There were five people who saved the students—three men and two women.

After they rescued Tu Dan and her group, they asked Tu Dan if there was fog in Hangzhou city. At that time, Tu Dan had just fled from Hangzhou with the students and encountered the game, so her whole state was anxious and restless.

She didn’t understand why these people wanted to court death, but still pointed them in the right direction. During this, she heard a fat man say: “Hurry up, don’t let anyone beat us to it!”

Another woman replied carelessly: “What’s the rush? The people in the maze are probably all dead. Who’s going to compete with us…”

In just these few exchanges, their car had already driven far away.

Tu Dan didn’t take it to heart. Her mind was full of thoughts about how to rush to Yangzhou for refuge, but unexpectedly, fog also appeared in Yangzhou, and the rescue boats kept not coming.

Later, Tu Dan and the students gradually calmed down.

They found a place to settle, then reanalyzed the meaning of the brocade pouch note and combined it with those people’s last two sentences to reach a conclusion:

First, there was a maze in the fog;

Second, there were puzzle pieces in the maze.

The number of puzzle pieces should be limited, otherwise the fat man wouldn’t have used the word “beat,” and the brocade pouch note also mentioned that “collecting all the puzzle pieces can clear all games,” which was enough to show that the puzzle pieces were very precious.

This was also the reason Tu Dan had been hesitant and hadn’t explained clearly to Shen Mo.

She wanted to争取 a few more chances for herself and her students.

Now, Zhang Tianyang had laid everything bare, his eyes fixed on Bai Youwei as he asked: “Now can you tell me? What exactly is wrong with our walking method?”

Bai Youwei said: “There’s nothing wrong.”

Zhang Tianyang’s eyes widened. “You!…”

“Don’t be anxious, there’s still a ‘but.'” Bai Youwei smiled. “There’s nothing wrong with the walking method itself, but the error tolerance rate is almost zero. That is to say, once you discover an error midway, you’ll have to completely overturn everything and start again.”

“You’re so certain we’ll make errors?” Zhang Tianyang was somewhat unconvinced.

“Because you’re human.” Bai Youwei had an expression that said this was natural. “As long as you’re human, you’ll definitely make errors. You can’t guarantee that your classmates are as smart and careful as you, and you can’t guarantee they won’t get directions wrong in the passages. Think about it—when you use the progressive walking method and complete zero percent of the maze, you discover that the last passage you advanced into is a dead end, and the correct passage was missed imperceptibly. When you turn back wanting to investigate, how do you investigate? Don’t you have to check from the beginning?”

Zhang Tianyang’s face gradually paled, then turned iron blue and ugly.

Bai Youwei spread her hands. “If you don’t believe me, forget it. Anyway, if I were you, I’d go check right now whether there are any problems with the progress you just advanced.”

Zhang Tianyang bit his lip and was silent for a while, then suddenly turned and walked toward the maze passage.

“Tianyang!” Tu Dan hurriedly reached out to grab him. “Don’t be reckless, it’s already late!”

“It’s fine, Teacher Tu. I’ll just go take a quick look, I won’t go too deep.” Zhang Tianyang forced a smile. “Besides, there are lights everywhere here, so there’s no problem with visibility.”

He was very insistent.

Tu Dan had to look after the other students and couldn’t go with him, so she shouted toward the group of students: “Yang Yi, you go with Zhang Tianyang to look.”

A tall male student stood up and went with Zhang Tianyang.

The remaining students had various expressions, clustering in front of their tents and discussing in low voices:

“Is our walking method really no good?”

“I don’t know… Hey, when you were inserting the flags, did you insert them all correctly?”

“Should be right, I think. What about you?”

“I don’t know either…”

…

Not much time passed before Zhang Tianyang and Yang Yi returned.

Both boys had their heads lowered and shoulders slumped, looking somewhat dejected.

Chen Hui took two bottles of water and went forward, handing them over and asking: “How was it? Any discoveries?”

“…Yeah.” Yang Yi sullenly took a sip of water, his eyes glancing at Zhang Tianyang beside him. “One flag was wrong.”