Chapter 78: The Empty Floors
His mind felt somewhat fatigued because of it, but it also allowed him to reach the conclusion that the fourteenth floor posed absolutely no danger.
But that was very wrong.
Where were the bodies?
Why were there no corpses at all?
Forget about the people.
Perhaps they had not been home or perhaps they had been eaten by the Spider Chimera.
But what about the zombies?
According to Joo Joowon’s assumptions, the zombies upstairs should either still be trapped inside their apartments or have been killed by survivors.
After all, when he had been killing zombies downstairs, he had encountered other living people as well.
This proved that the proportion of humans who transformed into zombies was not nearly as high as he had imagined.
Many people had probably died for unclear reasons simply because the apocalypse game descended in the middle of the night.
Therefore, logically speaking, even if there were no people left on the fourteenth floor, there should at least be a few corpses remaining.
Yet the current fourteenth floor was far too clean.
It was so clean that it was as though nobody had ever lived there, even before the apocalypse began.
That was impossible!
Apartments in this neighborhood were in high demand.
Usually, within two or three days of one tenant moving out, another tenant would move in.
No matter what happened, it was impossible for an entire floor to remain vacant.
It was too strange.
Joo Joowon could not think of an answer, so he simply decided to go upstairs himself.
His search threads could not completely replace eyes.
They might fail to detect details that were obvious to ordinary vision.
Perhaps once he saw everything with his own eyes, he would find the answers to these questions.
The dim corridor made the already difficult to notice threads even harder to detect.
Joo Joowon looked around.
Because of the poor lighting, he could not see very clearly, so he switched on his flashlight.
The bright beam of light reflected off the smooth ceramic tiles.
Joo Joowon casually chose one apartment and walked inside.
With the spider silk now at his disposal, he no longer needed any additional tools to unlock doors.
After opening the door, he found that the furniture arrangement inside still carried signs of everyday life.
It was obvious that people had lived here before.
He looked around for a while but failed to spot anything unusual, so he moved on to another apartment.
The condition of this one was noticeably worse.
The owner had clearly been rather untidy,and one of the windows had been left open.
Rainwater had already soaked the table near the window, but apart from that, there was nothing particularly worth paying attention to.
He could only move on once again.
This time, Joo Joowon finally found some clues.
The apartment looked as though it had been ransacked by thieves.
Everything was in complete disarray.
It was obvious that two people living together had struggled violently after one of them turned into a zombie.
Unfortunately, there was very little inside the bedroom that could have been used as a weapon.
The only things scattered across the bed were several cosmetic bottles that had clearly been grabbed in panic during the struggle.
On the fresh light blue bedsheets was a large patch of dried reddish brown blood.
Apart from that, there was nothing.
No corpses.
No severed limbs or remains left behind.
Joo Joowon stepped closer to inspect it.
A foul stench immediately assaulted him.
Even with the helmet covering his face, he could easily imagine just how eye watering the smell would have been.
It was obvious that after being attacked by their partner, the other person had tried to resist but ultimately failed, which was why such a large amount of blood had been left behind on the bedsheets.
But where was the zombie that had killed them?
Players had no interest in zombie corpses after killing them.
As for other creatures, that seemed unlikely as well.
After all, one mountain could not hold two tigers.
If there really had been another boss nearby, the Spider Chimera would not have chased after him upstairs so recklessly and without hesitation.
After inspecting the entire floor, Joo Joowon controlled the search threads to continue scouting upward while he followed behind.
After repeating this process floor after floor, he discovered that every upper level shared the same strange situation.
There were neither human corpses nor zombie corpses anywhere to be found.
Yet in some places, traces of blood remained, clear evidence that people had been attacked.
Perhaps some of the blood belonged to zombies as well.
Joo Joowon simply could not distinguish the difference.
By the time he had finished checking every floor, a vague theory had already begun forming in his mind.
On the sixteenth floor, he even found two copper coins that could only have dropped from zombies, along with clear signs that someone had searched through the area for supplies.
This proved that there had originally been living survivors on the upper floors.
They had simply disappeared for reasons he could not yet understand.
On one floor, he even discovered that someone had cut open the security bars on a window and twisted bedsheets together into a rope hanging downward.
That was obviously a decision made after realizing that a boss monster was blocking the normal route of escape.
Joo Joowon returned to the twelfth floor and walked over to the enormous cocoons he had previously tossed into the corner.
He connected his silk thread to the spiral web structure and slowly began peeling apart the cocoon layer by layer.
Before long, he had dismantled enough of it to create an opening large enough for him to lean in and inspect the inside.
Joo Joowon shone the flashlight into the cocoon.
A human head floated silently in the green liquid, its unfocused eyes opened wide as they stared directly toward the entrance.
"...!"
Joo Joowon nearly dropped the flashlight from shock and almost threw it away on instinct.
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