Am I really hallucinating?

Chapter 673 Gray?

"So do you think if I turn the light off now, will she be able to move again?"

After a brief silence, Zheng Fan put forward a very creative idea.

"Mr. Illusion, our time is rather tight... probably." Lin Yilin wasn't very interested, but something seemed off when she mentioned the reason.

Because time and space within the illusionary realm are not completely synchronized with the outside world, the most significant difference is in the perceived time, making it difficult to even believe one's own heartbeat.

"Then forget it." Zheng Fan suddenly felt bored, mainly because he was going along with Binary Girl's wishes, and directly stomped on the female corpse's head and crushed it.

"Ugh..." A faint scream came from Zheng Fan's feet, but neither Zheng Fan nor Lin Yilin paid much attention to her anymore.

From the moment Zheng Fan turned on the light, Lin Yilin's eyes quickly took in everything in the room.

The simple, dark room, made of cement bricks, would normally have no other light source besides a single incandescent light bulb hanging from the ceiling.

The ceiling is very low, just over two meters high, so taller people can't even fully stretch out their bodies.

Staying in such a place year-round would undoubtedly be extremely depressing.

"It's very old. Is this the only condition the secret laboratory funded by the Modish family has?" Lin Yilin also noticed some of the instruments and equipment in the room and found that they were almost obsolete. With the passage of time and use, the signs of aging were quite obvious.

The whole place exuded a stereotypical and terrifying atmosphere, like an abandoned hospital, but the Modish family's secret experiments shouldn't look like this.

"These investors are practically betting their lives and their money on research projects. Surely there's no one making a profit in the middle?" Zheng Fan joked.

Of course, it was just a joke. If what they were seeing was real, then the Modish family must be out of their minds. Even a fool could see that there was something wrong with the conditions and the equipment.

Is it because of the illusory world?

“Most likely, but why such a stereotypical scene?” Zheng Fan said, casually pulling back the curtain of a bed next to him, only to find a corpse struggling and trembling inside. Zheng Fan, who had just pulled back the curtain, stared at the body.

Click.

The corpse was made to look like a corpse, and its mouth was sewn shut so that not a sound could be heard.

Lin Yilin didn't pay attention to Zheng Fan's commotion, and continued along the previous topic: "Based on my previous experience of being caught up in the earthquake illusion, the scenes in the illusion may also be pieced together from the strongest impressions and memories of many people who were caught up in it."

“For some people, this is what a laboratory should look like.” Zheng Fan poked his head into the gap in the ceiling and made a new discovery: what looked like a large, wriggling mass of flesh stuffed into the ceiling.

However, Zheng Fan didn't actually climb up to look; he simply stretched his neck out to look inside.

Suddenly, Zheng Fan's neck began to move violently, and a fierce fighting sound came from the ceiling.

"There's probably nothing of value here. Let's look elsewhere. I remember Jackson came in too. He doesn't seem to know anything about this place. The Prism Unit is indeed very complicated." Lin Yilin decided to leave this boring and depressing ward.

"Okay, just a moment." Zheng Fan's voice came from the ceiling, sounding somewhat different from his usual voice.

It turns out that he successfully strangled the lump of flesh blocking the ceiling with just his neck; he was incredibly powerful.

Zheng pulled his neck back and stretched it, even though he should have already stretched it out thoroughly.

Pushing open the door to the ward, a completely different scene unfolded before my eyes.

"A factory?" Lin Yilin spotted a common architectural scene in the Xixi Keke neighborhood. Rusty iron sheets, the smell of rusty metal mixed with the odor of mold, and even the slightest movement could easily stir up clouds of dust.

There are people moving around here.

Dressed in dirty clothes, they mechanically repeated their work, their precise yet stiff movements becoming an integral part of the place.

Do not……

I approached a little closer. Those moving things were indeed robots. Although their appearance was humanoid, easily triggering the uncanny valley effect, the metallic sheen, the assembly lines, the screws, and the creaking of the gears inside clearly identified them.

They didn't even notice Zheng Fan and Lin Yilin approaching.

"This is quite different from what we just had..." Lin Yilin said after confirming.

Moving from oppressive hospital wards to robotic factories? What is this trying to say?
Zheng Fan observed for a while, then suddenly reached out and, in the blink of an eye, finished all the work the robots were doing. The robots repeated the same actions several times before belatedly realizing that their work was complete and that they no longer needed to work.

They remained frozen for a long time, most of them seemingly stuck and crashing on the spot.

Until one of the most dilapidated robots turned around, stood blankly in front of Zheng Fan, and stretched out its hand...

Bang!
Its outstretched hand fell apart, not because of Zheng Fan's actions, but because it seemed to have truly been overwhelmed by the burden at this point.

A key fell out from among the shattered parts.

"No, give me something better, I don't need this." Zheng Fan picked up the dull gray key, not very happy.

But the robot clearly couldn't understand this, and it stopped moving.

"It seems that some key was directly cracked by Mr. Illusion in a simple and brutal way." Lin Yilin walked over, reached out to take the key and examined it: "Since he's willing to solve our puzzles instead of just attacking us, this illusionary world seems quite friendly..."

Unfortunately, nothing could be seen on the key, so Lin Yilin could only put it away for the time being.

After leaving the factory through the factory gate, the scene transition wasn't as abrupt this time; they found themselves directly on the street.

"The streets of the grey neighborhood."

As for why Lin Yilin could immediately tell that this was a scene from a gray neighborhood, it was naturally because of the corpses dressed in the uniforms of the Bureau of Public Security scattered all over the ground.

“Gray scale… characteristics… gray neighborhood? Is this place meant to represent a gray neighborhood?” With three scenes and the name “Gray Scale Project”, Lin Yilin had already grasped something.

Any description of color properties here is absolutely not without reason.

But why a gray world?

The gray world is just a concept proposed by Dadu, referring to areas that are essentially part of the white world but are divided into regions as a buffer layer.

However, due to the large influx of people and the long historical accumulation of the area, the gray neighborhoods have gradually developed into what they are today.

Normally, it is still part of the white world, just not within the protection of some kind of system in the central part of the capital. To be precise, it is a protective net of the white world, but it has been tainted by too much black.

Was the experiment that took place behind that door for the sake of a gray world?

(End of this chapter)