Chapter 239 Brothers (2)

There were lots of nicks on the wall that the bed leaned on. Engraved on it was the same design… Four parallel vertical lines with a horizontal stretch.

It is usually a sign used by detainees to count the days. If it’s a Chinese, he may engrave “Positive”. 1) However, what on the wall are all signs like that.

“Well… There were at least six people who have made marks on the wall……” Feng Bujue’s line of sight went through those signs and muttered.

It is not difficult to reach this conclusion. Although these are only lines, different people have a different depth, length and angle perception. And in order to avoid being mixed up with other people’s marks, each person’s marks have some distance away from other people’s marks.

“To get a mark on a stone wall like this, you can’t do it with your fingernails. You must have tools.” Feng Bujue kneeled on the bed near the wall, touched and felt the traces with his palm: “These people used the same thing…” He looked around the room again, “And the THING is not in this room right now.” An answer came to his mind in a second, “Tableware…”

He looked carefully around the walls, the ceiling, the floor of the room, “Well, all the marks were on this wall next to the bed but not somewhere else… “

“Let’s say they only get the cutlery when they eat, and then they have to return it with the plate or they’ll get some kind of punishment.” Feng Bujue analyzed: “So, the time that engrave these marks should be their mealtime…” He looked at the marks again:” Because they can only sit on the bed and eat, they finish it handy after the meal……”

“Wait!” Feng Bujue denied the conjecture immediately.

He quickly went to the iron door and looked out first through the upper window. The hallway outside had floors of wood and walls of stone on both sides, and the ceiling is slightly higher than in this room. At the angle between the wall and the ceiling, some solar lamps are placed at intervals. From the cell nothing remarkable was visible, and twenty meters from it was all dark.

After glancing for a few seconds, Feng Bujue immediately fell to the ground to observe the rectangular opening under the iron door, he almost put his face on it and sniffed the smell. Finally, he touched the edge of the opening with his hand and licked his finger again… Then he stood up satisfied.

“The presence of food on the upper and lower edges of the mouth suggests that someone is actually using the orifice for delivery.” His eyes went back to the farthest corner of the room, “While the plastic bucket as the “toilet” was left in the far corner of the room.” He went back to the bed and thought,” The prisoner’s range of activity clearly covers the whole room. They can go to the door to get food, or go to the side “toilet”. If the marks were caused by cutlery, they could have been engraved on any wall.”

“So… Assuming that there is no cutlery…” He stood up again, standing in the middle of the room, imitated the style of Kudou Shinichi 2), with one arm resting on his elbow and the other on his chin.

He looked out at the door as if his eyes were recreating fragments of the past. In his imaginary picture, there was only a loaf of bread and a plastic dish with soup in it brought in.

“Well… The possibility of no dinnerware should be bigger.” Feng Bujue cast his eyes on the symbols on the wall: “Well, how do they do it then? And it must be engraved on THIS wall…… “

The answer was in front of him when the previous answer was excluded.

A flash went through his mind and a smile appeared on Feng Bujue’s face. He stepped forward, lifted the sheet up, and saw the thing he was looking for.

The bed as a whole, no part could be disassembled, and all its four legs were welded to the ground. The support of the bed is made entirely from iron, its bedplate is also not a wooden board but metallic spring’s that twine together.

Several of these springs, however, were broken. Although they could not be completely pulled away from the bedplate, they could be held at the end of the broken spring and bent to the wall for marking.

“No wonder the marks are all on the wall beside the bed, and they are all below a certain height. Because of the drag on the other end of the spring, they were unable to write steadily and could only manage to carve straight lines.” It took Feng Bujue five minutes to guess the origin of the mark. For him, the process of observing the environment, gathering information, reasoning, and solving problems was just an “infinitely pleasurable thing” … Which let him even forget the physical pain.

“This room has no windows, no sunrise or sunset. They have to rely on their senses, the body clock, and the number of times people from outside send themselves food.” Feng Bujue began to pace back and forth: “And this marking tool is not easy to find… well…” he mused, “Looks like there are more than six people in this room. But, there were only six or seven prisoners who were calm and did not give up.

“The marks stopped at the ninth passage, indicating that they had not been here more than ten days. They should be able to deduce that they have seen traces left by their predecessors…… Something is sure to happen on the tenth or ninth night. For the situation present, there’s 1 percent of being released, 1 percent of changing rooms, and 98 percent of being killed.” Feng Bujue sneered: “Hum… What they could do was just record their days in captivity, on the wall.”

He walked to the wall and leaned to consider his height. “Without a synopsis, I can’t be sure if I’m playing “Feng Bujue”, or someone else… Um…… It’s about the same height.” He placed his hand parallel to the top of his head and leaned against the wall. Then he looked at it with his eyes, “It’s approximately 180cm. What about my bag……” He glanced at the menu, and he saw the flashlights, Scp-500, Miss Moxxi’s Bad Temper, and the life-value supplements were all turned to gray. “Hum… As expected.” He let out a groan.

“Well… Let me see…” The guy dragged ‘me’ in the opening CG is less than 1.7 meters, but he can drag a 1.8-meter adult with one hand, and it didn’t look like a hard thing to achieve for him.” Feng Bujue surmised the BOSS’s strength: “That must be way over the ability of ordinary people… At least in terms of strength, it’s similar to me, a level 27 player. If that fellow had controlled the prisoners’ meals and allowed them to eat only one meal a day, he could have suppressed all the prisoners here without weapons.

Feng Bujue walked to the door: “Like this prison play, what could he be…….. Manslaughter, Sadism, Cannibalism, Mad Scientist……” Combined with the BOSS’s few lines of dialogue at the beginning of CG, he struck his palm with the fist: “Well, scientist.”

“What he said… Is he telling me? Or himself?” Feng Bujue thought, “Or, speak to me and himself?”

As he spoke, he grabbed the bars of the small window above the door and tried to pull and push it a few times. Obviously, the door was locked.

There are no handles on either side of the door but only keyholes. There is a small window at the top, and the door could be pulled without a handle.

Feng Bujue squatted down and checked the lock, which was naturally meaningless…

“Get out of the room…… Haha…” Feng Bujue confirmed the task content in the taskbar again:” Since it’s a scenario after newbie time, and is also a single person nightmare, I could have affirmation: This is made for me personally…… Breakthrough iron gates or something with brute strength will not work at all. So, just find a way to unlock it…”

He took out the pipe wrench and began a carpet search. He started from the side of the door, on the wall and the ground gently knocking inch by inch, wanting to find any mechanism or mezzanine, even the corners behind the small wooden cabinet and plastic bucket were moved and carefully checked.

Turns out, nothing was there…

So, he began to tear the sheets. The sheets are still thick, but they are not stuffed with rotten cotton or goose feathers, but with strips of cloth that looked as if they had been cut up from old clothes with all colours and textures.

Feng Bujue found nothing except broken strips of cloth in the sheets, so… He put all the rags on the ground and tried to sort them……

He followed colour, material, even area… Different orders were made, but the results were meaningless and there seemed to be no rule between the rags. However, Feng Bujue didn’t give up, he even tried to complete a jigsaw puzzle with these patchwork strips of color……

After sitting on the ground and playing for half an hour, Feng Bujue finally gave up. After trying something completely impossible for a normal person, he got the conclusion that a normal person would make in a few seconds: It was just a pile of useless rags.

“Ah… Waste of life, a heap of rubbish, and even if these rags are twisted into ropes, there would be no place to hang myself in the room.” Feng Bujue laughed with a self-mocking tone, “Where else could there be a key?” He looked first at the small wooden cabinet. “All three drawers in this cabinet are empty.” He looked again at the blue plastic bucket, “That bucket……At the bottom, there are nearly three inches of feces and urine, and the possibility of a key exists…” He swallowed saliva. “The bottom of it is too deep. But what if I dump everything out of the bucket and find nothing, this place…”

He wanted to drive the odd idea out of his mind and came to the small wooden cabinet first. This time he simply removed all three drawers from the cabinet and placed them on the floor. Next, he checked each of them. Regrettably, he found nothing but dust. He knocked the whole wooden cabinet very carefully but found no inner cabinet or anything like that.

Three drawers were now lying side by side on the floor, and the wood was so thin that it was impossible to find any interlining without checking it.

So… Once again, the puzzle came to an impasse.

“Is it really hidden in shit…… That’s too……” Feng Bujue turned over, stared deeply at the plastic bucket, “This scenario is so gross… “

All of a sudden, he came up with an idea: “Hey! If I pour the stuff in the bucket into three drawers, it should be a solving way… The drawers are shallow and easy to find things inside.”

With that in mind, he was really ready to go. He got up immediately, carrying a drawer and going to the plastic bucket. Fortunately, just at this moment, he saw something.

“Oh!” Feng Bujue lifted that drawer, looking at the bottom of the drawer, “Ha ha ha ha!” After a burst of laughter, he turned the other two drawers and turned them upward.

There was a word written in blood at the bottom of each of the three drawers. They were arranged according to their position on the top and bottom of the wooden cabinet. The information was: “Bed” was written on the back of the top drawer, “Key” was written on the middle drawer, and “Bracket” was written on the bottom drawer.

“That is to say, the key is hidden in……” Feng Bujue suddenly turned around and looked again at the bed.

The horizontal bracket that paralleled to the bedplate is hollow, while the one against the wall is solid. From the end of the bed, from the bottom up, Feng Bujue began to strike slightly and he finally heard the movement inside, in the middle of it…

“To hide the key in such a place…… Is this really designed for earthlings?” Feng Bujue cursed.

In fact, he had nothing to complain about. The notice was written at the back of the drawer for players to find, otherwise who would know the key was in this place…

Bam, bam, bam…… Feng Bujue hit it and twisted it, but the bed didn’t even have a dent.

“What do you mean?” Feng Bujue said: “[Excellent] pipe wrench can’t even cost a bit damaged on it… Does it want to mention me…….. There’s a chainsaw in that dunghill?”

He sat cross-legged on the ground. After he finished imitating Kudou Shinichi, he began to learn the style of Ikkyu Soojun 3) trying to come to a solution by meditation………

“Yes!” Feng Bujue really got a useable idea.

With the mentality that he would not get pregnant even if he tried, he used [Less hasty maintenance] but unexpectedly caught up with the failure of skills… With a 60% success rate for apparatus specialist class D and a 10% increase in the success rate for all active skills ([Dedication of the Ince Warlock]), he still failed…

Thus, Feng Bujue began to doubt his idea if it was correct or not.

However, the wasting of 200 stamina value couldn’t make him give up. Since there is no CD for this skill, he used it again. This time, the skill was used successfully and the bed changed.

“Sure enough! This counts as a mechanical being!” Feng Bujue was filled with great rejoicing. The unbreakable bed made of pure metal seemed to have a simple structure, but it makes sense to classify it as a mechanical creation because it has, one and only one mechanism.

Just like the communications equipment that had been restored in the village, this bed is one of those objects that can be fixed without observing it’s properties from the game menu. After Feng Bujue restored it to [Ordinary] quality, all the rust from the bed was gone, and all the springs that had sprung from the broken part of the bed were restored to place.

The most critical change is at the end of the outer leg, which’s the iron bar connecting the head of the bed to the end of the bed. There are two more metal wedges, which had been corroded and smoothed out without any outline. But at this time, as long as Feng Bujue used his pipe wrench, it could be discharged easily.

Then, after a few minutes’ of laborious toils, he succeeded in removing the metal support from the bed.

Away from the bed, the bracket became a two-meter-long hollow iron bar. Any boy carrying something like this would have an urge to imitate a certain monkey…… 4)

Anyway, Feng Bujue erected the hollow stick and hit it on the ground several times. He thought the key would fall down from the hollow pipe, but nothing happened.

“Ah…” Feng Bujue picked up the iron stick and observed it with one eye. He could see some light coming through from the other end, and there was a small thing with a key shape. But somehow, it wouldn’t drop out from the stick.

Feng Bujue tried to turn the stick over again to see if it would slide down the other end, but the result was the same. He sat on the ground, embarrassed, with a stick across his hand, and banged it with his pipe wrench for a while… but the location of the key was still the same.

“What kind of setting is this… When the pipe was knocked there was a sound, it isn’t fixed or welded to the inner side……” He confirmed again and again that the metal support did not have a condition of side-wide and mid-narrow. “This is just the first puzzle……What do you want me to do?”

This “what do you want me to do” had suddenly enlightened Feng Bujue.

“Wait……It’s……” He thought, reaching into his coat pocket. The soap, the candle, and the comb were all collected by him randomly.

“The solution to the puzzle so far except the reasoning part… My skill [Less hasty maintenance] and equipment [Mario’s Pipe Wrench] are needed. Without those, it’s impossible to get here.” Feng Bujue said, “Since the system prepared the hard scenario for me, then……. “

Then, he took the anti-gravity gun out of his bag. This thing didn’t turn into grey.

Feng Bujue pressed the grab button of the item to suspend the candle, then manually adjust the candle to an appropriate angle. He stuck one end of the candle into the end of the hollow stick, and sure enough… It was a perfect fit.

“Well, there are some goods to designing puzzles like this. At least when I solve them, it’s easy to know I’m right…… ” Feng Bujue said, pressing the launch button.

1. Chinses use the character “positive” to count on things with 5 strokes.
2. Kudou Shinichi: Main character in Japanese cartoon Detective Conan, a “children” detective works on all kinds of cases that happened around him.
3. Ikkyu Soojun: Main character in Japanese cartoon Ikkyu-san, a cartoon that tells a little monk called Ikkyu used his wisdom to solve the challenging by the General of Japanese. He loves to sit cross-leg and comes up with a solution.
4. Sun Wukong the Monkey King…… Yes, I have this kind of feeling when each time I see a long stick…… LOL.

*)  The author mentioned here that the mattress and the sheet are the same.