WOA 5

World Of The Aberrant: Harvesting Apparitions Within The Nightmare

Chapter 5: The Restroom Rules

A violent wave of vertigo crashed over him once again, hitting harder than before. The entire world spun off its axis, twisting every color and sound until everything dissolved into blinding chaos. When the dizziness finally receded like an ebbing tide, Baiyu opened his eyes and found himself standing right back outside the pitch-black doorway of the café.

This time, that sickeningly sweet, mechanical female voice didn't greet him.

The entire storefront felt like a long-abandoned tomb, drowning in a suffocating, dead silence. Inside, the darkness was absolute—so thick he couldn't even see his own hand in front of his face. Even the air felt stagnant and congealed, carrying a faint stench of damp mildew laced with an unidentifiable, creeping rot. If not for Heiyan’s shared sight piercing through the pitch-black void, Baiyu would have been completely blind to the bleak desolation stretching out before him.

The café had reverted to its initial state of hollow stillness. Every note of background music had vanished, leaving not even a phantom echo of that eerie melody lingering in his ears. All the patrons—those stiff, puppet-like diners—along with the black-and-white uniformed staff, had disappeared without a trace. The space stood utterly deserted, leaving only the vague, shadowy outlines of tables and chairs looming in his dark-adapted vision like the silent ribs of some massive, dead beast.

Baiyu's heart thudded unevenly against his ribs—not out of panic, but from raw, honed survival instinct. This suffocating quiet was infinitely more unsettling than the earlier noise. He took a cautious step forward, testing the air to see if the space had shifted again.

Pat.

A distinct footstep echoed directly behind him. The sound was crystal clear—like bare, wet feet slapping against damp wooden floorboards, carrying a sickening, sticky squelch. Baiyu’s entire body locked tight, though he forced himself to keep his head facing strictly forward.

He took a few more slow, deliberate steps, treading as carefully as if walking across razor-thin ice.

Right on cue, the footsteps echoed behind him again. The cadence matched his stride down to the millisecond—neither faster nor slower, never drifting closer or falling behind, clinging to his back like an invisible shadow. Baiyu could practically feel an icy draft creeping up the nape of his neck, as though something was hovering inches behind his ear, breathing in dead silence.

Try to outrun it?

He killed the thought the second it surfaced. Whatever this was, raw speed wasn't going to shake it. It clung to him like a fresh curse—a silent passenger bound to him the moment he stepped into this twisted trap.

Going by the customer regulations, the thing shadowing me right now has to be that kid, Baiyu reasoned silently.

It was the hollow-eyed child that had asked him to hunt down its missing eyeballs. Which begged the question: where was the restroom?

Since accepting the child's plea and slipping on that red uniform had warped the space into this new layer, the "restroom" had to exist somewhere within this distorted pocket. The only catch was figuring out where it was hiding.

A sudden, reckless idea crossed his mind. Without turning his head an inch, he spoke casually into the suffocating darkness behind his shoulder. "Hey, little brat tailing me—do you even know where the restroom is where you dropped your eyeballs?"

"......"

Unsurprisingly, nothing answered. Only that wet, sticky pat-pat kept pacing him step for step.

Baiyu clicked his tongue in mild irritation.

Plenty of higher-tier Demons possessed sharp intellects, capable of holding twisted, cryptic conversations with humans. Baiyu had always prided himself on his knack for "negotiating" with anomalies, extracting fatal clues from seemingly meaningless chatter.

Yet the lesser apparitions manifested inside a Demon's nightmare domain operated differently. They lacked true sentience; their minds were hollowed down to basic, hardcoded scripts. Even their speech was just a pre-programmed loop.

Take the child ghost from earlier—asking him to find its eyeballs wasn't a genuine plea. It was a scripted "question trigger" planted by the overarching Demon to bait prey deeper into the snare. Because Baiyu's off-script question fell outside its rigid programming, it literally couldn't respond. It wasn't a thinking creature; it was a meat puppet executing a single line of code.

After sweeping nearly every inch of the darkened dining floor, Baiyu's eyes finally settled on the one place he hadn't properly inspected yet—the espresso bar. Even during his earlier loops through this nightmare, he had only glanced past it, keeping his focus locked on the mannequin-like waiters.

He stepped behind the counter. Everything back here was disturbingly spotless, clashing sharply with the tomb-like decay of the rest of the room. Resting neatly folded on the smooth countertop were two sets of uniforms, standing out sharply in Heiyan's dark-adapted vision. One was the male waiter's black suit; the other was the red uniform worn by the hostess at the front door.

Baiyu stood still, running through the logic.

According to the Customer Regulations, if a child begins following you, you are supposed to seek help from a red-uniformed employee. Given his current predicament, the most logical conclusion was that he needed to put the red uniform on himself—becoming the "red-uniformed staff" dictated by the rules.

Of course, there was another possibility: that the rule required finding an actual, living red-uniformed employee the moment the child latched onto him.

Still, trapped inside this deserted, pitch-black void, hunting down another employee was completely out of the question. His only play was to step into the role himself.

He picked up the red uniform. The fabric felt freezing cold against his fingers, slick with an unnatural, clammy dampness—as if it had just been fished out of a vat of ice water. A faint, metallic tang of blood drifted up into his nostrils, making him furrow his brow instinctively.

Without hesitating, he pulled the damp, freezing uniform over his clothes. The instant the fabric touched his skin, an indescribable chill shot straight to his core, as though something ice-cold was seeping directly through the threads and sinking into his flesh.

Creeeeeak—

A harsh, grating screech—like rusted iron hinges screaming in agony—shattered the dead silence of the café. Out of nowhere, a heavy doorway materialized directly out of the smooth, solid wall at the back of the room. Slowly, inch by inch, the door swung inward, exposing a throat of bottomless black. Stamped clearly across the wood were the twin silhouettes of a man and a woman, standing out starkly in his supernatural sight.

Baiyu walked up to the threshold. Taped carefully to the center of the door in the dark was a faded slip of paper, its edges curled and warped as if chewed away by years of damp rot.

Restroom Regulations:

1. The restroom # is safe.
2. There are no mirrors inside the restroom.
3. Under any circumstances, please ## use the last stall in the women's restroom.
4. Please ^do not turn on the restroom lights if you encounter danger.
5. If you encounter danger, trust the restroom janitor; they will protect you.
6. Please help me find my eyeballs.

The restroom rules were far shorter than the café guidelines, yet the paper was covered in frantic, ugly scratch-outs and scribbled edits. Those crossed-out strokes and jammed-in characters twisted across the page like screaming, distorted faces howling silently in the dark.

Baiyu stared hard at the paper, channeling Heiyan's power into his eyes. Instantly, the doctored text began to vibrate violently, as if tugged by invisible threads. He could feel a wave of suffocating malice trying to force those falsified rules straight into his brain.

Yet Heiyan's power sliced through the illusion like a surgical scalpel. Before his eyes, the fake ink peeled away layer by layer, exposing the raw, twisted truth hidden beneath.

"Rule 1: The restroom is NOT safe," Baiyu corrected silently. The crossed-out character for "not" burned brightly in his vision like a flare.

"Rule 3: Under any circumstances, do NOT use the last stall in the men's restroom."

"Rule 4: Turn ON the restroom lights if you encounter danger." Someone had deliberately wedged the word "not" into the sentence.

"And..." Baiyu's gaze dropped to the final line. That sentence—"Please help me find my eyeballs"—bore zero scratch marks, yet it stuck out like a sore thumb. It didn't read like a rule at all; it sounded like a desperate plea... or a deeper, deadlier lure.

Was the person who wrote the rules the same one who tampered with them? Baiyu chewed on the thought. He wasn't referring to the overarching Demon, of course, but whoever the "me" in that final line was. Even without Heiyan's sight, the sheer jarring weirdness of that sixth entry was impossible to miss.

Why was it added? And who wrote it?

He remembered that he had only crossed into this restroom dimension after agreeing to the child's request and putting on the red uniform. Could the "me" begging for its eyeballs on the paper be that very child? The silent little shadow still clinging to his heels? Could that child actually be a trapped victim—a genuine soul tangled inside the rules, crying out for help?

Baiyu pushed open the door to the men's restroom first.

The hinges shrieked in protest. In his mind, since the corrected rules made zero mention of the women's restroom, there was likely nothing critical hidden inside—no reason to waste time exploring dead ends. He needed to keep his focus locked strictly on the zones flagged by the warnings.

Inside, a dying incandescent bulb dangled from the ceiling, casting a pale, sickly glare over the room. The light sputtered erratic, strobing violently between blinding glare and pitch-black shadow—like the uneven, ragged breathing of a dying lung, making the entire room feel unstable and alive.

Cold, bluish-green tiles lined the walls and floor, looking grim and bruised under the strobing light, as if soaked in something foul.

Drip... drop... drip...

A faint, rhythmic sound of liquid hitting tile echoed from somewhere deep inside. Aside from that slow, maddening drip, the restroom was dead silent.

Above the row of sinks, where a long mirror should have hung, there was only bare, freezing concrete. That empty space radiated an intense, unsettling wrongness, as if something vital had been violently ripped off the wall.

In the furthest, darkest corner of the room, Baiyu spotted a filthy plastic bucket holding an upright mop. The wooden handle was black with rot, and the frayed cloth strands were caked in thick grime—yet looking closer, he could see a dark, ominous crimson seeping up from beneath the filth.

Just as he stepped forward to inspect it, heavy, deliberate footsteps sounded from behind him.

Unlike the child's light, wet pat-pat, these steps were slow, dragging, and heavy. Something else—something much larger—was closing in.

"Young man, what are you doing in here?"

A raspy, ancient voice grated from behind him, sounding like dry, rotting wood scraping together.

Baiyu turned around slowly.

The child that had been glued to his heels was gone. Standing in its place was a white-haired old man draped in a baggy, faded blue janitor's uniform, reeking of cheap bleach mixed with the sweet, sickening stench of rotting meat.

Deep, craggy wrinkles carved across the old man's face like crumpled parchment. Sunk deep inside dark, hollow sockets were two cloudy, milky eyeballs—looking like dusty glass marbles—staring blankly straight at him. Despite his frail, withered frame, an unnatural, suffocating aura clung to his skin.

The old janitor didn't flinch when Baiyu turned; his milky eyes simply stayed locked onto Baiyu's face, unblinking. "Sigh... ever since this place was abandoned, no living soul has stepped foot in here for a mighty long time," he wheezed. "Didn't expect to run into someone today. Young man, take my advice and leave while you still can. This place... it ain't clean."

Shuffling stiffly past Baiyu, the old man limped toward the corner bucket and gripped the rotting mop handle.

The wood let out a sharp creak, as if groaning in protest, yet the janitor ignored it, tightening his gnarled hands around the shaft to begin mopping.

Baiyu kept his eyes glued to every twitch of the old man's body. Struggling to read any hostile intent, he watched the janitor methodically scrub the floor like any ordinary worker. The man looked utterly out of place in this nightmare—or perhaps he was simply part of the nightmare's architecture itself. Looking closer, even the mop in his hands screamed wrongness.

Baiyu saw it clearly: thick, bright crimson blood was dripping steadily from the frayed mop head onto the bluish tiles. Yet the horrifying part wasn't the blood—it was that the instant each drop struck the floor, it vanished into thin air, leaving behind zero stain, zero smear, not even a wet sheen. The tiles remained pristine and cold, as if untouched.

The janitor paid zero mind to the impossible phenomenon. With dead, glassy eyes, he dragged the mop back and forth in a slow, hypnotic rhythm, producing a dry, grating hiss-hiss against the tile.

Baiyu stood completely still, watching patiently without interrupting. Inside this cursed restroom, one man mopped invisible blood while the other watched in dead silence—a bizarrely calm tableau masking razor-sharp, suffocating tension.

"Excuse me, step aside," the janitor rasped, working the mop right up to the tips of Baiyu's shoes as he tilted his withered head up.

It was the closest Baiyu had gotten to the old man's face. Under the strobing ceiling bulb, those cloudy eyeballs looked loose inside their sunken sockets, as if they might pop out and roll across the floor at any second. Deep, knife-like creases carved his sagging skin into stiff, leathery slabs covered in dark liver spots—the spitting image of a waterlogged corpse eaten away by time and rot. The choking stench of decay and bleach washed over Baiyu in a thick wave.

For a few agonizing seconds, their eyes locked. To Baiyu, those seconds stretched into an eternity. There was no hatred in the old man's gaze, nor any warmth—just a bottomless, dead void threatening to suck his very soul straight out of his chest.

Baiyu's heart hammered furiously against his ribs. Forcing his voice steady, he replied, "Sure."

"Thank you," the janitor muttered mechanically, resuming his slow, rhythmic mopping.

Baiyu stepped two paces back, clearing the path. The old man's head twitched slightly backward, his milky eyes sweeping over where Baiyu now stood before murmuring another hollow thanks and turning back to his work.

Silence fell over them once more, broken only by the dry hiss of the mop and that endless drip-drop from the pipes.

When the janitor finally reached the exit doorway, he pulled the mop upright and froze stiffly. Turning his cloudy gaze back toward Baiyu, he rasped, "Still not leaving, young man?"

He stood waiting by the door for a long, heavy beat, as if time itself had ground to a halt.

Baiyu didn't budge, meeting his dead stare calmly before giving a slow shake of his head.

The janitor didn't press him. A flicker of something unreadable flashed across his hollow eyes before vanishing back into dead stillness. Accepting Baiyu's choice, the old man's body began to dissolve right there in the doorway. His edges blurred like dry sand scattering in the wind—or dark ink bleeding into water—dissolving upward from his boots until nothing remained in the empty air.

THUD!

The instant the janitor vanished, the wooden mop clattered heavily onto the tiles with a sickening, hollow crack.

Immediately, the crimson blood soaked into the mop head stopped vanishing. Like a burst dam, a torrent of dark, thick gore exploded outward across the floor, flooding the cold blue tiles in a blinding wave of red. The metallic, nauseating stench of fresh slaughter instantly choked the air.

At that exact second, Heiyan's power inside Baiyu violently seized up, slammed by a wave of crushing interference.

His sharp night vision blurred instantly, swallowed whole as if a thick curtain of black fog had been thrown over his eyes.

Suddenly, something wet, cold, and round rolled right down across his cheek.

Pitch darkness slammed down over the room.

Stripped of his supernatural sight, Baiyu was plunged into total, suffocating blindness. Raising a trembling hand, he touched his cheek where the slimy sphere had rolled past. His fingers came away slick with thick, sticky mucus.

"Is this... blood?"

Bringing his trembling fingers to his nose, he sniffed cautiously. It wasn't ordinary blood—it reeked of rusted iron mixed with cold, foul slime, sending a violent wave of nausea straight to his skull.

The space around him began to warp and groan. Above the sinks, on that bare concrete wall, a massive mirror materialized out of thin air, gleaming dimly in the pitch-black dark like a portal into another dimension. At the very back of the restroom, the door to the final stall—the one whose rule had been tampered with to warn "DO NOT USE"—suddenly swung wide open on its own.

The pitch-black void inside gaped open like the jaws of a starving beast, silently inviting him in. A freezing draft, thick with the stench of grave rot, blew straight out from its depths.

Baiyu's mind raced—had he just walked straight into a deeper trap?

He was completely trapped inside the anomaly's suffocating dark, stripped of Heiyan's sight and robbed of all sense of direction. And there, straight ahead, the forbidden final stall yawned open like a bottomless abyss, waiting to swallow him alive.

Something was moving silently through the dark, creeping closer inch by inch. He could feel its freezing, suffocating malice wrapping around his skin, dragging him steadily toward the edge of the void.

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