Chapter 236: Maze

Xuanyuan Qing suddenly extinguished her phone flashlight, and the three pressed against the damp brick wall. Two dark red light spots were flickering alternately in the five o'clock direction, like the compound eyes of some creature.

The buzzing of the server host's radiator mixed with the vague shouting from the night market in the distance. The hem of Xu Xiaochuan's school uniform scraped against the iron wire mesh of the window frame, tearing a hole. He was about to complain but was choked by the special USB drive flashing blue light in Qin Tianluo's hand.

"Thirteen-needle encryption." Xuanyuan Qing suddenly spoke, her fingernails scratching binary symbols into the broken wall dust. "The back of the 45th brick in the bluestone alley—there was a scar on the firewall Old Xu asked you to patch last time."

The rolling shutter door of the grocery store at the end of the alley suddenly rattled, the "Demolish" character spray-painted in fluorescent paint shining with an oily sheen like a toad's back in the moonlight. Cold sweat soaked Xu Xiaochuan's schoolbag straps, inside which the radiator was still hot. When he dismantled that smoking second-hand server three days ago, the screen suddenly popped up his dad's ID photo—Xu Jianhua in the faded entry photo, revealing his right hand missing its ring finger.

Qin Tianluo chewed on half a damp cigarette, rubbing his phone screen, the cracks cutting blue light marks into his face: "I'll cover the front door, you two take the ventilation pipe." He paused. "Little Qing, stop shaking that bell of yours; you can hear it sifting beans from thirty meters away."

"You think I want to?" Xuanyuan Qing stuffed the silver bell back into her pocket, the small pig pendant on her key ring trembling gently. "Old Xu hid the master control code in this broken bell last time and didn't give me the manual..."

The shadow spread like melted asphalt over the wall base. The moment the dark red light spots extinguished, three tactical flashlights split the darkness with white light. Xu Xiaochuan instinctively took out three electromagnetic pulse patches he'd made himself from his schoolbag.

"Split up!" Xuanyuan Qing suddenly kicked open the precarious iron fence. "The monitor on the second floor of the sauce meat shop in the east is a decoy!"

Amidst the sound of the anti-theft window breaking, Xu Xiaochuan's shoelaces hooked onto a rusty steel bar. He heard a mechanical synthesized voice reporting: "Distance to matrix core 2.3 kilometers, estimated clearance program to start in 4 minutes and 17 seconds—"

"Damn! How come this thing even downloaded my dad's ledger?" Xu Xiaochuan shook off his sports shoes while running, the holes in his socks scraping against the road gravel. He took out a fluorescent pen from his schoolbag and slashed wildly at the wall with pixelated graffiti—that was the base station coordinate code he'd cracked last week.

"Why is this broken wall still drooling?" The hem of Xu Xiaochuan's school uniform was stuck to the wall, making a sound like tearing tape when he pulled it off. The silver bell in his hand suddenly vibrated at a high frequency, numbing his tiger's mouth.

Lin Yu's tactical boots crushed the blue mucus seeping from the ground, the soles making a sticky sound like pulled sugar. Three meters above his head, semi-solid black matter was dripping slowly, burning a coin-sized hole in the shoulder of Qin Tianluo's windbreaker.

"Don't touch those projections!" Xuanyuan Qing dragged Xu Xiaochuan by the collar, the third button of the boy's school uniform popping off and hitting the wall, only to be rolled away by suddenly extending data tentacles. She threw the silver bell backhand, and the metal surface collided with Void energy, exploding with blue-purple electric arcs.

Qin Tianluo suddenly coughed violently, the blood beads leaking from between his fingers forming a QR code pattern on the black floor tiles. He staggered and leaned against the wall, and the wall immediately displayed surveillance footage of the bun shop from thirty years ago—Xu Jianhua's right hand, missing its ring finger, was kneading dough.

"The safe zone is in the northeast corner." Xu Xiaochuan suddenly unzipped his school uniform, revealing a T-shirt printed with anime characters. "Every three morphological changes, there's a 37-second stable period, but the last cycle was shorter..."

The entire wall suddenly caved inward, revealing a honeycomb structure. Seventeen mechanical bodies with gold-rimmed glasses were crawling out of the hexagonal holes, their chest badges flashing with "404NotFound" red light.

Lin Yu's tactical gloves grazed the wall, bringing up a string of sparks. Gold and black energy spread along the wall cracks, revealing dense bullet holes wherever it passed—those were the traces left from the alley battle last week.

"Old Qin, your fly is open!" Xuanyuan Qing suddenly kicked away a mechanical dog that was pouncing, the metal debris hitting the calculation formula Xu Xiaochuan had just drawn. The boy scrambled to wipe it, only to find those blue mucus were devouring the chalk marks.

Qin Tianluo threw his pocket watch to the ground, and the cracks in the dial seeped with the aroma of sugar-fried chestnuts. The three mechanical bodies suddenly stopped moving, their prosthetic eyes flashing wildly with the Snake game screen.

"Northwest direction, quick!" Xu Xiaochuan's canvas shoes got stuck in a suddenly bulging ground crack, and his shoelaces were stuck by some transparent substance. He grabbed half a steel pipe and hammered wildly, finding the ground beginning to present the snow-like noise of an old television.

The load-bearing pillar twenty meters away suddenly twisted into a twist, and amidst the crisp sound of steel bars breaking, Xiao Chengzhou's cold laugh came: "Welcome to my data graveyard."

Xu Xiaochuan's chalk tip bounced a parabola on the wall, and the chalk dust fell on Qin Tianluo's blue-tinted eyelashes. A high-frequency current sound suddenly came from the maze corner, and eight mechanical spider legs gleaming with blue light pierced the wall, the compound eyes composed of data streams reflecting the distorted shadows of the four.

"Are these spider legs modified from graphics cards?" Lin Yu retreated half a step, gold and black energy condensing into boxing gloves on his knuckles. The wind brought by the spider legs swept away Xu Xiaochuan's draft paper, and the boy was dragged to the corner by Xuanyuan Qing when he tried to save it.

The moment the silver bell vibrated, the spider monster's data skin rippled. Lin Yu's fist grazed its abdomen, and the exploding code fragments splashed like popcorn. "Old Qin!" He suddenly sidestepped Qin Tianluo's grapple, the latter's blue pupils flashing with a 404 error code.

Xuanyuan Qing threw the silver bell and hit Qin Tianluo on the back of the neck, sparks flying from the metal collision. Xu Xiaochuan lay on the ground, calculating wildly, the chalk drawing a pixelated formula between the brick seams: "The load-bearing pillar in the southeast corner turns into a portal every three minutes!"

The spider monster's broken limbs were reorganizing, the new chelicerae gleaming with ominous purple light. Lin Yu grabbed Qin Tianluo by the collar and slammed him into the wall, the sound of bricks falling like rain. Xu Xiaochuan threw his chalk box at the spider's compound eyes, and in the exploding colored smoke, surveillance footage of the bun shop from thirty years ago appeared.

"Follow the steam from the steamer!" The boy grabbed half a draft paper, on which a floor plan of the donkey meat burger shop was scribbled. Xuanyuan Qing kicked open the suddenly bulging wall bricks, revealing a flickering display screen behind it. Qin Tianluo's mechanical arm suddenly stuttered, and half a rusty USB drive popped out of his knuckles.

Lin Yu grabbed the USB drive and inserted it into the wall crack, and the entire brick wall suddenly pixelated and collapsed. Xu Xiaochuan's canvas shoes were entangled by the data stream, and when his school uniform trousers tore, they revealed a Doraemon bandage on his knee.

"This maze designer definitely has hemorrhoids!" he cursed while prying open the mechanical tentacles grabbing his ankles. ===== CHAPTER 237 =====