Thriller Paradise

"Ha… haha…" Feng Bujue's lips were twitching. He removed the magnet from his pocket and placed it over the small hole. He realized that the size was just right. He attempted to reach the magnet through the hole. It had only reached one third of the way in when he felt a strong magnetic pull inside the hole. It sucked the whole magnetic strip in, and the next second, the safe opened on its own.

This smaller safe did not require any password. The dial lock on the front was just a distraction. The real way to open it was to trigger one of the mechanisms inside. Eighty percent of this safe was made from a normal metallic material, but on the inside of the small hole, there was a part that was made from unique, high-density magnetic stones. It had a machine wedge built into it, and the only way to unlock this safe was to use the magnet that he had procured earlier.

"The type of puzzle solving keeps on changing. The system sure is creative…"

Even though Feng Bujue was feeling quite annoyed that he had wasted so much time, he soon calmed down. The larger safe on the outside was unlocked by a code, but that did not mean that the smaller safe inside would require the same method to unlock it. He only had himself to blame for falling into the trap of preconception.

Feng Bujue took out the item 'The Cell Key That Leads to Underground 1F' from inside the small safe. Then he left Cell Six and walked up the stairs that headed above. After unlocking the black iron cell door, the key disappeared. The system announced at the same time, "Current quest complete. Main quest updated."

The mission step 'Explore Underground 2F. Open the door that leads upstairs.' had been ticked, and now the next step of the quest appeared to take its place. "Head to Surface 1F."

"Hmm?" When Feng Bujue saw this latest updated quest, he was confused. Theoretically speaking, should the new quest not have been something like 'Explore Underground 1F. Open the door that leads upstairs.'? However, the latest update only had a simple directive of 'Head to Surface 1F.' This made it sound like…

"Is it possible that I can walk straight up there without anything stopping me?" Feng Bujue mumbled to himself. He held the rusted long iron rod, which had turned back into a trash quality item, and carefully moved down Underground 1F's corridor. This floor had a practically mirrored design of the level beneath it. Not far from the stairs were six cell rooms, with three on each side. But the cell rooms on this floor had different steel doors from the ones underneath them. There were no feeding holes or small windows. There was no paint on the doors to indicate their number either. Other than the keyhole and the handle, the six doors were like slabs of steel with unknown thickness. From outside, it was impossible to tell the situation of the cells on the other side.

Feng Bujue tried to see if he could open any of the six doors. They were all locked. As he walked down the doors, he paid close attention to any noise behind them. There was nothing. He thought to himself, The chance of this entire floor being a decoration is infinitely small, so that can only mean… I will have to return here later…

While he thought, he reached the other end of the corridor. Before him was a staircase that led upward. Combining the steps that he had taken and the length of the corridor, Feng Bujue could confirm that right underneath this staircase would be Cell 0. However, this confirmation held no meaning other than the fact that the corridor for Underground 1F and 2F had the same length. It did not seem to mean anything else.

The staircase before him was made from wood, and it looked decrepit and used. There was a lingering smell on the steps. The origin of the smell was probably the food or feces that had accidentally spilled out while being transported, mixed together with the bodily fluids of the people being dragged up and down the stairs. After they were mixed together, it came this cocktail of stenches that was not that strong but extremely vomit-inducing.

Feng Bujue followed the steps up the stairs. After a turn at a landing, he ran into a wooden door. He reached out to hold the doorknob and turned on it carefully. The door opened successfully just like that. Beyond the door was the ground floor. Standing at the step, looking out from the door, one could see a room that looked like a storage room. The walls were built from bricks, and there were many bursting gunny sacks lying around. By one of the walls were three rows of round wooden barrels that were normally seen at wineries.

The lighting in this room was far worse than the rooms underground. The only source of light was an oil lamp placed above the wine barrels. Feng Bujue naturally would not barge unprepared into the dim environment. He first poked the iron rod that he was holding through the door and hit around in all directions. After confirming that there was no trap that would react to a physical presence waiting for him, he walked through the door into the room.

"Current quest completed. Main quest updated," the system announced once more, and the new quest appeared. "Explore the ground floor to find the six keys. They are red, yellow, blue, black, white, and gray keys. Then return to Underground 1F to open the six steel doors."

Feng Bujue glanced at the mission before continuing to move forward. The first thing that he did was retrieve the oil lamp. In his situation where he was banned from using his flashlight, procuring a light source was something that was instrumental. He only walked for three meters when suddenly… with a loud bang, the door behind him closed.

Feng Bujue whipped his head around, but he could only see a closed door and his own shadow that was reflected on the wall. He stayed on extreme alert for about ten seconds, but around him was only a suffocating silence. At that moment, he came to a quick decision. He took out the Bell of Jin Gang and activated its effect of 'Death Warning'. In the following five minutes, anything that might cause harm or threaten Feng Bujue's Life Points would cause the Bell of Jin Gang to ring and react. But after he activated the item and waited another twenty seconds, there was no ringing from the bell at all.

"Hmm… What is going on?" Feng Bujue said to himself. "There isn't any draft in this place, and the door, I am sure, does not have a spring lock type of mechanism. Without an outside force, how did the door slam shut on its own?"

For a normal person with a sense of fear, under such circumstances, their actions and mind would be affected to a certain degree, but as should be known by now, Feng Bujue was not this kind of person. For this man, even if an eerie scary ghost mask suddenly appeared behind the door, it would not affect his Terror Points. He would only consider the threat to his Life Points and ignore the very existence of the Terror Points. Therefore, as long as the Bell of Jin Gang did not ring, he had no fear.

He rushed forward to come to the door. He reached out to pull on the door, but to his surprise, he heard the announcement from the system. "This door has been sealed by some kind of special power. Only those in possession of the six color keys will be able to open it."

"Oh… So, it was the system who closed it." Feng Bujue sighed in relief. He instantly understood the reasoning and purpose behind this. The reason this door was closed was to prevent the player from returning underground when they only had one or two keys and thus disrupt the progress of the game.

"Hmm… While Death Warning is still in effect, I should go around and take a look to see what's what."

With that in mind, Feng Bujue turned around to grab the oil lamp. He dropped the iron rod on the ground and headed quickly toward the other door inside the room. Pushing open the door, he found a dark corridor beyond it. The light from the oil lamp only managed to cast its light so far ahead of Feng Bujue. It was worth noting that the oil lamp's remark said, "Do not suspect how long this light will be able to hold on. When the time comes for it to go off, it will do so."

Unlike the two underground levels, the ground floor was made up from wood and bricks, and it had a lot more rooms. There were corners on the corridors and furniture in the rooms. It looked more like a home than a prison.

"So, it is a setting of a mad scientist building a dungeon under his own home," Feng Bujue surmised to himself. "Perhaps only the six rooms at Underground 2F are used to imprison people, and the rooms at Underground 1F are actually labs."

He held the oil lamp and walked down with his body turned to the side so that he could use the effect of Death Warning to its maximum. For now, he did not plan to start a detailed exploration and rushed down the corridor as fast as he could. He opened every door that he came across, leaned into it, and took two steps forward before retreating to go on to the next room.

Throughout this whole process, what left the deepest impression on Feng Bujue was the smell on this level. For some reason, the air on this level appeared to be worse than the underground dungeon. It felt like… this home was built between a slaughterhouse and a chemical factory, and the windows were left open at all times.

Just like that, he used about three minutes to test all the rooms on the first room. The bell of Jin Gang did not ring even once. Although this did not mean that he was one hundred percent safe, it at least meant that before he triggered a new event, just walking around the house would not cause him to fall into any danger. After inspecting the whole floor, there were two places that Feng Bujue was not allowed entry.

The first was the staircase that led to the second floor. It was blocked by a blob of meat. Yes, a blob of meat. It looked like a giant meatball made from the amalgamation of many dead bodies. The force that bound them together was unknown. In any case, it formed a wall made literally from flesh to block Feng Bujue's access to the staircase. Since the Bell of Jin Gang did not ring when Feng Bujue neared the blob of flesh, he walked toward it without any worry or caution. He even used his finger to poke at it several times. At the time, the system reacted by telling him, "A blockage formed by a curse. It looks to be made up of dead carcasses."

The second place that he could not access was the front door that would have led him out of the house. This was a place that he was able to reach by walking down the corridor. The door looked just like a normal wooden door, but when Feng Bujue's hand gripped around the door handle, the system told him, "It is locked."

These three words were probably the most common hint that a player playing a puzzle game would face when coming across a door. This was such a lazy design that even Feng Bujue did not feel the desire to mock it.

"Ah… Since the start of the scenario, it has been about one and a half hours." After the effect for the Bell of Jin Gang's Death Warning wore off, Feng Bujue returned to the storage room that was connected to the underground staircase. "But it feels like I have not even reached the halfway point of the scenario yet…"

He started his investigation. He expended about five minutes to give the storage room a good search, but he did not find anything useful. There were only cobwebs and dust at the corners of the room. The gunny sacks were filled with sand, and the rows of barrels against the wall were empty. Every single one of them.

From his cursory exploration, there should not be a key hidden inside this storage room. Even if there was, it was hidden somewhere one would not be able to discover with conventional means; one needed some kind of hint to discover it. Therefore, Feng Bujue held the oil lamp and returned to the corridor and headed to the first room. The room next to the storage room was the study. The floor of the study was even carpeted. It did not look like a normal carpet. The machine that created this thing would probably swear that this was not its own creation. When Feng Bujue stepped on it, it felt like the thing had turned into a plant. It felt more like a carpet of moss that covered the room, which was filled with horrible stench and dampness. Theoretically speaking, that was the perfect environment for the growth of moss.

After entering the door, Feng Bujue found two altars on the left and right hand side. The decoration that was placed there had already disappeared. If it was plant that was once placed there, it would have perished from the horrible air already; if it was a divine statue that was placed there, the saints would probably have been dragged out by the various demons that inhabited the darkness. They were dragged down into the evil whirlpool of abyss that presided underneath the home.

Feng Bujue walked to the window and pulled open the curtains. Through the glass, he could see a thick layer of darkness. Even if he raised the lamp before the window, it did nothing to cast the darkness away. It was futile to try to open the window. Even if he attempted to use the wrench to crack the window, he would only end up with a sore hand. He stuck his face close to the windowsill and sniffed at it. Unfortunately, the air outside the window did not leak into the room. He could only smell the scent of dampness and mildew. It belonged to this house, a decaying smell that was mixed with the scent of tarpaulin and rotten wood.

"Looks like it's impossible to escape from the house this way," Feng Bujue commented as he walked to the study table that took up the middle of the room. The table was very messy with stuff littered everywhere. Feng Bujue picked up the items one by one and examined their properties. They were all trash. Only one of the drawers was left unopened. The rest of the drawers had been yanked out of the table and left on the ground. The papers that should have been inside the drawers littered the corner of the room and stuck at the corner of the table. An inkwell that probably belonged on the table was tipped over on the ground. The ink inside it had long since dried, and the paper around it was dyed black by the ink. Other than that, there was a black stain on the carpet that looked like a mushroom cloud.

Feng Bujue opened the only drawer that was left in the table and found a magnifying glass inside it. When he saw the object, he could not help but burst into laughter. "Hah… If only I had a smoking pipe, then it will be perfect."

Most of people from his age group, when they saw others in this outfit, would see it as old-fashioned or obsolete, but Feng Bujue had a firm belief that dangling a smoke on his lips and holding a magnifying glass in his hand was cool and retro, or perhaps this was a vision that only he would understand. Having obtained the magnifying glass, Feng Bujue found his interest growing. With the oil lamp in one hand and a magnifying glass in another, he turned to the other side of the study. On the wall of the study, there was a bookshelf. It was filled from top to bottom with books. One did not need to put into words the attraction an object like that had on Feng Bujue.

There was no time limitation to this scenario. If there was no one there to stop him, there was a chance that Feng Bujue would stay in the room and pull the books out one by one and finish them. The only thing that would make him stop was the time limit for using the gaming hub. When the connection time went over the maximum time that was allowed in a day, Feng Bujue would be forcibly disconnected from the game.

Thankfully, the system did something cruel to our Feng Bujue. Ninety-nine percent of the books on the shelf had no translation. There was not only no translation—the player could not even read the words clearly. The words in the book, be it on the cover or on the pages, had all been blurred out. This annoyed Feng Bujue to no end because he was quite interested in 'decryption' as well. When he read Sherlock Holmes' case of the Dancing Man when he was in primary school, he had spent at least half a year immersed in solving puzzles related to alphabets. The alphabet system in this scenario happened to have similarities to the English language. Initially, he had been confident that he would be able to translate the language system of this world using the decoder that he could have devised. But he had to give up that plan. Of course, the remaining one percent of the books had been translated by the system, and they were the hints provided for the players…

"The Advanced Study of Alchemy…" Feng Bujue studied the book with a dark blue cover and read out the title. "Hmm… Why is this placed here for me to see?"

As he commented on that, a slip of paper fluttered out from within the pages. Feng Bujue bent down to pick up the paper. When he held it to the light, he realized that it was not a piece of paper but a faded photograph. The photograph itself had yellowed, and this was a black and white photo, so the edges and the picture itself now had the same color. In the picture, there were two boys that looked about ten. They stood facing the camera next to each other. The smaller kid on the left was pressing his hand on the head of the kid on the right. Both of them were smiling brilliantly at the camera. Even through the picture, Feng Bujue could see their innocence and joy. Feng Bujue stared at the picture for several seconds, and something that he did not expect happened.

The next second, he reentered the state of the introductory cinematic. A video started to play before him. The video was similar to the picture. It had a sepia tone to it, instead of being completely black and white.

There was a field and a farm, and beyond the fences, some livestock like horses and cows were grazing freely on the field. A herding dog was running over. This was a peaceful scene. The camera shifted, and a valley entered his view. Not far from the valley sat a house that was two stories tall. Feng Bujue had reason to believe that it was the house that he was currently in. Even though he had taken three minutes to walk around the ground floor, in these few minutes that looked like he was wandering aimlessly, he had collected a lot of information.

He had an early guess of the house's size, the number of the windows and doors, and a layout of the ground floor in his mind. He had also arranged in his mind to see if there was any overlap between the rooms on the ground floor and the cells underground. He even considered the possibility of a hidden area between the walls…

In any case, the layout of the ground floor of this place had already imprinted itself in Feng Bujue's mind, so when he saw the outline of the house in the video, he made that quick association.

Laughter, the sound of children's laughter.

The video did not cut into the house like Feng Bujue expected but continued to move horizontally to show a piece of grassy land. There was a swing and a small boy with blond hair was sitting on the swing. A woman, who should be the mother, was pushing him on the swing. The boy was chuckling happily and freely, and the mother's face had a blissful smile.

Not far away from the swing, under a tree, sat a boy with brown hair. He was holding a book in his arms, and he was enraptured by it. It was a book with dark blue color… Obviously, it was the Advanced Study of Alchemy that Feng Bujue had just found.

"Arthur, do you want to come and play?" The mother turned around to call after the boy under the tree. Feng Bujue could not hear the boy's answer because the video stopped then. He returned to the game and found himself in the study.

"Hmm… Could it be that…" The first reaction Feng Bujue had after watching the cinematic was to reach out and pull at his own hair.