Chapter 16 The Hidden Switch

"Heh... heh..." Feng Bujue's mouth twitched as he took out the magnet from his pocket and compared it to the small hole. He found that the size was just right.

He tried to insert the magnet, but it only went in about a third of the way when he felt a powerful magnetic force pulling from inside the round hole. It sucked the entire magnet in. The next second, the box opened...

It turned out that this small safe didn't need a password at all. The lock on the front was just a decoy; the real way to open it was to trigger a mechanism inside. Eighty percent of this safe was made of ordinary metal materials, but inside that small hole, there was a special, high-density magnetic ore, containing a locking wedge. The only tool that could unlock this mechanism was that piece of magnet.

"Constantly changing the puzzle-solving rules, huh... interesting..." Although Feng Bujue was a little annoyed, he quickly calmed down. The big box outside was opened with a password, but that didn't mean the small box inside had to be opened with a password as well. He could only blame himself for falling into the trap due to his fixed mindset.

Feng Bujue took out the [Cell Door Key to Underground 1F] from the small safe, then left Cell Six and headed for the stairs leading to the upper level.

After opening the black iron barred cell door, the key disappeared. The system prompt also sounded at this moment: [Current quest completed, main quest updated.]

The quest [Explore Underground 2F and open the door to the upper level] was checked off, and the next step appeared: [Proceed to Ground Floor 1F.]

"Huh?" Feng Bujue felt a little strange when he saw this quest. Logically speaking, the quest should have said something like "Explore Underground 1F and find a way to the ground," but instead, it simply said, "Proceed to Ground Floor 1F," as if...

"Could it be that I can go straight up?" Feng Bujue muttered.

He held the rusty long iron bar (which had long since reverted to its dilapidated quality) and cautiously walked forward along the corridor of Underground 1F. This floor was almost a mirror image of Underground 2F. Not far from the stairs were six cells, three on each side. However, the iron doors of the cells on this floor were different from those on the lower floor. There was no food delivery opening or small iron window, and there were no numbers painted on the doors. These six iron doors, apart from the keyhole and doorknob, were almost solid iron plates of unknown thickness, and it was impossible to see what was inside from the outside.

Feng Bujue tried to open each of these six doors, but they were all locked. He pressed his ear against the door panels to listen, but he couldn't hear any movement. He thought to himself, "It's unlikely that this entire floor of Underground 1F is just for show, which means... I'll have to come back later, won't I..."

While he was thinking, he had already reached the other end of the corridor, where a flight of stairs leading upwards appeared in front of him. Feng Bujue had calculated the length of the corridor based on his stride, and he was sure that Zero Cell should be directly below these stairs. However, his calculations didn't seem to have much significance other than to show that the corridors of Underground 1F and 2F were the same length.

The stairs in front of him were made of wood and looked very old. There were still many strange smells on the steps. The source of those smells might be food or excrement spilled during transport, or it might be blood and bodily fluids left behind when people were dragged up and down. Mixed together, it became a smell that, although not strong, was enough to make one nauseous.

Feng Bujue went up the steps. After turning once, he came to a wooden door. He reached out and grasped the doorknob, cautiously turning it. The door opened smoothly.

Behind the door was the ground floor. Standing on the stairs and looking out, he could see a room similar to a storage room. The walls were made of brick and wood, and the room was filled with many bulging burlap sacks. Along one wall, there were rows of round wooden wine barrels stacked three high.

The light in that room was even worse than in the underground. The only light source was a kerosene lamp placed on a wine barrel. Feng Bujue naturally wouldn't rashly walk into that dark environment. He first extended the iron bar in his hand into the door and tapped it up, down, left, and right a few times to make sure there were no traps that would be triggered by physical contact before stepping through the doorway.

[Current quest completed, main quest updated.] The system prompt sounded once again, and a new quest appeared: [Explore Ground Floor 1F, find the six keys of red, yellow, blue, black, white, and gray, then return to Underground 1F to open the six iron doors.]

Feng Bujue glanced at the quest and continued forward. The first thing he did was to take the kerosene lamp. In a situation where he couldn't use a flashlight, obtaining a light source was obviously a top priority.

He had only taken three steps forward when... bang! The door behind him slammed shut.

Feng Bujue turned around sharply, but all he could see was the closed door and his own shadow on the wall. He listened cautiously for more than ten seconds, but the only thing he could hear was suffocating silence.

At that moment, he made a decisive decision, took out the Vajra Bell, and activated its "Death Warning" effect.

For the next five minutes, anything that harbored hostility towards Feng Bujue and could potentially threaten his life would trigger a reaction from the Vajra Bell.

However, he waited about twenty seconds after activating the effect, but not a single ring sounded.

"Whoa... what's going on..." Feng Bujue muttered, "There's no wind in this place, and this door couldn't possibly have a spring-loaded closing hinge... How did it close without any external force?"

A normal person with a sense of fear would definitely be affected to some extent in this state. But Feng Bujue wasn't that kind of person... For him, even if a ghastly face suddenly appeared behind the door, it wouldn't have the slightest impact on his scare value. He only ever considered the threat to his survival value and ignored the existence of scare value.

So, as long as the Vajra Bell didn't ring, he had no worries.

He quickly walked up to the door and reached out to open it. Unexpectedly, he heard a system prompt: [This door has been sealed by a special force. Only those who possess the six-colored keys can open it.]

"Oh... so the system closed it." Feng Bujue breathed a sigh of relief. He immediately understood the meaning of the prompt. The door was closed to prevent players from returning to the underground after finding only one or two keys, thereby disrupting the game's progress.

"Well... while the Death Warning state is still active, I'll go out and scout around." Thinking this, Feng Bujue turned around, picked up the kerosene lamp, left the iron bar on the ground, and quickly walked towards the other door in the room.

Pushing the door open, he found himself in a dark corridor. The light from the kerosene lamp could only spread to a limited distance. By the way, the description of this kerosene lamp read: [Don't question how long it can burn. It will go out when it's supposed to.]

Unlike the two underground floors, the ground floor was basically built of brick and wood, with more rooms. The corridors had corners, and the rooms contained furniture; it looked like a residential house.

"A mad scientist built a dungeon under his own house, huh..." Feng Bujue thought, "Maybe only those six rooms on the second underground floor were used to imprison people, while the first underground floor was some kind of laboratory?"

He held the kerosene lamp and moved forward sideways. In order to make good use of the Death Warning state, he temporarily refrained from detailed exploration. Instead, he quickly passed through the corridor, opened the door of each room, leaned in, took a few steps, and then retreated to the next room...

During this process, what impressed Feng Bujue the most was the smell of this floor. For some reason, the air here seemed even worse than in those underground cells. The feeling was... this house was built right in the middle of a slaughterhouse and a chemical factory, and the windows were always open.

In this way, it took Feng Bujue more than three minutes to try all the rooms on the first floor. The Vajra Bell didn't ring even once. Although this didn't mean absolute safety, it at least indicated that there would be no danger from simply walking around in the mansion before triggering a new flag.

After exploring the entire floor, there were two places that Feng Bujue couldn't get through.

The first was the staircase leading to the second floor, which was blocked by a lump of meat. Yes, a lump of meat. It looked like a large meatball made of the flesh of many corpses. He didn't know what force held these things together, forming a wall of flesh that sealed off the staircase.

Since the Vajra Bell didn't ring, Feng Bujue recklessly approached the lump of meat and poked it a few times. At that time, the system voice prompted: [A barrier controlled by a spell, which appears to be made of accumulated corpses.]

The second place that couldn't be passed was the main door leading out of the house. Following the corridor, he could quickly reach it. That door looked like an ordinary wooden door, but when Feng Bujue reached for the doorknob, he received this system prompt: [Cannot be opened.]

These three words were perhaps the most common prompt that players faced when encountering doors in all horror puzzle games, and even Feng Bujue had no interest in complaining about it.

"Ah... An hour and a half has passed since I entered the script." After the Death Warning time ran out, Feng Bujue returned to the storage room connecting to the underground. "It feels like the game progress isn't even halfway done yet..." As he said this, he began to search.

He spent five minutes searching the storage room but found no useful items. The corners of the room were only filled with dust and cobwebs. The burlap sacks were filled with sand, and every row of wine barrels against the wall was empty.

Preliminary observation indicated that there were no keys in this storage room, and even if there were, they were hidden in a place that couldn't be found under normal circumstances. Some kind of clue was needed to guide him to their location.

So, Feng Bujue carried the kerosene lamp back to the corridor on the first floor and walked towards the next room.

Next door was a study, and the floor of the study was covered with a carpet. It wasn't an ordinary carpet. To put it figuratively... even the loom that made it would probably curse that it wasn't its product. When Feng Bujue stepped on it, he felt that this thing had already become plant-like. In this foul-smelling, dark air, it had degenerated into lush, moist lichen, like moss spreading all over the ground...

After entering the room, there were two alcoves on the wall to the left. The decorations that had been placed inside were gone. If flowers and plants had been placed inside, they would have died in this filthy, dirty air; if sacred statues had been placed inside, the saints had probably been dragged out by the demons, large and small, in the darkness, and dragged all the way to some evil abyss beneath the house...

Feng Bujue walked to the window and pulled open the curtains. Through the glass, he could only see thick darkness. Even if he held the kerosene lamp up to the window, it was useless. Trying to open the window was obviously useless, and smashing the glass with a pipe wrench only numbed his hand.

He pressed his face close to the windowsill and sniffed, but unfortunately, no air from outside leaked in. All he smelled was a musty smell, belonging to this mansion, a moldy stench similar to that emitted when oilcloth and rotten wood were mixed together.

"It seems that escaping the house isn't very likely." Feng Bujue muttered as he came to the desk in the center of the room.

The desk was very messy, with a pile of objects scattered haphazardly. Feng Bujue picked up each object one by one and looked at its properties, but they were all trash.

Only one of the desk's drawers was unopened. The other drawers had all been pulled out of the desk and were lying on the floor. The papers in the drawers were scattered haphazardly in the corners and under the desk. An ink bottle that had fallen from somewhere was also lying on the floor. The ink in the bottle had long since dried up, and some of the nearby papers were stained with ink. The carpet was splattered with a pool of ink stains.

After opening the only drawer that could be opened, Feng Bujue found a magnifying glass inside. He smiled at that moment, "Heh... if there was also a pipe or something, that would be cool."

Most people his age would think that someone who struck that pose was old-fashioned or chuuni. Only Feng Bujue firmly believed that holding a pipe in his mouth and a magnifying glass in his hand was cool. Perhaps this was a kind of romance that only belonged to him.

With the magnifying glass in hand, Feng Bujue became even more energetic. He held the kerosene lamp in one hand and the magnifying glass in the other, and turned to the side of the study. On that wall of the study, there was a bookcase, filled with books from top to bottom. Such a prop was undoubtedly tempting to Feng Bujue.

There was no time limit in this script. If no one stopped him, it was possible that Feng Bujue would stay in this room and read each book one by one. The only thing that could stop him was the connection time limit of the game pod. When the nerve connection time in reality exceeded the maximum limit for that day, Feng Bujue in the script would be forcibly logged off.

Fortunately, the system had done something very clever in the settings. On this bookshelf, 99% of the books were not translated. Not only were they not translated, but the system wouldn't even let the player see the words clearly. The words in each book, including the cover and the title on the side, were blurry.

This made Feng Bujue very unhappy because he was also quite interested in "deciphering." Since he read "The Dancing Men" in *Sherlock Holmes* in elementary school, he had been immersed in cipher games related to letters for at least half a year. The text in this script was seven or eight points similar to English, and he had originally been confident that he could decipher the language rules of this world, but now he had to give up.

Of course, there was also 1% of the books that the system had translated, which meant that they were hints that he was meant to read...

"*Advanced Alchemy*..." Feng Bujue looked at the book with the dark blue cover and read out the title, "Hmm... why do they want me to read this..." Before he could finish speaking, a piece of paper suddenly fell out from between the pages.

Feng Bujue bent down to pick up the piece of paper and held it up to the light to examine it. Only then did he realize that it wasn't a piece of paper, but a faded photograph.

The paper of the photograph had yellowed, and since it was originally a black and white photograph, the border and the middle looked the same color. In the photo, there were two boys who looked to be about ten years old, standing side by side facing the camera. The slightly shorter boy on the left was pressing his hand on the head of the boy on the right, and both of them were showing silly smiles. Even just through the photo, Feng Bujue seemed to be able to feel their simplicity and happiness.

Feng Bujue looked at the photo for a few seconds, not expecting that something would happen.

The next second, he re-entered the state he was in when watching the opening CG, and a video appeared and played before his eyes. This scene, like the photograph, was also faded, but at least it wasn't completely black and white.

A meadow, a pasture, with sparse fences. Some cattle, horses and poultry were leisurely pacing in the pasture, and a sheepdog was running past. After this harmonious scene, the camera panned horizontally, and a barn came into view. Beside the barn, not far away, stood a two-story house.

Feng Bujue had no doubt that the house in the video was the one he was in. Although he had only spent a little more than three minutes walking through the rooms on the first floor, the amount of information he had gathered in those seemingly casual minutes was absolutely enormous.

He estimated the area of the house, calculated the number of windows and doors, constructed the entire floor plan of the first floor in his mind, and even deduced whether the position of each room on the first floor overlapped with the position of each room in the underground corridor. He even considered whether there were secret rooms between the walls...

In short, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the floor plan of the first floor of this house was already in Feng Bujue's mind. Therefore, after seeing the external outline of the big house in this video, he quickly made a judgment.

Laughter, children's laughter.

The scene didn't cut into the house as Feng Bujue had expected, but continued to pan horizontally, coming to a lawn next to it. There was a swing there, and a blonde boy was sitting on the swing. A woman, who should be his mother, was helping him push the swing. The boy emitted a cheerful and hearty laugh, and the mother's face was also filled with a happy smile.

Under a tree not far from the swing, another little boy was sitting, a boy with brown hair. He was holding a book, watching with great interest. It was a book with a dark blue cover... obviously, it was the same book as *Advanced Alchemy*, which Feng Bujue had just found.

"Arthur, would you like to come and play for a while?" The mother turned her head and said to the boy sitting under the tree.

Feng Bujue didn't hear the child under the tree answer because the video stopped there. He returned to the state of the game in progress, and was once again in that study.

"Hmm... could it be..." Feng Bujue's first reaction after watching the CG was to reach out and grab a handful of his own hair.