Chapters Forty-Three and Forty-Four: Ascension (5K)

The window glass was extremely heavy, resembling the bulletproof glass of a presidential state car, more than thick enough to withstand machine-gun fire. It was obviously impossible to shatter it with brute force alone.

Outside the window, the night was deep and the city lights twinkled. Judging by the elevation of the lights, the secret room where Li Sheng was located was at least on the fortieth or fiftieth floor of a high-rise building.

"I certainly didn't expect this..."

He had originally assumed the secret room would be set in some abandoned factory or the remote wilderness. "However, one thing can be confirmed: the geographical location here is not Cuba, and the time is not noon."

Ring-ring.

The red rotary telephone on the coffee table began to ring. Li Sheng walked forward, first wringing the excess water from his sleeves, then retracting his hands inside them, and using a blanket from the sofa as a barrier between his hands and the phone before finally picking up the receiver.

Judging by the drowning trap of the previous secret room, these hidden chambers were all designed to kill people. There might even be cheap tricks like poisoning the receiver or rigging the phone with high voltage; one simply had to be cautious.

The call connected successfully, and a pleasant, mechanical female AI voice came through: "g=t, p=e, r=s, b=o, z=d."

Li Sheng nodded and spoke into the phone: "Messed-up text, messed-up text?! Messed-up text, messed-up text!"

The garbled characters were a classic example of mojibake in Chinese, which essentially originated from UTF-8 hex "???" substitution symbols turning into errors when converted to GBK encoding.

Li Sheng asked this for two reasons: first, to test the operator on the other end of the line, and second, if there was no operator, perhaps he could use encoded language to flirt with the AI girl on the phone and maybe get her social media handle.

"..."

The other end of the line fell silent for a moment before repeating: "g=t, p=e, r=s, b=o, z=d."

Tsk, no response. Playing hard to get, huh?

Li Sheng curled his lips, pressed down on the cradle, and when he lifted it again, the voice was still reciting that same string of passwords. Clearly, it was not going to let him call the outside world for help.

Rumble!

A loud crash echoed from outside the room. The rear wall suddenly began to move, slowly advancing as a single, solid piece.

Tables and chairs overturned, the sofa shifted, and the glass desk lamp crashed to the floor, shattering into pieces.

"The room is eight meters wide, and the wall's moving speed is about two centimeters per second. It will take just over six minutes to close completely and crush me into a meat patty.

At the same time, because only the rear wall is moving instead of the left and right walls converging, it means I have no way to use some hard object to wedge open the right-hand window and escape outside."

Li Sheng calmly assessed the situation. Whether it was due to being soaked in seawater for too long leading to a drop in body temperature and wandering thoughts, or if being thrust into a script mission had unleashed his lazy nature,

a part of his mind was still wandering elsewhere as he muttered internally: "Crushed into a meat patty? Are the designers of this secret room trying to send me to the two-dimensional anime world?

Erm... It seems Your Excellency's understanding of the «two·di·men·sional» realm is· seemingly· full· of· misconceptions, oh☆~! Well, even the most fundamental «cour·tesy♪, jus·tice♪, in·tegri·ty♪, and shamedulness♪» have long since been lost...♪ (Laughs) Say, I—even kimizu like you, do you have any qualification to call yourself «two♡-di♡-mens♡ional»★? Fufufu—after all, Your Excellency is already «two·di·men·sion·dis·quali·fied», aren't you~♪?"

While reciting these excessively high-concentration, cringe-inducing chuunibyou lines, he rapidly explored the room.

Beside the fireplace, he discovered an eight-digit electronic combination lock with a keyboard. Near the edge of the rug, he found an old photograph.

The photo showed a teenage boy and girl dressed in Renaissance-era European costumes and long gowns, gazing deeply into each other's eyes on an opera stage.

The young man bore a striking resemblance to Owen Hedges, the persona Li Sheng was currently portraying.

Considering that the old photograph had already yellowed, the boy was likely not Owen's son or relative, but a younger Owen himself.

As for the girl in the photo, she was presumably Owen's deceased wife mentioned in the mission briefing?

"The two people in the photo are performing in a play... a play..."

An idea struck him. Dodging the relentlessly advancing wall, he looked toward the bookshelf beside the fireplace.

The shelves were tightly packed with all kinds of books—economics, law, politics. The only one remotely related to drama was a copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets.

He pulled the book from the shelf and flipped it open, but instead of a password, he found page after page of repetitive English gibberish.

kbsp wr h rwdt gthg rgwor mn rxbvp
wg wr gtp nmowawpz rnhov wq gtp kbspor pipr
wg wr gtp uhspr rgwoopz mn il gtp kbspor gphor
wg wr gtp uwrprg abox ba xhzqprr
gtp iwggpo ghrgp wq bqpr gtobhg
hqz gtp tbqpl gthg opxhwqr bmg ba ophft

Every single page contained this exact text.

Crackling—

The space continued to shrink. The curtain hooks were all crushed off, and the sturdy-looking leather sofa was easily pulverized and shattered into tiny pieces under the terrifying pushing force of the hydraulic press.

Treading on the sawdust-covered floor, Li Sheng thought rapidly. Among the English gibberish, the only eight-letter word was "nmowawpz". He entered it into the fireplace's password pad, but it indicated failure.

"g=t, p=e, r=s, b=o, z=d..."

The telephone on the coffee table was still broadcasting that string of passwords until it was crushed by the wall, snapping the phone line and finally halting its repetition.

"I see. 'g=t, p=e' are the hints for decoding the gibberish. The most frequent word in the code, 'gtp', is actually 't*e', most likely 'tie' or 'the'. Considering that the frequency of 'the' in English is much higher than the former, let's assume 't' is 'h'. Then the fourth word in the last line, 'gthg', is actually 'that', meaning 'h=a'..."

Decoding the rest of the text swiftly yielded the complete message: "Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs; Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes; Being vexed, a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears. What is it else? A madness most discreet, A choking gall and a preserving sweet."

Among them, the eight-digit password "nmowawpz" corresponded to "purified".

Upon entering the code, the fireplace gave a low hum and slowly slid aside, revealing a passage just wide enough for one person to pass through.

Li Sheng squeezed sideways into the passage, stepping forward thoughtfully.

***

The two secret rooms were not merely standalone chambers; the latitude and longitude coordinates in the first room, along with the photo and cipher in the second room, all seemed related to Owen's life history.

With these thoughts in mind, he arrived at the third room.

This space was somewhat smaller, the entire room completely empty except for a metal door without any lock in the corner, bearing the words [Only One Can Survive] inscribed upon it.

In the middle of the room's floor stood a liquid crystal screen and a device.

The device consisted of a transparent glass cylinder, a syringe, and a rubber hose.

The bottom of the cylinder was firmly welded to the floor and could not be moved. The top was sealed and connected to the hose. Milliliter graduation marks were printed on its exterior, while four metal disks were attached to its interior, arranged in upper and lower pairs.

Two sets of power cables ran along the floor all the way to the metal door.

Combined with the syringe and hose used for drawing blood, it appeared he was expected to draw at least 800 milliliters of his own blood, pump it into the cylinder, and use the electrical conductivity of blood to complete the circuit for the metal disk electrodes, thereby opening the sealed metal door.

Moreover, the sealed design at the top of the cylinder prevented Li Sheng from filling the bottle with the seawater soaked into his clothes or simply using urine.

Bzzzt.

Just as he was feeling a twinge of regret for this, the LCD screen lit up, projecting a scene resembling security camera footage.

Inside the frame was a middle-aged man wearing a shirt and trousers. Looking exhausted, with cracked lips and symptoms of dehydration, he staggered through the blazing hot desert under the scorching sun until he reached a telephone booth, inserted a coin, and dialed the number "001212*******".

Timely enough, a telephone dropped down from the ceiling of the secret room, connecting automatically without Li Sheng even needing to pick it up. The painful voice of the man from the surveillance footage emerged: "Owen, it's Mike. Listen to me, don't go to London for the appointment—that escape room is a trap. They tricked me and dumped me in the Mexican desert, and I can't get out..."

"Wait, did you say you're in Mexico?"

Li Sheng called out loudly, but the man on the other end of the line, as if succumbing to dehydration and shock, stumbled out of the telephone booth in a daze and collapsed before the door of a small wooden shack.

The door of that wooden shack was an exact match to the heavy door of the secret room.

Judging by this, Mike was the very same good friend mentioned in the mission briefing who had persuaded Owen to participate in the escape room game.

Li Sheng pondered for a moment, picked up the syringe, and inserted it into his arm. Blood flowed along the tubing into the glass cylinder, slowly accumulating to the 800ml mark.

The blood connected the circuit, and the metal door of the secret room swung open in response, revealing an elevator.

In the corner of the elevator sat a black duffel bag with its zipper open, exposing stack after stack of US dollars.

These dollars served as the clearance reward, meaning that as long as Li Sheng walked out of the secret room, the mission would be considered complete.

Without the slightest hesitation, he pulled out the syringe, picked up the sextant, and strode forward.

"Ugh... ugh..."

The audio from the room's speakers suddenly amplified. It was Mike's labored, shock-induced breathing as he lay sprawled on the desert floor, appearing exceptionally agonizing.

"Oh? Amplifying the sound? Are they trying to make me feel empathetic, to stay behind for the sake of a friend and risk hemorrhagic shock by drawing 1,600 milliliters of blood to open the metal door on Mike's side so he can escape too?"

Li Sheng turned around, stared at the surveillance camera, and sneered, "Pointless. Out of two people, at most one can survive."

Setting aside the fact that players executing script missions felt no genuine attachment, responsibility, or obligation toward the characters they portrayed,

more importantly, it was utterly meaningless.

Mike was already dead.

Li Sheng stepped into the elevator car and glanced at the indicator panel, discovering that this building was a towering seventy stories high, with his current floor situated at the fifty-fifth. As the elevator doors automatically closed, the indicator light for the 1st floor lit up.

The elevator began its descent, but Li Sheng raised his head, locked eyes with the surveillance camera, and said calmly, "Take me to see you. The operators of this game."

Nothing happened. Li Sheng smashed his sextant against the ceiling of the elevator, forcefully shattering the ventilation panel, and continued, "If you don't come looking for me, I'll come looking for you."

This time, the elevator finally ground to a halt. After a brief pause, it reversed direction and began to ascend.

The floor numbers climbed steadily. Inside the car, Li Sheng composedly straightened his clothes and casually flipped through the bag of banknotes.

Fifty thousand dollars—nearly three hundred and sixty thousand RMB! When had he ever seen this much cash in person?!

This was enough to buy a twentieth of an apartment in Yin City!

Ding-dong.

The elevator car reached the top floor, and the doors slid open. Greeting Li Sheng was a group of security guards holding firearms.

"Freeze!"

"Don't move!"

"Put your hands up!"

The security personnel shouted at him. The latter squinted and retorted, "One guy tells me not to move, and another tells me to put my hands up. Are you American gun guys all this uncoordinated when conducting entrapment?"

"Hehehe, boys, be polite."

An elderly white man, clearly accustomed to high positions, walked over, dismissed the armed guards with a wave, and pointed at Li Sheng. "This Mr. Owen is the super dark horse of tonight's gambling match! Treat him with some respect!"

The elderly man in the suit held immense authority; the armed guards exchanged glances and lowered their firearms.

Moving past the group of security personnel, Li Sheng was finally able to take in the scene at the top floor of the building.

A grand banquet was underway. Male and female VIPs wore masks, dressed in tailored suits and evening gowns, clinking glasses and conversing cheerfully.

They were not here merely to drink or dance, but to participate in a special gambling match—high up in the magnificent hall, screens were suspended, broadcasting the surveillance feeds of various secret rooms and the contestants struggling for survival within them.

Some died in spike traps, others were sliced into chunks by sharp steel cables, some inhaled poison gas and collapsed with cyanotic faces, while others were burned alive into charcoal.

Whenever a contestant perished, their screen turned gray and the word [Eliminated] appeared across it.

The numbers on the screens of the remaining survivors increased accordingly.

Accumulated chips: six million.
Nine million.
Fifteen million.
Twenty-seven million.
The unit was US dollars.

These high-society elites were playing a wagering game, betting on which of the dozens of contestants trapped in the building's secret rooms would die and who would manage to survive.

The winners laughed heartily, while the losers showed no signs of wailing or despair, merely looking slightly regretful.

Millions of dollars and human lives were nothing more than chips to them.

"Hah, just as I thought: beasts in human clothing feasting on men."

Li Sheng let out a dry, mirthless laugh and asked the elderly man in the suit, "Since you let me up here and let me see all this, aren't you afraid I'll tell the media after I leave?"

"Mr. Owen, you're a smart man; you should understand the rules of the game. Besides, the owners of most news media outlets you know are right here at this banquet. Even if you published the news, no media outlet would broadcast it.

How should I put it... This is like a pastime within a closed circle, held every few years. Only by participating in games of this sort can one be counted as an insider and gain access to the circle's resources."

The elderly man in the suit smiled playfully and answered indifferently, "What I'm curious about is why you abandoned Mike Garcia in the third secret room without the slightest hesitation. As far as I know, he was your lifelong best friend, your buddy, your best man, and your confidant."

"Because Mike is already dead."

Li Sheng said apathetically, "Remember the surveillance footage in the secret room? He said he was in New Mexico, while this is New York. The time difference between the two is only an hour; it's impossible for it to be pitch black here while it's broad daylight over there.

The only explanation is that the surveillance footage was pre-recorded and deliberately played to interfere with my judgment. Mike has been dead for a long time."

The elderly man in the suit looked utterly astonished. "Wait, how did you know this was New York? We injected you with an anesthetic and transported you from London back to New York; you shouldn't have known your location."

"It's very simple: the way Mike punched in his phone number."

Li Sheng said calmly, "When dialing an international long-distance call, '001' is the country code for the United States, and '212' is the regional code for New York. You adjusted the angle of the surveillance camera to deliberately keep me from seeing the telephone booth's dial pad, but you didn't expect me to deduce the numbers simply from the movement of Mike's arm.

As for what you called 'transporting me back to New York'—interesting. It seems this Owen Hedges was a New Yorker to begin with.

And the Cuban coordinates in the first room—let me think, 20 degrees north latitude, 75.9 degrees west longitude, that would be the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, right?

Combining that with Owen's identity as a human rights lawyer, all the clues connect: Owen investigated a case of prisoner abuse by the U.S. military, suffered secret retaliation, had his family burned to death, and Owen himself spiraled into depression and lost his job.

Since you killed Owen's family and then killed his best friend, you certainly weren't going to let Owen walk away; you intended to send him on his way sooner or later.

Once he died, it would simply be another ignored obituary in the newspaper, much like the leaders of the Occupy Wall Street movement a few years ago, or the Boeing whistleblowers of recent times."

Keep in mind that the objective of this mission was [Remain alive until escaping the dark room]
Rather than [Escape the dark room and remain alive].

The system had also provided a subtle hint through the mission objective.

Li Sheng's overly detached and aloof tone caused the old white man's brow to furrow involuntarily.

The anesthetic they had injected into Owen Hedges would only induce deep sleep; it wouldn't alter a person's personality or memories.

"You... you're not Owen?"

"Me? Of course not. I am a champion of justice, a crime-fighter, a nightwalker, a protector of the weak, a professional mercenary, a winner of the Red Star Kindergarten Perfect Attendance Star Award, a handsome guy, a LeBron/Kobe hater, Tiger Shenyang, a gaming pro..."

At the mention of this, Li Sheng pereled up and reeled off a long list of monikers. Unfortunately, the old white man was not a fan of internet memes and didn't catch the references; otherwise, he might have quipped, "Sorry, there isn't enough room for all these people here."

[Mission objective completed]
[Player restrictions lifted]
[Script mission "Escape" completed. Transmission will occur in 5 minutes]

The system prompt echoed in his mind. Li Sheng chuckled, rotated his neck, and introduced himself: "In 1974, I won the championship in my very first free-fight match in Southeast Asia. In 1980, I defeated the Japanese heavy-hitter Thunder Dragon, and then for three consecutive years, I defeated all karate masters to win the All-Japan Free-Fight Championship. I am proficient in ancient Chinese martial arts, hailed as the nemesis of Japanese karate, and go by the alias the Devil's Muscle Man..."

Unable to suppress his escalating sense of unease any longer, the elderly man shouted at the armed guards, "Hold him down!"

The armed guards swarmed forward, grabbing Li Sheng by the arms.

Clang!

Bone blades suddenly snapped out of Li Sheng's forearms, slicing off every single finger that had rested upon his arms.

Blood sprayed wildly, staining the expensive Persian carpet.

The screams of the guards echoed through the magnificent, luxurious high-rise hall.

Hearing the commotion, the mingling elites ceased their cheerful conversations and turned as one to look.

Amidst the terrified gazes of the crowd, black chitinous plates slowly covered Li Sheng's cheeks, chest, and spine, while pitch-black horns sprouted from his forehead. With a casual slash of his blade, he shattered the elevator call button, cutting off any route of escape.

Turning back, he offered a gentle smile to the hall full of aristocrats. "The game officially begins."