Rubik’s Cube

Chapter 63

Someone more capable than Ji Yushi?

This made Morita Yu sigh. It seems that the Star Era time and space was a lot more developed than his time and space. There was quite a large gap in technological development.

However, apart from exchanging information about this Rubik’s Cube, the three didn’t go into too much detail about where they’re from.

In order to maintain the stability of time and space, they refrained from interacting too much with those from other times and spaces.

Regardless of which time and space they’re from, the three Tianqiong laws have been engraved into their bones: Never change the past. Never talk about the present. Never be obsessed with the future.

“The rooms here are indeed moving.” Zoe spoke up, “Whenever someone opens a door and enters, the original room would be changed and replaced by another room when that same door is opened again. Perhaps there are sensing mechanisms installed in the rooms.”

She clearly had to have experienced a situation like this several times while she was here to be able to say something like this with so much certainty.

Ji Yushi nodded, “It’s possible.”

Zoe began to think, “In that case, it would be hard for us to find a pattern. There are too many rooms here. What does ‘Rubik’s Cube’ want us to do? What does it want us to join?”

Everyone wanted to know the answer to this question. It could only be answered through experimentation and exploration. If you remained in the same room to be safe, you would never be able to reach the answer.

After the three spoke briefly, they decided to move on.

Zoe removed the red ball floating in the air.

The three then checked the rooms in the order of top, bottom, left, right, front and back. The colours of the balls in the six surrounding rooms were different. There were two blue, one yellow, one green, one purple, and one red.

According to Morita Yu’s guess from earlier, everyone chose the room with the red ball and moved on.

Along the way, Zoe continued to use her small dagger to carve numbers onto the floor.

Pure white rooms appeared one after another. It made it easy for one to feel isolated from the outside world. In actual fact, it was really like that for them.

Morita Yu would try to find topics to talk about, but he wasn’t like Li Chun the chatterbox. Although he spoke a little more than the rest of them, he always talked about useful information.

“Senior, you estimated that there are at least twenty-one people active here and that helped me figure one thing out.” Morita Yu said, “When I waited in a room after separating from the rest of my squad, a door opened suddenly but I didn’t press a switch. That door opened for a second and then closed on its own.”

He spoke very grimly and continue to gesture, “I thought that if it was my teammate, they would definitely call out to me so when I saw that there was no one behind that door, I thought it was a ghost. Now that I think about it, it was actually quite simple. Someone from another squad must have found me but didn’t want to work with me so they left. It might’ve been a teammate of yours.”

If there really were only three Guardian squads here, Morita Yu’s chances of running into the seventh squad was quite high.

Ji Yushi however felt that there may not only be three squads here. They may probably encounter more traversers like them from other crevices in time and space from now on.

“It probably wasn’t my teammate.” Ji Yushi said, “If they found you, they wouldn’t just leave.”

Even if they were competing against each other, the seventh squad wouldn’t do something like that.

An effective but reserved exchange of information was the way for him to find his teammates in this Rubik’s Cube as soon as possible.

Morita Yu smiled, revealing his white teeth, “Ah, senior is confident in your captain and your teammates. I really envy that.”

Zoe didn’t like to speak much, and she also felt that Morita Yu spoke too much. She just wanted to quickly get out of this place, “It’s not like that in your squad?”

“It’s not that, it’s not like that.” Morita Yu scratched his head and spoke with some embarrassment, “I have always been dealing with administrative work before and originally wanted to be a Recorder, but I signed up as a Guardian because they were short in people. In terms of combat power and experience, I’m still very inadequate so I’m not very close with my teammates.”

Zoe didn’t feel sorry for him.

Every Guardian would need some time to adjust after joining a new squad. If one could adjust, they could stay but if they couldn’t, they would leave. She had seen that too many times in Tianqiong.

Hearing Morita Yu’s answer, Ji Yushi seemed to be a little moved.

He turned and said to Morita Yu, “Those doing administrative work have their own strengths. After a few more missions, you will gradually become familiar with them.”

They arrived at a new room.

Up, down, down.

This was the third room. All of them had red balls.

Ji Yushi remembered the direction of each of the rooms they had entered. The layout of the rooms that was originally set up as a parallel line in his mind had begun to change and reorganise. The arrangement here was many times more complicated than he had anticipated. It had far exceeded his rough estimate earlier of 86 rooms.

Joining.

What exactly did it mean?

Zoe continued to remove the balls. After she pressed the switches, Morita Yu and Ji Yushi would respectively check the colour of the ball in the other rooms.

Morita Yu checked the room on the left, “Red!”

Ji Yushi climbed up the silver-white ladder on the right wall and checked, “Red….wait.”

The scene in that room was reflected in Ji Yushi’s eyes. There was a large pool of bright red blood on the floor and there was a decapitated head facing away from him in the corner of the room.

Sensing his abnormality, the two asked him what was wrong.

Ji Yushi climbed down the ladder. Being exposed to such a bloody scene after such a long time, nausea and discomfort surged from the depths of his stomach. He barely held it in and said, “There is a human head inside.”

Morita Yu was surprised, “Human head?! A dead person?”

Ji Yushi made a sound of affirmation. He didn’t want to continue this topic.

Zoe expressed her doubts, “You said that the ball is red. Why would there be a dead person?”

This couldn’t be considered as her not trusting Ji Yushi. After all, they had only met by chance and there was no tacit understanding or emotional connection between them. Regardless of how logical Ji Yushi’s analysis was just now, Zoe felt that she should check it herself.

Zoe climbed up the ladder to check. Her expression changed, “What happened?”

Hearing that there really was a dead body and it was also just a head, Morita Yu didn’t even want to go up the ladder himself to check and even stayed away from that wall. He didn’t want to stay here any longer, “Let’s go and stop worrying about it. It might have been done by the man who killed Chuck. He’s a murderer! He will definitely get his retribution!”

The Super S-level mission had been turned into an enclosed room homicide case by Morita Yu. He reacted passionately with a sense of righteousness much like a second-year middle school student.

As he complained, Morita Yu climbed up the left ladder, “Let’s go, let’s not waste our time. People normally become unable to even move after starving for three days. I’m right now feeling very weak. We should hurry!”

Ji Yushi followed behind Morita Yu. He got ready to climb the ladder.

Zoe also jumped off the right ladder.

Ji Yushi looked up and could only see the soles of Morita Yu’s feet. He climbed up two steps before seeing Morita Yu lower his head and look down at him from above, “Senior, be careful. Don’t let me step on your hands.”

As soon as he finished saying that, Morita Yu entered the hole. Soon afterwards, his feet shot outwards and something heavy fell with a loud thud. There was no longer any movement.

Ji Yushi was doubtful. He went up another two steps.

Once he saw the situation, all the blood in his body seemed to flow backwards, “Morita!!!”

That shout was particularly frightening. Even his voice trembled a little.

Zoe was still standing on the ground. She raised her head and shouted, “What’s wrong?! What happened?!”

Ji Yushi still had Morita’s words ‘Senior, be careful’ lingering in his ears when he saw Morita fall to the ground. He had died on the spot. Blood spattered out from his neck and the wound was cut neatly as if it was cut by a knife —-

His head was gone.

Ji Yushi suddenly thought of something. He quickly got off the ladder.

“Give it to me!”

He grabbed the ball in Zoe’s hand and quickly found the switch for the room on the right.

He swiftly climbed up the ladder and looked into the room on the right. That head in the corner of the room now had a source….It was Morita Yu’s head!

Zoe had already climbed the ladder on the left and saw Morita Yu’s body, “W-what?! Why?!”

She couldn’t accept it. Why was a person who was alive just a moment ago suddenly dead, and it was also without a single sound?

In a situation like this, anyone with emotions would feel sad. Not to mention, she had also gone through so many rooms with Morita Yu. The rims of her eyes reddened, and she stepped off the ladder.

“How could this happen?! What went wrong?!”

According to their previous theory that ‘same coloured rooms are safe’, they should be able to continue without any problems.

They had gone through many rooms relying on this theory. Morita Yu’s death was completely outside of their expectations.

Could it be that same coloured rooms aren’t safe?

Then what was safe?!

Zoe circled around the room in frustration a few times before slamming the butt of her gun against the wall, “So that head in the other room is Morita’s?! But how could that be possible? He was here just now, and that head was already there when we arrived. How do you explain that? It doesn’t make sense!”

She finished her words angrily and turned to look at Ji Yushi who stood next to the ladder on the right. He had his eyes closed and seemed to be thinking about something.

During this short period of time together, this young man from the East from seventy years ago had left her with a calm impression.

Apart from his beautiful appearance, his calmness seemed to be the next most alluring trait of Ji Yushi’s.

But at this moment, she saw that Ji Yushi’s face was extremely pale and covered with cold sweat.

Ji Yushi couldn’t control himself.

After seeing Morita’s corpse and head, all kinds of messy memories surfaced uncontrollably in his mind.

Blood splattering after Tang Le was bitten by a zombie, brain pulp exploding as a bullet from diamond bird bursts through Li Chun’s head, the rotten flesh on the windshield, the calf wearing short black boots…..and also that rainy day, the knife plunged into a certain someone’s chest.

He didn’t want to see it.

He didn’t want to remember it either.

But there was no one here telling him not to look.

He opened his eyes. As he tried to suppress the turmoil in his eyes, he quickly took out his medicine box.

A small piece fell into the palm of his hand. It soon entered his mouth.

“How are you? Are you okay?” Zoe asked, “You seem unstable.”

With no water around, he crushed the medicine with his teeth. His mouth was filled with a bitter taste.

Ji Yushi chewed it slowly and seemed to be taking in the bitterness. He wiped away the cold sweat and, as if nothing had happened before, he said, “Two minutes.”

Zoe thought he was asking for a two-minute rest. Seeing that he wasn’t in good condition, she temporarily put aside her doubts and fear and proposed, “No, you should rest more. Half an hour. You will at least need half an hour. We can’t leave now anyway. We can’t choose the room with a red ball. That theory isn’t right……”

“From the moment we found the head until Morita’s death, it was about two minutes.” Ji Yushi spoke concisely, “That is to say, the time in the room with the head is two minutes in the future. There is a time difference between the two rooms.”

His thoughts were a little messy. After saying that, he corrected himself, “No, it should be that there is a time difference between the three rooms.”

They were all traversers, so they have naturally learned a lot about time and space.

But Zoe wasn’t like the seventh squad who had faced all sorts of strange situations. She was shocked, “How could there be a time difference in the same time and space? It makes no sense…..”

The situation here was similar to the city and rainforest and surrounds in the Chaos mission.

If it was Song Qinglan, he would be able to immediately follow his train of thought.

In many cases, Ji Yushi didn’t need to say everything for Song Qinglan to fully understand what he wanted to convey and they could analyse the situation together. The other teammates also only needed to ask questions and they could solve it together.

Ji Yushi didn’t have the time to explain to Zoe his adventures with the time anchor and the crevice in time and space. He could only go straight to the main topic: “You are right. Under normal circumstances, there shouldn’t be a time difference in the same time and space. Conversely, you can think about it another way. What if these rooms are not from the same time and space?”

Zoe was stunned by Ji Yushi’s bold speculation. It was temporarily difficult to accept.

Ji Yushi had already swallowed his medicine completely. Only the bitter taste remained in his mouth.

Perhaps it was just a psychological effect, but he was considerably better, “Do you have anything unimportant on you that you can lend me? We can throw it in to confirm this speculation.”

Zoe took out a packet of gum from her pocket. When Ji Yushi received it, she felt that it had appeared at the right time and chuckled, “Want one?”

In a short amount of time, he had readjusted his mental state.

It looked a little unbelievable to Zoe, but she just attributed it as a skill possessed by everyone in the seventh squad.

Ji Yushi gave Zoe one and ate another one himself. Much of the bitterness in his mouth was gone.

The two chewed gum to relax.

It was actually rather strange situation.

Zoe, “You’re not throwing it in?”

“No need.” Ji Yushi held the packet of gum, “Just the thought of throwing the packet of gum in is enough. Zoe, can you check the room on the right for me?”

Zoe climbed up the ladder suspiciously. Her eyes widened in shock, “T-there’s half a packet of gum!”

This was something Ji Yushi had expected. He threw the gum back to Zoe, “Compare it. Is it yours?”

After confirming that it was her gum, Zoe’s mind was a mess.

The courses she had studied, the practical experience she had gained, and her experiences after being hijacked, it all spun around in her mind.

Ji Yushi gave her time to think and didn’t interrupt her.

It took Zoe a full minute before she could speak again, “Could it be that the time in this room is two minutes in the future and it would show what might happen in two minutes?”

After entering the room, they had discovered Morita Yu’s head.

Two minutes later, Morita Yu did just that and his corpse also appeared in the room on the left.

Zoe said, “If I don’t throw the gum in and don’t fulfil that possibility?”

Ji Yushi stood in the middle of the room. He raised his arm to check his communicator, “It has been two minutes now. Check again. Is the gum still there?”

Zoe looked back and was surprised, “It’s gone!”

That half packet of gum had disappeared like a ghost.

After Zoe got off the ladder, Ji Yushi told her his thoughts, “If we really threw in the gum, the room on the right should be the same as the room on the left; both would have a half packet of gum.”

In this case, the order of it happening would be exactly the same as what happened to Morita Yu.

After experimenting, this idea of Ji Yushi’s was proven.

Those three rooms indeed had a time difference, and they couldn’t directly cross over.

Ji Yushi was still in thought. Chuck’s death mentioned by Zoe and Morita Yu earlier also happened the moment he entered a room. Was there a time difference between only some of the rooms or was there a time difference between all the rooms? Could it be that their safety actually had nothing to do with the colour of the rooms?

Ji Yushi asked, “Zoe, Morita said that the ball in the room where Chuck entered and died in was yellow?”

Zoe said, “Yes. Did you think of something?”

Ji Yushi shook his head, “Not yet. I need more information.”

The theory that they could go to rooms of the same colour had been overturned. It seems that there was still a possibility of death even if they did that. They searched around. Except for the two strange rooms with red balls, the rest were one yellow, one green and two blues.

Zoe thought of a way. She threw a piece of gum into each room to observe the consequences, but they all fell quietly onto the floor without any interference. Ji Yushi also checked the room that was two minutes in the future. It didn’t seem to be affected by the other coloured rooms.

It seems that there was no time difference between the remaining rooms, but even so, they didn’t dare haphazardly make a selection.

They seem to be trapped here.

*

The Tetris blocks changed quickly. It fell down at an almost unimaginable speed, clearing row after row.

Ji Yushi sat on the ground, his slender and pale fingers controlling the black and white console in his hands. His expression was focused and he appeared to be fully engaged with the game. The points accumulated rose extremely quickly. If he were to participate in a Tetris tournament, there was no doubt that Ji Yushi would come first.

In a setting like this, Ji Yushi sat there for two hours.

There was no doubt that even if he stayed there longer, he wouldn’t be bored.

Zoe was able to remain calm at first but after some time passed, she started to pace around the room anxiously. She had been here longer than Ji Yushi so her mentality was naturally also different. Seeing that Ji Yushi was still playing his game, she even considered the notion of leaving on her own.

She couldn’t wait any longer.

“Really not going?” Zoe picked up her gun and decided to choose a random room to enter.

Green or blue are fine.

As long as it wasn’t the yellow that killed Chuck or the terrible red rooms on the left and right hand side, she could give the other rooms a try.

Ji Yushi didn’t look away from his game and just said, “Like I said, I need more information.”

Zoe said, “Ji, you have just been sitting there and doing nothing. Even if you want more information, we don’t have any.”

Ji Yushi said, “Firstly, we are not the only traversers here. Secondly, every time someone enters a room, the room they were originally in would move. The movement of that room is not independent and would definitely cause the surrounding rooms to similarly move. Why don’t we wait a little first? Perhaps the surrounding rooms would be different the next time we check.”

Zoe was almost convinced by this. She was dumbfounded for half a second before she quickly retorted, “So what if the surrounding rooms change? Can you choose which room to go into?”

Ji Yushi said, “When the surrounding rooms change, we can test it out again. That way, we can collect more information. There is no useful information for us for the time being, but it is at least safe here.”

Zoe messed up her hair anxiously. Ji Yushi’s words were not just nonsense.

She calmed herself down and waited with Ji Yushi for another three hours.

Except for the sounds of the two of them breathing, these labrynth-like rooms fell into dead silence.

They took turns to check the surrounding rooms several times and saw no changes.

Zoe couldn’t wait any longer, “We need to get out of here!”

Ji Yushi looked at her.

Zoe said, “Look. If there are really a lot of rooms here, perhaps too many to count, even if we wait here until we die, the surrounding rooms won’t move. Why don’t we choose between the blue and green? Perhaps we may end up picking the right one and getting more information from that.”

Ji Yushi asked, “Which one do you want to choose?”

“It’s very simple. There are two of us.” Zoe said, “Why don’t we flip a coin? The one who loses will go first. You can choose any one you like. If it is the right one, we can go together. If it is the wrong one, the other person can survive and move on. It’ll be fair like this.”

Zoe liked it to be fair.

But Ji Yushi didn’t agree, “What if both are wrong?”

Zoe, “So what? It’s better than sitting and waiting.”

Although she would never do something like that, she kind of understood what kind of mentality that person who had used them as a test subject had.

Ji Yushi continued to sit there. He shook his head, “Sorry, I choose to stay.”

Zoe bent down next to him and spoke earnestly, “I really hope the right one is chosen. This is a mission and that Tianqiong said there are rewards. Even if it’s risky, it’s creating an opportunity for the other person, isn’t that right?”

Ji Yushi’s expression showed no changes. His dark eyes looked at her calmly, “I’m sorry. It’s because I want to succeed so I won’t want to take risks. If you want to leave, you can go ahead.”

Zoe was stunned.

She suddenly realised that besides being calm, this beautiful black-haired young man was also very ruthless.

She angrily huffed, “If I left the room, the rooms would move the moment the door closes, and you get the information you want without needing to do anything. It’s not fair!”

Ji Yushi, “Then you can choose to stay.”

Zoe was left speechless. She could only mutter, “Ji, you’re too terribly calm. There is no warmth from you. You probably don’t have a girlfriend with you like this.”

Ji Yushi said, “Oh, I like men.”

Zoe had already taken down the ball, “Whatever. It doesn’t matter if it’s men or women. You give off a feeling like you don’t need anyone.”

She opened the door to the room with the green ball. A hole appeared on the ground. The gum she had thrown was still there and it overall looked rather safe. While preparing to do down, she said, “If I succeed, I succeeded because of my courage — It will prove that a Guardian 70 years in the future is stronger than 70 years ago! If I die in the green room, you must remember that I created this opportunity for you. You owe me one, Ji.”

After saying that, she disappeared into the hole.

“Beep——–” Following that sound, the door closed.

However, at the same time.

“Beep——-” With that sound, the moment that door closed, another door opened.

From that door, Zoe entered.

Behind her was the alive and well Morita Yu.

They seem to be unable to see Ji Yushi and was completely unaware of his existence.

He watched Morita Yu jump off the ladder and say, “I have always been dealing with administrative work before and originally wanted to be a Recorder, but I signed up as a Guardian because they were short in people. In terms of combat power and experience, I’m still very inadequate so I’m not very close with my teammates.”

Following that, Ji Yushi saw ‘himself’ appear and similarly climb down the ladder.

He silently opened his mouth and mouthed along with his ‘other self’, “Those doing administrative work have their own strengths. After a few more missions, you will gradually become familiar with them.”