Chapter 918: Chapter 875: Your Employees Have Fled Overnight With a Train_2
Another two squares of information appeared on the chessboard.
The first square that the fourth group’s pieces passed was a Question and Answer Grid, which housed a ghost that liked to play "You Ask, I Answer". The second group had entered this type of Question and Answer Grid before.
The square where the fourth group’s pieces are now resting is [Honest Square]
[Honest Square]
[Will you take one step or two steps next time?]
[In this room, there is an Honest Ghost that doesn’t allow itself to be deceived. Pieces entering this room must answer within a minute about how many steps they will move in the next round. In the next round, the Honest Ghost will act with the piece. If the answer matches the steps taken, the ghost will reward you; if not, the deceived Honest Ghost will take your life.]
"Is this a question of honesty?" Gu Mian felt speechless as he looked at the information 007 sent in the group chat.
"When the pieces enter the Honest Square, they don’t know how many steps they will take next round," Liu Ruyan also looked at the chat, "This is completely about guessing what number the Chess Player of your group will roll, it really has nothing to do with honesty."
The pieces from other groups cannot communicate with their Chess Players, and the pieces must respond to the Honest Ghost within a minute of entering the Honest Pavilion. Even if the pieces could communicate, the Chess Player can’t control what they will roll next round.
Then came another minute of halftime.
But before the LED screen above them could display the countdown, the game panel suddenly popped up in front of them.
"What’s going on?" Gu Mian instinctively thought the instance was about to crash.
After reading the contents on the panel, he realized that wasn’t the case.
[Instance Pause Notice]
[Dear Players, due to some minor issues in the instance, the instance is temporarily stopped for ten minutes. Please be patient and wait for ten minutes, after which the game will continue.]
[Game time will also pause during the instance stoppage, so pieces don’t need to worry about the rule of not staying in a single room for more than ten minutes.]
[We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this pause for maintenance. Each player in the instance will receive a compensation of sixty Game Coins.]
"What’s going on?" Liu Ruyan found the game panel in front of her very amusing, "The instance broke down but not completely, only halfway and it can be fixed, is that right?"
Gu Mian thought it might be the Evil God’s plot being discovered by the instance side, leading to an emergency fix.
Are they going to kick the Evil God out of the instance? Gu Mian wondered.
Although the announcement told them to wait for ten minutes, no countdown appeared. It was clear that the ten minutes mentioned in the announcement was just a rough estimate for fixing the instance, the actual waiting time could be even longer.
The group having the hardest time now should be the pieces in the fourth group, they were still in the Honest Square with the Honest Ghost, and who knows how long they have to stay together.
At this time Liu Ruyan found that the [Ten Players Group Chat] couldn’t be used.
"Can you still open the group chat? I seem unable to even open my game panel," she looked at Gu Mian.
Can’t open it?
Gu Mian also tried to open his game panel and found that his panel couldn’t open either. Not only that, all the special items on his body were out of order, just like when he entered Paradise World last time.
What’s going on? Did the Evil God block the signal again?
Next would be the Evil God’s grand entrance, right?
But after waiting for half a minute, he didn’t see Xu Xingcheng descend from the sky, there was only Liu Ruyan giving him a wide-eyed look.
"Maybe the instance is fixing a bug, which temporarily caused the special items to be unusable." Liu Ruyan thought about how she was looking at the chat when the maintenance announcement appeared, but by the time she finished reading it, the chat couldn’t be opened.
Perhaps they used some special Shielding Instrument, Gu Mian thought, like the match-three instance’s shielding, probably to prevent players from randomly using special items during the instance fix, causing problems.
"What do you think about the other three groups of players?" Liu Ruyan asked Gu Mian.
Since they were idle, they might as well chat.
"Group two has low intelligence, group three has bad luck, group four is barely surviving," Gu Mian summarized.
"So, only our group is intelligent, in a lucky streak, and lively, right?" If it were possible to communicate with the other three groups now, Liu Ruyan would have gladly conveyed Gu Mian’s evaluation to the other groups’ players.
Unfortunately, everyone was half-deaf and blind on the chessboard, and till now, she didn’t even know who the players in the other three groups were.
"Before entering this instance, you mentioned Renle Mountain; do you think he might be in any of the other three groups?" Liu Ruyan asked after a moment of silence.
Gu Mian recalled the actions of the other three groups: "If Renle Mountain really entered this instance, then I think he is most likely in groups three or four."
He paused, then added, "Most likely in group three."
"Why?" Liu Ruyan asked curiously.
Liu Ruyan hadn’t entered match-three instance with Renle Mountain, but she couldn’t escape Fatty always talking in their ears about how cunning and deceitful Renle Mountain was. So even though Liu Ruyan had never been in the same instance with Renle Mountain, she knew he was a smart and ruthless person.
"If Renle Mountain really entered this instance, based on his character, he would definitely want to be the Chess Player, and if the other two disagreed, he would directly eliminate them," Gu Mian recalled the situation during group two’s preparation.
"Eliminate the other two in the initial room?" Liu Ruyan nodded, "That’s also a way; eliminating the other two would leave him alone in the initial room, and he could decide his identity."
"Remember the rule of this instance?" Gu Mian recited one rule word for word, "If all pieces on the board are dead or unable to act, and the treasure chest is still unfound, the surviving Chess Player and piece will automatically exit the instance."
"So even if two pieces from any group die, their Chess Player won’t be in any life danger."
Though this means two pieces are lost at the start and can’t achieve the final victory, Renle Mountain, as the Chess Player, would be absolutely safe. To Renle Mountain, his life was far more important than any benefit.
Liu Ruyan thought about the scene during preparation when three little figures in room two were fighting: "Renle Mountain’s way would not be to join the scuffle but to quietly stab the other two in the back."
So if Renle Mountain had entered this instance, he certainly wouldn’t be in room two.
"How did you choose group three and four," Liu Ruyan asked, "why do you think if Renle Mountain is there, he’s most likely in group three?" Because compared to group three, group four opened with losing a piece? But that seems to relate to luck, unrelated to anything else.
"Of course not for that reason," Gu Mian closed his eyes, thinking about the paths taken by groups three and four since they started, "It’s related to their direction of movement."
As the two were communicating, the game panel appeared before them again.
[Dear Players, Hello, the employees who ran away have returned to their jobs...]
There was a bright red line drawn horizontally in the middle of the first sentence, probably a discarded draft, yet it was published for some reason.
The text below was the official announcement.
[Hello dear players, the minor bug in the instance has been fixed, please continue the instance, 60 Game Coins have been issued to each player’s mailbox, please collect them promptly]
"What’s up with the first sentence?" Liu Ruyan was quite intrigued by the first line with the red cross, realizing something, "So it wasn’t about bug fixing but about urgently recalling runaway staff, wasn’t it?"
After reading this line, Liu Ruyan finally understood why she and Gu Mian had encountered four consecutive empty rooms.
It was likely the ghosts in nearby rooms heard Gu Mian was coming to their room and didn’t want to receive him, so they ran away overnight with their jobs.
But seeing the announcement states that the runaway staff has been recalled, in their upcoming moves, they should not encounter empty rooms again.
At this time, she found that their game panel and group chat could be opened again, confirming that it was indeed the instance that had blocked their game panel just now.
Meanwhile, in the initial room, 007 had already rolled the dice and made a choice, and Gu Mian and Liu Ruyan saw a door to the next room appear on one wall.
