Chapter 145 Young Master Zhou Occupies the Bedroom

With a sense of foreboding, Zhou Zhiheng clicked on the merchant's introduction. The details page popped up with all sorts of colorful and fancy gadgets and themed battle outfits.

His fingertips, which were lightly tapping on the table, stopped abruptly.

Why did she buy all this stuff? Was it to please those random men?

Did Caesar corrupt her during the time they spent alone together?

Zhou Zhiheng was furious when he thought about how Caesar had taken her to that murky and chaotic place called the Labyrinth of Eros last time.

With a slight twitch of his fingertips, he was immediately surrounded by a circle of white light.

"Super Dimension Ledger, initiate correlation analysis, target: Ning Shuyin's shopping record. Speculate on the most likely related items she bought."

The hyper-dimensional ledger began its rapid calculations.

While waiting for the results, Zhou Zhiheng's mind kept flashing back to the faces of Situ Linchen, Luo Lan, and Caesar. Each one of them seemed incredibly irritating to him.

Big data swept across the ledger interface, eliminating one person after another from the network of relationships.

To Zhou Zhiheng's surprise, the "sensory tide" expense did not lead to one of the three men he had anticipated.

The ledger clearly shows a mailing address: "Institute of Ancient Civilizations".

And the person most closely associated with this expenditure was—Gu Lei.

Confidence level of speculation: 100%.

Zhou Zhiheng's face darkened. He immediately connected to the internal communication line.

Amanda.

"Chairman, what are your orders?" came the voice of his second personal assistant.

Where is Ning Shuyin now?

"Reporting to the Chairman, according to your special attention log, Ms. Ning entered the Yaoling Hotel, which is under your name, this morning. The Alliance Frontier Academic Forum is being held there today."

Academic forum?

The thought of the reasoning results of the hyperdimensional ledger—that annoying academic!—made Zhou Zhiheng completely restless.

“Arrange the aircraft,” he said, grabbing his coat from the back of his chair. “I need to get to the venue, right now.”

As night deepened, the forum's banquet was a lively affair.

Gu Lei and Su Qianqian didn't even go into the banquet hall. The intriguing puzzles were clearly more appealing to them than the exquisite food and insincere social interactions.

"The Gate of Connection manifests in the Heart of the Wood. The Heart of the Wood in this sentence should refer to the Tree of Wisdom in the hotel lobby." Su Qianqian, holding Gu Lei's hand, ran excitedly towards the hotel lobby.

The two found the next clue at the base of the tree trunk carved from crystal.

It is a "one-stroke drawing" puzzle lock.

“The rules are,” Gu Lei read with a slight smile as he explained the puzzle instructions on the lock, “the pen tip cannot leave the plane, and you can open the mechanism by passing through all the dots with no more than eight straight lines.”

"Let me try it." Su Qianqian picked up the electronic pen from the box with great interest.

Such a problem was extremely simple for the two of them. Gu Lei was extremely knowledgeable and could perform advanced mental arithmetic even with his eyes closed.

Su Qianqian can even use her perception to directly cheat.

But she didn't.

Using superpowers to play a treasure hunt can be ridiculously fast, but it will cause you to miss the romantic atmosphere of two people spending time together like ordinary people.

There are 81 dots on the box. They tried to draw them one by one, failing several times.

However, just as Gu Lei made the final stroke, his body swayed.

"What's wrong with you?" Su Qianqian noticed something was wrong.

“It’s nothing,” Gu Lei shook his head. “I’m probably just a little tired today and suddenly feel sleepy.”

"Something's not right." Su Qianqian also felt slightly dizzy. Her gaze immediately swept over the air vents of the hotel's central air conditioning system.

The clues were soon discovered at the base of the tree-shaped sculpture.

“The air here is polluted, we have to leave.” Su Qianqian made a quick decision, threw down the lock she was holding, and pulled Gu Lei toward the guest elevator.

The colorless and odorless hypnotic gas stopped dissipating after the two of them left.

On the hotel's rooftop, on the VIP helipad, Zhou Zhiheng strolled off the Phantom.

"She forged the organizer's information and sent it to that Ms. Su? Interesting."

His personal assistant, Amanda, had already sent over the message that had been intercepted from the hotel's public radio.

“Ancient Immortal’s poems?” Zhou Zhiheng’s purple eyes narrowed slightly. “Get me the surveillance footage and send all the puzzles she set up to the general manager’s office.”

The general manager's office at the Yaoling Hotel is extremely spacious.

At this moment, Zhou Zhiheng sat behind that geometric desk like a king.

The general manager stood respectfully to the side with his hands at his sides.

Within ten minutes, the security team delivered all the clues that Ning Shuyin had carefully laid out—small pieces of paper, password boxes, star map cards, riddle envelopes, and so on.

"Chairman, three leads have been taken away," the general manager reported. "According to the surveillance footage, it was Professor Gu Lei and Miss Su Qianqian."

"Hmm." Zhou Zhiheng responded casually, his gaze falling on the untouched puzzles in front of him.

"Where the light shines, the shadow follows." He picked up a glass cube that required adjusting the angle of the light to overlay the text.

The words were reflected on the glass desk: Love is trust. Please go to the top floor to stargaze.

He then picked up a red ribbon that looked like it was tied in a knot: "To untie this knot, force is not enough. Only by wrapping two loops together can you achieve the desired result."

With a series of interlocking movements, his beautiful fingers gracefully untied the knot.

Ning Shuyin's puzzles are all ingenious, interconnected, and full of romance.

For the next ten minutes, the only sounds in the office were the rustling of those gadgets being fiddled with and Zhou Zhiheng's occasional soft laughter.

The results of the star map code were deduced.

The palindromic structure hidden in the poem has been found.

The complex mechanical encryption box was disassembled under his slender fingertips.

Zhou Zhiheng's calculation and logical reasoning abilities were rigorously trained from a young age.

But he wasn't in a hurry to play.

He wanted to savor the experience slowly and find the end of the game, to discover what lay hidden within.

Finally, when he assembled a set of seventy-one tangram pieces into a specific nebula shape, a soft "click" sounded, and the hidden compartment in the center of the back panel popped open.

A magnetic card lay quietly inside.

Zhou Zhiheng stretched out his finger, picked up the card, and saw that it was a room key for the top-floor suite of this hotel.

"VIP001, Wings of the Purple Heron".

It turned out that she had gone to great lengths just to lead the person to that room.

Zhou Zhiheng's initial annoyance at the shopping record eased slightly.

But he immediately snorted in dissatisfaction. She actually put so much effort into someone else.

He stood up, twirled the room key between his fingers, and said, "Put all these things back where they were, and book another presidential suite in the villa's guest room area. Put the new room key in there."

He scrambled the 71-piece puzzle and threw it into the general manager's hands.

He then added, "All security on the rooftop will be removed tonight. I don't want anyone to disturb me."