Chapter 21: Lost (1)

The old man said with a serious expression, “What’s going on? Isn’t this the same room we were in before?”

“It’s not certain yet.” As he spoke, Zuo Qingcang calmly pulled out his dagger again and started carving a mark on the ground. “Let’s wait here and see if this mark disappears.”

The old man nodded. He immediately understood what Zuo Qingcang wanted to confirm. If the mark did not disappear, it would mean they might be trapped in a labyrinth made of stone chambers.

Staring intently at the ground in front of him, Zuo Qingcang asked the old man, “After we entered the stone chamber, did you sense any artificial flow of Spiritual Power? Could it be that we’ve fallen victim to Dao Arts?”

“No. If there were any, I would definitely have noticed.” The old man shook his head. “It could be Dao Arts, or it could be a mechanism. Many Dao Arts don’t require the operation of Spiritual Power to function. Just like the star chart at the entrance—it was created using Dao Arts during construction. Once completed, even without Spiritual Power as an energy source, its mere existence can drive people mad.”

The two of them discussed several possibilities. As they talked, Zuo Qingcang kept track of the time. After half an hour, the mark in front of them remained unchanged.

The old man’s face grew dark. Zuo Qingcang nodded and said, “The mark isn’t disappearing, which means when we backtracked, we entered a different room.” With that, he walked back into the middle passage and headed toward the stone chamber they had just left.

But when the two of them looked at the spot where Zuo Qingcang had made the mark before retreating, they found it empty. That mark had disappeared too.

They tried a few more times, and the old man’s expression grew increasingly grim. No matter whether they moved forward, backward, or through any of the three passages—left, middle, or right—the mark would vanish after one round trip.

“Every time we pass through a passage, we end up in a new stone chamber?” The old man stared in disbelief at the three passages ahead and the one behind them, saying uneasily, “What’s going on? Is something following us, erasing the marks we made?”

“Unlikely.” Zuo Qingcang shook his head. “It takes us about thirty seconds on average to pass through a passage. Round trip, that’s sixty seconds. To restore these scratches in that time…”

“We have to try!” The old man stood up. “If we backtrack along the way we came and can’t return to the original path, it means this place really is strange—it’s not that someone erased the marks.”

Zuo Qingcang did not object. With no clues to go on, testing every possibility was the only option.

So the two of them began retracing their steps along the original route. Since they had always taken the middle passage, in theory, they should be able to go back the same way.

But as they retraced their steps, they began to feel something strange.

The stone chamber was square, with a passage on each of its four sides. Earlier, when Zuo Qingcang and the old man had determined that the passage behind them was the way back, the stone chamber had only three possible paths forward.

But now, the two of them weren’t even sure if the way they were going was actually backward. After passing through several stone chambers, a strange feeling enveloped them. Visually, the process looked no different from when they had been moving forward earlier.

A sense of confusion—where front, back, left, and right were all mixed up—overwhelmed them. Logically, they knew they were going backward, but the visual information made it feel exactly the same as moving forward.

They could only silently count the number of stone chambers they passed through. But the more they counted, the more restless the old man became, and the faster his steps grew.

Finally, after entering another stone chamber—the thirtieth by their count—the old man said anxiously, “The thirtieth. There’s no way we passed through this many stone chambers on our way in. And in all these chambers, we haven’t found a single mark. That means we haven’t been in any room we marked before.”

Zuo Qingcang placed a hand on his shoulder and said coldly, “Don’t panic. Now more than ever, we need to stay calm.”

The old man forced a nod and took a deep breath, as if trying to expel the frustration in his chest.

Zuo Qingcang observed the stone chamber and concluded, “In this situation, either space itself is changing, or we’re under some kind of illusion. Unless there’s a spatial transfer Dao Arts array in this structure, illusions or spatial changes are just tricks deceiving our eyes through visuals or structure.”

The old man shook his head firmly. “There’s definitely no spatial transfer Dao Arts at work here. Even Western Wei has lost such arts. They only exist in ruins from ancient times, and any one of them requires vast amounts of Spiritual Power to activate. It can’t be that.”

“Then let’s first see if there’s something wrong with the structure here.” Zuo Qingcang looked around the stone chamber, thinking, “First, we need to confirm whether what we’re seeing is real or not.”

Zuo Qingcang took out the rope tied around his waist, handed one end to the old man, and held the other end himself. Then the two stood along the walls of the stone chamber.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m checking if this stone chamber has any issues.” As he spoke, Zuo Qingcang used the rope to measure whether the chamber was truly square as it appeared and whether the distances to the four passages were equal.

“Nothing wrong.” After measuring, the structure of the stone chamber matched what they saw. Then he looked at the old man and asked, “Have you heard of magic tricks?”

“Magic tricks?”

“Yes. I once learned a bit from a guy named David Copperfield. He told me one thing: to deceive the audience on stage, the most important part is to grab their attention and direct it to something unimportant. This is called substitution. The audience never discovers the secret of the trick because they never truly see it.”

The old man asked, “David Copperfield? A Westerner?”

Through Liu Zhicheng’s memories, Zuo Qingcang knew that beyond the New Continent, further west, lay a country made up of Westerners, with a culture and people similar to the Europe and America of the previous world.

Zuo Qingcang said, “Yeah, a pretty interesting Westerner.”

The old man followed Zuo Qingcang’s gaze toward the surrounding passages. Compared to the brightly lit stone chamber, the unlit passages appeared pitch black.

Clearly, the illuminated stone chamber had drawn their attention, while the darkness-shrouded passages were easier to overlook.

The old man said thoughtfully, “You mean the problem lies in the passages?”

“If every room we enter is different, then the passages connecting these rooms are obviously the key.”

Zuo Qingcang left one end of the rope in the stone chamber, while he and the old man held the other end. Then he carved a cross mark and arbitrarily chose the left passage to enter.

“Based on our earlier experience, every time we enter a passage, a new stone chamber appears. So what happens if we hold onto the rope?”

“When we try to go back the same way, will the rope disappear? Or will it remain?”

“What will happen to the marks we made?”