Volume 2: The Undersea City Chapter 90: Dead End
Ke Lan hesitated for a moment and then turned around and walked back... Only a fool would rush into an unfamiliar maze without any information .
He planned to search the camp again, maybe there were some clues he had missed...
"Whenever you encounter a fork in the road during exploration, unless there are special circumstances, you must leave a mark at the fork that is easy to identify and difficult to erase..."
This is the content in the "Beginner's Guide to Ruin Hunters", which is a compulsory course for every hunter entering the profession. Although these people are not hunters, since they are a field team, the training they receive will only be more systematic and rigorous than that of hunters.
Even the entrance to the cave is marked with steel nails, so there is no reason why there should be no marks at these four forks in the road.
Ke Lan thought so...but when he shone the flashlight straight ahead, he froze in place.
There were actually four forks in the road on the return path!
"Grass!"
A creepy feeling came over him. Ke Lan slowly bent down, picked up a small stone from the ground, and threw it towards the fork in the road.
The stone hit the wall of the cave, making a crisp "bang" sound, and then bounced to the ground.
These four forks in the road are real, they are not optical camouflage or something like that...
"Is this the legendary 'ghost wall'? I actually ran into it?" Ke Lan took a deep breath and tried to calm himself down. "Could it be...another hallucination or something like that?"
If it was an illusion, when and where did it begin?
After I left the camp?
Or... earlier?
Ke Lan swept the flashlight across the four forks in the road one by one. Fortunately, these four forks were different from the four he had just encountered... Although things were still very strange, at least they were not outrageous...
Ke Lan calculated the distance by counting steps. The first fork in the road he encountered was 762 steps away from the camp. Assuming that one step was about half a meter, that was 381 meters... and after he chose to turn back, he walked another 240 steps, or 120 meters. At this point, the original one-way road became a five-way intersection...
This passage is straight, without any branches along the way, just like the ice road under the glacier ruins, so Ke Lan would never, and it is impossible for her to go the wrong way... It was these four forks in the road that led to the only path leading to the camp.
If Lao Gou were here, he would definitely say "weird" several times in a row.
Ke Lan thought for a moment, turned around again, and walked in the direction he started from.
Another two hundred and forty steps later, he returned to the five-way intersection he encountered for the first time... Fortunately, there was no change in this place.
Then he turned around, closed his eyes, and walked back while counting his steps.
This is a very stupid method... but it is widely circulated among hunters. Old hunters often tell rookies who are going to the ruins for the first time: When you find that you may be trapped in an illusion, don't believe anything you see. Close your eyes, cover your ears, and move forward with your head held high.
Many hunters who did this fell into the trap with their eyes closed... However, there were also a considerable number of hunters who actually walked out of the maze using this method.
Some hallucinations disrupt the five senses of human beings, but when people completely abandon the five senses, these hallucinations are of no use at all.
"Two hundred and thirty-eight... two hundred and thirty-nine... two hundred and four."
He opened his eyes, and what appeared in his vision was still the familiar five-way intersection. The four holes seemed like four strange and twisted smiling faces, laughing at his foolish attempt...
"Fuck, you, mom." Ke Lan said word by word, and gave the four holes a vicious middle finger.
He suddenly thought of the memoirs of a famous hunter he had read before, in which he seemed to have written the following sentence:
“True danger never waits for you to decide whether to face it, but swallows you whole when you make the decision.”
Ke Lan felt like he was swallowed up by this underground maze... He was afraid that he had already stepped into this maze after leaving the camp.
The old hunter had also encountered an underground maze, and he only had six words to say about how to deal with this situation: "Don't look back, keep moving forward."
"Don't look back, keep moving forward..." Ke Lan repeated softly, "Okay... I'll be silly if I want to... I didn't expect that I would be the fool..."
He turned back for the fourth time and headed towards the four forks in the road he had discovered at the beginning.
What the old hunter said is actually correct. In this situation, the more you analyze, the more confused you will get. If you just rush in, you might be able to solve this "mystifying" puzzle.
"There are four choices in total. I've turned back four times, so I'll choose the fourth fork in the road." Ke Lan identified the cave entrance on the far right and dived in.
After walking about 500 meters, four more forks in the road appeared ahead.
Ke Lan stopped and checked the four holes carefully again. There was nothing abnormal and no valuable discoveries were made.
"I'd rather choose four. I'll just go down this path until the end."
…
…
Nearly five hours had passed, but Ke Lan felt as if he had been trekking in this dark underground cave for a year - starting from the first fork in the road when he left the camp, he encountered a total of nineteen forks in the road in these five hours, each with four options, and each time, he chose the fourth one.
Finally, what appeared in front of him this time was no longer a fork in the road.
It's a dead end.
“Hoo…Hoo…”
"I thought I would be asked to choose again and again..." Ke Lan was already a little numb, "Just like those horror movies that repeat themselves endlessly..."
In this dead end, there is a statue.
To be precise, it was part of a statue... This statue was supposed to be a huge stone pillar, but now only the top was exposed. A lifelike giant eye was engraved on the exposed part of the stone pillar, and a piece of ore was embedded in the pupil of the giant eye, emitting a faint dark green fluorescence.
Ke Lan sighed and said two words expressionlessly: "Fuck you."
