Chapter 37

 It was Zhou Ziheng’s voice. Xia Xiqing wiped his face, freeing himself from his memories, and walked over to the carpet where he had been sitting earlier. He crossed his legs and sat down, just as he had expected. The blue button he had seen earlier was indeed Zhou Ziheng.

“I can hear you.” The moment he heard the response, Xia Xiqing had a hunch, and he immediately asked, “Did you also turn that blue knob just now?”

“Yes.” Zhou Ziheng’s affirmative reply came from the other end. “Does your radio also have three knobs—two red and one blue?”

“Yes.” Xia Xiqing stared at the knob, his suspicions confirmed. “I get it now. This radio actually functions as a walkie-talkie, but the condition is that both people must turn the knob representing the other at the same time to establish a connection.” Xia Xiqing sighed, propping his elbows on the small round table, and lazily said to Zhou Ziheng on the other end of the walkie-talkie, “I’ve been waiting for you for a long time.”

　 “Mine seems to be a bedroom too,” Zhou Ziheng looked around.

Both bedrooms? What a coincidence.

Xia Xiqing fiddled with the knobs on the radio while asking, “Does the red knob on your radio also have letters written below it?”

　 “Yes, one is labeled 0, and the other isn’t.”

Are all radios set up like this? Xia Xiqing glanced at the row of knobs, reached out to try turning the red one next to it, but as soon as he turned it, the radio’s sound became fuzzy again, turning into static without any voices.

Did the signal drop?

　 He immediately turned on the blue knob and turned off the red one, and Zhou Ziheng’s voice reappeared: “What happened just now? The sound suddenly disappeared.”

“I just turned on another knob. It seems that this radio can only connect to two rooms at a time. If one person selects the knob of another room, the signal will be interrupted.”

　 “The threshold is really high,” Zhou Ziheng teased.

　 Zhou Ziheng remained silent for a while, and Xia Xiqing didn’t know if he was thinking about the same thing he had said when he had kissed him forcefully that day.

But he didn’t expect that Zhou Ziheng wasn’t thinking the same thing. He was happy for a moment because of the phrase “mutual affection” and felt a little embarrassed, so he didn’t speak.

　 The atmosphere suddenly became a bit awkward, so Xia Xiqing stood up and walked around the room, trying to give each other some space.

Strangely, this room had no door lock. There was a square area on the door, with only a small puzzle piece embedded in it, and the rest was blank. Xia Xiqing tried to remove the puzzle piece with his hand but found it was fixed in place. But strangely, the edges of the fixed puzzle piece, like many of the items in this room, had a groove that fit perfectly with the shape of the puzzle piece.

“There should be other puzzle pieces in this room. Could it be that you have to collect all the puzzle pieces to open the room…” Xia Xiqing muttered to himself, but Zhou Ziheng spoke up from the other end, “Are you talking about puzzle pieces? My room has puzzle pieces too.”

　 “Really?” Xia Xiqing was a bit surprised. Based on the previous episode’s setup for the escape room, this didn’t make much sense, as each escape room in the previous episode had completely different puzzle-solving methods and a wide variety of props. But this time was different—there were so many similarities.

　 “Yeah, I just found a puzzle piece in a book on my desk, but it was the only one. I looked for a long time but couldn’t find a suitable place to put the puzzle.”

Xia Xiqing grew increasingly puzzled as he listened. He followed Zhou Ziheng’s instructions and walked to his desk, “Then what happened?”

　 “Then I noticed a square blank area on the door of my room. Since the puzzle piece had two vertical edges, I tried placing it there, and it fit perfectly. It also seemed to have a magnetic attraction, so I left it there.”

The door?

There was already a puzzle piece pre-placed on his door, but Zhou Ziheng had to place his own puzzle piece there.

　 What was going on?

“You placed the puzzle piece there? In the top left corner?”

“Yes, the top left corner was the perfect spot for it.”

“Does your puzzle piece also have a groove around it?”

　 “That’s right. How did you know?” Zhou Ziheng had just mentioned the desk, and Xia Xiqing felt that there must be other clues on his desk as well. Strangely, when he walked over to the desk, he noticed that there was also a butterfly specimen in the desk drawer.

This was the second time a butterfly had appeared, which meant it was definitely not a coincidence.

“Are there any butterflies in your room?”

　 “Butterflies?” Zhou Ziheng’s voice was clearly puzzled. “No butterflies.”

Xia Xiqing found this odd. “Does your desk have drawers? Is there a butterfly on or near the drawers?”

　 Zhou Ziheng looked down to check. “There are drawers, but no butterflies. However, there is a four-digit combination lock.”

A combination lock? Xia Xiqing checked his own drawers again but didn’t find any combination locks. He tried to open them and found that the drawers were indeed locked, but there were no keyholes or locks. He looked at the butterfly specimen stuck on the drawer and wondered if the lock hole was hidden behind it. He took the butterfly off and found no lock hole, but there were some tiny words written on it.

[The last one]

　 Xia Xiqing looked down at his dark blue shirt and thought about the idea he had previously dismissed. Perhaps he and Zhou Ziheng had really been split into different groups by the program crew, which was why their rooms had some similar decorations but were not completely identical. In that case, the two of them might need to work together to unlock some of the codes in the room.

He tried to verify his hypothesis.

　 “Are there a few books on your desk?”

　 Xia Xiqing counted his books and found that there were indeed three, which seemed to align with his thoughts. “What’s the title of the first one?”

“Chaos Theory.” Zhou Ziheng also realized something. “Yours too?”

　 “Yes, that’s right.” This book, *Chaos Theory*, was the one Xia Xiqing had used to find the first butterfly. Fortunately, when he had just taken out the bookmark, he had flipped the book upside down on the desk, preserving the page with the butterfly specimen. “I also have this book on my desk, and there’s a butterfly bookmark inside. I just took it out.”

　 “Bookmark?” Zhou Ziheng flipped through his copy of *Chaos Theory* from cover to cover but found no bookmark. “There’s no bookmark in my book. Which page did you see it on?”

Xia Xiqing flipped the book over and checked the page number. “Page 377.”

　 “Page 377…” Zhou Ziheng repeated the page number Xia Xiqing had mentioned, and noticed that this chapter was about the butterfly effect. “The butterfly effect?”

“Yes, it’s about the butterfly effect. It seems our books are indeed identical.” Xia Xiqing found it a bit strange, “Is Chaos (chaos theory) part of physics? I’m not very familiar with this area.”

Zhou Ziheng gave an affirmative answer, “Well, more accurately, it belongs to deterministic dynamics. The concept of chaos refers to a system’s overall evolution being largely determined by its initial state, or being sensitive to its initial state.”

　 Although Xia Xiqing was good at math, he was still an arts student. He leaned back in his chair, flipping through the book while jokingly saying, “Speak plainly.”

Zhou Ziheng chuckled softly, then patiently explained, “The ‘system’ we’re talking about here is quite broad, such as a sequence of continuous events. For example, this morning when you left home, you hesitated between wearing a white shirt or a black shirt, and you chose the white one you liked. Usually, after leaving home, you would want to buy a cup of coffee and then go to work, but today you were afraid of getting your clothes dirty, so you gave up the coffee and drove straight to work after leaving home.”

　 Zhou Ziheng tried to explain this complex and mysterious concept in the simplest terms possible: “Usually, the time you spend buying coffee causes you to miss the best opportunity to avoid the morning rush hour, so you often encounter traffic jams. But today, by not buying coffee, you managed to avoid the traffic and drove all the way to the company building with green lights the whole way. You became the first person to arrive at work, and coincidentally, the boss had an urgent meeting that required an assistant. He chose you, so you accompanied the boss on a flight to Brazil. However, the plane crashed upon landing, and you became one of the passengers who perished.”

　 Xia Xiqing, who had been listening intently to the story, heard the mysterious ending and burst into laughter in frustration. “What ‘victim’? You sure know how to make things up.”

　 Zhou Ziheng on the other end also laughed. His slightly hoarse laughter sounded particularly pleasant amid the crackling of the phone line. “It’s just a metaphor. I was too lazy to continue making up the story.” After saying that, he asked, “So, have you ever considered what the outcome would have been if you had chosen the black shirt that morning?”

　 If I had chosen the black shirt…

“I would still have gone to the coffee shop as usual, gotten stuck in traffic as usual, been late for work, and wouldn’t have been specially promoted by my boss to attend the meeting, so I wouldn’t have boarded that flight.” Xia Xiqing followed Zhou Ziheng’s line of thinking.

　 “That’s highly likely. This is what I mean when I say that in chaos theory, the evolution of a system is highly sensitive to its initial state. You can think of ‘wearing a white shirt’ and ‘wearing a black shirt’ as two different initial states. They may influence the development of a series of subsequent events.” Zhou Ziheng added, “The butterfly effect is an important part of chaos theory.”

　 Without any preparation, the two of them blurted out simultaneously the most classic quote about the butterfly effect: “The flapping of a butterfly’s wings in the Amazon rainforest may, two weeks later, trigger a tornado in Texas, USA.”

　 After saying this, both of them paused for a moment, then burst into laughter.

Zhou Ziheng sighed slightly and said, “So, who knows which choice at a particular moment in time might lead to irreversible changes in our lives?”

　 Upon hearing his words, Xia Xiqing couldn’t help but think: If Xu Qichen hadn’t given him that VIP ticket to the movie premiere, and he hadn’t actually gone to the event, would everything have started differently?

No, why was he feeling so sentimental?

“What’s wrong?”

　 Xia Xiqing snapped back to reality. “Nothing. I just don’t think there’s any point in dwelling on such things.”

“Of course there is.” Zhou Ziheng’s tone clearly showed his opposition to this assertion, though he didn’t realize that Xia Xiqing’s words were merely a way to mask his own distraction. “Chaos theory is the third revolution in physics after relativity and quantum mechanics. These three can be called the three great scientific achievements of the 20th century. The emergence of chaos theory has also overturned people’s previously narrow linear thinking. After all, there are countless things in this world that cannot be explained by linear relationships, right?”

　 After hearing his words, Xia Xiqing’s lips curled slightly upward. For some reason, he suddenly found Zhou Ziheng exceptionally charming at that moment—whether it was the way he used simple examples to explain abstract concepts or the way he passionately defended science at that moment, he seemed so captivating.

　 “Smart is the new sexy.” This phrase, which had been popular for so long, found its best embodiment in Zhou Ziheng at that moment.

“You’re right,” Xia Xiqing said, his voice tinged with a soft smile.

Though the emotion was weakened by the signal, it still landed heavily in Zhou Ziheng’s ears.

　 Being affirmed is always a cause for joy. Zhou Ziheng tried to use such reasoning to convince himself of his growing sense of pleasure.

　 “We seem to be getting further and further off topic,” Xia Xiqing couldn’t help but laugh self-deprecatingly. It was supposed to be an escape room game, but it felt like he was on the phone with Zhou Ziheng, and the conversation kept veering off topic. He bent down and picked up the other two books on the corner of the table, flipping through the pages carefully with his fingers.

　 Sure enough, there was also a small butterfly specimen in this book.

“I found another butterfly specimen in the second book.”

After a moment, Zhou Ziheng’s voice came from the other end, “I still haven’t seen any butterflies in my book. What is the page number of the second book, and what is the content inside?”

　 Xia Xiqing glanced at it. “The page number is 610. It discusses the Big Bang theory.” After saying this, he placed the butterfly back inside, picked up the last and thickest book, and sure enough, this one also contained a butterfly.

　 “The third book also has a butterfly bookmark, tucked into page 987. The content of the book is… left heart hypoplasia syndrome? Strange, this person’s reading range is truly broad, from chaos to the universe, from the universe to human pathology.”

　 Zhou Ziheng’s intuition told him it was related to numbers. “These page numbers might be connected. The first book is page 377, the second book is page 610, and the third book is page 987. Are there any other places with butterfly specimens?”

　 Xia Xiqing searched the desk, but there were no other books on it besides these few, and there were no bookshelves in the room either.

“Butterflies… butterflies…”

　 He suddenly remembered the butterfly specimen he had seen on the drawer earlier.

“The last butterfly specimen is directly above the desk drawer.” Xia Xiqing had a bold hypothesis, “Is the password lock on your desk also directly above the drawer?”

“That’s right.”

　 That makes sense.

The first butterfly corresponds to the first book, the second butterfly to the second book, and the third butterfly to the third book. So the place where the last butterfly is stuck has [last one] written on it. Does this mean that this butterfly represents the four-digit password Zhou Ziheng needs to find?

　 “So, the four-digit password for your drawer might need to be deduced from the clues hinted at by the three butterflies in my room.”

　 If their signals don’t align, won’t they be unable to decode the password?

This is probably the show’s new tactic to hype up the CP. As long as they choose each other, they have a chance to decode the password, forcing the two to collaborate even in different rooms.

This show’s production team is truly as twisted as ever.

　 Author’s note:

Program director: Guys, we invited you here to record a show about decoding, not to chat on the phone and talk about love, okay? There’s no tension at all.

　 With exam week approaching, I’ve also started to get busy (yes, even graduate students can’t escape final exams, even though they’re mostly projects and presentations). Regular readers should know that I’m a barebones updater, and I’ve been under a lot of pressure these past few days, but I’m trying my best to adjust, so the word count may be reduced (just temporarily).

　 As for Xia Xiqing’s character: I have no intention of whitewashing his playboy lifestyle from before, but that doesn’t stop the cute readers in the comments section from feeling sorry for him. I think the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Of course, if any cute readers really can’t stand his past love life, feel free to stop reading.

　 Additionally, whether it’s Zhou Ziheng or Xia Xiqing, I feel sorry for both of them as if they were my own sons. You all feel the same way—you can feel sorry for whoever you want. I often play a “misery contest” with readers in the reader group, comparing which of the current four sons is the most unfortunate.

　 My consistent character design style is to favor flawed characters, and Xia Xiqing and Xu Qichen are typical examples. And to be honest, Xia Xiqing didn’t really hurt Zhou Ziheng. After being rejected, he gracefully backed off and didn’t force himself on him [which would have definitely failed].