“Magnet…” Feng Bujue read out the six letters that were carved on the back of the fake teeth. “Hmm… Are these Magneto’s fake teeth?” he asked half-jokingly. He placed the teeth in his pocket and took out the earlier soap and small wooden comb to confirm their properties.
———
Name: Dirty Soap
Type: Plot Item
Quality: Normal
Function: Unknown
Can be taken out of the scenario: Yes
Remark: The workmanship behind it is very rough.
———
“The soap is like the set of fake teeth. They can be taken out of the scenario,” Feng Bujue said to himself.
———
Name: Wooden Comb
Type: Plot Item
Quality: Normal
Function: Unknown
Can be taken out of the scenario: No
Remark: A normal wooden comb. It looks aged.
———
“But this comb and the candle stuck in the rod are unable to be taken out of the scenario,” Feng Bujue said. For now, he had no idea what was the difference between the two. Perhaps it was nothing important, but he still made a note to remember it.
As previously mentioned, Feng Bujue’s mind was like a well-kept library. He knew where to find the things he needed. Different information had different storage priorities, and useless trash would be swept out. When playing this kind of highly-difficult puzzle scenario, he would place everything in the middle of the library, a place where he could reach them whenever he needed to. It was like a clue web made from information, and the analysis would be done on this web. As he gained more information, many hypotheses would appear, expanding the web. When he solved those problems, the web would dwindle before returning to a point.
By then, the web in Feng Bujue’s mind had already opened. Like many great detectives, he had sharp instincts. He had a feeling that the few objects that could be taken out of the scenario would be the string at the middle of the web.
“Magnet… magnet…” Feng Bujue murmured to himself as he placed all the plot items into his pocket. He took out the wrench to start testing again. This was a simple test. He was using the wrench to find things that were magnetic. Feng Bujue held the wrench and moved it about an inch above the pile of trash. If there was a magnet mixed in it, it would be sucked up to the wrench, or it would pull the wrench done, but there was no such reaction.
“Fine, the answer and the hint are not in the same place. That’s not surprising.” He shrugged and stood up to walk to Cell One. The next step, he tried to work on the cell doors. He predicted that one of the doors or part of the door was magnetic. If all six doors failed him, he planned to return to Cell 0. If that still did not work, he would have to start a carpet search and use the wrench like a magnetic radar, scanning every inch of the walls and floor. After completing all of those steps, if he still had not found anything magnetic, there was one solution left, and that was to reconsider the meaning of the term magnet.
Five minutes passed, and the first three cell doors were not magnetic. Feng Bujue even reached his hand through the feeding hole and tested the wrench in the small square space that he could reach, but he found nothing. When he reached Cell Four, Feng Bujue repeated the same steps and started his slow search. This time, when the wrench moved to the small window above the door, it reacted. Feng Bujue followed the feeling and soon found the source of magnetism. “Is this it?”
Like other cells, Cell Four had iron bars on the windows, and there were five of them. The difference was, for Cell Four, the bar in the middle was magnetic. However, the magnetic power was not strong, not enough to suck Feng Bujue’s wrench to it, yet it was enough to react to the metal object near it. The iron bar was about twenty centimeters long and roughly the thickness of a person’s forefinger. Upon closer inspection, one could notice the upper and lower edge of the bar had parts where it was seriously rusted. Feng Bujue clamped the wrench around the rusted areas and applied force. Several seconds later, with a crack, the upper half of the bar snapped. He repeated the same process to snap the lower part. He pulled the bar out and held it in his hand.
“So… I now have a cylindrical magnetic bar that is about ten cm long,” Feng Bujue said. “So what?”
Actually, what to do next was right before his eyes—use the magnet to find the key. Feng Bujue used the magnet and returned to the pile of trash. Perhaps he would find things like iron barbs or needles, though he was not sure whether he could use those to open the door. With no result, he returned to Cell 0. The door could not be locked anymore; one could open it freely from the inside and outside. Feng Bujue picked up the torn cloth on the ground and started to bind them into a rope. If this was Xiao Tan who did this, he would have done a great job. After all, he worked with surgical knife, so rope binding should be nothing to him.
But for Feng Bujue… he was good with everything but this.
It was strange. He had a bright mind, good patience, and a pair of sturdy hands, but when it came to jobs like weaving and knotting, he was useless. When he was young, it had taken him two months to learn how to tie his shoelaces. After that, he had worn running shoes that did not have laces for a year. One year later, he forgot how to tie shoe laces again.
After ten minutes, Feng Bujue had only managed to bind a rope that was relatively sturdy of two meters long. Even though he tried his best to only use the pieces of cloth made of similar material, the rope was rough and weird looking.
He confirmed the usability of the rope and used it to skip rope several times in the corridor… before tying the magnet to one end of the rope. Then, like going on a fishing trip, Feng Bujue tossed the rope with the magnetic through the feeding hole and pulled them back. This continued for twenty minutes, and he confirmed that the key was not hidden in the blind spots of the six cells.
“Er… could it be that…” After multiple failed attempts, his mind returned to that spot. “There is one thing in Cell 0 that is untested… Now that the door is open, I can return to Cell 0 freely, which probably means that…”
