Back in time about thirty minutes ago.
While Ji Thrush and Ren Jianmo were still competing with a group of murlocs in the Blackwater Lake, Mo Tiangen and the Fan family siblings had just run through a long cave tunnel and came to a gorgeous spiral staircase.
After figuring out that this is a three-dimensional maze, they no longer struggled with such unimaginable logic issues as why a seemingly natural cave exit is connected to a spiral staircase.
The staircase is divided into four sections, each section has a circular landing, and each landing has another staircase leading to a different corridor.
From a long-distance perspective, the environment the three of them are in now has a bit of the charm of Hogwarts Castle.
Mo Tiangen and the others have been in the maze for a long time, and they are quite experienced in dealing with these forks.
They climbed up the stairs in one breath, made a mark at the first platform, and then stepped up the stairs.
The stairs on the first platform lead to a corridor covered with red carpets. At the end is an open-air garden, which has been arranged as a gorgeous wedding scene. A couple of newlyweds danced among hundreds of guests.
Such a harmonious scene appeared here, but it was so sudden that it made people feel chills down the spine.
Mo Tiangen and the Fan family siblings went into the garden bravely, and went around in a circle without disturbing the guests as much as possible, trying to find any exit or fork.
But no.
It's just a garden.
In just a few minutes when the three of them stayed, everything except them was changing rapidly.
The neatly trimmed green plants quickly experienced the entire life cycle of deformation, leaf fall and withering; the rich food spoiled and deteriorated, and finally there was only a handful of gray and black dross that could not be discerned...
The gorgeous robes on the guests became dirty and torn, and their bodies rapidly aged and withered until they turned into shriveled mummies with only a layer of skin wrapped around their skeletons.
But even so, the guests still danced to the out-of-key music until they found Mo Tiangen and the Fan family siblings who still maintained their human appearance.
So what else is there to say
The wedding scene turned into a shooting set of a zombie movie. The three of them jumped up and down and ran wildly while being chased by a group of mummies. Finally, they rushed out of the garden gate and closed the heavy door firmly.
They returned to the spiral staircase, climbed to the second landing, and climbed a steep wooden staircase up a dark, narrow corridor.
At the end of the corridor, there is an open stone door leading to a large vaulted space.
Or to be more precise, it was a huge circular shaft.
The area of the entire shaft is more than 100 square meters by visual inspection, and the depth is more than 100 meters.
Looking down from the current height of Mo Tiangen, Fan Hemian, and Fan Luming, they could only see the bottomless darkness below, and at the same time feel a gust of draft blowing up.
Fan Luming never felt that he was afraid of heights, but looking at the deep pit in front of him that seemed to be eating people, he still felt a little weak in his feet for no reason.
In the center of the shaft is a huge floating plate made up of four concentric circles, which occupies about half of the area of the shaft. Each circular plate is suspended at the same height by four iron cables like hanging baskets.
From where the three of Mo Tiangen were, there happened to be a wooden suspension bridge leading to the floating board.
During the few seconds they were in a daze, there was a muffled "rumbling" sound behind them, and when they turned their heads, the stone door they had passed through when they came in was slowly and automatically closed.
"Jile!"
Mo Tiangen turned his head, trying to use brute force to save the gradually closing door.
However, the outer wall of the entire shaft slowly turned clockwise, and the closed stone door moved out of their reach.
The walls are made of marble and polished very smooth. Unless they are three geckos, it is basically impossible to climb on such a wall.
"okay."
Teacher Dagen turned his head and shrugged helplessly, "It seems that we can only go forward."
So the three of them walked across the rickety suspension bridge and came to the floating board suspended by many iron cables in the center of the shaft.
"I guess, this should be an escape room game."
Fan Luming looked around and made a guess.
The suspended platform where the three of them are now is not deep from the bottom of the shaft, but relatively much closer to the top.
As long as they raised their heads, they could see a circular dome covered with exquisite colorful murals and inlaid with gemstones of different shapes.
Other than that, the only thing on the floating board is a one-meter-high pillar in the center, and a stone plate is supported directly above the pillar, which is as big as two palms, and the surface is also carved with exquisite patterns.
Mo Tiangen and his siblings from the Fan family leaned closer to the pillar and carefully studied the texture carved on the stone plate.
The pattern is a vine.
The vine twisted and twisted into a spiral shape, and there were five flowers and eleven leaves in total. Each flower was inlaid with a gemstone—two were yellow, and the other three were red, blue, and green. kinds of colors.
"Look, these leaves..."
Fan Luming gently stroked the grooves on the leaves with his fingers, and said to his companion:
"I guess, is it also inlaid with some gemstones?"
Mo Tiangen and Fan Hemian looked at each other.
They felt that what the younger brother said made a lot of sense.
Now the three of them are trapped in this silo, and they can't even abstain automatically. If they don't do anything, they can only wait for the time to run out and then GAME OVER, or someone else will find "Vatican" to end the mission .
If they want to leave here, they must use the clues they can find to deduce the way to break the level.
If Fan Luming's thinking is correct, the jigsaw mechanism on the pillar is their only way out.
It's just... where are the missing gems going to come from
Thinking of this, the three raised their heads together.
On the semi-arc dome about three stories away from them, there is a circle of murals, and some key parts are also inlaid with red, yellow, blue and green gemstones—the size and shape are the same as what they saw on the arabesques on the columns. exactly the same.
"So, this means that we should take off the gems on it?"
Fan Luming stroked his chin, frowning in thought.
"It's just..."
He looked back at the slightly wobbly floating board under his feet, and remembered the boundless darkness that he had just glanced at with his head, feeling very disturbed:
"According to my experience of reading tomb robbery novels, if such traps are accidentally misplaced, there will be big problems..."
Mo Tiangen also felt the same way.
He looked up at the shiny gemstones embedded in the mural above his head, and then lowered his head to study the pattern of vines on the stone pillar.
After thinking about it for half a minute, I still had no idea, so I could only turn to look at Fan Hemian as if asking for help:
"It's so endless, who knows how to put these gems!"
Fan Hemian ignored him.
The girl just kept her head up, staring at the murals painted on the ceiling without blinking.
Teacher Dagen and his younger brother followed her gaze and looked up together.
With the level of art appreciation of the three of them, it is difficult to clearly say which country and era the style of those murals should be counted as.
If he had to describe it, Mo Tiangen felt that it was a bit like the painting style on the sheepskin scrolls unearthed in the Mesopotamia printed in world history textbooks, but the colors were much brighter than those on the cultural relics.
"Look."
Fan Hemian stretched out his hand and pointed to the direction of two o'clock above his head, "Is that what the man is holding in his hand a steelyard?"
Mo Tiangen and Fan Luming followed her directions and looked over.
The mural depicts a market scene.
A woman in a flowered turban holds a steelyard with three feathers in a small tray to the left and a blue gemstone to the right.
Teacher Dagen touched his short stubble:
"What does this mean? Three feathers weigh as much as a sapphire?"
Fan Hemian nodded vigorously.
"And over there!"
She turned around and pointed in another direction, "Those two also have feathers and gems in their hands."
Just as the girl said, in one corner, a pair of merchants were painted, one of them was holding two feathers, and the other was paying the bill with a citrine from a cowhide bag.
Fan Luming had an idea, immediately raised his head, and started circling in circles.
"There are also here!"
Soon, he found two other scenes—a child exchanging four feathers for a ruby, and a tax collector holding a feather and a green emerald in each of his left and right hands.
"I see!"
Mo Tiangen also recalled it.
"That is to say, if feathers are used as the commodity unit, the gemstones of four colors are equivalent to one, two, three, and four respectively?"
"yes!"
Fan Hemian suddenly slapped his forehead, then rushed over and grabbed Mo Tiangen's sleeve, and shook it several times in obsession:
"Why am I so stupid!"
As she spoke, she pointed to the pillar at her feet:
"This is a four times four Sudoku game for elementary school students!"
Hearing what his sister said, Fan Luming immediately bent down and carefully studied the positions of the flowers and leaves on the vine for the second time.
The "4×4" Sudoku game can be regarded as the simplest entry-level game.
It consists of a grid array of four rows and four columns, and is divided into four grid arrays of two rows and two columns.
When cracking, the player needs to fill in four different numbers of 1, 2, 3, and 4 in the sixteen blanks, use each number four times, and in each row, each column, and each 2×2 square matrix must And it can only be used once, so that the sum of each row, each column, and each 2×2 square matrix number is equal.
The five flowers and eleven leaves are arranged in four rows, and each row is also symmetrical. If you ignore the fancy vines below and just look at the grooves that can be embedded with gems, isn't it just a standard Sudoku table!
"A four-by-four Sudoku grid needs at least five basic numbers!"
While talking, Fan Hemian quickly calculated the answer in his brain.
"The gems inlaid on the five flowers are equivalent to the starting numbers on the form..."
She murmured to herself:
"The first row is 3, the second row is 2, the third row is 4, the fourth row is 1 and 2..."
As he said that, Fan Hemian turned his head abruptly, staring at Mo Tiangen with piercing eyes:
"Dagen, if you become a giant, you should be able to get the gemstone on the ceiling by reaching out, right?"