欧美日韩精油系列

Chapter 89: The Easiest and Hardest Puzzle

Now, Nathan told me that I shouldn't let go of the rope when he explained the plan. Usually, people wouldn't say those kinds of things because that was kinda obvious. But he did emphasize it to me.

Probably because he thought I might've let go of the rope, like what I was doing right now.

But it couldn't be helped, the amount of rope we brought along wasn't enough to reach the bottom. So naturally, that meant falling down without the rope was the only way to get down.

Now, a more sane person probably would just climb back up, and that's also what Nathan would've done. But while he didn't say it, there was a reason why Nathan let me go down instead of him when we found out how deep it was.

Because he knew that I was more willing to risk my life than cut my losses.

And so, with Bryson's voice screaming in my head, I began sliding down the side of the wall. The bumpy rocks kept slamming into my side and tearing into my cloak, while my feet jostled whenever they hit a bumpy rock.

It was definitely a painful journey, but the incline was enough so that I wasn't falling at a speed that was dangerous. The biggest risk I was facing right now was actually whether or not a rock too big would end up cutting into me and make me bleed to death down here.

But I was willing to take my chances.

It only took ten seconds before I found my feet suddenly slamming into the ground. Pain shot through my bones, especially so for my joints. There were a lot of bruises all over my limbs and my back. They had already begun to swell somewhat. If I looked at them, they might already be purple.

But the important part was that I got to the bottom and that I was still alive.

Once Bryson realized that we had gotten down relatively safely, he began mumbling things to himself and crying out in pain a lot. Since it seemed he was going to be sticking to that for a while, I decided to just cast the fire spell and hold it in my hand as a source of light.

When the fireball suddenly materialized in front of me, I squinted and began adjusting to the light. Although the fireball I had in my hand wasn't that small, it was still inconvenient to look around because of its flickering.

Regardless, I was still able to roughly make out my surroundings. Unlike how it looked from above, it was very clearly not natural. The wall behind me was now a flat surface with various symbols carved into them that seemed to resemble Egyptian hieroglyphics to a certain extent. I recognized basically none of them, and they were hard to make out clearly with just the light.

Still, all those symbols didn't really matter for solving the puzzle. I began walking around to explore the surrounding area to see if it matched up with how the game was.

As I did, Bryson called out.

'Ow! How are you walking? Stop, stop, just take a break for now, I'm not sure if you could tell, but this is painful!'

I rolled my eyes as I continued walking.

"So what? You want to take a break when you feel a bit of pain? Do you think after a person cuts you they'll give you some time to rest before fighting?"

'...'

"Knowing how to retain your composure through pain is a basic skill for any person that intends on fighting. I see that this is another problem you have, being too sensitive to pain. We should work on that as well."

'...Actually... I was just joking earlier. T-This amount of pain does not matter, so there is no need to go through training.'

I raised an eyebrow.

"Alright then, don't forget those words."

I was able to finish my preliminary exploration pretty quickly. Although from above, it looked incredibly wide, from down here, it was about the size of a gymnasium. Despite the various things that would probably fall down here, the ground itself was actually spotless. In fact, some of the dirt I had tracked in had disappeared at some point.

But more importantly, everything here was the same as it was like in the game. Though, it felt a little surreal to see it from this perspective.

At one end of the room was a rather large black door. On that door was a ten-by-ten grid of squares. As of right now, all of them just appeared to be indents. However, along with that, there were also gray bricks that protruded out of the walls.

If they are pushed, then they will cause certain squares to light up, or if they are already lit up, they would be turned off instead. As for the number of buttons, there were exactly fifty-seven lined up along all the walls.

The goal was to get all of them to light up.

If you couldn't already imagine, this puzzle was an extremely huge pain, as if discovering this secret in the first place wasn't hard enough. The buttons themselves each lit up at least fifteen different squares. And on top of that, the buttons would revert to their original state after being pressed, so it was very common to not only forget the location of the buttons but also be unable to figure out whether or not it was turned on in the first place because it wasn't a lever.

I did give it a good few attempts when I first tried it, without planning to search up how to do it since I didn't think that was a good way to have fun in games. But it did not take me too long to give up before searching up a walkthrough.

...Yet, it would turn out that nobody had posted a walkthrough of this portion of the game.

That was fair enough considering how hard it was to find this secret, and even if it was found, not many people would have the tenacity to solve it. While initially trying to solve the damn thing, I thought there was a net behind me to fall on.

But in reality, there was no net. Instead, I just continued falling further.

I still had no idea what the developers of the game were thinking putting this kind of bullshit in. Keep in mind, I had nothing against puzzles being hard, but they had to be hard for the right reasons. It wasn't a cool riddle, or a puzzle with some sort of special way to come to a solution.

This was simply a difficult puzzle because it took a normal puzzle and made it bigger.

At first, I gave up on it, but eventually, I ended up coming back. Like a dumbass, I tried to solve it normally, but soon enough I wrote down what every single button did on paper and worked out the solution that way.

Naturally, the process was slow and tiring but I did eventually figure it out. While I would like to say that I used some sort of genius method to figure that out, it was really just trial and error.

I really wanted to find some sort of smart way to do it, but in the end, I was basically just banging my head against the wall the entire time.

By the way, I was planning on dangling the answer in front of Nathan, but he was able to solve it without even writing it down on paper. He only spent a few hours on it and finished it.

However, because I worked so hard on it for so damn long, I already memorized the sequence of numbers a long time ago. In fact, I doubt I could even forget them. I began to mumble under my breath as I approached the first button on the left.

"One... Three... Four... Seven..."

Following my words, I pressed the first button, then the third one, and so on. Bryson eventually spoke up in my head when he saw what I was doing.

'What are you doing? Is this not a puzzle? You should at least look to see your progress.'

I completely ignored him.

"Fifty-three... Fifty-four... Fifty-seven."

After clicking the last button, I turned to look at the door. Every single square was shining brightly, and its shine only continued to grow brighter. At first, it was still rather dark and dingy, but soon enough the entire room was so bright, it was as though the sun itself was right there.

'What? You solved it already?'

Ignoring how amazed Bryson sounded, I closed my eyes and covered them with my arm. It was getting too bright even for me. After some time, a faint rumbling ensued as the light gradually died down.

After opening up my eyes, I saw that the gates had opened up all the way. The light that they had been emitting was actually still as strong, but now both doors were directly on the walls. It kinda looked like they were accented by neon lights.

Anyway, while the doors were fairly large, the area behind them was actually fairly small. It was a small room with a cramped ceiling. And in that room, was a pedestal with a fairly large book on top.

It was the tome for the spell Blackout.

'...So you have been here before. No wonder you were able to do it on the first try. Was this scroll left behind by you?'

I laughed at Bryson's conclusion.

"No, are you kidding me? Were you even paying attention to my initial explanation? I've already seen the future. Because I solved it then, I obviously don't need to try all over again."

'The future...'

It seemed that he didn't believe me at all when I initially said that, which is fair enough. But now, it seemed like he wasn't doubting it entirely at least.

I gingerly grabbed onto the Blackout tome with both hands. It honestly just looked like one of those old books you'd see in a library. The cover had a rough texture and was damaged in various places. The pages themselves seemed to be wrinkled, probably because it was splashed by water at some point.

I let out a soft sigh.

"Now... I just need to find a way back up."

'Wait, you didn't have a plan for that?'

"Nope."

I walked out with a careless expression, but then I heard a voice that sounded like it was coming from every direction.

"You require a way back up you say?"

...Hm. I must be going crazy. After all, there isn't supposed to be anybody down here.

'W-Who's that? You know the future, right? Explain!'

Ah. Well, maybe we were both going crazy.