Chapter 311: Ten Thousand

A square hall, with four identical arched doorways.

Luo Qi walked around the hall quickly, relieved that he was not foolish enough to turn back through the door he had come from. He hesitated for a moment, then chose to walk down the path directly opposite the door he had entered through. Passing through that door, behind it was another identical corridor. If Luo Qi were not certain he hadn't taken a wrong turn, he would have surely thought he had walked backward.

The entire corridor was silent; there were doors on both sides of the corridor, and no windows to help him orient himself. Luo Qi walked on with patience, once again reaching the end of a corridor. Luo Qi judged from his intuition that the three corridors he had walked through were all the same length.

Then, just as he had guessed, there was a turn at the end of this corridor that allowed him to turn onto a fourth corridor. He hurried on, though this time the turn in the corridor bent to the left. As Luo Qi stepped onto the fourth corridor, he simply started running, finishing the fourth corridor in one breath; this corridor was still the same length as the previous three.

At the end of the fourth corridor was a window. Luo Qi ran to the window and looked out; outside were rows of trees. Sunlight could pass through the window, but one could not see what was actually beyond the trees at all.

Luo Qi started running back. He ran past two corridors and returned to the central hall. This time, he chose the door on the right. He accurately guessed what was behind the door; this building was simply a bit eerie. He ran along the fifth corridor to the turning point again, this time turning left. The sixth corridor ended at an equal distance, and at the end of the corridor was an identical window.

Outside the window, the trees were dense, like a green screen, tightly blocking everything inside. Or perhaps, Luo Qi suspected, it was more like a green wall.

Luo Qi retreated, ran back to the central hall again, and walked through the opposite door. The same corridor repeated itself; the seventh corridor, a left turn, and the eighth corridor was just behind the right-angle bend. He walked to the end of the eighth corridor, where a window was embedded in the wall at the end of the corridor, with a row of green trees outside.

Luo Qi pressed his hand against the windowsill, feeling like he was about to go crazy. Part of the reason was that he had already run through eight corridors, the entire interior space of the building, and still hadn't found a restroom.

But besides that, there were other problems. He had walked through eight corridors; the core of the eight corridors was a central hall, and the central hall had four doors leading to four core corridors. At the ends of the four outer corridors, there were four windows. Other than that, there were only symmetrical small rooms and obliquely symmetrical small parlors in the corridors. So...

"Damn it," Luo Qi couldn't help but say out loud. "So, where exactly is the front door here?"

This was a closed building; some lunatic hadn't built a front door when constructing this place! A large building without a door, with eight corridors and at least dozens of identical rooms. How wonderful. Luo Qi had never seen what a real mental hospital looked like, but in his imagination, this place perfectly matched the image of a mental hospital in his mind.

Luo Qi subconsciously reached out to knock on the window. The glass on the window was very thick, and the texture didn't feel much like glass. Furthermore, this window was actually a single piece of glass with an arched top. In other words, this window couldn't be pushed open either.

Whoever designed this building didn't want people here to come and go freely.

Or, whoever designed this building had a client base consisting entirely of people like Du Zhengyi.

Whether it was copper walls and iron bastions or bulletproof glass, Du Zhengyi would have no obstacles moving in and out.

Luo Qi looked at the window and couldn't help but sigh; this was simply discrimination.

Luo Qi raised his claw again and smashed it maliciously against the window glass. He looked back suspiciously at the path he had come from. He remembered that the first time he turned, he turned right, and the subsequent three turns were all to the left. Once right, three times left. But thinking back, he had started from the end of a corridor the first time, which was why he turned right; left and right were relative to him, relative to his starting point. If he started from the central hall every time and walked into the four corridors connected to the hall, then every turn he made would be a left turn. He had already run through the entire building with his own feet; although he hadn't found a toilet, a little thought made it clear that the layout of this building was regular, and symmetrical to a certain degree.

This layout... Luo Qi could almost see it. He traced the route in his mind, carefully checking every turn, every simple yet meaningful proportion, and then depicted this diagram in his mind as an aerial view from high above.

On this aerial view, the shape of the building could not be clearer—it was the pattern most favored by the great leader Hitler.

Luo Qi almost laughed out loud.

But, of course, Mages didn't have that kind of sense of humor. The meaning here must be the original implication of this symbol. Luo Qi knew this symbol was as ancient as the Ouroboros symbol, spread throughout ancient human India, Persia, Greece, blah blah, and very likely existed simultaneously in the ancient Mage World. Except for the self-definition of that man with the small mustache, in other cultures, this symbol almost entirely held the meaning of supreme auspiciousness. In the Buddhism Luo Qi was most familiar with, this was the auspicious Wan character.

Luo Qi pondered for a while and marveled secretly. It was a pity that understanding the architectural structure and style here was of no use to him in his urgent need to urinate.

Luo Qi leaned against the window, thinking about the structural characteristics here and the way of thinking of Mages he was familiar with.

A moment later, he raised his head, examining the entire wall beside him. He pressed his hand against the wall and said loudly, "I want a restroom, I want a restroom to appear here. If I can't find a restroom, I'm going to pee on the carpet."

A hidden door appeared on the wall beside him, and a restroom appeared in the corridor.

He knew that he didn't actually have to say it out loud, nor did he have to phrase it as a threat, but it was easier to find the knack of focusing his attention to express his needs when saying it this way. Luo Qi pushed open the door to the restroom impatiently; he could guess what was going on with this restroom. The Highland Mages were actually extravagant enough to use a Sandbox Space as a restroom.

He wanted to laugh three times; a type of Magic that Du Zhengyi was very skilled at handling, the Highland Mages merely used as a restroom.

But when he walked out of the restroom, Luo Qi gradually began to feel some awe. He had once thought that the Qionglin was the most powerful existence in the Mage World, but the resources of the Highland Mages seemed even more profound and unfathomable.