The group gathered their things and prepared to return to the restaurant.
Room 1905 was indeed a good spot, and that Hallucination Monster must still have a lot of information it hadn't spilled, but on one hand, the room was too small to do much in, and on the other, this floor was not very stable. Although the elevator monster and the door-banging monster in room 1913 were gone, other rooms still harbored monsters.
This room had been holding back, looking to kill Shiller, so Shiller had to stay on guard. On the contrary, the restaurant controlled by Cobblepot was somewhat safer, even if Cobblepot might have been controlled. Colin was a scar in his heart, and Shiller had used room 1905 to help him come to terms with it, and he had leveraged Cobblepot's feelings for his mother to make him desperately want to leave the hotel, aligning their interests for the most part.
As long as the other party didn't flip the table to strong-arm Cobblepot, he would be momentarily trustworthy, so the restaurant would be a good stronghold. Shiller's plan needed to be carried out there.
On their way back, their luck finally improved a bit. The elevator wasn't activated by others, and there were no monsters blocking the path, so they returned to the restaurant relatively smoothly.
Upon entering the restaurant, Shiller immediately asked Cobblepot, "Now that the hotel is sealed off, where is the kitchen waste being thrown?"
"In the cold storage behind," Cobblepot replied. "There's nowhere to dispose of it, so we can only freeze it temporarily, but fortunately, there isn't too much of it. Otherwise, the restaurant would be overwhelmed by the trash."
Shiller looked up at the ceiling, which was still adorned with many spinal bones. He then looked at Cobblepot and asked, "Where did you put the spines you extracted from those people?"
"That was just an illusion," Cobblepot said. "But the bones from the ingredients are also stored in the cold storage, frozen. What are you planning to do?"
As Shiller walked towards the cold storage, he said, "Naturally, to recycle and avoid waste."
The other three followed Shiller into the cold storage and found that indeed some kitchen waste was piled up, but there were more unused food ingredients.
To be precise, there was little that could be utilized. As Shiller had mentioned before, the parts of the human body that are edible and taste good are pitifully few. If sharks are hardly edible, let alone fit for cooking, humans were even less so.
Shiller directed the other three to sort the ingredients by category—torsos, limbs, and heads—then he found a cutting machine in the kitchen. It resembled a handheld electric saw, but was more suited for cutting meat, typically used for frozen meat. Now it was just right for the job.
After temporarily moving these frozen meats to the outside cold fresh store, Shiller announced his plans. He said, "Cut off all the meat and keep the bones. Remember, do not break the bones, especially the limbs' bones; they're very important."
"Jerome, come out with me for a moment," he said.
The other two went to work, and Jerome followed Shiller out of the cold storage. They came to the restaurant's floor-to-ceiling windows, which followed the same rule: if you look at it out of the corner of your eye, you could see another hotel.
"How confident are you in using these two hotels as supports, with bones as materials, to construct a path to the top floor?" Shiller asked.
Jerome's eyes widened. Was this something a human could conceive of? Truly, you would be the envy of Satan.
But since he also lacked a moral bottom line, he soon began to contemplate seriously, and then shook his head, "If there were enough raw materials, constructing the simplest dual-triangle structure wouldn't be difficult, but there are two problems."
"Go on."
Jerome appreciated clients who were this straightforward. He took the papers he had used to write answers, and while drawing, he explained to Shiller, "If there were only one hotel, it would be extremely difficult due to the inability to construct, but if it's between two walls, it's much simpler."
"However, the first and most important problem is the insufficiency of materials in the cold storage. Even if you extracted all the bones, it wouldn't be enough. But I know that's basically the few things in the hotel that can be moved. Things like these chairs and chandeliers would disappear if thrown out the window."
Obviously, Jerome had tried before. Unfortunately, even the monsters couldn't shake the hotel itself, so using the hotel's things as materials was not feasible.
Of course, you could do like Shiller and wedge something in the window, but there really wasn't anything long enough; extending half a meter out of the window was the limit, and it wouldn't serve much purpose.
But there was an exception, which were the guests. The hotel couldn't protect the guests, so naturally, it couldn't control where part of the guests' bodies were. Therefore, it was feasible to use parts of the guests' bodies to construct stairs.
Unfortunately, flesh decayed too quickly. Shiller didn't want to build a one-time passageway; if he couldn't defeat those monsters on the rooftop, there would be no place to run later on, and he certainly wasn't going to make such a foolish move.
Bones were a good choice. On the one hand, human bones are quite strong, and on the other, there were ready materials in the restaurant. Shiller had guessed they wouldn't be enough, so he wasn't frustrated but asked, "So what's the second problem?"
"There's nothing to secure with," Jerome said. "Bones are different from wood and stone; they can't form mortise and tenon structures. Perhaps they could be tied with rope, but we don't have any rope, and I'm not sure if things like curtains could be taken out the window. I don't think so."
Jerome thought Shiller's idea of using part of the guests to build stairs was brilliant, but implementing it was extremely difficult since almost everything in the hotel couldn't be used outside the windows, and the hotel's ingredients had been processed to the point where tendons were mostly severed, making them useless as well.
But Shiller suddenly extended his hand in front of Jerome. He opened his hand and Jerome saw several screws lying there.
Jerome, who had previously dismantled a door plate, immediately recognized them as the screws used to fasten it. He looked at Shiller with some confusion, and Shiller said, "I think these might be useful. Maybe you can try it."
"But these are also from the hotel, right?" Jerome didn't continue further, the hotel rooms were indeed miraculous, changing locations by altering the door plates, meaning that the screws keeping the door plates in place must also be unique, possibly not ordinary screws.
"Then maybe the door plates can be used too," Jerome inferred.
Shiller shook his head and said, "Rooms are indispensable in a hotel; we can't provoke the behind-the-scenes manipulator."
Jerome thought about it and felt that made sense—they didn't need to anger the Behind-the-scenes Manipulator now, as they were not strong enough and didn't have the right, and everyone here cared about someone, but the monsters didn't.
Jerome decided to try Shiller's approach, but the problem of materials had yet to be resolved. Shiller simply sent a message to Peter, asking him to take advantage of his freedom to move around to measure various data of the hotel, and then have Jerome draw the plans.
He himself went to the entrance of the dining room, simultaneously taking out a white candle and a red candle.
Jerome, watching his actions, felt curious and asked, "What's the difference between these two candles?"
"They represent two different states of me."
"What's different?"
"The white one is the normal state; the red one is the morbid state."
"You're sicker than I thought."
"Thanks for the compliment."
Seeing him light a white candle, Jerome said, "Are you sure this so-called normal state can handle it? It seems the morbid state might be stronger."
But then Shiller also lit the red candle.
As both flames lit up, Jerome's brain froze for a moment.
While the wick was still unburnt, Shiller headed to the cookroom, borrowed back the umbrella he had given to Cobblepot earlier, then turned to Jerome and said, "I'll be going out in a bit. Keep an eye on the candles and don't speak to me."
Jerome instinctively stepped back and nodded; knowing that when that damned psychologist had come out before, Shiller had only warned him that the person had a bad temper, but now he wasn't allowed to speak at all—what sort of thing was going to come out?
Jerome didn't know, but Shiller paused for a moment then turned and went into the cookroom, fetched a large cargo trolley meant for transporting goods, and left the dining room with it.
Twenty minutes later, Shiller returned, the trolley nearly full. Jerome peered inside and saw quite a few familiar faces.
The man lying on the far left had only a small upper body left, the dangling cervical spine seemed to have been entwined with something, but now, there was nothing.
That was the guest from room 1903.
And indeed, there was a head with completely shattered features and a body in a suit—that was the guest from room 1901.
Further to the side, on top of the two of them was a seemingly unremarkable tracksuit corpse, but the eyeballs had detached from the sockets and lay peacefully on his chest; another person's arm had separated from the body, the parted area full of dense holes.
It seemed the 19th floor had been taken out in one sweep.
Jerome was curious, but remembering Shiller's earlier warning, he held back from asking. Shiller finished one trip and then went out again, returning with a trolley full of bodies each time.
After several trips, the corpses in the cold storage must have piled up, and Jerome noticed that with each return, the umbrella in Shiller's hand became a bit more transparent, eventually reaching an almost ghostly state.
He glanced at the almost complete design drawing, and when Shiller came in for who knows which time, he gestured an 'okay' sign in Shiller's visible angle.
Shiller blew out the two candles.
"Watching his expression gradually return to normal," Jerome said, "Who is that guy? Why do I feel like he wants to kill me?"
"Your feeling is correct; he's the most capable fighter among us," Shiller said, putting away the candles before adding, "You might be wondering how I got into the rooms without a door card..."
As he spoke, the black umbrella in his hand completely disappeared. He sighed and said, "I'll get Cobblepot another one, but not the real one, that's too dangerous."
Jerome vaguely remembered being told not to point the umbrella at people, so he asked, "What's on the umbrella face?"
"The fruits of your beloved's wisdom."
"...?"
"Oh, no." Shiller shook his head and said, "The umbrella face is just your beloved's cloak."