Chapter 313: Seventy-Seventh Floor, Euros’s Flower Forest (1)
[23 hours 48 minutes until the rest period ends. Please take a rest.]
At some point during our idle chatter, the last climber finally cleared the seventy-sixth floor, and a countdown appeared. Only one day remained until the next all-climber floor.
On any other day, I wouldn’t have felt even the slightest bit of tension, but today was different. Watching the timer tick down stirred a strange feeling within me.
Is it because I saw a glimpse of the future?
My jumbled thoughts contained a faint nervousness, and I felt restless. Moreover, everyone seemed uneasy.
Ha Hee-Jeong seemed to feel it, too. Though she didn’t openly display it, the moment the clock began ticking, the atmosphere stiffened ever so slightly.
Of course, that heaviness didn’t last long. We simply stopped joking around and sat down at the dining table.
It was time to eat, and both of us were hungry. After all, Ha Hee-Jeong had come here right after waking up, and I had just completed a floor.
Although we ate our usual daily meals, something felt different today, now that there was one more person. It wasn’t just a numbers thing or the atmosphere; the situation itself was genuinely different.
Maybe we ordered too much?
Unlike me, who usually settled for simple meals, Ha Hee-Jeong enjoyed fine food. Since it was her first time sharing a meal with someone else in the downtime between floors, she had ordered all sorts of dishes.
The table was so packed that there wasn’t even room for any silverware. It felt a bit excessive, but it was certainly better than running short on food.