“Ahhhhhhhhh!” The programmer suddenly clutched his head and dropped to his knees.
His hunched back trembled. He understood now, yet couldn’t believe it. His voice came out in a low, broken whisper.
“How could this happen? How could this happen? How could…”
He’d scraped together more than ten million in prize money, step by painstaking step, and made it this far. But how could he need the passwords from everyone’s arms just to claim his money?!
His fragmented moans swelled into a scream. He slammed a fist against the floor, overwhelmed with regret.
Now he understood. The game had deliberately set them up!
If only he’d figured it out sooner. If he’d noticed the passwords on the others’ arms before they died and memorized them, he could have collected the prize money!
His furious roar filled the room with all the frustration of his own carelessness.
At last, his exhausted voice fell silent.
Behind the four stone walls, an eerie silence settled over them.
Chi Wei remained crouched beside the password wall. Her fingertips, braced against it, had gone pale. A bead of cold sweat slid down her temple.
The Silver-Masked Woman stood behind her. Chi Wei could feel the heavy disgust in the woman’s gaze on her back.
It wasn’t aimed at her alone. The woman seemed to despise the other two people here as well.
Chi Wei could understand why.
Anyone would probably hate them.
In the games before this, they’d abandoned their teammates without a second thought, all to grab more prize money. Now that greed had become an act of self-destruction.
Without the passwords, all they could do was wait for the magma to rise and pour down over them.
Chi Wei lowered her head and gave a scornful laugh.
Hadn’t the Silver-Masked Woman herself once voted to abandon someone?
Chi Wei wondered if the woman counted herself among the people she despised for bringing this on themselves.
Chi Wei didn’t dwell on it. Instead, she glanced back and memorized the password on the Silver-Masked Woman’s arm.
It was nine digits. She entered it into the corresponding slots:
[5-2-1-0-0-1-0-0-0]
Then there was the seven-digit password on her own right arm. She had no choice but to enter that one too.
“One password left. Hey, you—roll up your sleeve.”
Chi Wei called to the programmer, who was still kneeling and lost in thought. Her voice held the same helplessness and despair that had begun to seep into the room.
She knew they’d been tricked by the game and that their chances of survival were slim. But accepting their fate and waiting to die? The wait could be impossibly long.
The programmer gripped his clothes in one fist, sitting motionless where he was.
Chi Wei gritted her teeth, wiped the cold sweat from her forehead, and shouted, “Show me your password!”
Waiting to die wouldn’t get them anywhere.
An air of defeat and decay was already eating away at their minds. She did her best to keep out of its reach.
The programmer mechanically bared his arm. After pausing for a few seconds, he suddenly scrambled up and came over.
“Have you thought of something?” he asked, hope flooding his voice.
He’d suddenly remembered that this woman was no fool. She’d even won that game, “Did You Forget to Play Rock-Paper-Scissors Again?”
Maybe—maybe she was clever enough to have figured out that everyone else had passwords on their arms!
The programmer seized one of Chi Wei’s arms, clinging to her like a drowning man grabbing a floating log.
“If you let us die in here, you’ll die too! Put in the passwords you know!”
Chi Wei turned to look at him in confusion. Then she smiled.
“I don’t know any passwords.”
So even at a time like this, the programmer still thought she was deliberately hiding the passwords so she could keep all the prize money for herself after everyone else died?
Chi Wei lowered her eyes with a laugh and pushed his hand off her arm.
“Then why did you ask for my password?” the programmer demanded, his face twisting with anger. “I shouldn’t have told you mine first! If we can’t enter all ten passwords, no one’s getting out of here alive!”
He glanced at the trail of magma on the wall and named his price.
“Two million!”
Chi Wei: “?”
“Enter the passwords and, once we’re out, I’ll give you two million yuan!”
What a weirdo.
Chi Wei covered her face with one hand and laughed, speechless.
At that moment, the Fat Auntie, having heard the commotion, hurried over too.
“Oh, so you do know the passwords! Good grief! You’re trying to take advantage of our predicament?”
“All right, look. I know it’s hard for you young people to earn money. How about this? Open the wall for us and I’ll give you half a million yuan once I’ve got my prize money.”
Chi Wei didn’t react. No one could see her expression beneath the mask.
But the air around her seemed to freeze. Her silence had taken on an unsettling edge.
The Fat Auntie’s mouth twisted with anger. She glared at Chi Wei for a long moment before reluctantly softening her tone.
“What’s wrong? You still think that’s too little? Young people really shouldn’t be so greedy… Fine, I’ll give you a million. That puts an extra three million in your pocket. Happy now? Hey, get this straight: we’re not begging you! If you don’t enter the passwords, the magma will burn every one of us to death!”
By the end, the Fat Auntie had taken on the air of someone bestowing charity.
She called over to the Silver-Masked Woman as well. “You don’t know the passwords either? Give her a share of your prize money. Let her earn something.”
The Silver-Masked Woman replied coolly, “She doesn’t know the passwords.”
“What did you say?”
Chi Wei spoke up.
“She’s right. I don’t know the other passwords.”
Her voice was cold enough to crack.
“Enough. You think you’ve seen through what’s going on in someone else’s head, but all you’ve done is imagine what you’d do if you were in their place. You’ve been treating me like one of you this whole time.”
Chi Wei shoved the programmer away, stepped around the Fat Auntie, and walked over to the opposite wall.
She drew up her knees and wrapped her arms around them, glaring back at the others with open irritation.
“A snake looking in a mirror can only see another poisonous heart.”
Those two…
Stay away from me. What a pain.
Chi Wei wasn’t a saint. Even in such an extreme situation, she could still despise people.
The Fat Auntie and the programmer went pale, then flushed red. They stared at her, their faces twisting.
“How do you know she doesn’t know the passwords?”
The Fat Auntie turned back to the Silver-Masked Woman.
“I don’t know them. Why would she?” The Silver-Masked Woman sounded utterly certain.
Then she added, “You might as well wait to die.”
She left the password wall and sat against the opposite wall, facing Chi Wei, legs crossed and eyes closed as she rested.
The Fat Auntie and the programmer were left staring after them, stunned.
Then the two of them began to scream.
“Hey! Do you two want to die?”
“You don’t know the passwords. What are you so smug about?”
“Was I the only one who voted to eliminate the others? Everyone’s responsible! How dare you sit there acting so high and mighty? Say something! The money’s right in front of us. Don’t you want it? You… I get it! You’re both crazy! You were planning to kill yourselves anyway! Ahhhhh… Waaaaah…”
The Fat Auntie ranted and raved until she finally broke down sobbing.
Even in ordinary life, most people couldn’t stand the silent treatment. How much less could they bear it now?
One step from heaven, one step from hell. The brutal swing between hope and despair, and the knowledge that there was no escape from their fate, could overwhelm anyone.
The programmer stared at the wall, his face ashen, sweat pouring from his brow.
Between the stones, the red line of magma had risen almost to his height.
Once it reached above their heads, it would spray out of the round tube.
The roar of the magma rolled in from behind the wall. The heat in the air grew more and more palpable. The Fat Auntie couldn’t take it any longer. Sobbing, she crawled to the wall opposite the password panel, the spot farthest from the heat.
“Waaaaah… ahhhhh… waaaaaah…” Her sobs were utterly desperate. As she clung to the wall, she suddenly remembered—
The six dead players were just on the other side!
They hadn’t been destroyed. They were only shut out.
The Fat Auntie went mad with panic, pounding and shoving at the wall. She must have wished she could dig a tunnel through it and see the passwords on the six dead players’ arms!
But all her effort came to nothing. The solid wall didn’t budge, while waves of heat continued to crash through the enclosed space.
The programmer was so hot he took off his clothes and removed his glasses, now damp with sweat. He kept pleading with the game’s organizers, swearing he didn’t want the money anymore, offering to give up the prize if they would only let him leave the game.
Chi Wei stayed motionless with her face buried in her knees. Her whole body was soaked as if she’d climbed out of a lake. Sweat clung to her eyelids, caught by her lashes. She could feel the temperature climbing, and knew the magma was close to erupting.
The Fat Auntie’s shrill, panicked screams and the programmer’s crazed breakdown filled the room, where life and death hung in the balance.
“I want out of the game! Let me out! Ahhhhh! Why won’t you two say anything?!”
The Silver-Masked Woman sat as still as if she were meditating.
“Wait to die.”
Chi Wei spoke almost in unison with her, her voice edged with mockery.
“Guess we’ll wait to die.”
If they already knew begging was useless, they might as well die with some dignity, right?
Of course not. Chi Wei just didn’t want to deal with them.
Even when she knew she was at the end of the road, Chi Wei was the kind of person who kept walking until she reached the end.
Images of the password slots kept surfacing in her mind, along with the four lines that had already been filled in:
[2020
□□□□
□□□□□
3211000
□□□□□□□□
521001000
6210001000
□□□□□□□□□□
□□□□□□□□□□□
□□□□□□□□□□□□
□□□□□□□□□□□□□]
Sweat trembled on her lashes. As the heat baked her skin, her breathing grew more and more labored between her knees.
Her brain felt hot and swollen. Her nerves throbbed.
Only one thought kept her going as the image of the passwords replayed in her mind. She had to find something in them—
Did the four passwords she knew have anything in common? Anything that stood out?
