CH 43

Translator: Turtletranslators

Translation Checker: Rin 

Editor: Shark

Proofreader: Khun

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Bai Chunian traced the walls of the hot spring bathroom, investigating undiscovered clues. After walking around just once, a gap gradually appeared in the door on the north wall. However, immediately after the entire door appeared, the width of the door began to narrow so fast that if he didn’t seize this opportunity, the door would probably vanish in a flash.

Bai Chunian swiftly picked up the HK417 seized by the mercenaries and put it on his back, scooped Rimbaud up quickly, and ran towards the disappearing door. As he nimbly rolled on the ground near the gap and into the next room, the door instantly disappeared and the two were trapped again in the new room. 

The first thing Bai Chunian did was to glance at his watch. To be on the safe side, he had collected all the watches from the mercenary’s corpse, both mechanical and electronic. The moment they both entered this room, the time on all the watches jumped to one o’clock in the afternoon.

This room also had a red patterned wallpaper and was also a square-shaped room of the same length, width, and height.

In the centre of the room were five or six metal shelves surrounded by a sink, stove, range hood, baskets, a table with a knife rack, and exquisite plates. Cleanly polished mirrors covered the walls.

This was a back kitchen. Bai Chunian mentally labelled this back kitchen “13”, as the time in this room was all set for 1pm.

“Are they all built to meet the specifications of a particular villa?” Bai Chunian guessed silently.

Bai Chunian checked the shelves and cupboards and picked up a note from the floor.

The paper and handwriting of the note were the same as the one found in the bathroom, both left by the missing writer and marked “page 2” where the page number should be. However, it was not neatly arranged like the last note but rather like it was thrown on the floor in a panic.

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“I get it, it’s actually a maze. I can’t predict at all what kind of room I’m going to walk into next. I can barely walk now. The room I’m in now is a yellow playhouse, decorated in a cozy fashion (if you ignore the mirrors everywhere on the walls), with plush teddy bears and pink bunnies on the carpet. In the middle is a small coffee table used for building blocks and on the tabletop is a pile of square blocks arranged in a very unusual way. It’s a good thing I studied descriptive geometry in college, so I can easily draw its three views and three-dimensional drawings. If the police can see it, I hope it will help you find clues.” 

Viewing architectural drawings was a mandatory lesson for Alliance agents. Bai Chunian easily understood what the writer was trying to say from the scribbled illustrations:

It was a bunch of irregular-shaped buildings built with 28 square blocks, not in the shape of any regular cube. The entire cube appeared to be a hollowed-out rectangular prism with a base of three by three and a height of five.

This matched the numbers on the clock. It could be tentatively deduced that this was the three-dimensional design of the entire chamber.

Ktf jggjcufwfca bo atf meyf yibmxr kjr jmaejiis delaf bvv; la tjv rfnfc qlfmfr bc atf ybaabw ijsfg, atgff bc atf rfmbcv, fluta bc atf atlgv, atgff bc atf obegat, jcv rfnfc bc atf oloat ijsfg. Ktlr jggjcufwfca mgfjafv j iba bo tbiibkfv-bea rqjmfr lc atf mfcafg bo atf fcalgf meyf yelivlcu. 

The writer had drawn three circles on the sketch, dividing the cube vertically into three with the leftmost layer marked blue, the layer sandwiched in the middle marked red, and the rightmost layer marked yellow.

Sitting on the ground, Bai Chunian closed his eyes and pondered over the roughly drawn sketch.

When a cube building was given a three-dimensional view and sketch, the exact shape and placement of the entire building could be fully determined. But 324 gave far too many distracting clues; it was hard to link the patterns of the colors, digital time, placement shapes, and room functions.

Bai Chunian finally understood how closely the contents En Ke mentioned in File F described 324. This was an extremely self-obsessed experiment. All he gave were puzzles derived from his own odd ideas without consideration of the experience or situation of the person solving them. No wonder he was incinerated and disposed of as a failed scrap; he simply failed to serve as a filter for less intelligent humans. 

Bai Chunian sat on the floor with his eyes closed in contemplation. Rimbaud didn’t bother him and sat down beside the cupboard to admire the jeweled ring Bai Chunian wore on the tip of his own tail, picking up a plate to eat as a biscuit as he did so.

“This.” Rimbaud took the last bite of the leftover porcelain piece and examined it, reading with his head tilted, “Yiyuan Renguang.”

Bai Chunian looked back at him as Rimbaud picked up the broken porcelain piece in his hand and shook it at him.

“Baby, are you only able to read the parts you know?” Bai Chunian took the piece of porcelain and picked up another intact plate to examine it, finding that it had a custom-made pattern of “Zhengyuan Restaurant” printed on it. 

This was a well-known restaurant that existed in reality with a reputation similar to that of the Quanjude, located at the intersection of Fengcheng South Road and Hongya Road in Tongkou City and known by everyone in China.

The 109 Research Institute was also built on the outskirts of this city. The two places were probably less than an hour’s drive away from each other.

The communicator went off again.

He said, “The restaurant has just opened a door and we’re now in the next room. I can’t see what this room is for. There are four car seats in the very middle, a steering wheel in front of the front left seat, a manual gearbox on the right, an ashtray, and an indicator light for an empty car in front. The indicator light is pressed down, meaning there’s someone in the car. This is a Volkswagen Santana taxi ah.” 

Bai Chunian: “Wallpaper color? Time?”

He: “Red, 12 noon. What about yours over there?”

Bai Chunian: “I have a basic profile of the Invisible Stalker now, but I’m not sure yet.”

He Suowei: “You still know how to do this?” 

Profiling refers to inferring the psychology of the person being observed through their behavior.

“I’ll tell you when I’m sure.” Still pondering over another issue, Bai Chunian held up the illustration left by the missing writer and circled the room a few times before suddenly jumping up and landing heavily on the floor.

Rimbaud was so stunned he forgot to eat the broken porcelain in his hand and just stared at the idiot.

After Bai Chunian jumped a few times, the three walls of the room altogether began to reveal a gap from underneath, which grew larger and larger as the doorway gradually became complete. 

The room Bai Chunian was in was subjected to a downward impact, so it slid downwards.

“Sure enough, it’s a map.”

An analysis of the three-dimensional view and three-dimensional diagram drawn on the note showed that the bottom of room 13 where Bai Chunian was located was empty. This now proved that all rooms could be moved either vertically or horizontally by panning.

Bai Chunian chose a doorway and looked out. None of the three doorways had a room outside, just a large black hole through the space. This unofficially confirmed the accuracy of the drawings left by the missing writer. 

“The rooms can be pushed.” Bai Chunian relayed the information to He Suowei.

Meanwhile, Rimbaud kept his eyes on the last unopened door and licked his lips hungrily.

Bai Chunian called out to him over his shoulder, “What’re you staring at?”

Rimbaud thought for a moment in confusion, “A painting, passed by.” 

Bai Chunian didn’t understand what he meant and walked over to the only door that wasn’t open and studied it carefully, “What painting?”

Rimbaud described it indifferently, “Red, fractured, flat, large pieces, not edible.”

“…” Bai Chunian couldn’t deduce what the painting looked like, so he had to let it be for now and picked Rimbaud up, “Let’s go outside and look at it. Hold me tight.”

Rimbaud wrapped his arms around the alpha’s neck and wrapped his tail around his body. The tip of his nose gently rubbed against the fish-shaped markings on the side of his neck, “So obedient.” 

“Oh, really.” Bai Chunian raised half an eyebrow and patted Rimbaud’s bottom, “I can be more well-behaved in the future.”

Rimbaud seemed a little resistant to such an action that offended his status, but after looking at the smiling and very well-behaved alpha, he found it forgivable and whispered a warning, “Can’t, touch there.”

“Then I won’t touch it with my hands later.” Bai Chunian laughed.

Walking out of the back kitchen, the two entered a large, empty, dark space. It had no other design, but rails ran horizontally and vertically, a bit like the kind of scaffolding with green netting erected outside construction sites. You could tell that these square rooms were moving on rails and that applying force to one side of the room would cause the room to move. 

With one hand holding Rimbaud and the other holding the bright torch he had retrieved from the mercenary, Bai Chunian carefully searched around the room he had just come out of.

There was some dried blood and residue on the floor close to the wall. Bai Chunian knelt down and shone his torch on the floor, feeling the blood residue stick to his fingertips.

Following the direction of the blood dripping down, Bai Chunian glanced above the wall and was eye to eye with a bloodied face.

“Holy shit.” 

Bai Chunian took two steps back in shock before he could see the full picture. It was a body crushed alive with bones and flesh and blood glued to the wall, already squashed and shattered.

“A pancake.” Rimbaud reached out and gently picked at the scraps of flesh on the wall with his nails, nuzzling alpha’s neck and asking softly, “Dead, and shouldn’t be, eaten, as well?”

“Expired meat, eating it will upset your stomach. We don’t eat that.” Bai Chunian pushed the omega in his arms upwards, “Let’s withdraw first. It’s easy to die here if you stay in this place for too long.”

Before the words left his mouth, the room that Bai Chunian had just stepped on began to float upwards. At the same time, the room above their heads descended at a rapid pace. If they dodged one step slower, they’d end up with the same fate as the squashed corpse on the wall. 

In a panic, Bai Chunian leapt and rolled with Rimbaud towards the right. A doorway appeared above him and Bai Chunian threw Rimbaud out in one smooth motion. Sharp claws extended from Rimbaud’s fingertips. He climbed firmly onto the floor of the doorway above him, threw down his fishtail, and curled it around Bai Chunian’s hand, taking the alpha with him as he tumbled into the room.

The doorway closed and disappeared. Just a second too late and the two could’ve been run right over by the falling room or cut in half as the two adjacent rooms panned out.

This was a bright blue room. Bai Chunian glanced at his watch, which showed eleven in the morning.

The room didn’t have excessive furnishings, only a huge horizontal cylindrical steel machine in the center with a square iron door bearing a pull handle directly in front of it. 

Bai Chunian pulled the iron door open and took a look, confirming that it was an incinerator.

“Captain He.” Bai Chunian tapped on his communicator, “I’m pretty sure now of the connection between these rooms and the time. These are all the places that the Invisible Stalker passed through on his way out of the 109 Research Institute. He gave them exact copies to turn into rooms, and the time in the rooms is the time he had arrived at each place.”

“324 escaped before entering the Research Institute’s incinerator. The room shows 11am, and after walking for an hour he saw the taxi. Because he can turn invisible, he could get on the car undetected and follow the taxi’s passengers out of Zhengyuan Restaurant and into the rear kitchen to hide. The time in the back kitchen was 1 pm, a crucial part of the journey that just happened to coincide. ”

“Captain He?” 

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