Chapter 305: A Square?
Though everyone heard that loud crash, due to their limited field of view, none of them knew exactly what had happened outside their own rooms.
All they knew was that someone had died.
But who died? And how?
"Damn it..." Chen Junnan slapped himself across the face and scolded, "Chen Junnan, snap out of it... What does that dead guy have to do with you?"
The slight stinging pain brought him back to his senses. If he kept worrying like this, he'd be the one dying next.
He got up and paced around the room again. The door was locked tight—completely impossible to open.
The man to his left was most likely dead by now, but how could he verify it?
The fourth round had begun. Following Chen Junnan's earlier reasoning, if Yun Yao was Questioner No. 1, he was No. 2, and the man on his left was No. 3, then it was now No. 4's turn to receive a question.
He would once again be the last person to get the call.
What would the question look like by the time it reached him?
After a long wait, Chen Junnan felt enough time had passed. He reached out and placed his hand on the phone in advance.
*Ring—*
The instant the phone rang, Chen Junnan picked it up.
"Hello..." Yun Yao's voice came through. "Great, you're still alive?"
"Heh, you sure know how to say nice things." Chen Junnan sighed. "Don't worry, I've always been a hair's breadth from death."
"Stop joking around..." Yun Yao said seriously. "This time the question is, 'Was the killer a square?'"
"This..." Chen Junnan was taken aback. "That old lecher's questions are getting trickier and trickier..."
"So what do you think?" Yun Yao asked. "That sound came from very close to us. Do you know who died?"
"I have a rough idea." Chen Junnan nodded. "But whether the killer was a 'square' or a 'club'—how the hell would I know?"
"Anyway, I chose 'No'..." Yun Yao said. "Every answer before this was 'Yes'. Do you think it's related to the dead person?"
Yun Yao's words gave Chen Junnan a new angle.
"Big star, you really are a tiny bit smarter than me." Chen Junnan chuckled. "But our answers alone can't decide the whole game. Nobody knows what the others chose."
"But you have one advantage over the rest," Yun Yao said. "You can call to confirm whether the person next to you is really dead."
"Good point."
After hanging up, Chen Junnan immediately pressed the dial button.
*Doo—*
The dial tone sounded. No one answered.
*Doo—*
A second dial tone. Still silence on the other end.
This basically confirmed that the man beside him was dead.
But how exactly had he died?
Chen Junnan didn't give up. He patiently waited through more than a dozen rings.
Just as he was about to hang up, the dial tone was interrupted. A soft voice came through.
"Hello...?"
Chen Junnan froze for a moment, then pulled his hand back and held the vintage phone to his ear.
"Hello?"
"Wh-Who are you?" a girl's voice asked.
Chen Junnan frowned, then immediately hung up.
According to the rules Di Snake had explained earlier, if a phone rang ten times without being answered, it would automatically redirect to the next living person.
He had let it ring at least thirteen or fourteen times. That meant this girl hadn't wanted to answer right away.
She hadn't realized the call would come to her.
So she was this round's "first person."
"So it's already come full circle...?" Chen Junnan muttered to himself. He returned to his screen and started thinking about this round's question. "Was the killer a square?"
First, he needed to establish two things.
First—was this the original question?
If it was like the previous "Should it fall?" how had it been altered, and what did it mean before the change?
Assuming no one had tampered with the question, then he needed to tackle the second issue—
What exactly was a "square"?
What word was "square's" counterpart? Was it "club" or "circle"?
If they were analogous terms, replacing one with the other should still make sense logically.
So it probably wasn't "club."
After all, since the game began, there'd been no mention of poker suits or anything related to playing card symbols. Bringing up "square" out of nowhere meant it almost certainly wasn't about poker suits.
So this "square" referred to its literal meaning—an actual "geometric solid."
That meant... the real meaning of this question was, "Did a square-shaped geometric object kill that person?"
Suddenly everything became much clearer. He could even guess what that sound had been.
A massive geometric object had fallen from above, crushing him to death.
And that earlier question, "Should it fall?"
That must have been the question controlling the descent of that giant geometric object.
"Damn it, I've used up a lifetime's worth of brainpower in just one day..." Chen Junnan shook his head and pressed "No."
The reason he chose "No" was because he knew what had fallen wasn't a "square."
"If I'm not mistaken," Chen Junnan thought, "it was a 'sphere.'"
He reached out and touched the wall on his left. After that huge crash, the wall had been struck by something massive a second time.
The feeling was more like a round object that wobbled after hitting the ground.
If a "square" had fallen, its flat surface would have made contact with the floor and stopped moving immediately.
Chen Junnan's answer was submitted. The screen lit up as usual.
"Final answer for this question: 'No.'"
He nodded to himself. "Looks like a lot of people thought the same way I did?"
A few seconds later, the sound of massive chains rang out again.
*Clank, clank, clank*—the noise came in an unbroken stream, pulling the rubble from the adjacent room back up into the air.
Chen Junnan listened quietly, trying to picture what was happening in the other room—
If he wasn't wrong, just one wall away, a thick iron chain had been hoisting a giant iron ball. Minutes ago, it had crashed down, instantly turning the person sitting in that room into pulp.
Now the chain was tightening, pulling the iron ball back up to the ceiling.
So the question was...
Why had it crushed *him*?
Had he been the only one who chose "Yes" to the earlier question "Should it fall?"
But that didn't make sense. Snake-type games rarely lied about their rules. Since Di Snake had said the answers followed the "majority rules" principle, more than half the people must have chosen "Yes."
At least seven people must have chosen "Yes."
"And out of those seven, it crushed *him*...?"
Chen Junnan pondered this. He knew that if he didn't figure out the logic behind who the iron ball targeted, he wouldn't know when he'd be the next one crushed to death without understanding why.
The chains above kept rattling, the noise grating on his nerves.
"My brain's already not working right, and now I've got this racket disturbing the peace..."
He touched his palm and found it damp with sweat. The feeling of not knowing when it would be his turn to be turned into a meat paste was deeply unsettling.