The journey to the botanical garden was smooth.
After Shi Yu got into the taxi, he closed his eyes and fell asleep.
Ji Congyang sat in the back and watched him, dreaming back to the experience outside Zhaoyang Cemetery. After being in a daze for a while, he began to harass his companions: "Old Qiao."
Qiao Yan was looking out the window.
Ji Congyang poked his arm and lowered his voice: "Xiao Qiao."
“…”
"Joe..."
"Just ask if you have any questions."
Ji Congyang asked in a very sincere tone: "Did you understand what he just said?"
Qiao Yan turned around, with a blank face, and tried to lower his voice: "Don't use your IQ to judge me."
Ji Congyang ignored his ridicule: "Didn't you ask my idol to add you as a friend and get rejected at Wukou Street? Now you see, people really have to be a little shameless. If we had been persistent back then, we wouldn't be able to play games with him now."
Qiao Yan couldn't roll his eyes, but moved his lips: "If you had really dared to pester me at that time, there was a greater chance that he would have beaten you to death."
Ji Congyang: "Don't take advantage of my idol's good temper and say bad things about him behind his back."
Qiao Yan didn't know which one to complain about first, the other person's elbow being bent outward or his blindness: "He has a good temper? Who gave you this illusion?"
"We have known each other for so many years, I know what you are thinking at a glance, so don't play dumb." Ji Congyang glanced at him, "If it were someone else, would you be able to drag them into the dinner party regardless of their attitude? You and my idol are only meeting for the second time, but you act so familiar with them and take the initiative to share what you know about the discussion. Aren't you just trying to get them to help you?"
"My idol is someone who would even pay you back for a cup of oatmeal. He is so principled. Although he is hard to approach on the inside, he is very easy on the outside. Just make him owe you money all the time."
Qiao Yan didn't deny it: "Don't you like him very much? Isn't it good to be able to watch him from such a close distance now?"
"Just because I like him doesn't mean I like to use him to get close to him."
"You didn't mean it when you took him to the infirmary? You didn't mean it when you spent all the money you earned from prostitution on the cruise ship on him? Then you helped him book rooms, buy things and treat him to meals. Weren't you willing to help him? Or were you smart enough to realize that I had some intentions towards him so early and even help me in return?"
"…Just leave the last sentence for me."
Ji Congyang sighed: "It's just this one game. When it's over and I get out safely, I can pay homage to my idol in my memories."
Qiao Yan glanced at him and said, "Is it difficult for you to make a wish and ask the system to assign you to the same game next time? Even if you really can't reach the requirements to enter the Upper Nine Heavens this time and he does, didn't you spend four years painting eggs to imitate Leonardo da Vinci? It's just five more months of accumulating points, and it's wasted?"
"It is useless, but not now."
"?"
"I was in the restaurant earlier and heard the player answer the phone and it started."
Qiao Yan finally completely withdrew his attention from the window glass.
"We clearly heard the person talking on the phone together, but after listening to it, I knew nothing, but he knew everything." Ji Congyang propped up his chin with his hand and looked at the shadow on the front seat. "Old Qiao, have you ever experienced that feeling? It was the feeling I didn't have when we were sophomores, when you had already received a national scholarship but I was still preparing for a make-up exam because I failed a course."
Qiao Yan didn't respond.
How could he not know? He had just experienced that feeling of distance that he could never catch up with in his lifetime.
He first saw her on a live broadcast, then met her on a cruise ship, and later they had a conversation without any obstacles. He felt that he was not much worse than the other person.
But after a while, you will understand that sometimes, some people exist simply to show that there are real differences between people in this world.
※
The taxi stops at the entrance of the Botanical Gardens.
Shi Yu took off his hoodie, got out of the car, and looked at the plants in his sight.
Ji Congyang looked at him suspiciously: "Idol?"
Why did you stop?
Shi Yu paused for a few seconds, raised his foot and said, "Let's go."
During the time when he was buying the tickets, Ji Congyang disappeared. When he came back after buying the tickets, Ji Congyang appeared out of nowhere and handed him a plastic bag.
Shi Yu was stunned for a moment: "Did you just buy it?"
"Yes." Ji Congyang said, "I remember that you don't like the smell of herbs. Fortunately, this is a botanical garden, and the nearby shops have masks prepared for tourists with allergies. I can't find anything better, so I'll just make do with this."
Shi Yu looked at the bag and didn't say anything for a long time.
He doesn't like the smell of herbs, but mainly he doesn't like the smell of medicine.
Although this is a botanical garden, most of the plants here are shrubs and ornamental plants. The taste is actually very different from the plants specially cultivated for medicinal purposes, and even more different from the medicines that can be used on humans after processing.
If he wasn't so sensitive about this, he wouldn't have paused when he just got off the car.
Ji Congyang still raised his hand, but he didn't answer: "Idol?"
Shi Yu came back to his senses and took the mask: "Thank you."
The botanical garden is surrounded by a maze. The walls are made of neatly trimmed bushes, more than two meters high. The green color reaches the sky, and it is difficult to tell the directions when you walk in.
The three of them walked along the bushes on the right side for nearly ten minutes before they saw grass of normal height.
The driver wasted quite a bit of time in the bush maze and just as he was near the exit he met up with his companions who were still wandering around inside.
Both of them were sent here since the beginning of the game and have never left. They walked out of the maze exit and stopped along the way, tentatively guessing where the center of the city might be where the exit of this space might be hidden.
Going further and further off the track.
The driver was wondering if they had guessed wrong when he stepped onto the short stone steps and suddenly felt a slight vibration under his feet.
It was like a crack suddenly opened up in a space that had been closed for a long time.
The driver looked up suddenly and saw the same expression on his companion's face.
There was no time to communicate, and the scene in front of them suddenly disappeared in the next second.
A tearing pain came.
Shi Yu left the bush maze and recognized the silhouette of a driver in the distance as he prepared to walk up the stone steps.
After taking two steps, he saw the driver and his companion walking beside him both stopped where they were. Then a line of blood began to flow from their necks and spread downwards.
The human body of flesh and blood seemed to have turned into two pieces of paper at this moment, torn into two irregular halves from the middle by some unknown existence. The bones and blood vessels were broken inch by inch, and the broken ends were full of pits and pits, with tendons and bones that were about to fall off.
Blood was splattered all over the ground.
Some passers-by screamed out of control and fled in panic.
The torso that was torn into two pieces fell to the ground, three of them overlapped each other, and one rolled down the stone steps. The organs inside were no longer wrapped and were scattered all over the place. A sticky paste flowed out and scattered on the ground mixed with blood.
※
It started raining in the botanical garden soon after, so the three of them had to move temporarily and take shelter under the transparent awning in the park.
Shi Yu sat on a public bench, looking at the two bodies in the distance. The rain outside was blown in by the wind, and strands of rain fell on his eyelashes.
Until an umbrella suddenly opened above my head.
He turned around and saw Ji Congyang trying hard to hold the umbrella handle without touching him, while tilting the umbrella wing over his head.
Ji Congyang was stunned when he saw his gaze, and then he grinned: "Idol, do you need an umbrella? I just bought it at the souvenir shop."
Shi Yu shook his head and continued to look at the corpse in the rain.
The corpse was literally torn in half. The death was so tragic that the blood from the broken surface was washed away very quickly, spreading over a larger and larger area, while the color became lighter and lighter.
Ji Congyang pondered for two seconds and said, "Idol, you don't have to be so stressed."
The driver and his companion appeared in the botanical garden, which proved that Shi Yu's guess was correct and that the two people were indeed found strictly according to the requirements of the center of the circle.
If that's the case, then why did they die?
They had clearly reached the middle center of the closure, and they were only one step away from leaving this space. What mistake could they have made at the last moment to get torn in half and trapped in this space forever?
If standing on the center of this space would result in death, then this would obviously contradict their previous inference that the center of the circle was the exit. Everything before was wrong and must be overturned.
Ji Congyang imagined a tragic case where he had worked so hard to answer a test paper and thought he would get full marks, but found out that he failed after the results came out. He put himself in her shoes and instantly had a heart attack. He tried harder to find words of comfort: "Idol, people always take a few detours in life. Look, Old Joe followed you the whole time today. Did he say a single valid statement? It was you who got us out of the cruise ship. All the guesses were made by you. Although there are some problems with the verification results now, at least there are no faults in the previous ones. This alone is much better than many players."
Qiao Yan deadpanned as many players in his words.
Ji Congyang was afraid that his idol would be hurt by this failure in reasoning, so he tried his best to give him some inspiration. After a while, he saw the other party suddenly turn his head.
Shi Yu: "Lend me your umbrella."
"Ah." Ji Congyang handed over the umbrella in a daze.
It has been a while since the two players died. The system's setting for clearly recording the traces of dead players has taken effect. The two bodies have disappeared, and the passers-by who had originally dispersed out of fear have also returned one after another, as if they had long forgotten that they had witnessed such a tragedy.
Only the faint smell of blood in the air had not completely dissipated, indicating the bloody scene that had taken place here.
Shi Yu walked to the stone steps holding an umbrella. Just as he was about to raise his foot, a force pulled him backwards.
Ji Congyang pulled his hat, his voice stuttering anxiously: "What are you...what are you doing over there? Don't go, you'll die!"
Shi Yu pulled his hat back on: "I didn't intend to go there."
As he said this, he walked around the stairs and went to the left.
At the end of the stairs is the glass house of the botanical garden, where are kept delicate plants that cannot withstand wind and rain.
Shi Yu walked around the steps outside the glass house, from the front door to the back door which was completely opposite to the front door. He stopped and looked at the house above.
The rain hit the glass and slid down in streams, like crying.
There were no accidents along the way down the stairs. I neither left the space nor was I torn in half.
If nothing unexpected happens, the center of this closed space is probably the range of the glass house above the stairs.
Ji Congyang and Qiao Yan squeezed under an umbrella and followed him closely. When they saw him about to go up the stairs again, they grabbed his hat again in panic: "Wait!"
Shi Yu looked at him.
Ji Congyang let go of his hand: "You..."
After organizing my words for a long time, I still didn't know what to say. In the end, I just whispered, "Don't be too sad."
Shi Yu looked at him silently for a long while: "I'm not sad."
"and you……"
"I was just wondering why they died."
Ji Congyang was at a loss.
"The exit of the closed space is at the center of the space. This inference has been verified twice. If this is wrong, then the first two successes cannot be explained. Pure luck is too random. If the first two times were not luck, the center of this space is indeed here, and the place is not wrong, then the only possibility is that the method used is wrong."
Shi Yu raised his hand and pulled the hat back again: "Do you remember what this copy is called?"
Qiao Yan: “Gear.”
Shi Yu hummed softly, and then continued: "Have you seen gears working? The teeth of two workpieces of different sizes mesh together, and the rotation of one drives the other to rotate together."
Qiao Yan vaguely sensed something, but couldn't figure out what it was.
"There are three closed spaces, and five players have already seen them. According to this ratio, there are at least 228 similar circular closed spaces for the 379 players. How are these spaces distributed?" Shi Yu said, "Either one space is counted as one gear, or two hundred spaces are arranged together, maybe in one row, or two or three rows. In addition to being arranged on a two-dimensional plane, there may also be arrangements in three dimensions. A single move can affect the entire body."
"Of course this is the most extreme case. I don't really like this possibility. Because when I was in the first two closed spaces, I never felt that the space had changed due to external forces. If the actions of more than 300 players directly affect the other 300 people, then no matter what the mission of this game is, the possibility of completing it is very small."
"If we rule out this possibility, there is still one possibility left."
Raindrops slid down the umbrella, splashing ripples that spread outward in circles, and his voice permeated into the rain curtain, like the sound of an ancient bell in the bamboo grove in an empty mountain.
"To put it simply, these two hundred or so closed spaces may all be distributed on the same gear, with each space representing a gear tooth. The player finds the center of the circle in the closed space, and comes to the center of the circle. Then the gear meshing with the spatial gear will start to rotate, sucking the player at the center of the circle onto the gear teeth of the meshing gear and taking him away from this space. Because the two gears are of different sizes and have different numbers of teeth on them, after the meshing gear rolls a circle, the gear teeth where the player is located will contact the spatial gear again and be teleported to a new closed space."
"I couldn't determine how these spaces were distributed before, because I couldn't find the pattern between them. But now I can roughly determine it."
Shi Yu looked back at the glass flower room at the top of the stairs: "The outdoor temperature in this city is around 15 or 16 degrees Celsius now, the outdoor temperature on the cruise ship is only in the single digits, and the temperature in the snowy plain where I first visited was above zero degrees Celsius."
Qiao Yan said, "The temperature is getting higher and higher? Are these circular spaces arranged in this order?"
Shi Yu turned his gaze away, his eyes calm: "It's not that they are arranged according to the climate temperature, but their arrangement method causes the temperature difference between spaces. Imagine if the tooth surface of this gear fits the longitude of the earth?"
Qiao Yan's heart trembled violently.
"Of course, this is obviously not the Earth. It's just that the arrangement of the closed space happens to match it. The snowfield is at the southernmost part of the ring gear, followed by the cruise ship and the city. Going north, the air temperature gradually increases."
Shi Yu said: "If this is the case, then the deaths of those two people just now can be explained."
Qiao Yan heard him mention this: "Why?"
"Do you remember the direction the cruise ship chose when it reached the center of the circle? It was north of the chord line, and the overall direction was from south to north."
"For a system to operate normally, the direction of the gears is determined from the beginning and cannot be changed. From the cruise ship to this city, the player's forward direction in space is from south to north. The space gear is forced to rotate from north to south, and the transmission gear meshing with it rotates from south to north for a circle, and finally stops at the previous level of the player's original space, and the player is demoted."
Shi Yu said calmly, "When the player just went to the center of the closed space to meet up with his companions, he was heading from north to south, which was the opposite direction of the meshing gears of the entire system."
What would happen if the running gears of a machine suddenly rotated in the opposite direction?
Of course it's a collapse.
So they were torn apart, causing the gears to reverse.
"It's true that the exit of the space is at the center of the circle. What's wrong is the direction they entered the center of the circle. The stone steps to the front door don't work, so let's go up from the back door."
Qiao Yan took a while to react, processing the information in his mind before he said, "But we are not sure about the probability of success."
After all, there is no evidence, it's just inference.
What if the inference is wrong, and if one goes around from the front door of the glass house to the back door, and walks from south to north into the center of this space, would the person still die in the end?
Shi Yu did not deny it: "So we need to verify it."
Qiao Yan: "How to verify..."
Without waiting for him to finish, Shi Yu turned around and stepped onto the stone steps.
A familiar space tremor came from under my feet.
The next moment, the scene changed.
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