San Tian Liang Jiao
Chapter 1222 Memories of Summer (15)
"Hey! Are you guys alright?" Xiao Tan's shout came down through the floor two seconds after the entrance closed.
"We're fine for now," Feng Bujue quickly responded.
Actually, for the two people in the wine cellar, the closing of the entrance didn't bring much fear... because the principal's office above and this place below were both lit by flashlights. So, even if the barrier closed, visually, they wouldn't feel much darker. It was just that "bang" sound that was a bit scary, of course... it didn't scare Feng Bujue.
"Jue-ge! The barrier closed on its own!" The next second, Xiao Tan shouted again.
"Yeah... I guessed that," Feng Bujue replied weakly.
This was also obvious, after all, the barrier couldn't have been closed by Xiao Tan and the others.
"The remote control seems to be malfunctioning." After a few more seconds, Xiao Ling's voice rang out.
She had obviously tried to open the entrance again with the remote, and failed.
"Hmm..." At this time, Gui Xiao, who had come to the entrance and squatted down to check, added, "Touching this barrier gives the prompt [Sealed by a dark force]."
Everyone understood the meaning of this prompt - the way to open this entrance had changed.
"Heh... it seems that we have to split up from here," Feng Bujue smiled and said to his teammates through the floor, "Anyway... you guys go and check around to see if there are any flags to trigger."
Speaking of this, the first thing Xiao Tan and the others thought of was the "mysterious man on the playground".
So, the four of them quickly walked to the window and looked outside again.
As a result...
"Jue-ge!" In less than ten seconds, Xiao Tan ran back above the entrance and shouted below, "That person is gone!"
Almost at the same time as he shouted these words, suddenly, from the darkness outside the principal's office... came a "whoosh—" sound.
"Eh? That just now..." Jue-ge naturally heard the sound, and then said, "...Could it be the sound of a sliding door?"
"Uh..." Xiao Tan was stunned for a second, and replied, "It seems so."
There was no doubt that the source of the sound was not on the second floor; because there were only two rooms on the second floor (the principal's office and the warehouse opposite it), and both were hinged doors, so... the sound just now must have come from downstairs.
"What do we do? Should we go down and take a look?" After a brief silence, An Yueqin asked.
"Of course, this is obviously the main storyline," Feng Bujue replied from under the floor, "Anyway, the four of you have already completed the 'puzzles that can only be solved by specific characters', so it doesn't matter if you get a lunchbox next, so... go ahead without worry."
"What about you guys?" Xiao Tan asked again, "Do you want... someone to stay here to support you?"
"Absolutely not," Feng Bujue replied decisively, "Leaving someone here to wait is equivalent to leaving a flashlight here to waste battery... how is that possible?" He paused, "You guys hurry up and explore your stuff, we're fine; when you've dealt with all the plot outside, maybe we can get out."
He was right. At the moment, the two teams each had two flashlights in their hands. In the wine cellar, Feng Bujue was holding Xiao Tan's flashlight, and Ruoyu was holding her own; and the situation outside was that Xiao Ling and An Yueqin were each holding their own flashlights. Although the power of these four flashlights was not the same, they were all mostly depleted... If nothing unexpected happened, within the next ten minutes, these four flashlights would go out one by one...
"Okay... we understand." A few seconds later, Xiao Tan and the others reached a consensus, "Then... Jue-ge, be careful, we'll take the first step."
"Hurry up and go, don't dawdle," Jue-ge replied, his tone showing no sense of crisis, but rather a hint of impatience.
So, the four outside had no psychological burden; they immediately left the principal's office and headed back to the first floor.
And Feng Bujue and Li Ruoyu were trapped in the narrow secret wine cellar...
"Is that really okay?" About ten seconds later, after confirming by hearing that everyone had gone far away, Ruoyu spoke, "You should have noticed it too... from the moment the entrance was closed, this place has..."
"I know," Feng Bujue interrupted, "But I don't think it's necessary for them to know..." He paused for half a second, and continued, "Even if I told them 'the air in the wine cellar is almost as bad as gaseous alcohol', there's nothing they can do, so it's better not to say it... so as not to increase their stress."
Obviously, both of them had already noticed... the situation triggered after the entrance was sealed was not a "change in light", but a "change in air"; the former would at most cause some fear, but the latter... was a physiological effect.
"So... what should we do now?" Ruoyu said, "Are we really going to just wait... until the entrance opens on its own?"
"It's rare to have such conditions, how about we take advantage of the alcohol to flirt?" At this time, Feng Bujue turned his head and shined the flashlight on his face from below, revealing a... um... how to describe it... the word "lewd smile" seems to be more appropriate.
"Okay~ you start~" Unexpectedly, Ruoyu gave an affirmative response, but... the expression on her face was dead fish eyes plus a poker face, and the tone was a mocking kind of forced reading.
"Hehe... no problem~" Feng Bujue laughed a few times, and then used the tone of a hooligan flirting with a good woman on the street in a TV series, "Beauty, are you alone?"
"Yes," Ruoyu replied.
"Hehe..." Feng Bujue continued, "Do you want to find a secluded place with me to talk about life?"
"Are you talking about what we're doing right now?" Ruoyu retorted.
"Uh..." Jue-ge couldn't resist a bit. Whenever he was in crisis, he would instinctively use a coping mechanism - to further lower the bottom line, "Hehe... well, why don't we just do something wet and shy."
"Spit in your mouth?" Ruoyu continued to use her cold tone and sharp on-the-spot reactions to attack Jue-ge's unrestrained words and deeds.
"Ha—" Finally, Jue-ge sighed, "Alright, alright~ I'm not kidding anymore..." When he said this, he finally returned to a serious (relatively speaking) attitude, "Let's keep moving forward."
After speaking, he didn't wait for Ruoyu to respond, turned around and continued forward, and walked to the other end of the wall in a few steps.
"Is there still a road over there?" Ruoyu asked as she followed.
"There's no road, but there's a pretty obvious puzzle..." Jue-ge said, tilting his body slightly to reveal a row of wine racks in front of him.
There were three shelves in total, each with five wooden slots. At this moment, there were five bottles of wine in these fifteen wooden slots, two bottles in the first row, both on the far left; one bottle in the second row, in the fourth slot; and two bottles in the third row, in the first and fifth slots respectively.
"This..." Ruoyu reacted quickly, "Corresponds to the 'Hanoi Tower graffiti' hint in the women's restroom, right?"
"It should be," Feng Bujue replied.
"But... you can solve this puzzle too," Ruoyu continued, "Is Togashi a girl in the setting?"
"How could it be... then there should only be two hints in the men's restroom," Feng Bujue replied, "In my opinion... it's because it doesn't matter who solves the hint itself." He paused for a second, and added, "Didn't I solve the tic-tac-toe implied nine-palace grid and the hint of 'watch your step'?"
"So?" Ruoyu gestured for him to continue.
"So... a hint is a hint, and it doesn't matter who discovers the connection," Feng Bujue said, "The key is... in the place where the hint points, there should still be some kind of problem that only specific characters can solve." He immediately gave an example, "For example... the place where the 'tic-tac-toe graffiti' hint is used needs someone who can play the piano; the place where the 'beware of the pool' hint is used needs someone who can dissect; and the place where the 'watch your step' hint is used needs someone who is 1.6 meters..."
"Hmm..." Ruoyu heard this, thoughtfully interjected, "That makes sense... the place where the 'patterned pattern' hint was used just now needs someone with extremely strong mathematical ability."
"Yes," Feng Bujue nodded and continued, "The thing that the hint points to is not necessarily something that needs specific skills to deal with, but... when such a thing appears, it means that a puzzle that needs specific skills to solve is nearby."
"Understood," Ruoyu said, looking at the wine rack again, "In that case, you should deal with this 'Hanoi Tower' puzzle."
"That's what I thought too," Feng Bujue said, "You keep an eye on me, in case some monster pops out of the surrounding walls, ceiling, ground, or even wine bottles when I move the wine bottles, you help me slap its ass."
"Okay," Ruoyu calmly agreed to the request.
After that, Feng Bujue was ready to start moving the wine bottles.
However...
"Eh?" As soon as he picked up the first bottle of wine, he was stunned with a look of doubt.
"What's wrong?" Ruoyu asked.
Feng Bujue didn't answer, but silently turned the wine bottle half a circle, showing the packaging paper on the bottle to Ruoyu.
"This is..." On the packaging paper that came into Ruoyu's sight, there was not a single word... no brand, name, description, or year... nothing; what was printed on the packaging paper was a painting.
"Heh..." After a little thought, Ruoyu sneered, "So that's what's going on."
"It looks like that's what it is," Feng Bujue shrugged, put the wine bottle back on the wine rack, and stepped aside from behind Ruoyu, giving way to the position in front of the wine rack.
Ruoyu didn't waste time. After moving two steps sideways, she picked up the five bottles of wine one by one and began to identify the paintings printed on the bottles.
…………
Here, let's briefly talk about the rules of the so-called "Hanoi Tower game".
This game originated from an ancient Indian legend, and the content of the legend will not be described in detail here... Simply put, the rule is to first set up three pillars, and put a number of discs on one of the pillars. The size of the discs must be from top to bottom from small to large; and the goal of the game is to move all the discs on one pillar to another pillar, provided that only one disc can be moved at a time, and the small disc cannot be placed on top of the large disc.
This is not a very complicated game, and most people can quickly find the rules of movement and complete this movement in the shortest possible steps.
In the example at hand, the three shelves of the wine cellar are equal to three pillars, and the five bottles of wine are equivalent to five discs from small to large; but the problem is... how should this "size" be distinguished?
The reason why Jue-ge thought he could handle this puzzle was... he thought he could easily distinguish the "size" represented by the five bottles of wine.
But, as mentioned above, when he saw the bottle, he found that - the information recorded on the bottle was something he couldn't decipher.
If the information given here was words, numbers, codes, or something like that, or there were slight differences in the volume and shape of the bottle itself, Jue-ge could definitely solve it; unfortunately... five paintings were printed on the five bottles of wine.
Needless to say, only Ruoyu, whose family runs an art gallery, can sort the five bottles of wine in front of this kind of hint.
…………
"Okay, it's been confirmed." In less than two minutes, Ruoyu spoke again, and stretched out her slender fingers to gently point to the wine bottles in front of her, "There are a few small traps in here... At first, I thought it was sorted by the year of the painting, but I quickly found that the creation year of Duse's *The Beauty of the Harem* is unknown, and it can only be determined that it was painted in the second half of the 19th century; this has a certain conflict with *Alyonushka*, which was released in 1881, and it is impossible to determine which one came first and which one came later..."
As she explained to Jue-ge, she was already moving the five bottles of wine.
"After that, I considered the size of the paintings, the genre, the style, and even the creator's situation at the time, etc... but some of the information has exceeded my knowledge reserves. So I changed my thinking and finally discovered the problem..."
At this point, she had placed all five bottles of wine in the five slots on the top shelf of the wine rack.
Just as her hand left the mouth of the bottle, she heard a "click" sound, and some kind of mechanism was activated from within the wine rack.
Immediately afterwards, the system prompt came: [Transfer the five bottles of wine to the bottom shelf in the correct way and order].
"It seems I was right..." Ruoyu said after hearing the sound, "The original position and distance of the five bottles of wine implied that the five painters were in three different eras and the order in which they died; therefore... the basis for arranging these five bottles of wine is the 'lifespan' of the five painters."
After speaking, she didn't wait for Jue-ge, who looked dazed, to make any gestures, and started moving the wine bottles according to the rules of the Hanoi Tower on her own.
In fact, Ruoyu was a little anxious in her heart, because... after staying in this "wine-filled" place for a while, she was indeed a little drunk. Not to mention her flushed cheeks, even her head was a little dizzy... this was not a good sign.