Pei Su: “The letter? The one mentioned in the exam question as being in 103?”
Guan Si said: “Not sure, but it’s most likely that letter. It was hidden very well, Brother Qi searched the entire ward before finding it.”
Pei Su watched him spread the letter out and asked, “Since you don’t want to cooperate with me, why show me the letter? You don’t strike me as someone who believes in ‘selfless giving.'”
“Naturally.” Guan Si paused mid-motion and said, “I won’t put myself in danger without ensuring my own safety. Having one fewer enemy is always better. If it ever comes to swords drawn, that’s a matter for later. For now, our primary task is to solve the puzzle and move to the next segment of the story, isn’t it?”
Pei Su let out a laugh: “A man who knows what’s what, that makes things easier.”
His gaze settled on the string of characters.
E7DJIU
S19WON
PSAND8
55QHAO
“What do you think these are?” Guan Si pointed at the letters. “English?”
“Doesn’t seem like it.” He Zhu explained, “If the letter itself were in English, then these numbers should all be converted into their corresponding letters of the 26-letter alphabet. But don’t forget 26 is a number made up of the digits 2 and 6. Numbers with two or more digits can be split apart. So is the 19 on this letter actually 19, or is it 1 and 9?”
When it came to this type of puzzle-solving, He Zhu was noticeably more engaged.
“Of course, that’s just one guess. Another possibility is converting these English letters into their corresponding numbers in the 26-letter alphabet, which would give us a string of numbers as a clue.”
Guan Si shook his head. “This is a letter, not a standalone clue. For a letter, I lean more toward ”
“The final answer should be a piece of text.”
The group fell into a unanimous silence.
Suddenly, Qi Dengzui’s voice came through from the sea of consciousness.
“Pinyin,” Qi Dengzui said. “These letters are Chinese pinyin.”
“Pinyin?” Guan Si asked. “Then what are the numbers? Numbers can’t become pinyin.”
“Exactly, so the numbers are distractors.”
Qi Dengzui looked at the letter through Guan Si’s eyes. “Numbers and letters are hard to pair up. If we use ‘text’ as the breakthrough point, and the letter involves various letters, the most likely possibility is pinyin.”
Guan Si immediately understood his meaning. Looking at the letter, he read character by character: “E7DJIU, S19WON, PSAND8, 55QHAO. Removing the numbers, it should be EDJIU, SWON, PSAND, QHAO.”
“ED can’t form pinyin with the letters after it, so it’s excluded. Similarly, S and N can’t form pinyin with the letters after them, so they’re excluded too. Eliminating the distractors this way, we get a set of pinyin.”
He Zhu, who had been silent, caught on: “JIU, WO, SAN, HAO.”
[Save me, Ward 3]
“You’re both right, but I have a question,” Pei Su said.
“Are ‘me’ and ‘Ward 3’ the same person?”
If “me” and “Ward 3” are the same person, then this letter is someone from Ward 3 begging for help, and the restored meaning would be: “Save me, I’m Ward 3.”
If “me” and “Ward 3” are not the same person, then this letter is someone else begging Ward 3 for help, and the restored meaning would be: “Ward 3, save me.”
Considering Pei Su’s question and the inconsistencies in the case, Qi Dengzui reasonably suspected that his identity. the patient in 103 might not have bipolar disorder, nor any mental illness at all. He was faking it. As for why he’d come to this asylum, that remained unknown.
Guan Si said, “But we woke up in 103. Brother Qi, if you’re not Ward 3, then who are you? And where’s the real Ward 3?”
The room fell into silence.
Guan Si suddenly asked, “What are your conditions?”
Pei Su said, “Me? I’m not sick. My identity is a young master who lost a family power struggle and was sent here with a mental illness label slapped on me. The condition they pinned on me is the simplest one depression.”
He Zhu said with a deadpan face, “I have emotional disorder or rather, emotional deficiency.”
Guan Si said, “We’ve already been to 101, but there was no one there, and we didn’t see any information about Candidate No. 1.”
He Zhu: “What about the medical records?”
Guan Si: “The records say No. 1 has dissociative identity disorder. It’s strange logically, Brother Qi and I fit that description better, yet we woke up in 103.”
“You can’t look at it that way,” He Zhu said thoughtfully. “The records don’t have names. Where each of us woke up isn’t necessarily our own ward. It’s very possible our current order has been shuffled.”
Guan Si agreed with him. “There must be clues in the exam hall pointing to our identities. Have you checked the hallway?”
“No.” Pei Su spread his hands. “We went back and forth, trying to avoid the head nurse finding out, so we kept our time in the hallway as short as possible.”
Guan Si suddenly understood something.
“The broadcast just now specifically mentioned that the hallway was empty, there must be clues in the hallway.” He said, “I’ll check the hallway on the 103 side. You two check this hallway carefully.”
“Alright,” He Zhu replied. “Be careful.”
The hallway of the asylum ward was spacious and empty, with only a vase of strange fragrance identical to the one in Room 103. The walls were painted a stark, sickly white, and cobwebs hung from the ceiling.
Some parts of the wall had already cracked, the fissures stretching all the way down to the base. Where the paint had peeled away, large patches of vivid red were exposed beneath, sending a chill down one’s spine.
Guan Si said softly, “Brother Qi, don’t you think the clues in this examination room are too sparse? Looking at this hallway with the naked eye, there’s nothing here at all. And this is only our first exam the difficulty is way too strange. Could it be that this so-called supernatural academy wants us dead?”
In his sea of consciousness, Qi Dengzui gently stroked the small orb of light beside him.
“If you can’t see it, that doesn’t mean you can’t feel it. Try touching around.”
Guan Si nodded and ran his hands along the wall as he walked down the hallway. The surface looked smooth, but it didn’t feel that way at all. The white wall had fine, tooth-like ridges, and because of the wall’s material, they were somewhat rough against the skin.
He went over it several times like this, but still found nothing.
He let out a sigh and leaned against the wall, about to speak, when Qi Dengzui heard him let out a muffled grunt.
“What’s wrong?”
Guan Si’s back was aching from the pressure. He said, “Something’s off, Brother Qi. There’s something on the wall behind me, something poked me.”
He turned around and saw that the spot he’d been leaning against was the doorplate for Room 101.
“Brother Qi, there’s writing on it!”
<Whoa, seriously?>
<Wait, that’s not right. I remember watching this exam before, I don’t recall this part of the plot.>
<Is this new content or hidden content? Did the difficulty of this exam just get upgraded? The last group of examinees didn’t seem to have that complex dissociative identity disorder or this hidden writing either, and that examinee in 101 didn’t disappear.>
<No idea. Let’s just watch.>
Guan Si slowly traced the doorplate with his fingers and discovered that the plate itself was smooth, stamped with “101,” but when he touched it, he could feel raised, invisible text on top of it.
Qi Dengzui: “Can you make it out? What does it say?”
Guan Si closed his eyes, feeling the strokes of the characters, and said softly, “Lots of horizontal strokes, and there’s a roof radical… wait, these characters seem to be…”
<I think I know…>
<What is it? What is it? Don’t keep us in suspense.>
” It’s my name.”
Guan Si felt it again. “That’s right, it’s Guan Si.”
[Attention, all examinees. We interrupt with an announcement.]
[This exam, “Escape from the Asylum,” has had its difficulty increased due to unknown reasons.]
[The difficulty of this exam is now: E→D.]
<Damn, it really got upgraded. Isn’t this just a death sentence? The strategies from previous examinees probably won’t work anymore.>
<This is way too unfair. What does “unknown reasons” even mean? That’s a ridiculous excuse.>
<I can’t believe this. Is the system trying to screw over Pei Su and He Zhu? Who plays like this?>
<101 is Guan Si’s name. The difficulty increase is clearly because of Guan Si.>
The difficulty had suddenly spiked, but Qi Dengzui showed no extra reaction. He patted the little grass orb of light. “Go touch the other patient rooms and see if the doorplates there have writing too.”
“Okay.” Guan Si’s voice was hoarse, feeling an intense itch radiating from the depths of his soul.
He suppressed the restless stirring in his heart and went through the doorplates of 102 and 104 in turn. The writing on them was Pei Su and He Zhu respectively, no issues there.
“It seems the problematic ones are 101 and 103,” Guan Si said. “Brother Qi, let’s head to the 103 hallway first.”
Just as he reached the 103 hallway, Guan Si ran into Pei Su and the others.
“Any findings?”
Guan Si nodded, his voice unusually grave: “There’s writing on the doorplates outside the rooms. I came to check 103.”
He walked over to the doorplate of 103 and placed his hand over it. “Three characters.”
After a brief moment of feeling it out, Guan Si said, “Brother Qi, it’s your name.”
The moment he finished speaking, the examinee badges in the main hall began to spin, faster and faster, lifting off from where they’d been placed and flying toward Guan Si.
The badge streaked through the air like a shooting star and landed steadily in his hand.
It spun and flipped in Guan Si’s palm, gradually revealing its information.
Examinee Name: Guan Si
Examinee Rank: Lowly Scholar LV.5
Examinee Points: 0
Examinee Ranking: Unranked
At this point, the identities of the four patients in the rooms and the identities of the examinees in this exam were all clear.
101-1 Guan Si Dissociative Identity Disorder.
102-2 Pei Su Depression.
103-3 Qi Dengzui – Bipolar Disorder.
104-4 He Zhu – Emotional Disorder.
“So…” Pei Su said, “This exam actually only has 3 real people. The system treated you as a candidate too?”
<Damn, the system is way too unfair.>
<Has no one mentioned it? This exam is really exciting. From Qi Dengzui going head-to-head with the nurse at the start, to the later split personality and the three-people-missing-one thing, it’s way more entertaining than other exams where they just serve themselves up as cannon fodder.>
<The comment above cracks me up. I think I already know who you’re talking about.>
<Those who get it, get it, alright? Finishing the last exam really felt like a waste of time.>
“Yes,” Guan Si said. “But that’s not the biggest problem.”