…It's times like this that make you wonder, "What the Hell am I doing with my life?"
Just like most other wanderers, you too heard the rumors, which have been going around for several years by now. People speak of a level so dangerous, so terrifying, that few have ever experienced its horrors and made it out alive to tell the tale — but those who did were hailed as brave heroes.
Now, you find yourself in Level 14, where the entrance to the level is supposedly located. You have with you a backpack filled with all the essentials: a flashlight, a combat knife, a thermos of Almond Water, and a digital camera to capture evidence of visiting the level — though you aren't exactly sure how you'll be able to take clear photos while running.
After exploring Level 14 for some time, you eventually encounter a door with a faint exclamation-shaped print on it. It almost appears defaced, scratched up and faded like someone tried to remove it.
You pause to pull out your camera and snap a photo of the door.
Then, just to be sure of yourself, you check the level's database entry:
…one of the most common ways to enter this hallway can be found via walking through a door with a symbol of an exclamation mark painted upon it…
This has to be it, you think to yourself. This is the entrance. You still aren't entirely sure what you're up against, but all you know is that you need to prove to your friends that you are not a pussy. Is that worth risking your life? Probably not, but you feel like you've already come too far to back out now.
Placing your hand upon the door, you pause to take a deep breath, before finally mustering the courage to push it open.
You step into an eerily quiet darkness. Something about this immediately feels…wrong. Like, the Backrooms kind of wrong, amplified one hundred times.
Inhaling your first gasp of the stale air around you, your lungs quickly fill with dust, ash and spores, and your resulting coughing fit is the only disruption of the otherwise utter silence. The beginnings of an asthma attack take hold, so you hastily gulp down a swig of Almond Water to alleviate the symptoms before they worsen. You then cover the lower half of your face with your hoodie, taking more shallow breaths to prevent further irritation of your lungs. You chastise yourself for having forgotten to bring a face mask, one of the most important safety precautions for exploring levels.
You're left confused by the current state and appearance of the level, so you again check the entry to make sure you didn't miss anything:
…the first room one will walk into will be entirely encased in a reflective metal, and lit by a dim red glow…
Wherever you find yourself obviously doesn't match that description at all. There is no red light, or any light for that matter.
Is it possible that you're in the wrong level? No, that can't be, because you went through the exact entrance you were supposed to — except, not really, because it was faded.
Well, the only way to know for certain is by venturing deeper. You turn on your flashlight to illuminate whatever darkness it can, and proceed to traverse the desolate corridor.
Along your journey, the true extent of this level's disrepair and decay becomes increasingly apparent. You find an “EXIT” sign unceremoniously lying amongst the filth and rubble on the floor.
You eventually come to a turn in the hall and reach the area where, according to the level's database entry, entities are supposed to gather:
…in the starting room are two doors. one is locked upon entering, but entities can be heard gathering behind it, attempting to break free…
The door, however, is completely gone, leaving only a gaping dark doorway in its place. You can only hear dead silence, and breathe a sigh of relief knowing that no entities are lurking.
Suddenly, you're overwhelmed by a nauseating smell, gagging slightly as you finally notice that the floor behind the doorway is littered with piles of bones — belonging to humans and entities alike. Some still had bits of rotting flesh attached to them, being the source of the foul odor. Perhaps that means their deaths were only recent, but you don't want to ponder the implications of that. You quickly turn around and walk down the hall, before the smell can overwhelm you too strongly.
At the end of the hall, you stop dead in your tracks before a door.
This is it, the point of no return. The door to the hallway. Easily the most infamous part of the level, the one thing every wanderer supposedly dreads about it. You wonder whether it's really ten kilometers long just like the entry claims. But another, more logical part of you reasons that nobody could actually outrun entities for such a distance, nor be able to accurately measure said distance whilst doing so. Regardless, you'll soon find out for yourself once proceed through the door…
…But you find yourself hesitating. A nagging doubt, an anxiety, arises towards the possibility that this hallway somehow remained in its original form, that you still would yet experience the dangers of this level.
But you've already gotten this far, probably a lot farther than your friends believed you would. You are determined to prove them all wrong, so you resolve to press onward.
You feel your heart begin racing as you place your hand upon the door, taking a deep breath and bracing yourself for what awaited on the other side. You can already vividly imagine the red lights, the blaring sirens, the horde of monsters pursuing you.
You finally muster the courage to push the door open, and what you find absolutely shocks you.
You find…absolutely nothing. No, literally. All that awaits you on the other side is darkness, silence, stillness, desolation, and decay.
A chill runs down your spine as you glance upon the many faded deep-cut scrapes and claw marks scrawled across the walls, ceiling and floor. They look…desperate, ravenous — almost as if the entities had tried chewing through the walls, and perhaps even each other. You find yet more discarded bones, cracked open like fortune cookies and completely drained of marrow. The sight disturbs you, and you can't help but almost pity the entities that died within this level.
You slowly raise your flashlight, but its beam fails to pierce the darkness and reach the other end of the hall. You sigh as you begin moving forward, hoping you won't have to actually walk through ten kilometers of this.
Now that you know for certain that this level is devoid of immediate danger, you lower your guard and allow your mind to wanderer as you walk. Your first reaction is, of course, relief. But strangely, you then feel overcome by some sense of disappointment and melancholy. You had anticipated an adrenaline-filled near-death experience, and what you actually received is rather underwhelming in comparison. It is nothing like what everyone else said it was supposed to be.
Regardless of whether this truly was once the level you sought out, the fact of the matter remains that it is not any longer. It had been completely drained of all life, all soul — even for as unorthodox as that initial “life” had been in its original form. It was almost as if it had been…completely forgotten.
Traversing the dilapidated hall, you ponder the origin of its current state, formulating many theories. Perhaps it was consumed by The Broken, only for its digested remnants to be regurgitated. Perhaps the corruption of Liminality thoroughly rotted it from the inside out like a tooth cavity. Maybe some higher power responsible for maintaining the level suddenly quit their job without giving notice. Or maybe the lifespan of levels is more finite than you once believed. In the end, all returns to dust, and even the mightiest of sandcastles are washed away by the indiscriminate tide.
Darker theories arise as your thoughts spiral further. Perhaps this was your fault. You had a very specific expectation of what this level would be like, an expectation passed on from everyone who told you about it. Like a game of telephone, it had likely already been passed down and retold many times by the time it reached you, with so many details being forgotten or changed that it became unrecognizable from its true original form. And that great false expectation would be the very undoing of the level, which ultimately collapsed beneath the weight of it. If such a fate could apply to levels…what if it could also apply to you?
Your existential crisis is abruptly interrupted when your next footstep fails to meet any surface. The breath is stolen from your lungs as you stumble back, realizing you had almost fallen into a massive gaping pit. Shakily, you arise back to your feet after catching your breath and regaining your bearings. You proceed carefully through this next stretch of the hall, maneuvering around the sinkholes littering the floor. The increasing dimness of your dying flashlight makes the experience all the more stressful, but you eventually make it to the other side.
You find yourself beginning to question what even made this level so special to begin with. What truly elevated its status above other levels? There was nothing inherently unique about the location itself. Plenty of levels had red lights and hordes of entities chasing you, levels that were known of long before this one was discovered. Yet it was only this level that captivated people. Surely it wasn't just because of its name…right?
Though, come to think of it, that was how this level had come to be so well-known to begin with. As the story goes, a clumsy M.E.G. archivist made a typo when naming the level's entry, accidentally using an exclamation point instead of a number. By the time this mistake was noticed, it had already been published to the General Public Database for several weeks. Attempts to rename the file and move it to its proper place in the standard numbered list were met with irrational outrage from wanderers, who enjoyed the mystique behind the anomalous name. And so it remained, only growing in infamy.
The amount of debris littering the floor gradually decreases and clears up. It seems that the entities had only made it so far down the hall before completely dying off. Then, you see the light at the end of the tunnel. You almost feel surprised that you made it to the end. While it wasn't that long of a walk, it really did feel like you had spent hours here.
While this wasn't the experience you expected to have here, you're still somehow grateful it. There was still something significant to be taken away from it, in its own unique way, even if it wasn't what you initially thought.
You could not help but wonder if…sometimes change like the kind this level had undergone could be for the best. Whatever force was behind this transformation, perhaps it did so because the level was not really as profound as people made it out to be. And in the level's change, it now provided a lesson where there previously was none. After all, things shouldn't always remain the same forever.
You wonder what lies beyond the exit. In its current state, it likely wouldn't be able to send someone to a random level. But you decide not to think too hard on it. If there was anything you've learned from this experience, it's that change and the unknown are not always something to fear. And you realize that, perhaps, you really are as brave as you told your friends you were.
And so, you bravely step into the light…
