Apocalypse Star House Hoarding-Chapter 288

Yu Xi slowly approached the location of the handprint from within the crystal bubble, reaching out to wipe it gently. After confirming that the handprint was on the outside of the bubble, she let out a slight sigh of relief.
Waking up to find a blood-stained handprint outside the crystal bubble was already terrifying. But what was even worse would have been discovering that the handprint was imprinted on the inside.
Luckily, that was just her speculation. This station hadn’t yet reached such an insane level of difficulty.
After waking up, she found it impossible to go back to sleep. As usual, she took out her camping lantern and checked around the entire crystal bubble. After confirming there were no other issues, she carefully unsealed the bubble and crawled out.
After rinsing her mouth with mouthwash, she carried her camping lantern, sipping on her “Awakening Tea” while debating over the bloodstained handprint outside the bubble.
If it weren’t for the handprint, she wouldn’t have needed to climb out at all. She could have simply stored the bubble away in her spatial gate. But now, with a bloodstained handprint on it, should she store it or leave it out?
If she left it, what if more strange things got attached to it later? Could she even bring herself to crawl back in and sleep tonight?
Her obsessive-compulsive tendencies kicked in. After staring at the handprint for a moment, she took out an array of cleaning supplies—camping lantern, disinfectant spray, long-handled brush, concentrated detergent—and started scrubbing.
For some reason, the handprint was particularly difficult to wash off. She switched between several detergents, finally resorting to the “Airborne Stain Removal Solution” she had stocked up on at the Fairy Tale Amusement Park station. After two rounds of cleaning, she managed to completely remove the bloodstain.
Finally, she used her spatial gate to direct warm water from her storage tank, rinsing the entire crystal bubble until it was spotlessly clean.
As soon as she stored the thoroughly cleaned crystal bubble into her spatial gate, her phone vibrated.
Notification: “Malicious Mark” has been dispelled. Tracking status lifted. Sanity value +0.5.
Yu Xi stared at the words “Malicious Mark” and felt a wave of discomfort. It seemed that the bloodstained handprint wasn’t just a simple imprint—it had a tracking function.
The entity from last night hadn’t attacked her, not because it didn’t want to, but because it couldn’t. The mark had been left so it could find her again today. Perhaps, if she had been marked and found a second time, it would have met the conditions to attack.
Now that the mark had been dispelled, the enemy had to start all over again.
This meant she couldn’t rest in the same place tonight—she needed to find a new location.
But for now, she had another pressing issue to deal with.
In horror stories, the protagonists always seemed to be preoccupied with solving mysteries and escaping danger, as if they had no other needs.
She wished things could be that simple. But even in this darkness, she couldn’t just take out her portable toilet and use it in the open. In the end, she released her treehouse, took care of her biological needs, and even took a quick five-minute combat shower.
As for food, she simply took out a tube of nutritional fluid.
This was her first time drinking nutritional fluid. It had a taste somewhat similar to probiotic drinks she had before. After finishing it, her previously empty stomach felt full. The idea that she wouldn’t feel hungry for the next three days still seemed a little unbelievable.
On the second day of being trapped in the dark, abandoned building, Yu Xi’s sanity value had recovered to 18. She opened the team chat and shared her experiences with the “Awakening Tea” and the “Malicious Mark,” exchanging information with her teammates.
She couldn’t just sit and wait for danger. Determined, she decided to start from the first floor and search the library building again.
**
The first floor was a large, high-ceilinged hall. Apart from the navigation desk in the center and some decorative rest areas around it, there were two doors on either side and a staircase leading upward.
She had checked these four doors yesterday. They seemed to be a staff lounge and a periodicals room. The desks, cabinets, and shelves inside—just like the upper floors—were empty, as if someone had cleared out all the books and documents before the building was sealed off.
Just like yesterday, the rooms were dim and eerily silent. Tables and chairs were overturned, and a thick layer of dust covered everything.
Yu Xi was even more meticulous than before. She shone her flashlight into every corner, taking extra precautions. If she spotted any abandoned objects, she refrained from touching them recklessly to avoid another unnecessary drop in sanity.
Since this was a library, it was inevitable that some books and documents would be left behind. She had tested it yesterday—anything that belonged in a library was fine. If she wanted to trigger a clue or a notification, she figured she should focus on items that didn’t belong in a library or seemed out of place.
With this strategy in mind, her second sweep was much more focused and efficient than the first.
The first floor had no issues.
The second and third floors were filled with small reading rooms, somewhat resembling classrooms. That was why she had initially mistaken the building for a school.
The corridors were just as long, dark, and eerie as before. On one side were reading rooms; on the other, a wall. The only windows were at either end of the hallway—large, European-style wooden-framed windows, sealed from the outside with gray bricks.
Since she was searching more carefully this time, she managed to find something on the second floor—inside the second reading room on the left. In the corner of a bookshelf, she spotted an old brooch.
The brooch was dark, rusted, and covered in dust, which was why she hadn’t noticed it before.
Prepared for any potential effects, she picked it up. It was a women’s sun-shaped brooch, with curved silver embellishments around the center, resembling sun rays.
The silver had completely tarnished, and there were several indentations in the center where gemstones had likely been embedded. Only one dull moonstone remained.
As she picked it up, the moonstone loosened and fell.
She wiped the dust off the silver embellishments beneath the stone and saw some words engraved there: “Illuminati.”
Taking the brooch didn’t lower her sanity or trigger any notifications, suggesting it was just an ordinary object. Yu Xi placed it back in the bookshelf’s corner and continued searching.
Further ahead, the opposite wall had burn marks, and the floor was littered with scorched, torn book pages. It seemed a small fire had once broken out here, but had been extinguished before it could spread.
She didn’t touch anything here. Yesterday, this area had caused her sanity to drop, though it hadn’t triggered any missions.
She concluded that this was simply a hazardous area with no real clues. While she was carefully scanning her surroundings for any other signs, a message popped up in the team chat.
The sender was Yu Zhenzhen, who ed that she had just gotten into a fight.
Yu Zhenzhen: “…Resources in this station are extremely scarce. Those travelers who saw us yesterday remembered which building we entered. Today, they thought they could outnumber us and take us down for our loot. Turns out, Ya Tong and I wiped them out instead! Ya Tong even got a station ticket—talk about delivery service!”
Yu Zhenzhen seemed quite pleased as she listed their spoils. Among them were items like “Awakening Tea” and, more notably, a puzzle piece.
She took a photo of the puzzle piece and sent it to the group chat.
The image loaded slowly, and by the time Yu Xi finished searching the reading room and was about to leave, the upload was finally completed.
The piece resembled a typical puzzle piece, but its overall shape was fan-like, with a smooth curved edge and two straight edges, each featuring a notched slot. This suggested that two other pieces could connect to it.
Judging from the approximately 120-degree angle of the fan shape, it would take two more pieces to form a complete circle.
One side of the puzzle piece was white, while the other was black. The black side faintly displayed the corner of some architectural design. On the white side, there were incomplete words: “Dark 2”. The character for “Dark” was fully visible, but the “2” was missing a portion due to the incomplete puzzle piece, though it was still recognizable.
Since this piece was a dropped item from defeated travelers and wasn’t categorized as a usable tool, Yu Zhenzhen and Ya Tong had carefully chosen it after some discussion.
Currently, the only information displayed on the phone regarding the puzzle piece was a notation “(1/3)”, with no additional prompts. They speculated that finding the other two pieces to complete the circular puzzle might reveal further clues.
Over on their side, the sun had already risen. As with the previous day, the sky was cloudy, with intermittent sunlight. Looking out the window, the campus was eerily quiet, devoid of any visible figures, giving off an oppressively tense atmosphere.
Since their methods of losing sanity differed from Yu Xi’s, they hadn’t received any similar recovery prompts overnight. It seemed that sanity-restoring items or tools had to be obtained through different means.
They also tested moving outside during the daytime and confirmed that their sanity levels didn’t drop. Thus, they planned to use the daylight hours to map out their exploration of the campus.
Before ending the conversation, Yu Zhenzhen reminded Yu Xi to be extra cautious. Since even her protective shield couldn’t prevent sanity loss, the threats here were clearly non-physical, their attacks silent and undetectable. While searching for clues was necessary, she had to proceed with utmost caution.
Yu Xi acknowledged the warning, put away her phone, and turned to leave the reading room when she suddenly felt a tremor.
It was as if an earthquake had struck—the entire building seemed to shake.
But unlike a normal earthquake, the shaking was limited to the structure itself. The tables, bookshelves, and cabinets inside remained completely still.
It felt as if she were inside a shell-like world, where only the outer layer was trembling while the inner world remained undisturbed.
The tremor lasted for about a minute before everything fell silent again. Staying alert, Yu Xi swept her flashlight across the room, bracing for any sudden supernatural attack.
When the beam of light passed over a bookshelf across from her, her gaze followed the movement—until it abruptly stopped.
Her breath caught.
She slowly stepped forward, flashlight in hand, and illuminated the bookshelf corner where the old sun-shaped brooch lay.
Not long ago, she had inspected this very brooch. She had accidentally knocked off the last remaining moonstone and wiped away the dust from the silver embellishments.
But now, the brooch lay there once more, covered in dust, with its last moonstone securely back in place.
A chill ran down her spine, and she felt her scalp tingle.
From the moment she had entered the room until now, she had been the only one inside. Her senses had been fully heightened, on alert for even the tiniest disturbances—so much so that she could have detected even a tiny insect flying past.
Yet, in that brief span of time, something had silently passed by her, unnoticed, and restored the brooch to its original state.
**
Stepping into the dark hallway, Yu Xi pulled out her phone to check her sanity value. It remained at 18.
She hadn’t been attacked, but she also hadn’t received any alerts.
Opening the team chat, she began typing out what had just happened. Before she could finish, someone else had already sent a message.
Xi Yuan: “An earthquake just happened! What the hell?! It woke me up!”
Since his time zone was five to six hours behind Yu Zhenzhen and Ya Tong’s, it was still dark on his side, and he had gone to bed later.
Ya Tong: “Same here! But it was really strange—the whole place shook, but none of the objects around me moved. It felt like…”
Ya Tong seemed to be searching for the right words to describe the sensation. Seeing this, Yu Xi deleted her unfinished message and completed the thought for her.
Yu Xi: “Like we were inside a shell-world, where only the shell was shaking while the inside remained unchanged. Right?”
Yu Zhenzhen: “Yes! Exactly! So creepy. Does this even count as an earthquake?”
Xi Yuan: “Definitely not an earthquake. Something else must be happening. By the way, where’s Lin Wu? He hasn’t checked in since yesterday.”
Yu Xi: “He should still be following up on his own investigation. But it’s been a while… it’s kind of concerning.”
Yu Zhenzhen: “Doesn’t Wu-ge have a few Holy Light Bombs? Even if they don’t work perfectly against everything here, they’re still better than nothing. He should be fine. This place is an A-rank station—it wouldn’t have enemies we have no means of dealing with.”
Ya Tong: “Whatever caused that tremor, it’s another clue. Today, we’re planning to track down some students here and ask them if this has ever happened before.”
After exchanging a few more quick messages, everyone returned to their respective tasks.
On the third and fourth floors, Yu Xi noticed more anomalies.
A chair had been moved. Since this area was a reading lounge, it was relatively open, and she distinctly remembered that when she passed through yesterday, there had been no obstacles in the center of the room. Now, a chair was positioned right in the middle of the walkway.
Other findings were similar—subtle changes in the arrangement of objects. The furniture seemed to have shifted slightly. Yet, bizarrely, everything was coated in dust, with no signs of dragging marks or fingerprints.
The strangeness of it all left her unsettled.
It felt as if what she was seeing now was the original state of the building, as though the structure was gradually reverting to its true form.
She felt like she was on the brink of realizing something—an elusive thought hovering just out of reach.
Two hours later, Xi Yuan sent another message.
Xi Yuan: “Guys, I need you to confirm something for me. Xiao Xi might not be able to test this on her side right now, but I just spoke with some of the local students here to gather intel about the tremors.
“They said this is the first time anything like this has ever happened. They’re scared too, but relieved that the buildings and furniture weren’t damaged.
“But as we talked, I realized something weird.”
The issue he pointed out was that the student he had spoken to had no recollection of the multiple cracks that had appeared in the library walls and floors yesterday.
The student was completely clueless, surprised even—he thought Xi Yuan was joking.
Xi Yuan initially assumed that this student hadn’t been to the library yesterday and simply hadn’t heard about what happened. However, he soon realized that none of the other students knew about the incident in the library either.
In the end, he took a few students directly to the library and led them to the floor where the anomalies had occurred yesterday. That was when something strange happened.
The previously cracked walls and floors were now completely intact. It wasn’t as if they had been repaired—it was as though the damage had never happened in the first place. There wasn’t a single trace left behind.
Yesterday, two incidents had occurred here. The tables and chairs had been knocked over and scattered due to the students pushing and shoving, and several chairs had even been broken. But now, every trace of disorder seemed to have been erased.
No, rather than being erased, it was as if everything had been restored.
As if—
Yu Xi: “Are you saying… time reset?”
Xi Yuan: “Exactly. That’s what I’m guessing. You mentioned that when you forcefully broke through the wall yesterday, you received a notification: ‘Layer Boundary Damage +1.’ The world you’re in is very small, only the size of the library, which is why you could detect such an alert. But for the three of us, our dimensional world is much larger, so we didn’t notice this phenomenon before.
“But in reality, the size might not matter—we are all trapped. It’s not just a division between the real world, the surface world, and the inner world, but instead, we are in different stagnant time loops. Each of us is caught in a world where time loops within a certain segment. That tremor just now was the reset of time.”
Right after Xi Yuan sent that message, Yu Xi, Ya Tong, and Yu Zhenzhen all received notifications on their phones.
Yu Xi’s notification read:
“Congratulations! You have deciphered the Time-Locked Layer World. Reward obtained:
‘Life-Sustaining Coffee’ (Restores SAN at a rate of 1 per second, lasting for 3 seconds).
Puzzle Piece (1/3, Dark).
Hint: Continue exploring to find a way to transcend the layer boundary. Success will grant a hidden reward.”
Yu Xi: “Looks like Ya Tong and Zhenzhen don’t even need to verify it. The system already gave us the answer—Xi Yuan was right.”
Yu Zhenzhen: “Finally! We’ve made some mission progress!”
Ya Tong: “We now have three puzzle pieces. Looks like collecting them will be an important task moving forward.”
Xi Yuan, who, as a native resident, never received mission notifications: “…Can someone please tell me what’s actually going on?”
**
Twelve hours later, Yu Xi released her treehouse on the first floor, took care of her biological needs, and then put it away before heading to a reading lounge on the fifth floor.
This area had originally been a drink station with very few bookshelves. The ceiling was high, and the space was open, filled with short round tables and chairs without any partition walls, offering a broad field of vision.
During her previous exploration, she hadn’t triggered any SAN loss here, which was why she chose it as her resting spot for tonight.
She deployed her crystal bubble in the corner between a tall bookshelf and the wall, then braced it with a table from the outside. Just like last night, she donned an oxygen mask, wrapped herself in a down jacket, and crawled inside, sealing the bubble from within. Pulling out a pillow and a blanket, she lay down.
Her SAN had dropped by 2 points today, bringing it to 16.
However, today’s exploration had yielded some rewards. Aside from the puzzle piece obtained as a mission reward, she had found another piece.
The structure of this new puzzle piece was identical to the one Yu Zhenzhen had shared earlier, but the black side had a different design, and the white side bore a different set of text.
One piece had “Dark 2” written on its white side. The new piece had “032” on it.
Although neither set of characters was complete, they were still discernible. The two pieces didn’t fit together, and she couldn’t yet figure out what the numbers meant.
Lin Wu still hadn’t sent any messages. Yu Xi had no idea what was going on with him. She leaned against her pillow and opened their private chat, sending him a message.
A moment passed with no reply.
She put away her phone, put on her sleep mask, and closed her eyes.
The mask wasn’t just for comfort—it was to prevent her from waking up and seeing something she shouldn’t, an unexpected shock that could cause her SAN to drop.
She didn’t know how long she had been asleep when a faint scratching sound reached her ears. It sounded like something sharp scraping against wood.
The next second, Yu Xi woke up.
She tilted her head slightly, listening intently. The sound wasn’t a dream. Somewhere in the vast, empty space outside, something was indeed scratching at the wood. Maybe the floor. Maybe the bookshelf…
She didn’t remove her sleep mask. Instead, she kept her breathing steady and continued to listen carefully.
If yesterday’s pattern held, the entity outside could only leave a mark on its first visit and couldn’t attack her directly. But there was likely a condition for that limitation—yesterday, she had been asleep. If the entity realized she was awake this time, the situation might change.
The scratching sound stopped. Silence returned.
As she hesitated over whether to remove her mask, a chilling sensation crept over her. A new sound emerged—this time, the scraping was no longer on wood but on something gelatinous.
The outer layer of her crystal bubble was made of a gel-like material. The sound was extremely close, coming from directly above her head.
Her breathing hitched for just a fraction of a second.
Even that tiny change was noticed.
The scratching against the gel intensified as if whatever was outside had realized it had been detected. The sound grew sharper and more frantic, as though it was moments away from tearing through the barrier and lunging at her.
She had been found.
There was no point in pretending anymore. The crystal bubble had good defensive properties. No matter what that thing was, she decided to roll the bubble directly over it—either crushing it or forcing it away.
She yanked off her sleep mask, instantly retrieved her pillow and blanket, and stood up inside the bubble. Using the sound as her guide, she rolled the crystal bubble forward, forcefully crushing whatever was outside.
The moment she felt the bubble roll over something, a piercing, eerie screech echoed through the space. It wasn’t like any living creature she knew.
Her SAN dropped—first by 0.5, then by another 0.5.
Just as she was about to retrieve the “Life-Sustaining Coffee” to recover, a soft golden light suddenly flared up in the darkness.
She turned toward the glow.
Streams of pale golden light, like flowing water, shot toward her, wrapping around the entire crystal bubble.
Her SAN’s downward spiral stopped.
Outside the golden shield, countless sharp light spikes burst outward.
The entity shrieked again—this time in a much more agonized, desperate tone, as if it was making a last-ditch effort.
But soon, as the golden spikes exploded outward, the sound abruptly ceased, and the chilling presence vanished completely.
The pale golden light surrounding her bubble faded away, and the darkness returned.
She turned, looking through the transparent gel layer toward a certain direction.
Footsteps approached, accompanied by faint traces of golden light.
By that dim glow, she caught a glimpse of a pair of pale, slender fingers and a pair of fast-approaching, straight legs.
…
Thingyan
: Chapter 288 and 289 had been completely retranslated due to errors pointed out by concerned readers. So sorry about that 😅