Chapter 315: The Cat's Plan

My name is Qiu Hua.

A Four-Star player.

Arranged by the Ninth Floor Master, my responsibility in the Instance is to ensure that Lin Xuan survives.

Earlier, when we were on the first floor, I proposed my plan to the crowd. Although it was a plan full of holes and errors, they agreed to it.

I know that every single one of these people did not believe in my plan from the bottom of their hearts, but amidst various calculations and intellectual gaming, they ultimately chose my plan.

We arrived on the second floor.

We searched the rooms one by one.

Every floor had six rooms, three on the left and three on the right. Excluding the first floor, across the remaining seventeen floors, there were a total of 102 rooms.

If we followed our plan and reinforced our memory five times, remembering the scenes in these 102 rooms would not be a big problem for a group of brain-reliant players like us.

We calculated up to the second layer, the mice calculated up to the fifth layer, but they used the first layer as bait to let us deduce the second layer.

With everyone's intelligence, they should all be able to deduce what the fifth layer was.

Right on cue...

Someone couldn't sit still anymore. I looked at the Fitness Blogger, who had inconspicuously fallen behind the group.

The Fitness Blogger should know that he had already become an abandoned piece. Therefore, if he wanted to save himself, he had to act one step ahead of us and...

Catch Lin Xuan!

Then the question became:

Which floor was Lin Xuan hiding on?

The answer was...

The 8th floor!

And specifically, in the very last room.

Firstly, we wasted ten minutes on the first floor.

Secondly, if the mice weren't caught by cats within two hours, they would clear the stage.

Then, there were five mice on the first floor.

Conclusion: The cat stationed on the first floor had to touch a first-floor mouse every 110/5, which is 22 minutes.

In other words, the time it took for us to complete one search of this building was 22 minutes.

22 minutes / 17 floors.

1.29 minutes / floor.

Excluding the time taken to climb stairs and for one cat to go down to the first floor to replace the guarding cat, the search time for each floor was about 1 minute.

This was no big deal.

After all, it was just recording scenes, and we were all brain-reliant. Plus, with only six rooms per floor, we just needed to skim through like flipping six pages of a book; one minute was ample.

Meanwhile, when Lin Xuan was caught by a cat, there was a three-minute Confirmation time. This time could be completely ignored, because the moment Lin Xuan was caught, he could confirm that the person who caught him was a real cat and enter a Ghost State.

One might find it strange. Weren't we figuring out which floor Lin Xuan was hiding on?

Why calculate all this extraneous stuff?

From Lin Xuan's perspective, if he wanted to break my plan, the best way was to alter the scene in each room. For example, moving the positions of items, or taking items from other rooms and placing them in different rooms to confuse the cats' reinforced memories.

In that case, he would definitely hide on the eighth floor and let us catch him.

This way, we would continue searching upwards, floors 9-18. According to the previous calculation, this would take about ten minutes.

And Lin Xuan, in his Ghost State, would return to the third floor within these ten minutes.

In other words, when we finished searching the 18th floor, Lin Xuan on the third floor would just be exiting his Ghost State and could begin moving items.

We would start searching from the second floor again.

When we searched up to the third floor, we would find that the scenes in the rooms on the third floor and above had all been altered by Lin Xuan. We wouldn't be able to reinforce our scene memory, and our search speed would slow down.

My plan would be broken!

As I mentioned earlier, we deduced up to the second layer of the plan, while the mice deduced up to the fifth layer of the plan. This was the fifth layer.

Presumably, the Fitness Blogger also deduced that Lin Xuan was hiding on the eighth floor.

Then, what he needed to do now was detach from the group and quickly head up to the eighth floor.

So, next up...

Was a psychological battle between Lin Xuan and the Fitness Blogger. Lin Xuan had to wait until all the cats had searched up to the eighth floor before he could be caught.

But the Fitness Blogger wouldn't care about any of this. He had to catch the mouse in advance, otherwise he would become Cannon Fodder.

Right on cue...

I saw the Fitness Blogger as anxious as an ant on a hot pan. Seeming to have made up his mind, he slowly pulled out his Liar-Slayer.

Interesting.

It seemed my goal had been achieved. Without suppressing my Mental State, I excitedly rubbed my hands together.

Inconspicuously, I blocked the Fitness Blogger's path to detach from the group.

Come on!

Let me see just how broken this legendary True Self Skill is!

Sorry, I forgot to mention, I had already calculated up to the sixth layer!

I saw the expression on the Fitness Blogger's face suddenly turn cold. He drew his gun, pointed it at the ceiling, and shouted:

"Ghost Whisperer: Rampage!"

The entire floor suddenly went dark. I stood quietly in place. Suddenly, I noticed something hit the ground, and then...

Clatter!

More and more items fell onto the floor, emitting clanking sounds.

What was going on?

I realized my back felt lighter. The backpack slung over my back seemed...

To have vanished out of thin air!

The items inside had all fallen out, but it was clearly a backpack full of items. Why did it feel like the items that dropped...

Were very few!

Strange, if the backpack vanished, then all the items inside should fall out. How could only a portion of the items fall out?

Could it be that some of the items inside the backpack also vanished into thin air?

What kind of damned skill was this?!

Not only that, but I also sensed that the other players' belongings were dropping as well.

When the light returned.

The Fitness Blogger was still surrounded in the middle by the eight of us players. There were some items scattered sparsely on the ground around him, but not many.

I noticed that among the nine of us, only Qiu Yinong's backpack was still there, while the rest of our backpacks had all vanished into thin air!

The Fitness Blogger was stunned. He seemed unable to care about so much anymore and charged at me.

Bang!

Surprisingly, he was repelled by my Liar-Slayer protection mechanism. He crashed towards a Three-Star player, and was repelled by that Three-Star player's Liar-Slayer as well.

Just like that, he bounced back and forth between us like a rubber ball.

We wore strange expressions. Surely, Rampage couldn't just be... this?

Finally, a Three-Star player moved aside to clear a path, and the Fitness Blogger was bounced into a room by the Liar-Slayer protection mechanism.

He was knocked dizzy, swaying unsteadily with a blank expression, and murmured, "How is this possible, ah ah ah, my skill..."

"Vanished?!!!"

Hearing this, my pupils contracted slightly. I secretly thought: 'Sure enough, Chen Ran used his skill just now!'

Because this building had no doors, the entire building could be viewed as a single Secret Room.

Simply put.

A player using a skill on another floor could radiate its effects throughout the entire building.

In other words.

Just now, when Chen Ran was on the first floor and noticed the first floor go dark, he knew someone upstairs had used a skill. Calculating based on the time, he concluded we hadn't yet searched up to the eighth floor, so he deployed Eternal Kingdom from the first floor.

Wait, was that right?

In my deduction, Chen Ran should have used his skill first to ban the Fitness Blogger from using his skill. But just now...

The Fitness Blogger clearly managed to deploy his skill before Chen Ran used his.

Could it be...

The second effect of his skill is that it can break other players' skills?

This would also explain why the items we carried vanished.

Thinking of this.

A wave of lingering fear washed over me. Luckily, some of the items in my bag were produced by the Instance, and most importantly, the clothes on my body and the food in my bag were also produced by the Instance. Otherwise...

I would have made a fool of myself!

But, there was another problem in all this.

Who provided the lie for Chen Ran?