They burst free of the collapsing courtroom—only to find not freedom, but a corridor that stretched without end.
Its walls glowed with a chalky gray sheen, like a blackboard scrubbed raw by countless erasers. Their footsteps echoed far too loudly, turning into a mocking rhythm, as if some unseen drummer was setting the beat.
Doors lined both sides of the hall, each plastered with bizarre labels:
The Glorious Age of Humanity: Trial Version
Global Apocalypse 1.0
Civilization Upgrade: Audit Failed
Do Not Open—Regret Guaranteed
"What… is this place?" a survivor whispered nervously.
Ethan stared at the doors, his lip twitching. "Looks like humanity's storage closet."
Against their better judgment, they pushed open the first door.
—Inside was a grotesque battlefield. Soldiers in uniforms from every era crouched not with rifles but with dice, hurling them across the ground. Explosions sounded like dice clattering; blood was nothing but red ink. The fallen were swiftly logged into ledgers and stamped: "Expenses Reimbursed."
"So that's the truth of human war," a survivor muttered with a dry laugh."Just one giant board game."
They slammed the door shut.
The second door nearly knocked them over. Behind it, politicians in suits gnawed on one another across a long table. Each bite dropped a slip of paper labeled Reform Proposal, which an invisible hand whisked away into a shredder.
"Democracy's evolutionary history," someone sneered."Or just the eternal cycle of eating and being eaten."
Door closed.
The third revealed classrooms of children, endlessly copying a single sentence: Work hard, and you can change your fate. But every hundred lines, the teacher struck it out in red ink, replacing it with: Fate has already changed you. The children's faces were blank, their eyelids nailed shut.
"Education's nightmare," Ethan whispered.
The corridor itself seemed to laugh at them. Each door was another absurd play, a black comedy staging humanity's cruelties as spectacle.
And worse—these weren't random. The deeper they went, the closer the scenes crawled toward their own memories, their own fears.
One door swung open to reveal countless duplicates of Ethan himself: some fleeing, some betraying their allies, some standing masked as the Void's preacher, shouting: "To live is to commit a crime!"
"Shut it!" Ethan roared, but his voice only echoed mockingly down the corridor, like an unseen audience was recording it for future reruns.
The survivors grew frantic. The hallway had no end. Every ten steps, fresh noises bled from behind the doors:
Infants' wails overlapping with old men's dying sighs.Crowds chanting "freedom" while chaining themselves tighter.A wedding where the rings exchanged were iron shackles.
"We're not traveling through history," one survivor murmured, face pale."We're being mocked by it."
And Ethan understood: this corridor wasn't an invention. It was a mirror of the Void—showing not fantasies, but humanity's own collective nightmares, curated into a grotesque exhibition.
That was more absurd than any trial. For here, the judge, jury, and audience weren't monsters. They were humanity itself.
Halfway down, glowing letters sprawled across the ceiling, garish as a circus marquee:"Welcome to the Museum of Human History: Nightmare Special Exhibition."
The font was cheerful, the colors cartoon-bright.
No one spoke. Only the hollow beat of footsteps echoed through the endless hall.