The sky had gradually darkened, and the lights in the teaching building turned on.

Students who had finished dinner were strolling around the playground.

The equipment room seemed even dimmer. The students remained silent as Lin Wanxing stood up and turned on the light.

A soft click.

The fluorescent tubes flickered, and the entire small storeroom brightened up.

Qin Ao finally came back to his senses. “What freedom do we have?”

Lin Wanxing — “This is a complex question. Are you sure you want to hear it?”

Perhaps her answer sounded dismissive, as Qin Ao glanced away.

“You don’t care whether we go or not, you’re only interested in this.”

He tapped the puzzle on the table.

Lin Wanxing stared at the student’s face and finally twirled her pen without continuing the topic.

The paper still showed those motivational quotes.

Things like “soar freely” or “self-improvement,” looked somewhat incongruous and contrived, but behind all that deliberateness was something.

Lin Wanxing folded her hands and looked up. “Aren’t you curious who stuffed these things to you?”

“I don’t care,” said Qin Ao.

“I see…” Lin Wanxing paused, “Then perhaps I shouldn’t tell you what I just discovered?”

Chen Jianghe, who had been standing at the door for a while, finally turned around. “What did you discover now?”

Lin Wanxing stopped teasing them and grabbed her pen, drawing a straight line on the paper.

She glanced at Qin Ao. “You mentioned earlier about the relationship between the number of characters in each sentence and the title symbols?”

“What, is there a connection?”

“No, think simpler. If we ignore the numbers and just look at the character count in each sentence?”

Chen Jianghe and Qin Ao frowned, lowering their heads to look for a while until they appeared ready to give up.

Lin Wanxing — “Think of the problem more simply. You can say anything.”

“There doesn’t seem to be any odd-even number pattern,” said Qin Ao.

“Are all character counts under 10?” asked Chen Jianghe.

“Correct.” Lin Wanxing nodded encouragingly at Chen Jianghe. “Each sentence is very short. Not only are they all under 10, but the longest doesn’t exceed 7 characters.”

“What does that indicate?”

“It indicates something strange,” Lin Wanxing scratched her chin with the pen cap, narrowing her eyes.

“Here you go again,” Qin Ao said, exasperated. “Can’t you just say everything in one breath?”

“Ah, sorry, I’m just borrowing your brains to think,” Lin Wanxing said while thinking. “In reality, motivational quotes are usually long, right? Like this one ‘Persistent effort creates brilliance,’ with ‘creates’ shortened to ‘forge.'”

She circled the next sentence. “And this one. ‘One should be self-reliant,’ we usually say ‘Men should be self-reliant’…”

“So what?”

“If this is a puzzle, then the puzzle-maker deliberately controlled the character count to make it shorter,” said Lin Wanxing.

Initially, Chen Jianghe and Qin Ao were listening attentively, but upon hearing this, Qin Ao responded coldly, “Your discovery is a bit boring.”

“It is somewhat boring. But that person put a lot of effort into composing these phrases, didn’t they?” Lin Wanxing smiled slightly. “These motivational quotes have a second strange aspect.”

She circled the character “heng” in “Persistent effort creates brilliance” and “Persistence,” then circled “zi” in “One should be self-reliant” and “Soar freely.”

“Each sentence has a repeated character?” Qin Ao finally understood.

Lin Wanxing nodded.

“Why would there be repeated characters?” Chen Jianghe asked.

“I haven’t figured that out yet,” Lin Wanxing said while circling all the characters that repeated in pairs between sentences.

Qin Ao’s previously animated mood suddenly deflated again. “Forget it.”

He was about to leave.

Lin Wanxing stopped him. “We’ve already made significant progress. Why don’t we think a bit more?”

“What else is there to think about?”

“Let me summarize. First, assuming this is a puzzle deliberately created for us, then the maker must want us to solve it. Therefore, it should be simple, similar to these types of puzzles.”

Lin Wanxing picked up the “100 Fun Puzzles” book from the table and showed it to the two young men. “Today I did many brain teasers and riddles and found that the answers to these things are always hidden in our blind spots. So there must be something we’re overlooking.”

Chen Jianghe took the puzzle book and began flipping through it, while Qin Ao scanned the seven or eight books on the table. “You read so much today? Such dedication, no wonder you became the top scholar.”

“The college entrance exam is relatively simple. Anyone with hands can do it,” Lin Wanxing said.

Qin Ao paused for a moment. “I don’t even know how to respond to that show-off.”

Just then, Chen Jianghe’s hand suddenly stopped turning pages. “What about this!”

Lin Wanxing looked up.

Chen Jianghe’s eyes were bright, slightly excited.

He put down the book, laid it flat, and displayed a puzzle.

The puzzle read as follows:

1. Below are 10×10, a total of 100 squares. Please fill in the answers according to the hints from 10 questions, one character per square.

2. Black squares mean no characters.

Tip: Fill in the easy ones first, then gradually complete the rest.

Horizontal:

1. A children’s song

2. The dharma name of Prince Duan of Dali after becoming a monk in “The Legend of the Condor Heroes”

3. Ronaldo’s nickname

4. The capital of Portugal

5. The strait between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean

6. A European country

7. The line before “misfortunes never come singly”

8. A type of cultural relic mentioned in middle school physics textbooks

9. A traditional form of Chinese entertainment

10. The movement led by Sun Yat-sen to overthrow the Qing Dynasty

11. A line from the ancient poem “Spring Dawn”

12. A xiangsheng (crosstalk) performer

Vertical:

1. A person who performs comedic acts in a circus

2. The line after “Asking the world, what is love”

3. A small sheet of newspaper printed extra by a newspaper office for breaking news

4. The only U.S. president who served four terms: Roosevelt

5. The season when all things revive

6. A song sung by Leslie Cheung

7. A famous work by Hemingway

8. The closest relatives

9. A famous minister of the Spring and Autumn Period, whose value was five sheepskins

10. A Taiwanese female singer

11. Marine creatures with both eyes on the same side

12. A common phrase used to congratulate businesspeople

13. An idiom that means to thoroughly reform oneself

…

Under the light, the black and white checkerboard pattern at the bottom half of the puzzle was particularly eye-catching.

Looking at where the horizontal and vertical grids intersected, Lin Wanxing felt an uncanny sensation.

It was as if something had been surrounding you all along like the smoke rising from a lit candle, curling and lingering, yet you could never quite make out what it was.

The moment the black and white grid appeared, the cover was lifted, you saw the candle, and everything became clear.

Although this puzzle had more blank spaces to fill, it was certainly similar.

It was as simple as filling in the corresponding words and phrases into the grid.

If that was the case, had the 10×10 grid board needed for solving the puzzle already been given to them?

Lin Wanxing looked at Chen Jianghe, meeting the young man’s equally bright and incredulous gaze.

She extended her hand to Chen Jianghe, palm open.

Understanding, the boy handed her a card.

It was the “Free 100 Ball Borrowings Card” that the young man had tentatively thrown to her when they first met.

It also had 100 horizontal and vertical squares, with some boxes covered by light patterns. From another perspective, if you considered the lightly patterned areas as blackened squares, there were indeed 10 segmented horizontal and vertical regions where corresponding sentences could be filled in.

“A… word… puzzle… game?” Seeing this, Qin Ao finally raised his voice in disbelief.

Lin Wanxing didn’t speak. She breathed softly and placed the ball-borrowing card that Chen Jianghe had given her aside.

Using a ruler and pencil, she copied the same grid with its pattern positions onto a draft paper.

Starting from the top left corner, she numbered each group of blank squares in order from horizontal to vertical, marking the character count in the top left corner.

Then she tried to match sentences with the same character count from the motivational quotes into the grid.

This was a very simple process—truly something anyone with hands could do.

But neither Chen Jianghe nor Qin Ao dared to breathe, both were utterly silent.

One sentence, two sentences, three sentences, appropriate sentences were filled into the grid, the character counts matched, the intersections aligned. There were even very few trial-and-error attempts, and the entire word grid was quickly completed.

It was fitting, perfect, as it should be.

④ Start anew.

The character “new” was filled in the middle square of “⑩□□□,” and as “The mountain of books has a path, diligence is the way” was finally written vertically into the word grid, the entire “word puzzle game” left only one final space: ⑩-□new book.

Another long period of silence followed.

Lin Wanxing folded her hands, rested her chin on them, and looked up at the two students.

The room was dim. Qin Ao also looked up, as if just awakening from a long dream.

“What ‘new book’?” He became even more confused. “There’s still a space for us to guess?”

“Yes.” Lin Wanxing stared at the grid on the paper, a strange sense of familiarity washing over her. She looked at the two students before her, hesitating to speak.

“What do you think should be filled in?” Chen Jianghe asked her, his eyes dark and bright.

“Fill in one character,” said Lin Wanxing.

“Damn, isn’t that obvious?”

“The conditions are as follows: this matter concerns both of you, the answer should be somewhere you can think of. Think about what connects you two.”

“What ‘new book’ what?” Qin Ao hesitated. “We both don’t like studying. Could it be ‘read new books’?”

“I have another clue here.”

“What clue?”

Lin Wanxing stood up from her chair and crouched down by the desk.

The filing cabinet beside her contained a large stack of old newspapers.

When a certain teacher came to play in the equipment room, he liked to sit beside her, take out several newspapers, and do the little games in them.

This was a very old-fashioned habit, and memorable because of its old-fashioned nature.

Lin Wanxing pulled out a stack of newspapers and placed them on the table.

Like that teacher’s movements when looking for things in newspapers, she began flipping through them.

For a moment, the only sound in the room was the crisp rustle of paper moving through the air.

Suddenly, Lin Wanxing stopped.

She laid the newspaper flat and pointed to the “Sunset Glow Section” at the bottom filling the page, at the bottom corner of page 16B of the “Hongjing Evening News” from July 12th, which was precisely a word puzzle.

All the blank spaces had been filled in.

Although the handwriting wasn’t clear, it was evident that someone had filled it in with a pencil.

“Who?” asked Chen Jianghe.

“Teacher Qian,” said Lin Wanxing.

“Teacher Qian!” Qin Ao’s eyes widened as he raised his voice. “You’re saying all these things were done by Teacher Qian?”

“I don’t know, but he plays word games and wanted me to take you both to a competition. That makes him highly suspicious.”

Lin Wanxing’s voice was very soft. She seemed to be in the clouds, feeling that everything was ethereal and incredible.

As she said this, a boy’s finger suddenly pointed to the space they had left at the end.

The intersection of all clues, was the only space they needed to fill.

At this point in their reasoning, the answer was about to emerge.

⑩□new book

Qin Ao — “Could the character that needs to be filled in be…”

“Fu,” said Chen Jianghe.