Bai Chunian ran his hands along the walls of the hot-spring bathroom, inspecting for overlooked clues. After a full round, a narrow gap gradually appeared in the door on the north wall. Once the door fully materialized, its width immediately started shrinking rapidly. If he didn’t act quickly, the door would vanish in a flash.
Bai Chunian swiftly grabbed the HK417 the mercenaries had confiscated, scooped up Lan Bo, and sprinted toward the narrowing door. Near the gap, he rolled nimbly, slipping into the next room just as the door disappeared. The two were now trapped in a new room.
Bai Chunian first glanced at the watches. To be safe, he collected all the timepieces from the mercenary corpses—both mechanical and digital. The moment he and Lan Bo stepped into this room, all the watches jumped to 1 p.m.
This room’s wallpaper was also red-patterned, another perfect cube in length, width, and height.
In the center of the room stood five or six metal shelves. Surrounding them were a pool, a stove, a range hood, baskets, and a refrigerator. On the counters were knife racks and neatly arranged bowls and plates. The walls were lined with polished mirrors.
It was a kitchen. Bai Chunian mentally labeled this as Room 13, since all the timepieces here showed 1 p.m.
“Were all these rooms built to the specifications of some villa?” Bai Chunian silently speculated.
He checked the shelves and cabinets and picked up a note from the floor.
The paper and handwriting matched the one he had found in the bathroom, left by the missing author. This note was marked “Page 2,” but unlike the previous note, it was tossed haphazardly on the floor, as if dropped in a panic.
“I understand now. This is really a maze. I can’t predict what kind of room I’ll step into next. I’m almost exhausted. The room I’m in now is a yellow toy house, cozyly decorated (if you ignore all the mirrors on the walls). Plush teddy bears and pink rabbits litter the carpet, with a small table for building blocks in the center. On the tabletop are several cubes arranged in a peculiar way. Luckily, I studied descriptive geometry in college—I can easily draw its three-view projection and 3D model. If the police ever see this, it might help them find clues.”
Reading building schematics was a core skill for Alliance operatives. Bai Chunian easily understood what the author intended from the messy sketch:
It depicted a bizarre structure built from 28 cube blocks, not resembling any conventional cuboid. Overall, it appeared as a hollow rectangular prism, base 3×3, height 5.
This matched the numbers on the clock, suggesting this was a preliminary 3D blueprint for the entire labyrinth.
The block arrangement was peculiar: seven on the bottom layer, three on the second, eight on the third, three on the fourth, seven on the fifth. This created multiple hollow spaces in the center of the cube.
The author marked three vertical sections with circles: the leftmost layer blue, the middle layer red, and the rightmost layer yellow.
Bai Chunian sat on the floor, eyes closed, contemplating the sketch.
With a three-view projection and a 3D model, the exact shape and placement of the structure could be determined. But 324 had scattered so many misleading clues—colors, time numbers, block arrangement, room function—that it was impossible to connect them.
Bai Chunian finally understood why Enke’s File F description of 324 was so apt: an extremely self-centered experimental subject. All the puzzles he designed stemmed from his eccentric logic, never considering the solver’s experience or situation. No wonder he was deemed a failed defective and incinerated; he never effectively filtered low-IQ humans.
Bai Chunian sat in thought. Lan Bo did not disturb him, perching near the dish cabinet, admiring the gemstone ring on his tail tip while nibbling on a plate.
“This…” Lan Bo examined the last bite of broken porcelain and tilted his head to read, “Yuan Ren Guang.”
Bai Chunian looked at him. Lan Bo waved the fragment in front of him.
“Baby, you only read what you recognize?” Bai Chunian took the shard, then picked up another intact plate, discovering it bore the custom pattern of “Zhengyuan Restaurant.”
A reputable restaurant in reality, well-known nationwide, comparable to Quanjude. The 109 Research Institute was also in the suburbs of the same city, less than an hour’s drive away.
The communicator buzzed again.
He Suowei: “The dining hall door just opened. We’re now in the next room. I don’t know what this room’s for. Four car seats in the center, the left-front seat has a steering wheel, the right seat a manual shifter. Ahead is an ashtray and an empty car indicator light—it’s pressed, meaning someone’s in the car. This is a Volkswagen Santana taxi.”
Bai Chunian: “Wallpaper color? What time?”
He Suowei: “Red, twelve noon. You?”
Bai Chunian: “I’m forming a basic profile on the Null-Form Stalker, but it’s not confirmed yet.”
He Suowei: “You can do that too?”
Profiling meant deducing someone’s psychology from their behavior.
“Once I confirm it, I’ll tell you.” Bai Chunian was still thinking about another problem. Holding the author’s sketch, he circled the room a few times, then suddenly jumped and slammed heavily to the floor.
Lan Bo froze, forgetting the porcelain shard in his hand, staring at him like a fool.
After a few jumps, the doors on three walls began forming from the bottom up. The gaps widened until the doors fully appeared.
The downward impact caused Bai Chunian’s room to slide down.
“So it really is a map.”
From the three-view and 3D sketches, Room 13 beneath him was empty, confirming that all rooms moved either vertically or horizontally.
Bai Chunian peered through one doorway. Outside all three doors was not another room, but a large, dark, continuous void—further validating the accuracy of the author’s drawings.
“The rooms can be pushed,” Bai Chunian told He Suowei.
Lan Bo kept his gaze fixed on the last unopened door, licking his lips hungrily.
Bai Chunian turned back and asked, “What are you looking at?”
Lan Bo thought for a moment, confused. “A painting… just passing by.”
Bai Chunian didn’t quite understand. He walked over to the only unopened door and examined it carefully. “What painting?”
Lan Bo described it faintly, “Red, broken, flat, in large patches… not edible.”
“…” Bai Chunian couldn’t even imagine what that painting looked like, so he let it go for the moment. He scooped Lan Bo up in his arms. “Let’s go out. Hold me tight.”
Lan Bo wrapped his arms around the alpha’s neck, his tail curling around him, and nudged his nose gently against the fish-shaped mark on Bai Chunian’s neck. “Good boy.”
“Am I?” Bai Chunian lifted one eyebrow and patted Lan Bo’s bottom. “I’ll be even better from now on.”
Lan Bo seemed slightly resistant to this challenge to his status, but seeing the alpha smiling obediently, he decided to forgive it, and whispered a warning, “No… touch there.”
“Then I won’t need to use my hands anymore.” Bai Chunian chuckled lightly.
They stepped out of the kitchen and entered a large, empty, dark space. There were no other designs, but tracks crisscrossed everywhere—like scaffolding draped with green nets during construction. It was clear that these square rooms moved along the tracks. Applying force to one side of a room could set it in motion.
Bai Chunian held Lan Bo in one arm, the other hand holding a high-powered flashlight he’d taken from the mercenaries, scanning carefully around the room they had just exited.
On the floor against the wall, there were dried bloodstains and debris. Bai Chunian crouched, shining the flashlight on the ground and touching the residue. Blood stuck to his fingers.
Following the trail upward, he looked to the wall above—and locked eyes with a face, mangled beyond recognition, pressed against the surface.
“Holy…”
Bai Chunian stumbled back two steps before taking in the full view: a body, crushed beyond comprehension, bones and flesh mashed against the wall.
“One pancake,” Lan Bo muttered, lightly scratching the meat fragments on the wall with his claws. Holding the alpha’s neck, he whispered, “Dead… shouldn’t eat it, right?”
“Expired meat will give you diarrhea. Not eating this.” Bai Chunian lifted the omega slightly in his arms. “Let’s get out. Staying here too long will get us killed.”
No sooner had he spoken than the room they had just stepped out of began rising, while the room above plummeted. One misstep and they could have been flattened alongside the crushed corpse on the wall.
Bai Chunian, flustered, leapt right and rolled, Lan Bo clinging tightly. A doorway appeared above; Bai Chunian threw Lan Bo through, who hooked his claws into the top of the frame, wrapping his tail around Bai Chunian’s hand, and they tumbled together into the new room.
The doorway closed behind them. A second later, they could have been crushed by the falling room or sliced in half as neighboring rooms shifted.
This was a bright blue room. Bai Chunian glanced at his watch: 11 a.m.
The room was sparsely furnished, dominated by a massive cylindrical steel machine lying horizontally. In front was a square iron door with a handle.
Bai Chunian opened it carefully—confirming it was an incinerator.
“Captain He,” he tapped his comms device, “I’m now certain about the correlation between these rooms and time. These are the locations the No-Form Stalker passed through after escaping Research Institute 109. He recreated each place perfectly as a room, and the time in each room reflects when he arrived there.”
“324 escaped before entering the incinerator. The room shows 11 a.m. One hour later, he saw a taxi. Since he can turn invisible, getting in didn’t alert anyone. He followed the taxi passengers, got off at Zhengyuan Restaurant, and hid in the kitchen. That segment matches perfectly.”
“Captain He?”