Chapter 1900: The Cycling Space
The marks still looked fresh, though that couldn't be used as a definitive standard, since all the rooms were brand new, showing no signs of human habitation whatsoever.
Xu Huo swept his gaze across the room and picked up a shard of the teapot that had splashed into the corner.
After walking for a while, he gradually began to summarize some patterns. Apart from the first courtyard entered from the main gate, where turning back was forbidden from the start, other areas only prohibited backtracking after passing through three courtyards. From the first room where he couldn't turn back, he took a flowerpot; from the second room, a teacup; from the third, a teapot... In subsequent rooms, he also removed items from different positions to serve as markers.
After going through two or three cycles where backtracking was forbidden, the room layouts would change. Starting from a tea room, it would transform into a bedroom, then into a dining room, and then into a living room. Although the types of rooms differed, the further inward he went, the more items the rooms contained.
Additionally, he discovered marks left by others in different rooms—carvings under wooden baskets, on the inner sides of bed legs, beneath chairs, and on the stands holding flowerpots. The initial "horizontal lines" probably shouldn't count as marks, because later carvings included the numbers "3" and "4."
If someone had been here and left marks while passing through rooms, they would normally number them in order of passage. Since there were skipped numbers, it meant the path Xu Huo had taken wasn't the same as the one the person carving those numbers had walked. Moreover, the rooms with carvings were never the ones where backtracking was forbidden. This suggested that each time, the rooms and positions where backtracking was sealed off might be different.
Xu Huo couldn't help but frown. If that were the case, even if the spaces corresponding to different doors in this courtyard weren't random, the number of possible combinations would still be enormous. Trying them one by one would be nearly impossible, because from the outside, there was no way to estimate how many spatial passages existed within.
However, after continuing forward for a while longer, he found that the room had turned back into a tea room. But unlike the first tea room he'd encountered, this one showed signs of use. On either side of the table sat a cup of hot tea, and the water in the teapot was still warm.
In that instant, countless thoughts flashed through Xu Huo's mind, but ultimately, they settled on time.
The mansion was clearly empty. Those noble scions certainly wouldn't have the leisure to sit down for tea. So who had left this behind?
He could only think of a time fragment being intercepted.
He reached out and touched the teacup, then moved it aside. He could indeed feel a slight warmth and a solid texture, and the cup shifted with his hand—this was a real space.
Of course, this wasn't impossible. After all, every door here was a teleportation passage. Different spaces might correspond to different times. Assuming the time in this space was exceptionally slow could explain why the water was still hot.
But for Xu Huo, this wasn't good news. Half an hour ago, he'd noticed that the "Complete Time" watch on his wrist was having issues. As he passed through different rooms, the converted time was no longer uniform. Sometimes the watch would even stop moving entirely, with no discernible pattern. If time was shifting, the time he spent inside would be completely different from the outside. The longer he delayed, the greater the time gap when he finally got out.
After a moment's hesitation, he took out his ticket, intending to forcibly leave this place. But to his utter surprise, this location was outside the ticket's usable range!
A ticket being unusable usually meant one of two things: either it was a special place where the game had closed the ticket's usage permissions—such as near the tracks or those hard-to-find special zones—or it was a place the game hadn't touched.
This mansion was in Zone 011, so it clearly wasn't a place the game hadn't touched. Could it be an instance venue that hadn't been finalized due to spatial issues?
Xu Huo thought for a moment and took out the authorization for the "Seventeenth Hospital," but the game notified him that he didn't have permission to open a random instance in this zone.
If random instances couldn't be opened, then this was still Zone 011. Since it wasn't an instance site in a spatial rift, did that mean this place itself was an instance?
He immediately searched for related instance information under the Dimension.
Even if this instance had been sealed off by Zone 011, as long as tickets had been issued for it, someone must have cleared it. Zone 011 could block its own residents, but could it block players from other zones?
Yet no matter whether he searched for similar instances under the Dimension, specifically looked up Zone 011 instances, or posted a high-price bounty for similar information on the Message Collection Terminal in Zone 011, he ultimately found nothing.
During this time, he kept moving forward. After passing the tea room and the bedroom, the next room was the dining room. The bedroom had some children's toys—dolls and various models—while the dining table was set with light, palatable dishes more suitable for a child's palate. The tableware was cartoon-themed, the chopsticks were training chopsticks for kids, and the knives, forks, and spoons were all plastic.
Xu Huo's gaze swept over the tableware before he finally took a dish from the table.
Continuing forward, he soon discovered number carvings on some furniture again. But these numbers were different from before. Although the chairs in all four rooms of the same courtyard were carved with "4," one of the rooms had the number "5" scratched out and replaced with "4."
This was different from the earlier situation where only one room had a number.
He chose the room with the scratched-out number and moved forward. The three rooms in the next courtyard had no marks, but their layouts were no different from the previous courtyards—all dining rooms, all with food.
This time, Xu Huo simply took bowls and plates from different positions on various tables before moving on. He did the same in the next courtyard.
After passing through three identical courtyards like this, the path behind was sealed again. He opened all three doors, took a look, and then stepped back. The rooms had turned into bedrooms, but with fewer toys.
In the same courtyard, entering a room and then retreating basically ensured that the location wouldn't change during those two trips in and out. This was completely different from the situation with those noble scions earlier. And after walking this far, aside from seeing one smashed-up room, he hadn't encountered anyone. Had they broken the rules here, or did the mansion's conditions change specifically when people traveled together?
Although the mansion was grand and exquisitely decorated, with tea rooms and living rooms, most of the furnishings—especially in the bedrooms and dining rooms—were prepared for children.
As for the items carved with numbers, their positions were mostly very low. The inner sides of bed legs, in particular, were inconvenient for adults to reach, even if they wanted to hide the marks. Of course, it was possible they were deliberately carved there, but if someone wanted to leave marks this way, carving them on the floor or walls would make them harder to damage or remove.
(End of Chapter)