Chapter 8 The Tenth Day

【Day Eight, all four test subjects except Dr. Andrei exhibited massive bleeding from their entire bodies. We had no choice but to send these four to the infirmary for emergency treatment.】

【Day Nine, Dr. Andrei, remaining in his cell, began using his excrement to draw bizarre symbols and unidentifiable writing on the walls. The amount he wrote was immense. By the time I filed this record today, he had practically covered the entire wall with feces.】

The record ended there, with no mention of Day Ten.

Clearly, Feng Bujue was currently experiencing “Day Ten”...

…………

One hour later.

"As expected, there's no exit here either..." Feng Bujue arrived at yet another corner of the map, encountering a dead end as expected.

"Brother Feng, what should we do now?" Igor's expression was worried. "We've already covered all four sides, all four corners of this floor... but there's no exit."

As Igor said, they had already walked a full circle along the perimeter of this floor...

Along the way, the two encountered three mutated subjects of the sleep experiment.

Speaking of which, those three were truly pitiful. When they encountered Jue-ge, they all thought they had met a "kindred spirit," so they didn't suspect anything. As a result, they were suddenly attacked and killed by someone; they truly died with their eyes wide open.

"There definitely is an exit." After a moment of thought, Feng Bujue said, "It's just that... 'certain guys' have deliberately hidden it."

The "certain guys" he was referring to were naturally the people from the Foundation.

Upon encountering the first nameless mutant, Feng Bujue noticed... the monster's "memory" had been modified; he clearly remembered various information, but he just couldn't remember where the exit was.

Later, the barefoot guy was in a similar situation... he could pinpoint his location using the coordinates he was in, thereby deducing the location of the archives, but he couldn't remember the location of the exit no matter what.

This kind of collective "specific memory loss" was clearly due to the interference of some higher-dimensional force.

Jue-ge initially suspected that it was the "system" that did it, but upon careful consideration, he felt it wasn't likely...

That's right, the Thriller Paradise system could indeed do similar things, but the system's methods were usually clever and subtle, without giving people such a clear sense of abruptness.

Later, when Feng Bujue thought of the sandbox theory, he understood... those guys who made the "interference," and those who created this crude sandbox... were the same people.

To put it in an analogy... the system was like an excellent writer, who could seamlessly fix some small bugs inadvertently left in the previous text while pushing the plot forward.

And the Foundation... was like a terrible reality show director, who would show what he wanted to do too deliberately, making the audience feel fake and helpless during the viewing process.

"You mean..." After listening to Jue-ge's words, Igor thought for a full ten seconds, then asked, "The exit has been disguised, so we can't see it even when we pass it?"

"Heh... a bunch of guys who can't even handle environmental details, asking them to disguise an exit... is a bit of a tall order." Feng Bujue laughed. "I think the actual situation is likely..." As he spoke, he turned his head to look at the corridor. "The exit here isn't on the four sides around us, but somewhere in the middle of this floor."

"This..." Igor thought for a moment, then slapped his forehead. "That's right! This is underground, the exit leads upwards, which means... the ceiling is the 'edge.'"

"I think..." Feng Bujue took over the other's words and said, "The exit here is probably something like an elevator..." He shrugged. "The reason we can't find the exit is actually very simple, because all the signs in the environment are gone. If those signs were still there, we could easily reach the exit." He paused. "Of course, if Nikolai and the others' memories hadn't been blocked by 'those guys', we could still leave relatively easily."

At the very moment Jue-ge said these words, suddenly...

Buzzing...

A series of buzzing sounds rang out.

Waves of invisible energy surged from all directions... and crisscrossed through the air.

"Oh? What are they planning to do?" Feng Bujue stared with dead fish eyes, muttering to himself, "Could it be that they want to..."

Whoosh—

Suddenly, a fist wind rose, interrupting Jue-ge's train of thought.

The person who launched the sudden attack... was none other than Igor!

"Hmph..." Feng Bujue snorted coldly, raising his arm to block, barely managing to stop the heavy punch that was aimed at his face.

However, although he protected his head, the bones of his forearm still couldn't withstand the heavy pressure and snapped in response.

"You're not even going to bother hiding it anymore, are you?" These words were not spoken to Igor, but to those "who were watching here."

On the other hand, Igor took advantage of the situation to pursue the attack, launching a fierce assault.

At this moment, this Soviet giant was completely different from before. The originally upright and simple Igor had instantly become a cold-faced, ruthless fighting machine.

"Ah... whatever." Feng Bujue retreated while fighting, his tone as relaxed as ever, "No matter how you guys deal with it, it's all the same to me."

Buzzing...

The buzzing sound was getting more and more urgent, and all the scenery was distorted, making people dizzy.

And Igor, like the surrounding scenery, had become like a reflection in the water, and his movement speed was affected as a result... becoming even slower.

"Clearly, the technology is not up to par, but you're still thinking of 'interfering excessively', this is the result." Feng Bujue looked at the distorted things around him and calmly commented.

Six or seven seconds later, Jue-ge's arm had already completely healed. Then, he used his speed advantage to move away from Igor. At the same time, he shouted loudly towards an empty space in the corridor, "You thought you could stay out of it and use me as an experimental specimen?" He smiled. "Heh... let's wait and see."

…………

Even though the space was distorted quite severely, it couldn't stop Feng Bujue's actions.

Five minutes later, Jue-ge made his way back to the door of the archives room he had been to before.

Then...

"In a way, this script is quite interesting..." Feng Bujue turned his back to the door of the archives room, sorted out his memories a little, and then said, "Rather than saying that the system is giving me a difficult problem, it's better to say that it's a three-way game between me, the system, and the Foundation..."

As he spoke, he took out that stack of documents from his pocket again.

"The system wants me to crack this sandbox and go out to make trouble for the Foundation, but it has to try its best to ensure that the inherent difficulty and principles of the nightmare script are not broken; the Foundation hopes to observe me and interfere with me, but it has to prevent me from noticing their existence." Feng Bujue thought in his heart, "However, just noticing the existence of the Foundation doesn't count as 'cracking the worldview'; at this stage, the system should have limited it - I have to 'get out' of here to complete the 'crack'."

While thinking, Feng Bujue had quickly reorganized the documents in his hand back to the state they were in when he took them out, the order was exactly the same.

"Right now, the Foundation's use of this 'emergency measure' shows that they have given up observing me and have changed their goal to 'preventing me from getting out'." Feng Bujue's thoughts had been straightened out and gradually became clear, "This change is equivalent to revealing a piece of information to me... that is - from the perspective of the Foundation's God's perspective... 'something that can help me get out' has already fallen into my hands."

At this time, Feng Bujue flipped through those documents again and scanned all the contents from beginning to end at an extremely fast speed.

"From this, it can be seen... I misunderstood the meaning of these documents from the beginning..." This time, after Jue-ge finished reading the files, he smiled, "Those documents that look very funny, and those documents related to the sleep experiment that I thought were useful... in essence, they are actually the same thing. Because my thinking is still limited to the so-called 'main line' and 'plot', I subconsciously classified these documents." He shook his head, "But in reality... I only need to use the purest puzzle-solving thinking to regard these six documents as the same set of information fragments."

Thinking of this, dozens of different pieces of information flashed chaotically in front of Jue-ge's eyes, each piece of information... like a thin spider silk, finally... converging into a huge, well-organized network.

"Meleye Mao Wa... Russian... Turn left..."

"The initial 'five' days... no abnormalities... that is, keep going forward... five intersections..."

"Day 'six'... the situation took a 'sudden turn' for the worse... turn... which way to turn?"

Feng Bujue hurried as he thought, stopped in place at this point, and looked to the left and right.

"In the following days... the prisoners sat 'back to back'..." He repeated this sentence and noticed that there were two doors facing each other on the right side within his sight, but there were none on the left side. "Hmm... I see..."

After confirming the direction to turn, Jue-ge continued forward.

"Day 'nine'... 'four' prisoners... 'two' of them... until day 'fourteen'..."

The next set of information was a little more difficult and required going to three intersections to investigate, finding the keywords indicated by four and two... that is, the number and arrangement of doors, and then walking the distance of fourteen intersections in the correct direction.

By analogy, after deciphering all the hints from the first two documents, Feng Bujue came to the door of a room.

He tried the metal door of this room, and the voice he got was - 【Old metal door, the lock is rusted, but it seems to be able to be broken open with brute force】

With this sentence, Jue-ge was relieved.

Now he doesn't need anyone to help him, he can easily kick the door open with one kick.

So, Jue-ge smoothly entered the room and found a 【key】 in the room.

The appearance of this item is a verification of his previous series of reasoning.

After Feng Bujue put the key in his pocket, he entered the next stage of deduction...

"The second experiment begins... that is, the second journey begins..."

"The experimental subjects and experimental methods used in this experiment will be adjusted so that we can obtain more diverse data... that is... this section will adopt completely new 'rules', which will be more complicated than the first section."

From a puzzle-solving perspective, every sentence in the experimental report can be interpreted as meaningful information.

"Fifteen death row inmates aged thirty to sixty... fifteen... ranging from thirty to sixty... um... even or odd?"

"Group one, five... the same as the first time... Group two, three... Groups three and four, two each... Groups five, six, and seven, one each..."

This time the puzzle was more complicated than the first section. Feng Bujue thought for a while, and although he had some assumptions, he didn't crack it.

However... he soon thought that the first puzzle was composed of "two documents", so this second section may also need to be combined with the second one; therefore, in addition to the large number of numbers and concepts provided by the second sleep experiment, Feng Bujue also took the "Resurrection Disk Project" into consideration...

"Water use changed to land use... change the use... change the way of operation... change... the concept?"

"Novgorod... circular... change the concept... put back into use..."

"Oh..." Jue-ge thought for a while, "That's how it is..."

When he turned the map he had drawn in his mind into a top-down plan, he immediately had a breakthrough.

This second puzzle is indeed very difficult... specifically, it is to regard this rectangular base, viewed from above, as a part of a circle. To put it figuratively... it's like a waffle.

Feng Bujue, who had walked around the edge of the base, naturally remembered that the number of horizontal corridors and vertical corridors in this base were odd and even, respectively.

Group one, five, the same as the first experiment... means that the first step is to walk five sections and move forward in the same direction as the first step of the first puzzle.

Next... don't look at Group Two, but continue to look at the situation in Group One...

"On the eighth day, a fight broke out in Group One, one person died, and the other four were injured to varying degrees." This is the next piece of information about Group One.

From this point on, the rules have changed. "Day" no longer refers to a section, but to a door. And "fight," "death," and "injury"... these words are all verified on the system voice that can be triggered on each closed door.

By analogy, according to this set of hints, regard the corridor as a part of the middle of the "circle", and act step by step clockwise.

Sometimes, there will also be a situation of "walking diagonally"; because players cannot walk through walls, walking diagonally is a combination of walking straight, turning, and walking straight three steps, but it is counted as one "section".

In short... when the second journey was over, Feng Bujue arrived at the door of a room 【that required a key to unlock】.

It took him a lot of time to get here; even for Jue-ge, it was quite difficult to compare the entire floor plan of the base in his mind, while also taking into account encrypted information conversion, reasoning and analysis...

"Phew..." After listening to the voice prompt, Jue-ge took a deep breath, then took out the key from his pocket and reached for the door lock...