Ch118.1 - The Cycle of Karma, What Goes Around Comes Around (32.1)

translator: baumkuchen editor: glitterypanda

Following that, was a continuous two minutes of the elevator moving.

A slight cool draft rushed in through the crack between the elevator doors, making a whooshing sound.

Their heightened sense of hearing made all the noise around them unbearably loud. The people in the elevator stood separate from one another, still as bronze statues.

Yuan Benshan grabbed Chi Xiaochi’s hand.

Chi Xiaochi didn’t reciprocate, but neither did he pull away.

Yuan Benshan also knew that his actions just now hadn’t been human at all, so he could only fish around for a conversation topic. “What’s wrong with Mister Gan?”

Chi Xiaochi’s voice was indifferent. “His nerves were too tense, so he fainted.”

Yuan Benshan said, “Just now...... Qiao Yun was already beyond saving, her internal organs had all been blown to pieces. If I hadn’t ended it quickly for her, she would have had to suffer another half hour of torment for no reason.”

Chi Xiaochi said, “I understand.”

Yuan Benshan tried to explain himself, “I was a little scared, it was subconscious. I didn’t mean to......”

Chi Xiaochi turned to look at him. His tone became a little less tense, and he even pulled his hand out of Yuan Benshan’s grasp and patted the back of his hand comfortingly. “I understand.”

However, hidden in the darkness, Chi Xiaochi’s face was utterly expressionless. His Yin-Yang eyes, covered by black coloured contacts, stared heavily at Yuan Benshan.

Yuan Benshan was utterly unaware of this. Hearing that Song Chunyang had forgiven him once again, he relaxed a little, straightening his back and waiting for the trial in the next room.

The next room, or also the last room, was where this nightmare would end.

The elevator slowly came to a stop. With it, the door opened automatically.

This time, the floor below their feet didn’t fall away, so they were able to walk smoothly out of the elevator and enter a spacious room of about 80 square metres.

Xu Jiayi, carrying Gan Tang on his back, was the last to step out of the elevator.

The moment after they stepped into the room, the door behind them slammed shut, locking off the route behind them.

As Chi Xiaochi looked around the room, his face slowly turned pale.

At first glance, it could be seen that the room was rectangular, like all the others before. The floor and walls were made entirely out of cement, but in the corners of the room, pointed metal objects resembling nozzles of spray guns were installed approximately every three centimetres, packed so densely together it would terrify a claustrophobe into breaking out into unbridled swearing.

Xu Jiayi put Gan Tang down, then swiped the tip of his finger over the nozzle of a spray gun. After placing it to his nose and taking a sniff, his expression changed slightly. “Smells like gasoline.”

Actually, even without him saying that, everyone there had smelled the faint scent of tar fumes upon stepping into the room.

It seemed, the spray guns were the source of that smell.

While Xu Jiayi was investigating the spray guns, Chi Xiaochi’s attention had already moved to another part of the room.

It was as if someone had been in the process of digging gas pipelines in the room, with multiple deep parallel ditches. Half of the floor had been completely dug up, leaving eight lonely parallel passages. Each pathway led straight to a vertical metal cabinet about the height of a person that was tightly pressed to a wall.

On each of the cabinets was a password panel. Looking at it from far away, it didn’t seem to have the usual number pad, but rather the 26 letters of the alphabet.

Pasted on the front doors of the eight metal cabinets, from left to right, were eight irregularly ordered letters in red tape.

S, A, C, R, I, F, E, L.

Chi Xiaochi then turned his gaze back towards the wall next to him.

Embedded in the wall was a giant glass panel, made of the same type of glass as the aquarium that had encaged Qiao Yun.

The glass panel was inlaid with a very complex “tangled line artwork”.

At the top of the installation, from left to right, were the capital letters A to Z.

Under each letter was a rivet, from which hung a long, thin brass chain.

Each of the 26 brass chains started from their own rivets, then extended downwards, crossing over one another. On the upper half of the picture were even embedded more than a hundred rivets. The thin chains wrapped around them, entangling around each other. It was the epitome of the idiom “twisted roots and gnarled branches”, making one’s eyes blur and head throb from just looking at it.

And in the middle of the installation, hung a translucent board, covering the 26 thin intertwined chains in the middle, making it so that they could only vaguely see their directions and outlines.

Most of the chains broke halfway. In the end, reaching out from beneath the translucent board were only eight brass chains, successfully reaching their destinations at the bottom of the picture.

Their endpoints were eight rivets. Similarly, below the rivets, were eight letters going from left to right.

S, A, C, R, I, F, E, L.

Meng Qian was a little puzzled. “What does he want us to do?”

As soon as he asked this, on the embedded glass panel, conveniently appeared a blood-red digital countdown.

The countdown showed fifteen minutes, and it had already started counting down.

Meng Qian immediately panicked. “What’s going on?!”

Yuan Benshan actually had some idea of what was going on, but he couldn’t be completely certain. He could only raise his voice to calm the group. “Stay calm and don’t panic, there should be some explanation.”

While the group was immersed in unease, Chi Xiaochi already had his hand raised and was drawing in the air, silently deriving the corresponding above letter from the bottom letters.

“Smart~”

The clown’s exaggerated laughter sounded simultaneously from all four corners of the room, in a 3D surround-sound effect, piercing to the point of making the group cover their ears with their hands.

“This level, is a very interesting level~”

The clown spoke in a sing-songy voice, “The rules of the game are very simple~ The eight letters on the bottom, correspond to certain eight letters on top. And on the eight cabinets, are the same eight letters......”

As he spoke, a dark, human-shaped figure with their hands drooping by their sides appeared in the corner of the room.

The group started.

Meng Qian ducked back, his voice harsh, “Who are you? Get out here!”

The human figure actually moved, but with its stiff joints yet overly lively movements, it looked like a puppet controlled by a drunken puppeteer.

Only when it got closer, was the group able to tell that it was really a human-shaped puppet of about the same height as a man.

The clown said cheerily, “Let me invite my employee, to show you the wrong way to play.”

The wooden “employee” skipped over to the glass panel. It placed a hand to its chin, acting like it was deep in thought, then clapped its hands together, as if it had already thought of something. Next, it danced over to the leftmost passage, and walked with exaggerated movements, like it was balancing on a tightrope, through the cement path that was wide enough for a person to walk through. It walked over to the metal cabinet that was marked with “S” and casually entered a Z into the password panel.

Unexpectedly, the lock opened with a beep.

The puppet, acting ecstatic, went straight in, locking the door behind it.

But in the next second, all of the spray guns near the S cabinet locked onto the S cabinet and began spewing raging flames. Orange tongues of flame licked wildly at the metal cabinet.

The metal had excellent thermal conductivity. In the beginning, the puppet who had failed to successfully crack the passcode started banging on the insides of the cabinet. After several seconds, the outsides of the cabinet were already burning red, becoming a veritable flaming casket.

The puppet let out a heartrending scream, and a few indents even appeared on the cabinet from its thumping.

But in the end, it was unable to escape the inferno.

After about two minutes of burning, the puppet in the cabinet finally fell completely silent.

The cabinet door opened automatically, and the puppet, burned beyond recognition and completely scorched black, fell out, straight into an already dug ditch to its side.

......As if it was a long-prepared grave.

Meng Qian gathered up his courage and went up to the ditch to take a look.

But with just that look, he let out a loud curse and pedaled backwards.

......At the bottom of the ditch lay a messy pile of burnt puppet corpses. Some of the puppets had had their eyelids burnt off, and were still staring sightlessly at the sky, clearly looking like they were dead, but unwilling to close their eyes.

And they didn’t know how many puppets before them had the clown used to perform similar tests.

The clown, however, seemed as if he’d just watched a spectacular play, rubbing his palms and laughing heartily. “Look, do you understand?!”

Who wouldn’t be able to understand.

This was nothing more than the “tangled lines puzzle” commonly seen in escape rooms.

Eight cabinets, corresponding to the eight letters at the bottom of the glass panel. They needed to connect the lines, and find the corresponding letter passcode for each of the cabinets.

Only if you got it right, could you survive.

If they got it wrong, and entered in the wrong password, they would still be able to enter the cabinet, but they would, like that puppet, be burned to death in the cabinet by the spray guns.

And what was worth noting was, just now, the clown had only turned on the spray guns by the S cabinet.

If they didn’t get into the cabinet in time, and the countdown ended, all of the spray guns would turn on at the same time——

Thinking about that hellish wave of flames, practically everyone shuddered.

“The rules of the game are like that~” The clown smiled, “I’ll give you all three little pointers~ Number one, in 15 minutes...... Oh, no, no, no, after 11 minutes and 21 seconds, all of the spray guns in the room will turn on; number two, only one person can hide in each cabinet, this is an ironclad rule, and it can’t be broken; number three, just like you saw, no matter what letter you enter, you can enter the cabinet, but the consequences of getting it wrong is up to you to bear, okay~”

“If you get through this room, you’ll be able to retrieve your temporarily stored items in the game room, as well as the presents I’ve prepared for you~ Have a good time, and I look forward to your next visit to my escape room——”

Finished speaking, the clown’s voice completely disappeared.

As the group waited to see if the clown was going to continue, Chi Xiaochi spoke, “Old Yuan.”

Yuan Benshan came back to himself, hurriedly walking over to Chi Xiaochi. “Don’t be afraid, we can slowly......”

Chi Xiaochi grabbed his hand and pulled it over to himself. He wrote two letters in his palm.

A——M.

Yuan Benshan stared at him in shock. “You......”

However, Chi Xiaochi didn’t pay any more attention to him, moving on to trace another path.

Yuan Benshan was both shocked and happy, but also a little doubtful. He went to stand before the glass panel, and started out from A, planning on deriving the answer all over again.

Chi Xiaochi didn’t expect him to believe him unconditionally, so he didn’t even frown, simply continuing to do his own thing.