Chapter 40: Collective Amnesia?

This was a Secret Room.

It was also a Study Room.

The Study Room was spacious, so large that twenty people sprawled haphazardly across the floor didn't make it feel crowded in the slightest.

Soon after.

The twenty players gradually woke up one after another.

No one spoke.

Everyone immediately observed their surroundings in this Secret Room. Many fixed their gazes on the text hanging on the wall behind the desk:

"A sequence of strange, fragmented symbols."

They looked like standard characters, yet at the same time, they didn't. If anything, they resembled some obscure foreign script.

The crowd wore varying expressions, but no one was willing to be the first to share their deductions.

Instead, they continued to search for clues.

There were three bookshelves in the Study Room, and every book on them was labeled with a unique number.

They ranged from number 19301 to 19999.

Across the three bookshelves sat nearly seven hundred books, the majority of which were works of literature.

The items on the desk were quite simple. There was an Hourglass about the size of a kettle. Strangely, the Hourglass contained no sand, but rather twenty Glass Beads.

Each of the Glass Beads was numbered.

They were numbered from 1 to 20.

What was even more bizarre was that both the top and bottom chambers of the Hourglass held exactly ten Glass Beads. The narrow neck in the middle was visibly wider than the beads, yet the ten Glass Beads in the top chamber simply defied gravity and refused to drop.

Aside from the Hourglass.

There was also a stack of paper on the desk, visually estimated to be around fifteen to twenty sheets.

On the topmost sheet, words were written with a Writing Brush: "The earth possesses four terrains, and energy flows from all eight directions."

Other than these items, there was absolutely nothing else.

The group furrowed their brows, and some even turned deathly pale. They knew very well that the puzzles in this Secret Room relied heavily on their foundational knowledge and trivia reserves.

After assessing the environment.

They began to assess each other.

The twenty people in the Secret Room consisted of three five-person teams, one two-person team, and three Unaffiliated Wanderers.

Everyone's gaze landed on the Unaffiliated Wanderers. The fact that these three dared to tackle an Instance solo meant they possessed absolute confidence in their puzzle-solving abilities.

These three consisted of two women and one man.

An elderly grandmother.

A Middle-aged Woman.

And a Teenager.

Exchanging knowing glances, the group deduced that the elderly woman was likely the expert decoder among them. She kept glancing at the text on the wall, as if struggling to recall a distant memory.

Chen Ran and Qiu Yinong exchanged a glance and silently retreated to the back of the crowd...

"Oh, I remember now! Chinese characters, the symbols up there are all Chinese characters!" the elderly lady, Zhang Jinhua, exclaimed.

"Ma'am, are you sure about that? Why do I feel like these are all Japanese?" The one who spoke up was a Middle-aged Uncle. He was an old fox, deliberately guiding the elderly lady to reveal what she knew.

A look of reminiscence surfaced on Zhang Jinhua's face.

"When I was young, the illiteracy rate among the common people was extremely high. To eradicate illiteracy, the government promoted Second-round Simplified Characters. They removed certain strokes from standard simplified characters to make them easier to recognize."

"These are all Second-round Simplified Characters!"

"However..."

At this point, a hint of confusion appeared on her face. The more she looked at the text, the less they resembled Second-round Simplified Characters.

She pointed to one of the symbols and said, "This symbol is the character for 'I'."

Then, she pointed to another. "And this symbol is the character for 'Edge'."

"As for the rest, it seems... they're either written incorrectly, or I just don't recognize them."

This put everyone in a difficult position.

The Second-round Simplified Characters promoted during the elderly lady's youth were something they had never even heard of, meaning the system had long since been abolished.

She was the oldest player present. Aside from her, it was likely that no one else could read these characters.

The Middle-aged Uncle wasn't ready to give up. He turned to the crowd and asked, "Does anyone here understand Second-round Simplified Characters?"

He was answered by a collective bowing of heads, looking exactly like a group of students terrified of being called on by the Teacher.

At this moment, the Middle-aged Woman among the Unaffiliated Wanderers spoke up with a peculiar expression. "Tell me, why are you all so obsessed with whether or not we can read the Second-round Simplified Characters?"

Her question stumped everyone.

Too lazy to explain, the Middle-aged Woman walked over to a bookshelf and patted the Shielding Plate.

The Middle-aged Uncle suddenly understood.

'That's right!'

'The numbering on the bookshelves ranges from 19301 to 19999. This is clearly a date format.'

'19301: January 1930.'

'19999: September 1999.'

'In other words, every single book represents a specific month of a specific year. As long as we know when the Second-round Simplified Characters were introduced, we might be able to find a book that records what each character means!'

"Ma'am, do you remember exactly which year and month the Second-round Simplified Characters were introduced?"

"It's been too long, I can't recall clearly. However, that was the same year the theater association I worked for resumed operations."

Everyone was left speechless.

Who in their right mind would pay attention to some theater association's history?

The path to deducing the exact date was completely blocked.

They could only turn their eyes back to the bookshelves. If they searched book by book, they might just find it.

However, they still didn't know if the Secret Room contained any traps. If they mishandled anything, they could very well trigger a lethal mechanism.

Yet, no one pointed this out.

They all walked toward the bookshelves, pretending to browse the titles, while in reality, not a single hand had touched the books.

Clack!

The sound of a marble dropping echoed through the room, startling everyone. Even Chen Ran and Qiu Yinong reflexively crouched down.

Only the Teenager remained standing blankly in place, holding a book in his hands as his entire body trembled uncontrollably from fear.

'There's actually an idiot who fell for it?'

This was the unanimous thought shared by the group. After waiting for quite some time and seeing that nothing happened, they finally stood back up with cautious movements.

Nobody paid any attention to the boy who triggered the mechanism; instead, they hurried over to the desk.

There, they saw that the Hourglass on the desk was missing one Glass Bead in its top chamber, while a new, unnumbered Glass Bead had appeared in the bottom chamber.

Many began to ponder deeply.

'The Teenager took a book from the shelf, which caused one of the Glass Beads in the top of the Hourglass to fall to the bottom chamber.'

'Furthermore, any Glass Bead that falls from the top loses its number.'

'Does this mean the Teenager is...'

'Eliminated?'

Thinking of this, someone turned to look at the book in his hand. It was a copy of "Journey to the West", which had absolutely nothing to do with Second-round Simplified Characters.

'He took the wrong book!'

'Taking the wrong book causes a Glass Bead to drop.'

They were certain that this person had triggered a trap, so quite a few people marked him as a primary target of observation.

Chen Ran noticed something.

The numbering of the Glass Beads in the top and bottom chambers of the Hourglass was consecutive.

Top chamber: Numbers 1 through 9.

Bottom chamber: Numbers 11 through 20.

'In other words, the Glass Bead that just fell was number 10, and now number 10 has been erased.'

'What do the numbers correspond to?'

He looked at the sheets of paper on the desk.

'There are about fifteen to twenty sheets in this stack. Factoring in the number of people present...'

'There should be exactly twenty sheets.'

'If the falling of a Glass Bead from the top of the Hourglass symbolizes a punishment...'

'What is the punishment?'

'The Second-round Simplified Characters, the dates, the numbers, the clues in the Study Room... everything seems to revolve around numbers.'

Just to be safe.

Chen Ran quietly took a Marker Pen out of his backpack and wrote down on his right palm: Number 10.

...

After a long while, the crowd still hadn't seen the Teenager suffer any punishment or get killed by a mechanism.

This left them bewildered, yet they still didn't dare to haphazardly grab books from the shelves. Consequently, the Hourglass clue was also practically severed.

In the Study Room, there were three clues:

First: The Second-round Simplified Characters.

Second: The Hourglass.

Third: The Xuan Paper on the desk.

With the first two clues leading to dead ends, they could only turn their attention to the third: the Xuan Paper.

Their gazes lingered on the eight large words: "The earth possesses four terrains, and energy flows from all eight directions."

While they were completely absorbed in their thoughts, the Teenager stealthily placed the book back in its original spot...

Suddenly, a wave of dizziness washed over everyone, but the sensation vanished as quickly as it had arrived.

However, the very next moment, everyone's eyes widened in shock as they stared intensely at the Hourglass on the desk.

The Middle-aged Uncle frowned and muttered, "Strange. Weren't there ten Glass Beads in the top of the Hourglass? Why are there only nine now?"