The dark red carpet, spread on the ground, subtly matched the atmosphere, creating a sense of unease.
Hol was indeed feeling fear and apprehension now.
He looked at the stairs leading to the second level of the ancient tower, thinking, "Could this be another endless staircase like before?"
From the outside, it looked like fifty floors, but inside, no matter how much you climbed, you couldn't reach the top?
Never reaching the final floor?
Such a thought was terrifying, because if such a situation truly occurred, Hol would have no recourse but to break down.
Hol slowly explored his surroundings, silently, daring not to make any large movements, for fear of startling some terrifying entity and suddenly losing his life.
Therefore, Hol had been exploring the surroundings with extreme caution, exploring the interior of the ancient tower—he didn't know if it would be effective, if his caution would help him avoid being discovered and attacked by certain monsters, but undoubtedly, being so cautious was better than shouting and making noise here.
Caution and prudence had only benefits, no drawbacks.
As he slowly explored, when twenty minutes had passed according to his phone, Hol had preliminarily explored the first level of the ancient tower.
The first level of the ancient tower, apart from the bats encountered earlier, had no other living creatures.
However, there were quite a few locked rooms.
The ground was covered in dust, clearly indicating it had been uninhabited for a long time.
And among the locked rooms, the doors had different colors.
A room in front of Hol, its door seemed heavy, and strange, scribbled runes were carved on it, which were chilling to look at.
Hol looked left and right at these strange, scribbled runes, feeling that they might be important, but he couldn't decipher or understand what they meant, only feeling a chill in his heart.
And these heavy doors were all locked.
The colors also differed, with yellow, blue, and red.
According to Hol's observation, yellow doors were the most numerous, accounting for about eighty percent of the rooms, with eighty percent of the doors being yellow.
Blue doors were relatively rare, accounting for only about twenty percent of the rooms.
As for red doors, on this first level, there was only one room with a red door.
Yellow doors were most common, blue doors were rare, and red doors were the rarest.
Hol began to form this understanding.
And upon careful observation, the runes carved on the yellow doors were the fewest and simplest, while the runes on the blue doors were much more complex.
The red door had the most complex runes.
"The importance of these rooms must be different."
"Yellow doors are of the lowest importance, blue doors of medium importance, and red doors of the highest importance?"
"So the runes carved on the doors are different?"
Hol naturally made these deductions.
Although they were guesses, he felt they were quite close to reality.
The doors were locked, so it was evident that they could be opened upon finding the keys.
Hol searched the entire first level of the ancient tower but did not find any keys.
Therefore, he could only proceed upstairs.
The second level of the ancient tower also had dark red carpets, dusty corridors, and dim lighting.
Hol cautiously explored and found that the layout of this level was similar to the first, with some rooms, and the doors of these rooms were also of three colors: yellow, blue, and red.
The scarcity was still the same: most rooms had yellow doors, blue doors were rare, and there was still only one red door.
The only difference in layout from downstairs was the position of the rooms, which were not symmetrical to the rooms downstairs, unlike typical room layouts.
The rooms with red doors, blue doors, and yellow doors had no discernible pattern and were not in the same positions as the rooms downstairs.
"What do these doors signify?"
Thinking this, Hol first explored the stairs and found that they led up to a maximum of ten floors. Beyond the tenth floor, there were no more stairs to go up, and he didn't know what method would be required to reach the interior of the ancient tower on the eleventh floor and above.
When Hol went downstairs, a fact that somewhat reassured him was that the stairs were normal, leading down to the first floor and up to the tenth floor.
There were no obstacles between going up and down, no supernatural phenomena occurred; it was not the endless staircase from before.
Hol had been frightened by the endless staircase, and the thought of facing an unending staircase alone had filled him with dread. Fortunately, he did not have to face such a situation now.
The stairs inside this ancient tower were normal stairs.
With this understanding, Hol began to gather his courage and explore the spaces from the third to the tenth floors—he had only explored the entire first and second floors before, and then came up to test if the stairs were abnormal. He had not yet explored the spaces from the third to the tenth floors in detail.
Now that he had confirmed the stairs were not abnormal, Hol intended to re-explore these rooms.
He knew very well that regardless of who built this ancient tower, or why he had arrived here from the endless staircase, he had to leave this place and return to his original "world"—assuming this was already another world—and quickly uncover the secrets of this ancient tower.
He had already felt hungry in the endless staircase.
Now, several more hours had passed, and his hunger was even more severe.
If this continued, after a day of hunger, Hol felt that even with a gun in his hand, if he encountered danger, he would not be able to cope with it due to the negative effects of dizziness and extreme hunger.
If he went three days without food and water, he would starve to death here.
In this ancient tower, where no one knew him and he didn't know where he was.
The thought of such an outcome made Hol's urgency to explore the ancient tower outweigh his fear.
The prospect of starving to death made him disregard the risks and focus solely on exploring this ancient tower.
Time passed quickly.
Fifty minutes, almost an hour, had passed.
Even with Hol's careful searching, he had finally explored the first ten floors of the ancient tower—the stairs from the tenth to the eleventh floor were nowhere to be found, so he could only explore the first ten floors.
Fortunately, Hol discovered two sets of keys in corners on the ninth and sixth floors, respectively.
The discovery of these two sets of keys also relieved Hol—without keys to open the doors, he would have had to blast them open with his firearm. Not to mention the noise it would create, making him feel that he should avoid doing so unless absolutely necessary.
Most importantly, looking at the strange runes carved on these doors, Hol had a strange feeling that if he tried to force them open without keys, he would not succeed.
At that time, not only would he be unable to open the doors, but he might also be injured by the magic above.