Rhodes Island does not exist.

“No wonder there hasn’t been a sound.” Lavender followed the doctor, stumbling along. “It’s too quiet here.”

"I heard there's a shop on the sixth floor, above the fifth floor," the professor asked. "Have you heard about it?"

“No, I have no such memory.” Lavender shook the vines on her body. “And even if there were shops, what difference would it make? The monsters here don’t need to eat.”

"Hmm?" The Doctor glanced back at Lavender. "But you said before that the Spiral Staircase was your stomach or something, and if it weren't for my bottle of Originium, I would have been eaten by you long ago... You said that, didn't you?"

“That kind of behavior isn’t eating,” Lavender said. “It’s just about giving yourself a sense of satisfaction.”

“What I mean by ‘no need to eat’ is that the supernatural beings do not need to rely on food to obtain energy to maintain their existence,” Lavender explained. “But apart from that, they will still eat if it is to satisfy their appetite.”

"I see." The doctor understood. "But if I had to put it simply, aren't all living things the same? Their interest in eating always outweighs their desires..."

"Tick."

A sudden, heavy sensation came from above my head.

It looked like water droplets were falling from above.

"Ok?"

The doctor subconsciously interrupted his speech and reached up to touch the top of his head.

Because he was dressed in a coat with a hood, he couldn't feel the moisture or temperature of the water droplets; he could only feel something hitting his head.

Hoods have some advantages, but also some disadvantages.

The advantage is that you don't need to bring an umbrella when you go out, so you won't be in a predicament even if it suddenly rains.

The downside is that you won't be able to see things falling from above.

But behind him was a strange creature covered in eyes, and obtaining this level of information was a piece of cake for her.

Intelligence should be utilized when necessary.

So when the professor felt the water droplets falling on his head, he didn't look up, but immediately asked the lavender behind him a question.

"Lavender, what was that thing that just landed on my head?"

It's water, saliva.

Lavender (quick answer).

Although he didn't know why, the doctor wasn't surprised by the lavender's answer; on the contrary, he thought it was perfectly reasonable.

that's true.

Having spent so much time traveling around Rhodes Island, this kind of thing had probably become second nature to him.

How could there possibly be a completely empty floor?

By now, almost every floor he had visited had something strange about it.

He had eliminated all the strange creatures on the fourth floor. The slugs on the eighth floor, despite their unsettling appearance, were surprisingly all good children. The ninth floor was too small to accommodate the strange creatures. As for the eleventh and twelfth floors, he had never even opened the doors.

Regardless of one's stance or whether or not one can communicate, the strange is still the strange. They are scattered like Rhodes Island's specialties, and one might encounter them unexpectedly.

So when he stepped into this incredibly quiet space, he already realized that the tranquility was extraordinary.

"It's coming down towards you," Lavender warned.

Perhaps to save time speaking, or perhaps because she felt it was unnecessary, Lavender did not tell the Doctor what was that thing hanging above his head dripping with saliva.

But the doctor understood that whatever it was, he shouldn't act rashly.

"understand!"

He lifted his feet and strode forward.

The back of his coat was lifted by the wind, and the Doctor made a short, instantaneous leap forward, carrying his pickaxe.

And right after he landed, a heavy thud came from the spot where he had been standing.

"Boom."

"It's heading towards you," the lavender warned again.

She was like a relentless alarm robot. Before the Doctor had even caught a glimpse of her bizarre appearance, Lavender had already sounded the alarm twice.

"understand!"

But the alarm was good, so the doctor still has to thank her.

"Whoosh-"

The dark figure moved with incredible speed. The moment the doctor made a dodge move, the strange creature had already rushed towards the doctor with a long gust of wind.

Thanks to the early warning from the lavender, we only missed out this time.

But it was precisely because they brushed past each other that the doctor was able to see the person's appearance.

That was a man.

Or rather, he is an oddity with the appearance of a middle-aged man.

It wore tattered and old clothes, and half of its head, like those of ordinary monsters, had turned into a muddy substance that drooped down the curve of its cheeks. Saliva dripped from the ulcerated corners of its mouth, hanging on the exposed white bone of its jaw.

It looks like the saliva that landed on the doctor's head earlier came from here.

"How should I put it? Although it had already been licked all over by those slugs when it was on the eighth floor..."

Looking at the strange sight before him, the doctor sighed inwardly.

"...But it's still disgusting after all."

Chapter 153, Chapter 152: The Flowers Fall, Helplessly

"Don't worry about it, it's just a common anomaly. Its brain has long since rotted away, and it has neither the ability to think for itself nor can it speak."

The lavender swayed its branches, its eyes following the words.

"You really do act like it's none of your business...!"

The doctor swung the pickaxe down, the heavy iron tip striking the man's grotesque back, forcing his entire body to bend and bow.

In that instant, the doctor seemed to hear the sound of something breaking.

"Because it didn't attack me, and I believe that for you, this is hardly a test, just a minor problem that you could easily solve," Lavender replied, her words logical and well-founded.

"If it could be solved so easily, it wouldn't be a minor problem!"

With a heavy press of his elbow on the back of the strange neck, the rotting middle-aged man finally lost his balance and began to writhe on the ground.

"The neck and spine should be broken by now." Looking down at the strange creature with a faint breath on the ground, the doctor flexed his wrists and muttered to himself.

“Even if the monster turns into mud, it can still move. But taking apart its bones isn’t very useful, is it?” Lavender said from behind.

As if in response to what Lavender had said, the strange creature, which had just been knocked to the ground by the Doctor breaking its bones, actually managed to stand up by its own two legs.

Although his entire upper body was hanging down strangely because his spine and cervical vertebrae were broken, he still managed to lunge at the doctor using only his upright legs and still mobile arms.

"Boom!"

This time, the doctor simply swung his pickaxe and smashed it on the head.

The head, which had already turned into a mushy mess, could not withstand such external force and shattered directly in the overflowing black paste, splattering all over the ground.

"So, what was that weirdo all about? Was he hanging on the ceiling above my head?" The doctor shook off the residue on his pickaxe, looked up at the spot where he had drooled earlier, and asked.

"It's less about being suspended and more about being hanging."

Lavender raised a vine and pointed to the ceiling. "You may not have noticed, but there's actually an iron hook there."

Following the lavender's limbs, which were connected to countless eyeballs, the doctor's gaze slid upwards.

“It really is.” The doctor looked closely and nodded. “There’s even half a rag hanging on the iron hook.”

“It was the fabric from that strange garment,” Lavender said. “He broke free of the garment on the hook and jumped down to where you were.”

"By the way, didn't you see him hanging up there a while ago?" The doctor turned around to look at the lavender, but gave up because he didn't know which eye to look at, and finally looked away.

"Yes." Lavender was extremely honest.

"Then why didn't you tell me then?" the doctor asked, frowning.

“Because at that time it looked like a dead thing,” Lavender replied. “It just hung there with its eyes closed and didn’t move at all. If you hadn’t happened to be standing right under it, it wouldn’t have even opened its eyes.”

“That makes sense…after all, there were no water stains on the ground before.” Thinking of this, the doctor nodded. “If he had been drooling since before that, there should have been traces on the ground.”

"In other words, you awakened it." Lavender's eyes turned to the headless monster lying motionless on the ground. "It opened its eyes because of your arrival."

"Why can't it be you?" The doctor poked the strange body with his pickaxe to make sure it wouldn't get up again.

“Of course it couldn’t be me.” Lavender swayed her branches. “You must have seen what happened just now. It wasn’t even interested in me. It didn’t even glance at me. It just kept chasing after you.”

"The reasons behind this are probably clear to you, given your knowledge of many complex matters."

She then added.

"Because you are a monster, and I am human." This was the only answer in the doctor's mind at that moment.

"I'm a monster and you're human? Perhaps so." Lavender's eyes darted around, three of them turning towards the Doctor. "But how will you prove you're not a monster?"

"Ok?"

This was the first time the doctor had ever heard such a question.

In fact, even he himself hadn't thought about this issue in detail.

Why don't I feel like I'm an oddball, but rather like a human being?

Strange, why?

What makes me feel this way?

“I apologize if my question has caused you to ponder this,” Lavender said, looking at the pensive Doctor. “But I don’t want you to slow down our journey because of it; that would be inefficient.”

"So what do you think?" The doctor looked up and posed the question to Lavender, who was slowly walking towards him.

"what?"

"When you asked that question, what were your thoughts? I'd like to hear your opinion." He looked intently into one of Lavender's eyes.

“I have no opinion, I was just saying it casually.” Lavender turned her eyes away from the Doctor and met his gaze with her other eyes. “Because I don’t have any profound intellectual attainments, and I don’t want to think about complicated things, so if you think my thoughts are strange, it’s probably just because I don’t have any memories.”

"You know what? I suddenly discovered a very strange feeling about you," the doctor said to Lavender.

"what?"

“Although neither of us has any memories, I always feel that we’ve known each other before.” His gaze traveled from her vines back to the branches, and then settled on her moving eyeballs. “What do you think?”

"I don't know." Lavender swayed her body. "I usually choose to keep quiet about things I don't know, and I usually choose not to comment on scenery I haven't seen before."

“I am just a weirdo who was born in a dark corner and grew up alone. Please don’t bother me with things that are beyond my understanding,” Lavender said. “Besides, our primary goal is to get out of here. You have already wasted too much time on trivial matters, which is quite inefficient.”

“But you raised the question first,” the PhD student said.

"The person who raises the question has no obligation to solve it. You can treat it as your own independent thinking, but don't elevate your independent behavior to the level of the collective. Okay, let's move on."

Chapter 154, Chapter 153: The Worldline of Love Between Two Wings

There was a blind spot in what just happened.

Walking onto the lower platform of the fifth-floor prison, the doctor began to speak.

"What?" Lavender asked.

"You said before that the strange thing was hanging on an iron hook, right?"

Although the two could no longer see the hook from their current position, the Doctor still symbolically pointed to the location where they had been before.

"Yes, what's the problem?" Lavender asked, puzzled.

"The iron hook was in a very remote location, and the monster couldn't have climbed it on its own without tools," the doctor said. "But it hung there all alone."

"You mean, someone else put it up there?" Lavender thought for a moment.

"Yes." The doctor nodded. "So there's probably something else in this prison, and judging from the fact that it was hanging on a hook but was in no danger, the person who did this was probably doing it for fun rather than with murderous intent."

"A very boring and inefficient activity," Lavender commented.

“Not everything is based on efficiency.” The doctor glanced back at the lavender. “I just mentioned the word ‘entertainment,’ and entertainment itself has little to do with efficiency.”

"Entertainment...what is entertainment?" Lavender asked.

"It's probably something that can help relieve loneliness and pass the time," the Doctor replied. "However, talking about entertainment on Rhodes Island might indeed be a bit unrealistic."

"...No one has been here for a long time."