Chapter 734: Exchanging Progress
Xu Ruosi temporarily changed the task progress to "clearing the instance" to prevent Xiao Ling and Yu Guangnan from knowing what they had gained in the Wax Museum. Unexpectedly, Xiao Ling had also completed one-sixth of the progress.
Now that the matter was clarified, Xu Ruosi and the others naturally wanted to try to obtain new progress.
Xu Huo did not gain any new progress. After a moment, Jie Ling and Xu Ruosi nodded to him.
Although Xu Huo hadn't obtained another one-sixth progress, Jie Ling and Xu Ruosi had benefited, so they could certainly exchange information.
Thus, Jie Ling told Xiao Ling and Yu Guangnan about the Wax Museum, omitting the Strange Talk Room and selectively sharing what the Wax Museum appeared to convey on the surface.
Because the answer Xiao Ling had provided was essentially just connecting the content of the two venues, it wasn't a particularly difficult puzzle to solve—that said, obtaining this one-sixth progress so quickly and easily actually felt a bit strange.
But after verifying it, Xiao Ling confirmed it was correct and said with a smile, "Pleasure working with you."
"This answer is way too simple." Yu Guangnan was skeptical. "It's so simple I'm starting to doubt whether this is really a D-rank instance."
"Usually, there's only one possibility in this situation: most likely, one of the six puzzles will be exceptionally difficult as the finale," Xiao Ling said. "It might even be the one that explains why the instance is stuck on the first day."
"If that's the case, then the difficulty of the task is extraordinary," Xu Ruosi said.
"I've thought of another problem," Jie Ling spoke up. "What if the hidden requirement for clearing the instance is to make the instance time run normally?"
"That's unlikely, right?" Yu Guangnan hesitated. "Time being stuck on the first day should be a condition of the instance itself. For players, the difficulty lies in clearing it within seven days; it doesn't have much to do with the instance's own time pattern."
"Let's hope so," Jie Ling said.
Though they said that, everyone had a bad feeling. The instance was named "The Riddle of the Sphinx," and it was entirely possible that a time-related puzzle would appear at the end.
"At least we now know that the instance time is stuck on the first day we entered the game," Xu Huo said. "This is new information. Knowing this at the very start of the game is extremely advantageous for us. Additionally, if more players arrive at noon today, it will confirm our guess."
Time looping back and forth within a single day—this was very likely the "Riddle of the Sphinx."
The Riddle of the Sphinx was a historical legend. A monster with the body of a lion and the head of a human would ask passersby a riddle: "What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?"
The Sphinx would kill anyone who answered incorrectly, until the riddle was solved by Oedipus.
Of course, as the story became widely known, many people knew the answer. The riddle, which seemed to be about time on the surface, ultimately had the answer "man." But forcing a connection between this riddle and the instance's one-day loop could barely be justified, since the riddle's surface meaning did represent a single day.
However, whether this was related to the clearance task was hard to say.
"You've been to the Decapitated Cemetery. Since the puzzle at the Mannequin Building was so simple, you should have cracked the third progress by now, right?" Xu Huo paused before looking at Xiao Ling and the other.
Xiao Ling shook her head. "Unfortunately, no. I've told you everything I know about the Decapitated Cemetery. To be honest, I tried it while I was still at the cemetery, and it didn't work."
"That shouldn't be the case," Xu Ruosi said. "At the Mad Prison, they imprisoned living people for experiments. The Decapitated Cemetery is easy to understand—those who were tortured and killed were buried there, corresponding to the numbers on the mannequins."
"You can try submitting that answer." Xiao Ling gestured for her to go ahead.
Xu Ruosi paused, then decisively tried. Afterward, she looked even more surprised than when she had learned how simple the puzzle solution was. "Given the first two progressions, this shouldn't be wrong!"
"I think the difficulty of the puzzles might be increasing progressively," Jie Ling said. "Have you noticed that the stories of the venues are connected? The Decapitated Cemetery definitely isn't just a place to bury experimental subjects."
"The ideas of keeping people alive and abusing test subjects are both fine, but those experimenters were basically devoid of humanity. Would they be kind enough to stitch up the test subjects and bury them in coffins? It's more likely they'd burn them or just cover them up on the spot."
"The Sun Museum City was built later," Yu Guangnan said.
"I looked at those bones. They don't seem like they were scattered and then reassembled," Xiao Ling mused. "I just don't know how much time passed between the deaths and the construction of the museum city."
"A few years would be enough." Xu Huo leaned toward the idea that the people had been properly gathered and buried normally at the time of death. The tombstones could have been changed later, but it would be difficult to piece together so many broken bones one by one.
This raised a question: if the experimental subjects were treated like livestock, the likelihood of a normal burial was very small. What drove the experimenters to do this?
Given that all the skeletons had been decapitated, there might be some religious elements involved, more or less.
But simply submitting this conclusion didn't trigger the game to mark the progress as complete. This meant that the Decapitated Cemetery had other hidden information, or perhaps it wasn't one of the six progress points at all.
"If that's the case, there could be many reasons," Yu Guangnan said. "Maybe the people here had some special belief that the dead must be buried intact. Or it could be a facade to lure more people into the experiment. But none of these are the real answer."
"Maybe the Decapitated Cemetery isn't one of the progress points," Xiao Ling concluded. "There are so many venues in the museum city. We've been to seven or eight and only hit two. We still need to filter the one-sixth progress. Just looking at the continuity of the stories, the Mannequin Building and the Mad Prison have no connection at all."
The other players agreed with this reasoning.
"The sound is getting quieter," Xu Ruosi warned.
The fake figures that had run out from outside were gradually calming down. They might have wandered far away or returned to their original venues.
"I'll go check it out." Yu Guangnan said, carefully climbing out through the window. After a moment of silence, Xu Ruosi asked Jie Ling, "How's your injury?"
"I've taken some medicine. It's fine." Jie Ling moved her limbs lightly.
Xiao Ling sneered. "A broken leg can't be fixed in a short time. Instead of pretending to be fine, you should think about how not to hold the others back."
Jie Ling's eyes turned wary. Being unable to move well could not only mean being abandoned but also becoming a primary target for companions. She had been trying hard to hide it, but she hadn't expected Xiao Ling to expose her directly!
"Let's keep things peaceful," Xu Huo interrupted the gradually strange atmosphere. "If we can't clear the instance, we might end up as neighbors later. There's no need to make things so tense."
The three women glared at him simultaneously.