocked.
He took a deep breath before taking a step forward. He walked through the doorway, and was only inches away from the red wooden beam. He took another step, and the wooden beam simply shifted out of the way. Yes, it shifted - it was quite simple, really, the hole it was in simply moved to the right, leaving no trace of its original position.
Wu Xiaoming darted rightward, reaching his hand at the wooden beam - simply out of curiosity. Under the light from the lantern, his fingers and palm got into contact with the cold, slightly rotten and spongy wood. A trace of cold energy seeped into his skin and his muscles, attempting to infect more of his body but was automatically pushed back and consumed by the Qi flowing in his body.
"No! Don't!" Just a blink of an eye late, the voice of a man echoed among the walls.
Wu Xiaoming shot back to his original position, looking around trying to find the source of the voice.
Hurried footsteps of child-like feet brushed through the edge of the area lit up by the lantern. Wu Xiaoming raised the lantern and followed the footsteps, only to catch the very swift glance of a young child with long hair and in a red garb. He tried to follow the figure, but it just disappeared behind a crooked tree-like structure close to the edge of the lantern's ring of light.
"Don't follow her! " The same man's voice echoed through the walls: "Run!"
What responded to the plea of the voice was a string of giggles, sounding like those of a little girl.