The cockroaches tumbling from the second cycle's ceiling had slipped past earlier players unnoticed, but Zhongli's sharp eye trailed them back to the first corridor, where a fallen photo frame glinted in the gloom.
He stooped to inspect it, noting the cracked glass and recalling its prior perch above the clock—a shift too deliberate to dismiss in this game's web of hints.
Flipping the frame, he found a prompt unlocking a zoom function for his view, a tool he grasped instantly as a key to piercing Silent Hill's veiled secrets.
"Magnify the field, clarify the shadows—this will unravel what's hidden," he murmured, his voice steady, sensing this discovery could tip the scales toward victory.
He swept the zoomed lens across the first corridor's every nook, confirming no further clues, then stepped into the third cycle, his patience a honed blade cutting through haste.
At the clock's base, near the wall's edge, his magnified gaze caught a fleeting line—as his fingertips run across my hand—a whisper of narrative sparking his curiosity.
Beneath the clock's dresser, another phrase flashed—I waited motionless—and Zhongli weighed them, two fragments of a puzzle he suspected stretched further still.
By the corridor's window, a third emerged—through the fog of fading consciousness—each snippet a thread he wove into a tapestry of meaning yet to fully form.
On the second corridor's ceiling, his lens snagged a fourth—I believe I heard a call—and as the bathroom door rattled with a baby's cry, a theory clicked into place.
"Infant wails, parallel worlds—could the bathroom bridge cycles?" he pondered, squinting at the door, envisioning the protagonist trapped across time's divide.
If this looping hall housed parallel realities, the cries might echo from a future self, the knocks from a past one—a hypothesis bolstered by Tartaglia's tales of later loops.
He entered the fourth cycle, a girl's ghost flickering past the bathroom, but his zoomed sweep found no new words, the trail cooling as he pressed forward.
The fifth cycle brought Lisa under the chandelier, a specter Zhongli met with unshaken calm—fearless after millennia, he strode past, her threat a known quantity he'd mastered.
In the sixth, he claimed the flashlight from the bathroom, the embryo wailing as the door shook from outside, reinforcing his sense of dual timelines clashing within these walls.
Not a ghost's pull, he reasoned—Lisa would've breached it—but a mortal hand, perhaps his own from another cycle, locked in this temporal tangle.
The seventh cycle yielded no new text despite his scrutiny, the four phrases—fingertips, motionless, fog, call—a riddle he couldn't yet crack, their purpose elusive.
Stepping into the eighth, the lights dimmed, high heels clicking behind, and Zhongli, defying Liam's expectations, spun around—only to meet Lisa's fatal lunge, his screen blacking out.
He peeled off the headset, unruffled, his turn-and-die a calculated test, not a flinch—proof to himself that retreat was no option, his composure a granite wall uncracked.
Liam sighed from the counter, "Zhongli's clarity's a locked vault," his system starved of the emotional flood Tartaglia's breakdowns had so freely spilled.
It wasn't barren—Zhongli's steady interest matched Tartaglia's common grit—but a mental collapse from this Geo sage could rival a day's haul from Liyue's masses.
His mind drifted to Mondstadt, a branch there ripe for Wendy's whimsy and Lumine's tears—better wool to shear than Nahida's unshakable wisdom, he mused.
Wendy, flighty and prone to sulks, and Silly Lumine, crumbling without her novels or sweets, promised a bounty of points if prodded just right.
Zhongli reset the game, his focus unbroken, diving back to the first cycle, his millennia of patience a slow grind against Silent Hill's cryptic core.
Each loop sharpened his theory—parallel selves, a fractured reality—and he traced the cockroaches again, the photo frame's zoom his torch in this dim, looping abyss.
Liam watched, his system purring softly, Zhongli's quiet resolve a steady drip—not the gush of panic, but a stream that might yet swell if the game's truth broke him.
The cafe thrummed, fifty machines alive with Mario's hops and Hu Tao's giggles, but Zhongli's silent hunt carved a deeper mark, a sage unyielding in digital shadow.
This wasn't just play—it was a duel of intellect, and Zhongli's calm march toward answers teased a payout Liam could only dream of cracking wide open.
***
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