Doomsday Jigsaw Puzzle

Chapter 117: Chapter 117: Deciphering the Manor Puzzle

Dealing with corpses was something Bai Wu was very adept at.

He still remembered exchanging academic discussions with a criminal in his previous life, informing him how to dispose of bodies perfectly to avoid suspicion.

Of course, this conversation happened after the criminal had been caught, so learning the method only served to frustrate the prisoner further.

But in the manor, it was much simpler and didn’t require any concealment; just digging a hole in the backyard of the villa and burying the corpses would do.

After all this, Mrs. Yi had already woken Lin Babao from bed.

The family of three began to enjoy breakfast as if, just an hour before, there hadn’t been three dead people in the house.

"Dad should talk about work."

"Mommy, why don’t you tell Dad about my upcoming birthday?"

"I want to act spoiled with Daddy."

The instructions of a certain child echoed in the minds of all three.

Bai Wu could at least be sure of one thing: the behavior of Yin Shuang and Lin Wurou was not their own will.

So at least here, this was very friendly to him as a full-archive collector.

He could deduce the "manor’s" demands through the actions of the three.

"I am the father, the one speaking to me is the child, and the one wanting to mischief must be that child. It’s the same with Yin Shuang and Lin Wurou."

This breakfast was a warm affair, at least for Bai Wu; he found it very comfortable to call the obedient child.

Lin Wurou’s expression was stiff at first, but eventually she responded very obediently and happily.

But Bai Wu had overlooked something.

He might not have negative emotions, but the human body’s mechanism could still react with nausea to uncomfortable sights.

Bai Wu could resist a beauty’s coquetry, but what if that beauty were male?

The sight of Lin Wurou cuddling Bai Wu’s arm and pouting, asking Bai Wu to feed her, was a bit too much for Bai Wu as the first-person participant.

Needle-like pain occurred twice in succession, and couldn’t suppress the awkwardness within him.

Yin Shuang actually found the scene quite appealing; Bai Wu’s looks scored nine points, and Lin Wurou’s were not in the least bit inferior. But she was not in the mood.

Such a warm, beautiful, and... awkward scene — had the previous family of three not died here, Yin Shuang might have been in the mood to appreciate Bai Wu and Lin Wurou’s performance.

Lin Wurou naturally did not want to perform an embarrassing action that would become the joke of a lifetime, but not doing so was simply too painful.

Bai Wu remembered this and managed to suppress his awkwardness, but he suddenly felt sorry for Dwarf.

At that moment, it was also the same moment for Dwarf.

Bai Xiaoyu was about to cry.

He was the one least afraid of pain; his experiences in the Pre-Tower Era made him endure too much suffering.

Destruction of the body and regrowth were not a single instance of pain but destruction and survival, each inflicting pain once, with the latter often surpassing the former.

However, enduring this kind of soul-piercing pain was not something that could be changed by tolerance; Bai Xiaoyu couldn’t accept calling Wu Jiu Dad.

He felt Bai Wu was more like an elder to him psychologically.

Or rather, Constantine would be more fitting.

But within the manor, there was no option to reject this, and everyone’s only choice was to love each other dearly.

Then there was Qin Lin.

He was thinking before going to sleep that he owned the Wheel of Sorrows and Joys, and today was lucky, but tomorrow, the Wheel of Sorrows and Joys would bring misfortune... what kind of calamity would it be?

Now he knew the answer.

At this moment, he was calling his future captain "dear," his eyes and brows filled with feminine shyness.

In a sense, this place was a super-dangerous zone for Qin Lin, akin to a red zone, because it could create a lot of embarrassing histories which wouldn’t go away just by entering the High Tower.

Wu Jiu was Bai Wu’s immediate superior, and Bai Wu was, in turn, the immediate superior to Qin Lin and Bai Xiaoyu.

To become the boss’s wife...

How could the hierarchy be so confusing? Would he and Laoda count as socially dead upon their return to the High Tower?

Wu Jiu was always serious and had a great capacity for enduring pain, but the strongest enemy outside the tower was the rules.

He could not fight against the manor’s rules.

Fortunately... another household was getting ready to leave, Rong’s baby, unlike Mr. Wang’s, hadn’t been tortured into breakdown.

They at least didn’t experience a bloody morning.

The first morning was not over yet, and everyone was starting to look forward to Bai Wu getting hold of clues as quickly as possible.

...

...

After breakfast, guided by hints, Bai Wu was ready to begin work. He really wanted to see Rong’s family off,

but the voice in his head reminded him that it wasn’t what he wanted to do.

The workplace was located in that luxury cruise-ship-like hotel-style building. After seeing Rong and the others off with mixed feelings, he entered the hotel-style building.

Ready to crack the so-called work.

The morning’s experiences didn’t bother him; embarrassment was something that only people with thin skin struggled with and would suffer from recurrently.

Bai Wu would not suffer, but he couldn’t be happy either.

Occasionally teasing Lin was a spice of life, but clearly, beneath those warm scenes, everyone was in exceptional pain.

"I must... no, I must make every effort, in the shortest and quickest time, to crack the manor’s puzzle."

The hotel-style office building where he worked was quite large; in Bai Wu’s eyes, it was comparable to the headquarters of some Fortune 500 companies.

When Bai Wu walked into the building, he looked around and noted that he didn’t encounter any dogs.

The manor covered a large area, but where exactly were the six dogs?

What did their howling the previous night mean?

His gaze fell on the front door. Since entering the villa, Prayle’s Eye hadn’t provided any notes of particular interest.

When he looked at the window, the note and his own thoughts were almost the same.

[A window with very effective soundproofing, so good that when you close it, the whole world seems to quiet down in agreement with you.]

When looking at the door.

[This material of door has some resistance to corrosion, but if you give it your all in one kick, you will definitely be able to break it down.]

When looking at the TV.

[Niso Ultra HD 8K TV, pretty decent, but when you look around the room, there’s no PS5 to be found. It’s like having a certain something, but never having the opportunity to use it.]

This morning, he also glanced at the fridge:

"I suggest you better stuff some beer and Coke in there, I really miss that flavor... uh, I mean, we both really miss that flavor."

The props themselves had nothing abnormal, including the bed, the bathroom mirror, the ceiling, those books.

Bai Wu had scrutinized everything, but the hints from his eyes indicated that these items were more normal than he was.

Of course, Bai Wu didn’t have time to note the chainsaw man before he fainted.

Every single thing was problematic.

Yet the feedback from each one had nothing worth noting.

Was this reasonable? It was not.

It wasn’t until this moment, when Bai Wu saw the door of the hotel-style office building, that he finally noticed something different.

"Let’s discuss a philosophical question. If looking horizontally turns ridges into peaks, then on what grounds do the people outside Mount Lu claim that those within the mountain cannot see its true form?"

The feedback from the door had nothing to do with it.

Bai Wu swore that if his hidden self were a person of riddles, he would definitely do a hidden self-eliminating hypnosis in the future.

However, he easily grasped the crux of this puzzle.

"’One can’t recognize Mount Lu’s true face because one is in the mountain, unable to see the mountain’s entirety. But if one is outside the mountain, how can one see the inside of the mountain? Thus, I have always been outside...’"

Bai Wu pushed open the door of the office building.

Before his eyes were elevators, five access-controlled passages, an information desk, a punch clock, and a floor layout hanging on the elevator buttons...

"Indeed, this is a corporate building; seven hundred years ago, it must have been bustling with people. At least before the apocalypse, it must have been the headquarters of a large corporation."

Bai Wu looked at the floors.

The entire office building had twenty-two floors. There were two floors for dining, three floors for employee lounges, and three floors occupied by the company’s various management meeting rooms.

Some floor purposes were not marked. His eyes didn’t hint at monsters existing on any floor like they did at Ninth Hospital. He decided to first check out the boardroom on the sixteenth floor.

Bai Wu opened the elevator.

Inside the elevator was a small electronic screen serving as a notice in critical moments and for advertising at other times.

It was morning, the time when staff entered their work state; Bai Wu saw that the content on the electronic screen was discussing a wolfish culture.

It demanded employees to have the spirit of wolves, with men and women slapping each other, and those whose performance didn’t meet standards had to shout ’I am useless’ among the crowd.

"Old capitalists," he muttered.

Just as the elevator was about to arrive at the sixteenth floor, the content on the electronic screen suddenly paused, as if the signal was interrupted.

The elevator door opened.

Every floor of the building was vast, even the separate meeting floor had its own machine room, archive room, reception, and waiting lounge.

The whole floor was desolate. There were no scattered documents on the ground, but a layer of dust had accumulated.

"Could it be that the other people never came here to look?"

People are inclined to be lazy. Bai Wu thought about it, maybe the previous few households, after the spiritual invasion was complete, felt they could no longer leave this place, and placed their hopes on the new residents coming in.

No one thought about solving the mystery of the building.

Bai Wu stood at the reception, smiled, and then he began to do push-ups, sit-ups, and make silly faces.

His body seemed to regain its freedom. freёwebnoѵel.com

Before entering the building, Bai Wu had a directive in his mind to return home and have lunch with his wife and kids before 11:40.

He looked at the elevator, which showed no change in floors; it had been the same only when he had entered.

With the recent probing action, Bai Wu understood something.

"This child does not know what her father’s job is, so everything is much restored; even if my mind was invaded and she could forcibly control my body and tamper with my memories, I am free during work hours! That is why the father has the most free time, because the head of a household needs to work! And the child is utterly ignorant of the nature of that work."

"Which means, during the everyday working hours, I can investigate freely. The elevator has only been used by me, and up to this moment, among the six households, I am the only one who has come here. This implies that even without entering this hotel-style office tower, it could still count as work!"

"Perhaps the captain and the others are considered working when flipping through those trade books at home? At least in the eyes of the children, adults reading books are working!"

Bai Wu was somewhat excited.

He could feel that the secret of the entire manor was contained within this building.

"There’s still some time before lunch; I must quickly find the clues."

Bai Wu walked into the conference room, his eyes scanning the surroundings.

With the presence of eyes, Bai Wu was not worried about failing to find clues, even meticulous search would reveal the answer.

Besides, exploring and decoding is like doing a puzzle; you don’t need to complete it entirely to infer what the picture might be.

He looked towards every room’s door on this floor.

[Lounge, where many people of status once sat, or occasionally those poised for promotion came in, smoking and drinking, discussing how to fleece someone. If you would go in, you might even find a top-quality cigar butt from 700 years ago~]

It’s not here.

[Restroom, why would you think there would be clues in the toilet? Could leaving small ads behind the toilet door really be an ingrained human behavior? After 700 years, there’s not even a stink left.]

It’s not here either.

[A server room, for doing unimportant tasks such as printing documents, sending emails, storing electronic documents, oh, and it contains my favorite Spider Solitaire and Minesweeper. I wonder, after so many years, if the computer’s GTX3090 could still run them~]

It seems it’s not the server room either.

At last, Bai Wu turned to the archives.

[Could it be, you’re already so dependent on me? Of course, there won’t be archives in the records room, just as the Shaolin Temple’s scripture library never has the manual for the Muscle/Sinew Changing Classic. The official documents are worthless to you, or are you thinking of becoming a capitalist with resources?]

The official documents?

Some clue there, apparently, the real documents are hidden somewhere, but not necessarily on this level.

Walking around the floor, Bai Wu turned a corner and saw the boardroom on the inside:

[A group of major shareholders sitting around a square table, discussing international affairs, oil prices, the latest moves of competitors? Or is a junior employee in front of the chairman exposing a board member’s crimes and demanding a hundredfold compensation, kneeling for an apology on the spot? This isn’t a TV drama; there are no clues here, most times their discussions are trivial matters. But you can go and sit, as the chairs are quite comfortable, made by my favorite Tan Woodworker craft.]

It’s not on the boardroom level either.

Afterward, Bai Wu visited several corners of this floor and found no useful clues.

"I can’t keep searching like this, because it’s very possible... I won’t be working this afternoon. I should think carefully, there must be a place I’ve overlooked."

It’s like a major capitalist from a previous life once said on TV with a aggrieved face, "I even have to work for two hours every day" to express how hard their life was.

Bai Wu did not believe that the father role he was playing would entail working during such a wonderful afternoon.

The afternoon would likely be entangled with Lin Wurou again... He had to hurry.

"Up to this point, what is the essential condition required to keep all six households alive and complete the game of house?"

"Why are most of the books in the study related to trade..."

"It seems I have to visit the chairman’s office?"