Chapter 140 The King's Awakening

Li Ang held up the rectangular iron blackboard, speaking as he activated his alchemy. He manipulated the blackboard's countless squares, raising and lowering them to mark whether candles were extinguished or burning.

"The design of the Shiku Maze is ingenious and highly mysterious. Even the top-tier players in the Killing Game can only dismantle a few doors.

But its absolute area isn't large. Otherwise, it would have teleported us to spaces hundreds or even thousands of squares apart from the start, making it impossible to know each other's locations.

This flaw proves that King Kṣitigarbha is still in a state of recovery, and his current location is approximately..."

"Northeast of the initial room, about 140 squares away."

Hohenheim suddenly opened his eyes. He had just cast a spell to accelerate his thinking speed, simulating all possible scenarios in his mind and finally pinpointing that area.

"Correct."

Li Ang nodded. "Unfortunately, because we chose to open the door in front at the beginning,

the final stage of the Langton's ant highway leads to the northwest.

Fortunately, we can dismantle some walls to create shortcuts artificially."

Hohenheim took a few steps, arriving in front of the stone door.

Several magical crystals hovering beside him automatically floated over, taking turns firing miniature beams at the stone door, each beam stronger than the last,

to observe the specific toughness of the stone door.

"Without consuming too much spiritual energy and maintaining the most basic self-preservation ability, we can dismantle about twenty doors."

Hohenheim's mind raced, and he muttered, "Twenty doors can greatly reduce the number of steps required, almost only one thousand six hundred steps..."

"To balance energy reactions, each team is assigned one or two outstanding players, which means that each team can dismantle an average of forty doors."

Li Ang tilted his dragon head and said casually, "Moreover, we can have several teams advance simultaneously, breaking down walls at specific nodes,

forcing turns, changing the room to a candle extinguished or lit state, and using the Shiku's own mechanism to open the left or right door of the room, eliminating obstacles for other teams.

While all teams complete the rendezvous, they can also save time and spiritual energy, reducing the total number of steps."

"This..."

Xing Hechou, on the other end of the walkie-talkie, felt his scalp tingle.

The Langton's ant at the beginning was complex enough, and now adding so many factors to calculate.

Five teams of players move simultaneously, each team has forty opportunities to dismantle the door,

the speed of travel between the teams is different, the speed of recovery of the player's spiritual energy is different, the efficiency of dismantling the door is different,

at the same time, it is necessary to pursue the least time, the shortest path, as little dismantling of the door as possible,

and in the course of travel,

using the roads they have traveled, the state of the rooms they have changed, to create convenience for other teams, and finally complete the meeting...

All the factors are superimposed together, and the calculation difficulty increases almost exponentially.

This feeling is like reading a math book,

just passing the rabbit case, learning one plus one equals two,

and now telling you that you have mastered the basic principles of arithmetic,

now start to answer, using z to represent the set of all integers, find all functions f:z→z, satisfying for any integers a and b, there are f(2a)+2f(b)=f(f(a+b)).

I fell asleep in high school math class, and when I woke up again, the whole world had changed...

Xing Hechou's head hurt for a while, but fortunately, there were many players in the team, and there were always corresponding abilities to solve it.

"The minimum total number of steps for the five teams is 1514 steps."

In the fourth team, a young player from Whale Song pushed the glasses on the bridge of his nose and said in a deep voice: "Mr. Li's team will first advance ten steps according to the rules, dismantle the room in front, turn left, and then advance twenty steps according to the rules, continue to dismantle..."

The Shiku Maze prohibits the use of drones and ordinary electronic equipment, but for the transcendents of Whale Song, their brains are computer processors.

"Have you calculated the result?

Very good, then let's begin."

Li Ang turned to look at Hohenheim, who immediately understood and snapped his fingers, releasing a group buff spell to the people in the stone room.

"Follow."

Li Ang said lightly, his feet gently stepped on the floor, and his figure shot out like an electric shock, and with a gentle pat of his palm, the heavy stone door flew out with a "bang" and hit the wall.

The naked eye can only see the afterimage of him moving,

The players who had been given various swiftness buff spells ran together,

They had to do their best to barely keep up with Li Ang, so as not to be left behind.

At the same time, the other teams scattered in the Shiku Maze were also moving quickly under the guidance of the Whale Song member.

————

The whistling wind swept past his ears, and Li Ang was running fast in seemingly identical stone rooms, his face always expressionless.

After automatically stepping into the Shiku, he felt that there was something abnormal in the surrounding environment,

Even if he relied on calm observation, rational analysis, and knowledge accumulation to summarize the laws of the Shiku Maze and find the correct path.

That sense of déjà vu did not disappear, but became stronger and stronger.

The entire maze doesn't seem to be designed solely for self-protection.

If it was just to protect King Kṣitigarbha, then the best solution for the maze would be countless layers of barriers that could be healed by consuming the power of faith.

The current maze seems complex and cumbersome, but it is actually simple and unadorned,

Its lethality is almost zero (if you don't consider not understanding the rules, thinking that you have been walking a dead end, and finally stopping in despair, starving and thirsty to death),

It's all about delaying time.

Those with too high energy levels like Michael can't get in,

Those with weak strength can enter, and the delay time is very long.

However, the maze has the lowest level of defense against the most numerous first-tier transcendents, who should be guarded against the most.

The top and bottom layers are defended, but the middle layer is not defended,

Why is that?

Li Ang felt that he vaguely grasped the biggest problem of the Shiku Maze, his brows furrowed unconsciously, and his movement speed slowed down a little subconsciously.

"The concentration of the power of faith has changed."

He stopped slowly in a stone room, scanning his surroundings with his eyes,

Hohenheim, who was hovering half a meter off the ground, also stopped, followed by his player companions who had been moving rapidly along the way and whose spiritual and physical strength had been severely depleted.

"Um."

Hohenheim took a deep breath, with a hint of uneasiness between his eyebrows and eyes, "The surrounding power of faith has not become more, but less.

The consumption of breaking the stone door along the way has also been reduced a lot.

He is unreservedly absorbing the power of the entire maze."

The "He" here does not refer to Michael, but to the source of all this, King Kṣitigarbha.

Boom boom boom boom!

The sound of bricks exploding and shattering spread along the ceiling and the ground,

The dull sound of the wall and stone door exploding echoed in the distance, approaching rapidly.

Boom!

Along with the collapse and disintegration of the wall on the left side of the stone room, the third squad where Shi Kong and the Side of Truth were located appeared in front of Li Ang.

The five player teams successively completed the meeting,

More than sixty people gathered together again, standing in the stone room, looking at the stone wall in front of them.

These sixty or so people are all the strongest players in the first and second tiers of the Killing Game, even if Hohenheim, Li Ang, and the Side of Truth, such disasters, are excluded,

The remaining players are enough to violently conquer a small country and destroy an entire modern army in one day.

But now, all of them are squeezed into a stone room, staring at the stone wall in front of them that is constantly emitting an ominous aura,

As if that wall was a demon that devoured people.

"Tsk, this oppressive force, it feels like 1.5, no, it's almost as high as 2 Barren Lions."

Li Ang twisted the beard of his dragon head mask, "Old Xing, say a few words."

"Ah?"

Xing Hechou was stunned when he heard this, "Say what?"

"A pre-war mobilization."

Li Ang said as a matter of course: "Isn't there such a scene in the movie, a group of transcendents are preparing to fight against the life-and-death enemy that endangers the world, and before they set off, there is always a collective close-up from a 45° angle, and then a passionate pre-war mobilization commentary.

For example, 'I'm going home to get married after this battle!'

'I will definitely come back alive!'

'We're going to wash our hands after this one!'

And so on."

...You even use the Barren Lion as a unit of measurement, what should I say, who can't even get into the top 100 of the combat power list?

And the point is that these pre-war mobilization lines you mentioned are obviously all death flags, okay?

It would be a ghost if you didn't die after saying it.

I still want to live a few more years.

Xing Hechou had also made up for a period of literary works in the Special Affairs Bureau's collective training, so of course he knew these memes,

The corners of his mouth twitched back and forth a few times, not knowing how to complain.

"..."

Hohenheim sighed lightly, picked up the walkie-talkie, and dialed Michael far outside, "How is the situation on your side? Have any civilians died?"

"There were injuries, the cause of the injuries was excessive extraction of the power of faith, and I rescued them."

Michael's voice was as calm as ever, "The power of the Shiku is declining, did you do something?"

"We just dismantled a few doors,

The reason for the decline of the Shiku is King Kṣitigarbha."

Hohenheim said in a deep voice: "He is about to wake up, how long will it take you to provide support?"

"I can't lock on to your location."

Michael said calmly: "Find King Kṣitigarbha and temporarily cut off his faith link with ordinary people,

Or make a bigger commotion."

"A bigger commotion?"

Hohenheim smiled bitterly when he heard this, exchanged glances with Shi Kong and others, put down the walkie-talkie, stepped forward,

Standing in front of the stone wall, his hands first clasped together, then slowly pulled apart.

The beam of light intertwined in his palms gathered into a point like a drill, pushing towards the stone wall.

As one of the strongest players present, he could feel that behind the wall in front of him, there was an aura as vast as the sea and unfathomable.

Buzz——

The light beam drill contacted the stone wall, canceling out the power of faith contained in the wall,

Slowly eroding a small hole with a diameter close to a finger in the stone wall.

Whoosh!

A strong aura visible to the naked eye shot out from behind the stone wall along the hole,

Hohenheim's face turned pale, and his figure retreated violently. The automatic defense spells he had added instantly triggered, forming several layers of colorful barriers, covering his body and temporarily blocking the aura.

The momentum of the aura remained unabated, rushing into the room rapidly,

Shi Kong stood in place without dodging, his clothes fluttering,

The Side of Truth slightly raised his head, and a thin shield composed of astral matter instantly condensed in front of his body, reducing the aura,

Li Ang waved his hand, and countless slender vines extended from the sleeves of his white coat,

Darting and shooting in the room, instantly weaving into a large net, sheltering the players behind.

The airflow can be blocked, but the aura is hard to avoid.

Everyone in the room felt that the air suddenly became several times heavier, their breathing was suppressed, their scalps were numb, and their limbs were numb and stiff as if they were immersed in cold ice water.

This aura is not magnificent and sacred, as benevolent as a Buddha,

But evil and inexplicable, hideous as a demon.

"This...what...is going on?"

Xing Hechou opened his mouth with difficulty, his teeth chattering.

"Who knows, King Kṣitigarbha was a figure from thousands of years ago, it's normal for some unknown secrets to happen in mythology."

Li Ang scratched the chin of his dragon head mask and said calmly: "However, it really looks like Wutian Moluo."

"...Hoo."

Hohenheim exhaled a long breath. He hadn't seen the "Journey to the West: The Later Story," which was made up of insufficient funds and upside-down shots, but he could understand what Li Ang meant.

Thousands of years is indeed too long, so long that they cannot piece together the complete truth through the fragments of mythology.

They can only take it one step at a time.

"Those whose total spiritual energy value is less than 2500, run away later."

Hohenheim's expression straightened, and he made a strange gesture with both hands, chanting mysterious and obscure spells.

"More dim than dusk,

More red than blood..."

As soon as his spell was uttered, the faces of the players present changed drastically,

David clenched the Halberd of the Arbiter in his hand, Setsunanyoin turned his palm and took out a dagger and short knife, Wang Buliuxing stepped forward and stood in front of Xing Hechou and a group of Special Affairs Bureau colleagues,

Dawn retreated to the edge of the wall that had just been destroyed, ready to summon the Kapool machine at any time.

Even Shi Kong, the Side of Truth, and Li Ang stepped back to the left and right, leaving space for Hohenheim.

"Time keeps passing,

Your power lasts forever..."

Hohenheim's chanting became louder and louder, and the magical crystals beside him rotated faster and faster, continuously providing spiritual power,

And in the air between his palms, faint red and black glowing lines appeared.

Those lines were fleeting, disappearing and regenerating, rapidly gathering and condensing like electric sparks, forming a perfect crimson glowing sphere.

Simple, ordinary, just like the light sphere used by junior mages.

"All the stupid things blocking in front of me,

With your and my strength,

Will surely perish!"

Hohenheim's face was as pale as paper, and he pushed the spell called [Dragon Slave] towards the front, seemingly slowly but actually quickly.

The crimson beam of light silently destroyed the wall, tore apart the terrifying aura that was suppressing more than sixty of the world's strongest, and bombarded into the room in front.