# 167
Chapter 167: The Scrambled Cube
If not for Lin Qiye’s lightning-fast reflexes, the headless man’s slash would have ended him in a single stroke.
Lin Qiye flicked a finger. The two Straight Blades lodged in the headless man’s chest shuddered, ripped free, and whipped back to him. Though the blades had torn ghastly wounds, no blood spurted—almost as if the creature had never possessed any in the first place.
He caught the blades and drifted to the floor without a sound.
Boom—!
At the same instant, the berserk Cao Yuan—sent flying into the next room—erupted with black fiend-fire. He shot back like an arrow, cackling, and slashed at the headless man.
The moment Cao Yuan created a louder noise, the headless man abandoned Lin Qiye and swung his massive executioner’s blade to meet the black-flame Straight Blade. Another collision!
Cao Yuan was hurled through yet another wall.
“Heh-heh-heh-heh…” Like a tireless beast, he kept laughing, kept charging, no matter how many times he was knocked away.
The headless man could one-shot any other recruit, but against the clearly off-the-charts Black King’s Annihilation Slash he was momentarily stymied. Or rather—as long as he didn’t deliberately make a racket—he was the one being flattened.
Unfortunately, every clash, every thunderous impact that sent Cao Yuan flying, briefly boosted the headless man’s power, letting him pummel the mad swordsman in return. Killing Cao Yuan, however, would still take time; in this state his vitality was cockroach-level absurd.
Lin Qiye hovered nearby like a ghost, silently watching Cao Yuan get smashed around, and sighed in resignation.
If Cao Yuan still had a shred of sanity—if he’d stop giggling and move more quietly—the headless man would be dead already. Sadly…
Letting Cao Yuan fight had been a huge mistake.
“Heh-heh-heh…”
They’d smashed through who-knew-how-many rooms. Cao Yuan crawled from the rubble again, swayed upright, gripped his Straight Blade, and leered as he charged.
Lin Qiye shadowed the pair, hunting for the perfect instant to kill the headless man, yet careful not to step too close—Cao Yuan made no distinction between friend and foe.
Suddenly, without warning, the rooms shifted once more!
“It’s changing again!” Lin Qiye darted toward the brawling duo, but the instant he reached the doorway the chamber vanished, replaced by a rapid strobe of different rooms.
When the environment stabilized, his mental perception no longer located either fighter.
“The second mystery in the building doesn’t want me interfering…” Lin Qiye quickly deduced the reason for the scramble, brows knitting.
Without him waiting in the wings, Cao Yuan’s odds in a solo fight plummeted. His mental strength couldn’t sustain the berserk state long, while the headless man only grew stronger with every sound. Prolong the fight and Cao Yuan would lose.
The hidden mystery was no fool either…
Lin Qiye hesitated only a moment, then sprinted through the rooms, senses sweeping every chamber, trying to relocate the battle.
Since the headless man was pinned by Cao Yuan, stealth was pointless; he opened the throttle and ran full-tilt. Had he possessed large-scale destruction, he’d already be tearing the building apart.
Room after room blurred past—then he slammed to a halt!
Beyond the endless chambers, his perception touched something different…
He turned toward the right-hand wall, gaze seeming to pierce it and, two rooms farther on, glimpse a strange spherical void.
There, wrapped by layer upon layer of rooms like a “core,” hovered a silver three-by-three cube, glowing eerily.
Lin Qiye’s eyes narrowed.
A levitating cube at the center of a warped space—anything but normal. If he was right, that was…
The second “River”-level mystery hiding in Building Three.
Its appearance stunned him. Every mystery he’d met had been living; he’d never seen one shaped like an object—something modern, no less. Some forbidden artifact, maybe, rather than a mystery?
The thought died as soon as it formed. His senses clearly detected life pulsing inside the cube. If it were merely a forbidden item, how could it possess such intelligence?
“A cube… so that’s it.” Understanding lit his eyes.
He’d grasped the pattern behind Building Three’s spatial chaos.
…
“A cube?” Baili Pangpang exclaimed at A Zhu’s telepathic message.
“Exactly. Every room’s rearrangement follows a cube,” A Zhu declared. “Treat each room as a small cubie, and the whole of Building Three is an irregular N×N×N cube—order changes at the mystery’s will. Each spatial shift is the cube being scrambled; cubies whiz to new positions, creating the illusion of randomness. But if you track every rotation’s axis and angle, you can predict it.
In short, our entire space has become a Rubik’s Cube, and the mystery is the player.
I collated the first thirty-two scrambles and found its pattern. From the next change onward, I can forecast the trajectory.”
Excitement rippled through the room; they’d sketched and analyzed for ages, waiting for those words.
“And there’s more,” A Zhu added. “I’ve also located where the mystery is hiding…”