Volume 5 Chapter 32 Fat Man’s Enumeration Method

Fat Man suddenly said he had an idea, and we were all taken aback, but then we were prepared for Fat Man to be full of crap. We were almost used to Fat Man’s unreliability, and instead of confronting him every time, we just let him talk nonsense!

In fact, I wasn’t very panicked at the time. Because we hadn’t really run out of food and water yet, it was just that there were these corpses here, and it was inevitable that there would be something bad in our hearts. In fact, people like me, when faced with such an intellectual challenge, even feel a little relieved. This is much easier than encountering a number of zongzi.

Pan Zi and I thought the same way, and didn’t take it seriously. We casually asked the fat guy, “What? Don’t bullshit us, we don’t have time for this!”

The fat guy came over to us and said to Pan Zi, “You’re discriminating against me! I’ve never messed up before, and this time I’ve thought of the absolute key!”

Pan Zi laughed and said, ‘With that tiny brain of yours, what do you think you’ve thought of?’

This time, however, Fat Man was surprisingly serious, and said in a serious tone, ”Actually, it’s not the key. I just had a flash of inspiration and thought of the mechanism in the underwater tomb. You see, at the time, we were also thinking very complexly, but in fact, how simple things are? I wonder if I’ve thought too much this time, and let the mechanism in the underwater tomb get a head start. Whenever something like this happens, I think the room will move. Maybe the problem here has nothing to do with the tomb at all. It’s just an ordinary tomb.

Pan Zi said with a grin, “Nonsense! If it were ordinary, I wouldn’t be able to get out…”

I saw that the fat guy hadn’t finished, so I waved at Pan Zi to let him continue.

The fat guy said, “Actually, it’s very simple. If there’s nothing wrong with this passage or this tomb, but we still can’t get out, then what’s the problem? It must be something about us.”

At this point, Pan Zi and I were both stunned. I said, “Are you saying that the problem with this endless loop is something about us?”

The fat guy nodded and said, “Although we don’t know what the problem is, it’s probably something like this. I think maybe we’ve been hypnotized by the murals. Or maybe there’s some hallucinogenic gas here. We’ve all been poisoned. I know of a mushroom that causes disorientation and makes you spin in circles, but I don’t know what it is.

The fat guy told me that when he was a kid, he used to hunt bears with a trap that used this poisonous mushroom.

I was suddenly in deep thought, and Pan Zi stopped talking, frowning and thinking about what the fat guy had said.

Is it our own problem? If so, then the difficulty of the matter is completely different. But after a little thought, I didn’t think it was quite right.

In fact, what the fat guy said was very enlightening. Maybe the truth is very close to what he said, but there is a fatal irrationality, and that is our own feelings. Would a person who had been poisoned look like us? I’ve been poisoned before, and a poisoned person would definitely have a strong reaction.

As for hypnosis, I’ve never really believed in it. Because it’s so targeted, it’s believable that the fat guy would be easily hypnotized, but it’s really not possible for Pan Zi and I.

But if we still return to the category of strange and ingenious techniques, it is indeed difficult to think of anything. In fact, I just thought of about a dozen methods, and two or three of them are completely feasible in terms of architectural structure, but these methods are too demanding, that is to say, there must be absolute prerequisites, such as the three of us not being allowed to move together, and our walking speed must be fixed, etc. Wang Zanghai would never design a trap with such a low success rate.

I suddenly thought to myself, “Am I too frustrated? I thought to myself, how many years ago was Wang Zanghai? Why have we never been able to get the upper hand?

We all thought about the problem at once, and we all entered a trance. The fat guy looked at us and didn’t say anything after he finished talking. I didn’t know what to do, so I just pretended to think about it. Later, I don’t know how, the more I thought, the more sleepy I got, and I fell asleep.

But I must have only slept for three or four hours, and I was still half-awake when I heard the voices of the fat man and Pan Zi, and I was woken up again. I got up and found that they were walking down the same path again. Shunzi had obviously just run back, panting heavily. Judging from the fat man’s expression, it was clear that the result was still the same, and there had been no progress.

I rubbed my eyes and asked what they were doing. The fat guy said that after thinking for a long time, they still had no idea, so they decided to try it. They had one person walk with their eyes closed, while the other person watched from behind. The two were connected by a rope to see if the person with their eyes open would suddenly turn around halfway through.

I shuddered at the thought. This was a completely ridiculous method of testing. It was lucky that these people were so thick-headed. If I had to do it, who knows if the person at the other end of the rope would still be the same person halfway through.

But in the end, the result was the same, whether they were blindfolded or not, they all felt that they were walking in a straight line, but in the end, the two of them walked back to the tomb. Because Shunzi was the one who was blindfolded, she walked with extra difficulty and her face was pale.

The few of them sat back down in their seats, sighing and groaning. I told them to save their energy, because such blind tests would actually lead to a disruption in thinking. Then things went back to how they were before I went to sleep, and we started discussing again without any meaning.

During the discussion, someone always fell asleep, but fortunately, when one person fell asleep, the other people could continue to think. In this way, we had one idea in the east and another in the west, and we proposed and then rejected it. At first, there were many opinions, but later, the few of us had fewer and fewer opinions. Time passed unknowingly for six or seven hours, and our stomachs began to growl again.

Finally, the fat guy lit a cigarette, thought for a moment, and said to us, “No, it’s a waste of time to think of solutions in such a fragmented way. Let’s do this: we write down all the possibilities and then summarize them into a few, and then directly verify these few.”

I nodded. In fact, in the end, we were discussing many issues repeatedly, and everyone was in a state of confusion.

He arranged a stone surface on the floor covered with goldware, then wrote down a few numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, and said, “Let’s think about the different hypotheses we have. You all think about it, don’t be specific, just give us a general direction.”

Pan Zi said, “The most likely hypothesis is that there is a mechanism.”

The fat man wrote “mechanism” in the place of 1. Then Shunzi said, “My idea is that something may be affecting our senses. It could be a psychological suggestion or hypnosis, making us walk back without realizing it.”

The fat man said to him, “You don’t need to go into such detail.” Then he wrote illusion after 2. Then he looked at me.

I said, “Theoretically, it could be spatial folding.”

“That’s impossible. It’s too far-fetched,” said Pan Zi.

The fat man said, “No matter what, there’s a one-in-ten-thousand possibility. Let’s just admit that we’re just making a list of memos.” He wrote it down. Then he said, “There might also be ghosts.” He wrote a 4, for ghosts.

“What’s the point of writing it down like that?” Pan Zi asked, confused.

The fat guy said, “You guys have read a lot of books, but you don’t understand. I’ve read less, so I have to write everything down. But there’s a good thing about that. For example, if there are a few things you can do together, you can figure it out in advance, which saves a lot of time. Don’t we only have two days? Let’s save some. Oh, right, do we have five points? Who has five points?

I looked at the four points, which really covered everything from quantum mechanics to metaphysics, psychology to engineering. The fifth point was a bit hard to come up with, and the discussion we had just now was actually just about discussing one and two, and three and four were simply impossible.

The fat guy looked at us and said, “Okay, let’s first verify one and two, which can be dealt with together.”

“What method do you use to verify?” I asked curiously.

In fact, we have done most of the experiments we can do, but because the tunnel is too long, many of the experiments are actually useless.

The fat man suddenly smiled: “Actually, I just thought of a good way. It is impossible to prove whether it is 1 or 2 that affects us, but there is a way to prove that it is not. You’ll see.”

I looked at the fat man, full of pride, with a feeling of confidence, and suddenly felt that something was wrong. Does this guy have any plans? He just picked up the rifle on the ground and said to us, “This tunnel is about 1000m to 2000m long. The Type 56 has a range of 400m, but the bullet can hit 3000m away. I’ll shoot a shot here and see what the result will be.”

I was enlightened at once, and I exclaimed in my heart, “What a genius!”

If it is because we ourselves feel that something is wrong, then the bullet has no feelings. The tomb passage can affect us, but it cannot affect the bullet. If the situation here can be explained by common sense, then the bullet will inevitably disappear at the end of the tomb passage and will not return.

The perfect part of this experiment is the speed of the bullet. In such a short tomb passage, the bullet can completely travel in 2 or 3 seconds, and no traps can function in such a short time.

But if the situation here really exceeds the scope of common sense and enters the realm of metaphysics, then the bullet will turn 180 degrees in the straight tunnel, just like us, transcending space.

Simple and beautiful, very much in line with the spirit of science, I am really a little ashamed that I, a college student, could not think of this method.

But then I thought, this trick can only be thought of by someone like him.

To determine whether there is an illusion, you need to find something that is not affected by the illusion. You need to find something nearby, and after three steps of consideration, the solution immediately came to mind. I suddenly felt that Wang Zanghai might have met his match. A person like him, who has been so meticulous, might be afraid of the rigid thinking of a fat man.

Fatty said he would do it, so we followed him. He walked into the tomb passage, cocked his gun, and tried to shoot at the tomb passage.

I hurriedly shouted, “Wait!”

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Don’t do it,” I said. “If, I mean if, the evil spirits are really that powerful here, then if you shoot, almost instantly you will be shot yourself.”

The fat man’s face changed. Obviously, he had just thought that the possibility of 1 and 2 was very high, and he had not considered whether 3 and 4 were true. However, when I said it, he nodded and moved the gun to the side. The bullet was a parabola. If the bullet was shot back, it should land below the muzzle.

We were all hiding at the door, not yet ready for the psychological preparation, when the fat man suddenly fired. A loud bang exploded in the tomb passage, followed by a series of echoes, but almost at the same time, we saw the tomb door shake violently, sending up a series of dust.

My head buzzed, and my heart said, “This is not good.” I hurriedly looked out, and the fat man was still in the same position as when he fired, but a bullet hole appeared in the door five or six centimeters below his gun, and the smoke from the explosion had not yet dispersed.