Chapter Twenty-Two: New Rules and Entities

Before their eyes, the world had undergone a profound transformation.

They turned back in the direction from which they had come, but where the teaching building should have been, thick mist now shrouded the landscape. If they accounted for the distance they had climbed, the entire teaching block would now lie buried underground.

Unbothered by this, he finally lifted his gaze to survey their surroundings.

All around were trees, their trunks rising straight and unnatural, as if pruned and planned by some deliberate hand. The ground beneath was carpeted with wild grass, its color a disturbing ashen brown, growing together in tangled patches and exuding a sense of desolation.

Most of the trees were missing their crowns, standing as mere trunks, looking for all the world like firewood sticks planted upright. The few trees that still possessed crowns were much shorter, barely level with the trunks themselves, and the thicket nearly blocked all passage. If there were any choice to be made, one would never willingly advance through such a place.

Chen Qing and his companion emerged from the passage, feeling the air grow warmer around them. He stamped the wild grass at his feet, and together they proceeded down the only narrow path trodden through the undergrowth.

After some six or seven minutes of walking, a bottleneck appeared before them.

Scattered about its entrance were countless snack wrappers, and directly above them a keypad awaited a password. The keypad was composed of nine numeric buttons, yet when Chen Qing looked beyond the gateway, he saw nothing that suggested what the password might unlock.

After all, this was merely an open gateway without any enclosure; even if the password remained unsolved, one could simply go around it.

Chen Qing explored the buildings flanking the passage, unable to fathom the purpose of this password.

But as he searched, doubt began to cloud his expression.

"But… we don't even know the rules of this place," Jiang Wan said, her face troubled.

She hesitated for a moment, then asked Chen Qing, "Are the rules from before still valid here? I see no way out."

Chen Qing nodded, rubbing his chin as he crouched down. "What if we've come from one back room into another?"

"What do you mean?" Jiang Wan was puzzled.

"Look here," he pointed to the base of the gateway. "The blood here is different from before. This… well, perhaps it's not even blood at all."

Where his finger pointed, several tufts of brown grass were stained a dark, dusky hue—imperceptible unless looked at closely.

"What kind of liquid is that?"

"I don't know… but in a place like this," Chen Qing laughed with a careless air, "just treat it as the blood of some entity."

"You really are…" she shook her head, then asked, "Are you going to crack the password?"

"Hmm…"

He glanced around, but the environment bore no relation to the password.

Numbers? Unusual objects?

This was not a game.

"Should we wait here for a while?"

Chen Qing frowned and refused at once, "No… no. This password will never reveal itself just by waiting…"

He pondered aloud, "She walks upon the dazzling staircase… with every step, a new self is born beneath her feet."

In that instant, clarity came to Chen Qing's mind; with the flash of a meteor-like thought, he understood the meaning of the phrase.

He looked up, and what should have been the distant sky now seemed close at hand.

He stared, seeing his reflection there, the world inverted as if mirrored in the heavens.

Sweat began to bead on Chen Qing's skin as he took in the scene.

Within the reflection, on the path before his mirrored self, dozens—hundreds—of grotesque creatures, each with only half a body, twisted and shuffled along.

They trembled, moving on a single leg, dragging half their intestines as they went.

Their bodies distorted, pouring forth blood that formed a river.

A human—or rather, a creature of human proportions—could spill no more than eight thousand milliliters of fluid before reaching their limit.

But these beings… they had already bled an entire river.

Within that river of blood, their one-sided bodies bristled with blades.

They pressed together, allowing the blades to pierce one another's flesh.

Step by step, they drew closer, only four or five meters from Chen Qing.

"Look up! The password is above us! Find it quickly!" he cried out, startling Jiang Wan, whose face turned pale.

She too saw those twisted creatures, and beside them stood several pillars.

Jiang Wan counted: exactly eight.

"Is the password eight?!"

"You know it can't be that simple!" Chen Qing kept his composure, eyes fixed on the pillars.

The pillars varied in height; if the tallest was assigned the value of 1, the shortest could be represented as 0.5, its height exactly halfway up the tallest.

In numerical terms, from left to right, the sequence was: 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 1, 1, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5.

"Try adding them all together!"

"No… that's not right. The sum is five, but if the two ones mark boundaries… No. Seems we're missing a number…"

Jiang Wan's face blanched as she saw the creatures approach.

She looked ahead, and in a swift motion loaded and aimed her pistol.

She watched her mirrored self in the sky, aligning the weapon, and with a roar of flame, fired.

The gunfire in the reflection flared at the exact moment, and the bullet traveled as she intended, striking several of the creatures.

But did it matter? Would the bullets stop them?

They glanced at the gaping wounds in their chests, hesitated briefly, then continued forward.

"Half… half," Chen Qing muttered, lowering his head as realization dawned.

"Mirror, sky! The numbers are inverted!"

He rushed to the keypad, unconsciously edging closer to the entities.

He entered the code, as the creatures' claws swung toward him.

At that moment, he saw a wound appear on his shoulder out of nowhere, and shackles materialized in the sky above, binding the entities.

The creatures were pinned to the ground, unable to move.

Blood flowed from Chen Qing's arm, turning gray-brown as it spilled.

The blood already on the ground deepened in color, merging with the grass.

"It seems… we have to solve the puzzles to move forward," Jiang Wan observed, watching his wound heal rapidly, her anxiety easing.

Yet as she spoke, Chen Qing's face trembled, and tendrils of flesh began to creep over his cheeks.

He heard a distant roar, pulled out the chocolate energy bar he'd brought with him, and after a brief snack, caught his breath and said to Jiang Wan, "Absolutely not… it's not just about the password."

He appeared weary, but with the entities immobilized, neither dared linger a second longer. They stepped past the creatures and pressed on.

Soon, the scenery began to change again.

The forest, previously made of trunks alone, now had upper halves—but the whole trees were split down the middle, just like the entities before.

Among the thickets, the gateway had changed. Instead of a password keypad, a sphere stood in its place.

Chen Qing approached and discovered the sphere could rotate half a turn in eight directions, resetting to the center after each movement.

Without hesitation, he looked up at the sky, where the entities that had wounded him appeared again.

This time, their target was not the sky.

Step by step, they twisted their bodies, their skins turning inside out like socks worn backward.

Only when their feet pointed downward did they begin to walk.

Descending like stairs, they approached Chen Qing on the ground; within seconds, their faces became visible.

Their features were grotesquely distorted, as if churned in a blender, the edges of swirling cavities leaking fluid. Each time they moved, liquid dripped from their nostrils and brains onto the earth.

With each drop, short, thick maggots crawled out of the ground, licking the fluid and forming footprints beneath the entities.

Each step left a mark made of writhing insects.

When the entities reached the ground, the maggots began to climb their bodies, burrowing deep into their viscera and spinal cords, invading every part.

The maggots reared up, wriggling for attention, but Chen Qing was too spent to care.

He counted the pillars in the sky.

From left to right, they were 1, 0.5, 0.5, and, after a completely broken stone pillar in the center, 1, 0.5, 1.

Chen Qing closed his eyes, calculated as before, and after arriving at the answer, focused on the hemisphere before him.

He pushed the sphere in various directions, but despite using the correct answer, nothing happened.

"What's going on…" he muttered, frowning as countless recalculations confirmed the reality.

The calculations were correct. Unmistakably correct.

He stared at the sphere, certain the order was right…