Chapter 4648: Desperate Escape (27)

"I always feel like the two of us missed some very important information." Bruce said while climbing up the ladder on the wall of the passage: "We shouldn't have left so hurriedly. If we had waited, there would definitely have been a show to watch."

"What do you want to see?" Schiller asked.

"I want to know if they will go to fix it if the mechanism is broken." Bruce said thoughtfully, "By then, it might be possible to lead out the background story."

"Then leaving quickly is the right thing to do," Schiller said, "If nothing goes wrong, the next room should mention the background."

Bruce was somewhat confused: "How do you know?"

"This instance isn't primarily plot-driven; it's mainly about secret room escape and mechanisms. But if there's no background story at all, it will seem very stiff, so the instance designer might write a simple story. You'd better not hold too high expectations."

"A simple story is still a story; let's take a look." Bruce supported the passage entrance with his hand and climbed up. Schiller also climbed up, and Bruce pulled him up.

After walking a short distance in the corridor, they entered a new room. This was still an empty room, except for a cage hanging from the ceiling. Bruce just wanted to walk forward to check, when he was suddenly tripped by something, and then the ground in front of him collapsed, and he fell straight in.

"Oh, damn it, what is this!" Bruce's voice came from below. Schiller leaned over to look and found he had fallen into a slanted hole. There were no walls on the sides of the hole, only dirt. There were also some damaged bricks at the bottom.

The small space below was just enough to accommodate one person. There was light in the room, so one could vaguely see the situation below. When Bruce walked out, he was holding a piece of bone.

"There's a skeleton below," Bruce sighed and said, "It looks like a middle-aged man in his forties or fifties. From the marks on the ribs, it can be judged that there was an injury to the chest cavity. The ankle also seems to have been twisted. More importantly..."

Bruce held up the bone in his hand. It was a very thin bone, clearly not an arm or leg bone. The most conspicuous feature was the metal ring buckled in the center of the bone, the iron chain connected to the ring, and the iron rod at the end of the chain.

"He was holding this in his hand." Bruce took out a notebook; it was the diary of this corpse. Since ordinary people wouldn't write their names in their own diaries, Bruce gave him the codename "Andrew."

Bruce opened the book and checked the contents by the firelight, learning that Andrew was an Afghan veteran suffering from PTSD.

"This character setting is a bit cliché," Bruce said, "I bet the plots of hundreds of movies are driven by Afghan veterans."

"Precisely because the plots of Hollywood blockbusters are widely spread, the level designer would use this classic identity. That way, no matter which country the players are from, they can easily identify with it." Schiller explained.

Bruce continued to read. The earlier diary entries were all written with a pen, probably just saying that he always thought of his comrades, felt very sad, and that life was poor and destitute.

Flipping further back, they finally reached the main event. The subsequent diary entries were all written in blood. Schiller took it over to look at it, then said: "It should be blood from the wound on the collarbone, not blood from the fingertips."

"You can even tell that?" Bruce was somewhat surprised. He had indeed never used blood to write, but in his impression, most people who used blood to write bit their fingertips to break them.

Schiller nodded and said: "If you bite your fingertip to break it, your finger will not exert enough force when writing due to pain, and the turns of the strokes will also be different from other situations. But if it's forged bloodstains, or written by dipping in blood from other places, it will be much smoother."

Bruce thought about it and felt that this was indeed the logic. Biting the fingertip to break it and then using the blood flowing from the fingertip to write was still a bit too idealistic. First of all, the human body has platelets; a bitten wound won't bleed for long, and even if you rub it hard on the paper, you won't be able to rub out much.

Secondly, how painful is it to bite your fingertip? While in pain, you still have to write on the paper; the strokes will definitely be different from other times. It's okay if you write a little, but if you write too much, not only will you run out of ink, but the font will also be deformed.

"This can be used to distinguish whether the blood letter left by the victim is real," Schiller said, "It's different if he bit his own finger to write it versus if the murderer dipped in his blood to write it."

"I haven't encountered this kind of case yet," Bruce said, "Sounds like you have? Professor?"

"I'm the one who dipped in someone else's blood to write."

"I shouldn't have asked." Bruce slapped his forehead. How could he have thought Schiller was from a detective's perspective instead of a murderer's perspective?

They turned their attention back to the diary and were quickly attracted by the content. In fact, Andrew rambled on about a lot of things, but only said two things in total. One was that he noticed this dungeon was artificially built and even heard someone walking in the staff passage, but his partner, his girlfriend Susan, didn't believe him, thinking he was having a PTSD episode and hallucinating.

The other was that Andrew had a plan, which was to hide in a room, wait for the cleaning staff to appear, and then launch a fatal sneak attack to escape this terrible secret room.

Clearly, his plan failed. He did hide in a room, but I'm afraid he didn't wait for the staff to arrive, but instead waited for himself to die here.

"However, if as you said, he had an injury to his chest cavity, then he might have been injured by the steel needles at the door before, and I'm afraid he wouldn't live long." Schiller said.

"Then how could he dig such a big hole?" Bruce looked back at the hole.

But then he realized, and said: "He wouldn't have the same problem as you, would he, Professor?"

"Post-traumatic stress disorder is indeed a very serious mental problem," Schiller said, "When it flares up, it is possible to release muscle restrictions. The diary says his situation is very serious, and he flares up as soon as he faces death."

"His girlfriend Susan died?" Bruce thought for a moment and said, "She wouldn't have been pierced to death by steel needles, would she?"

"Very likely. His girlfriend Susan died in the previous room; he luckily escaped, but had an episode because he witnessed the death. Using this brute force, he dug up the floor tiles and dug a hole to hide himself."

"But why couldn't he wait for the staff? Could the so-called staff passage and footsteps just be his hallucinations?"

"There could be two reasons why the staff didn't appear," Schiller analyzed, "It's possible Andrew didn't break the rules; he just dug a hole to hide himself, but he was actually still in this room; it was just another way of failing, and the mastermind didn't need to intervene."

"That's true." Bruce looked at the hole again, "No one stopped you when you dug the floor tiles at the time. This proves that the secret room doesn't seem to forbid destruction."

"Destruction isn't a good choice," Schiller shook his head and said, "It might even be a high-speed train to death. Because it consumes too much physical strength and isn't necessarily effective. Once you exhaust your physical strength without achieving any results, then you're dead for sure."

"It could even be said that allowing destruction itself is a trap." Schiller sighed and said, "Actually, I don't have much strength left either. If it weren't for skipping a level, I might have difficulty moving now."

"If it weren't for your great strength, we wouldn't have been able to skip that level." Bruce expressed optimism, saying, "Clearing the level in a normal way wouldn't necessarily consume less physical strength than this. They might have even chosen a more energy-saving way."

Bruce looked at the diary again and said: "What's the other possibility?"

"The staff actually already came, but Andrew didn't succeed in subduing them. He was killed, and then thrown back into the pit. The staff filled in the floor tiles and didn't bother with him again."

"That's interesting." Bruce said, "It's not strange that the staff could successfully subdue Andrew and kill him. After all, this person was already very weak, and the excitement brought by the mental illness only lasted for a short while. What's more, this staff member might have had a gun; having great strength might not necessarily be useful. The key is why did he throw the corpse here? It wouldn't just be to give us clues, right?"

"First, rule out the possibility of a conscience not yet extinguished. If the mastermind is an organization, they wouldn't let a novice do the work of collecting corpses. And those who can do this kind of work rarely have any compassion. Even if they did, taking him out to bury him would be better than throwing him here."

"Deliberately throwing him here to demonstrate?" Bruce hypothesized himself, but quickly denied it, "If he really wanted to demonstrate, there would be no need to throw him in a hole; just hanging him from the ceiling would do, right? It could also give people a fright."

"Since it's neither a discovery of conscience nor intentional, then only one possibility remains," Schiller said, "It's not that they didn't want to move him, but that they couldn't move him anymore."

Bruce looked down at the iron rod in his hand: "This one is Andrew's. This one is already rusted." He gently peeled off the rust layer on the surface with his hand and found some things similar to dried bloodstains.

"Looks like both sides were injured," Bruce said, "The staff member killed Andrew, but Andrew also stabbed the staff member. Compared to collecting the corpse, saving one's own life is more important. He should have quickly retreated for treatment, and the work of collecting the corpse wasn't completed. But who put Andrew into the hole and covered it with bricks?"

Bruce continued to flip through the diary. In fact, there was nothing left behind, but he continued to flip back, and saw someone write a word in blood on the penultimate page—"Blood."

This word was written quite wildly, and the handwriting of the last stroke was smeared out. Bruce suddenly realized: the two of them attacked each other, the staff member was injured, and Andrew was also injured, but neither of them died. The staff member ran away, and Andrew crawled back into the hole himself and covered it with floor tiles, seemingly wanting to hide.

"He didn't just want to hide his own corpse," Schiller said, "but precisely this diary, these guesses of his, and the clues. He wanted to let those who came later continue the investigation."

"Truly a warrior." Bruce sighed, "But that staff member didn't succeed in collecting the corpse, so were there no others? He injured the staff member, so no one came to trouble him?"

"It's highly likely because he didn't have long to live either, so there was no need to send anyone in to kill him. And by the time he really died, they should have sent someone in to collect the corpse again, but they all forgot."

"This is too much of a sloppy operation." Bruce shook his head and sighed, "Such a corpse was forgotten here, and they just don't care?"

"You just realized they are a sloppy operation?" Schiller sneered, "If they had any brains at all, they wouldn't use stone bricks when designing a secret room escape. Would there be so many issues if they used a whole steel plate?"

Bruce was speechless. The monitoring room also fell into collective silence. Mephisto rubbed his forehead: "Why did we use bricks again?"

Everyone looked at Greed, because the art style was decided by him. Greed snorted contemptuously and said: "What does Pride know? High-difficulty instances all require points to buy tickets. If you don't use models with more faces, render them more exquisitely, reflect the style, and set off the atmosphere, and it's all repetitive steel plates along the way, who will buy tickets next time?"

Everyone suddenly realized. This is truly you laughing at him for not understanding secret rooms, and him laughing at you for not understanding how to make money. ===== CHAPTER 4649 =====