As the blood filled the blanks in Poisson's equation, the muffled sound of gears turning suddenly came from the northwest corner.
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(Hua Jinyue's side...)
The sloping oak floorboards were transformed into 36 liftable heating panels, each inlaid with fragments of flame-scorched family photos.
Twelve funhouse mirrors are arranged radially, and distorted English letters are painted on the mirror surfaces with fluorescent paint. When the midday sun shines through the iron bars of the skylight, "MOTHER" will be distorted into "MONSTER".
There is an old-fashioned slide projector in the southeast corner, which plays the real-time surveillance of Ye Qingliu solving a problem in the basement in a loop. The image is refracted by the funhouse mirror into countless bleeding Ye Qingliu.
The vents were welded with barbed wire mesh, spewing out hot air mixed with chili powder every half hour. Seventy-two colors of crayons, each engraved with the date code of the Ye Group's acquisition, lay scattered along the wall.
The only drinking water device was a rusty bird-beak-shaped copper kettle with the water outlet sealed with wax and "The correct answer is in the mirror" written in lipstick on the body of the kettle.
Hua Jinyue must use crayons to complete her mother's torn face in a funhouse mirror. Each fragment corresponds to a math problem:
1. Face Outline: Use a red crayon to connect the numbered freckles to complete hundreds addition and subtraction.
2. Eye area: Convert the number of starbursts in the pupil into a multiplication equation.
3. Lip lines: Draw clock hands at corresponding angles according to the curvature of the lip lines.
Error penalties are escalated in a step-by-step manner:
First mistake: The heating plate at the corresponding position is heated to 60°C, burning the scabby welts on the soles of the feet.
Second mistake: A lace headband with thorns hung from the ceiling, wrapped around her slender neck, which looked like her mother's.
-Three mistakes: The slide projector switches modes, magnifying the scene of Ye Qingliu being punished ten times and projecting it onto the skin.
At this time, Hua Jinyue was kneeling on the seventh heating plate. The four-year-old girl's feet had been burned and had blisters in the shape of a checkerboard.
She was clutching a broken light blue crayon, trying to convert the number of starbursts in her mother's left eye into "3×4".
As she wrote "12" as a mirror-reversed "21", three hairbands suddenly dropped from her head, and the thorns pierced the old wound caused by the tie needle last week.
"I want my brother..." The girl put the crayon head into her mouth and chewed it. The mint-flavored wax mixed with blood flowed down her chin.
She suddenly discovered that the tears in the funhouse mirror reflected strange spots of light - those were the diamond-shaped spots of light reflected by the crystal chandelier on the entrance mirror when Chen Chunhua knelt on the ground.
At noon, the blazing sun penetrated the iron fence, casting a shadow of "MONSTER" on Hua Jinyue's back. As she used a purple crayon to complete her mother's earring, all the funhouse mirrors suddenly began to spin, reflecting Ye Qingliu from twenty different angles.
"7..……." Hua Jinyue threw the crayon towards the fastest-spinning mirror, and the wax melted into a protective film under the high temperature.
The funhouse mirror that was hit stopped rotating, reflecting the combination lock of the basement refrigerator - Ye Qingliu was sticking the bloody formula on it with a pain-relieving patch.
When the third blast of hot air hit, Hua Jinyue huddled in the spotlight cast by the slide projector. The chili powder burned her scabby eyelids, but it also suddenly sharpened her sense of smell.
Amid the pungent, spicy smell, she detected a hint of lemon detergent—the lingering scent of Chen Chunhua's apron, seeping in through the loose screw holes in the vent.
Hua Jinyue used a hairpin to pry open the screw and found a thousand paper cranes made of candy wrappers stuffed into the hole. When she unfolded it, she found a maze that Ye Qingliu had drawn with iodine, the exit pointing to the darkest funhouse mirror in the northwest corner.
As Hua Jinyue stumbled and crawled towards the target, the heating plate suddenly tilted and the whole person crashed into the frame with the fragment of his mother's wedding ring embedded in it.
(Ye Qingliu's side)
After the fifth spray of liquid nitrogen, Ye Qingliu noticed his pupils dilating. Through his hazy vision, he saw multiple reflections emerging from the bulletproof glass: his six-year-old self, his sixteen-year-old mother, and twenty-nine-year-old Chen Chunhua, all simultaneously solving equations.
When Ye Qingliu finally substituted the correct variable for the angle at which his mother fell from the building, all the screens suddenly went black for three seconds.
When the light came back on, the acceleration due to gravity problem became a simple elementary school division. Ye Qingliu stared blankly at "9.8 ÷ 2 = 4.9" and suddenly realized that this was the amount of glass shards from Chen Chunhua's shattered knee.
He slammed into the LCD screen with all his might, and through the cracks in the spider web he saw crayon smoke rising from the direction of the attic—that was the distress signal Hua Jinyue was sending using burning Disney stickers.
At the stroke of midnight, the slide projector screen suddenly went black for three seconds. When it came back on, Ye Qingliu's surveillance footage showed a slow-motion replay of Chen Chunhua's knee exploding.
Hua Jinyue screamed and scratched the mirror with a crayon, but inadvertently connected her mother's lip lines into a perfect parabola - this was the graphical solution to a calculus problem in the basement.
All the heating plates suddenly cooled, and the sound of ice clinking could be heard from the bird-beak copper kettle. When Hua Jinyue broke the wax seal on the water outlet, she discovered that the water was filled with the toffee crumbs that Ye Qingliu had hidden there last week.
Hua Jinyue held the candy grain under his tongue and used the last half of the crayon to write "7+1=8" on the skylight, which corresponded to the eighth piece of broken glass under Chen Chunhua's knee at the entrance.
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