“Following the crowd?”

Su Man blinked. She thought she’d understood, but hearing Lu Yuwen put it that way, she was confused again.

“That’s right.” Lu Yuwen looked toward a human-shaped puppet standing not far off and said in a measured voice, “The essence of following the crowd is the minority yielding to the majority. In order to adapt to their environment and fit into society, every person has, to one degree or another, gone along with the crowd before — abandoning their own thoughts, blindly following others, and ultimately walking down a path that merely appears correct. This maze magnifies that trait precisely, until people become puppets with no capacity for thought and no will of their own.”

Su Man gazed ahead at the words.

She felt she could picture it — the moment the maze descended, the panic and disorder.

The people would scramble desperately for a way out, discover the arrows, and band together, following the arrows in search of an exit… the numbers would grow, more and more, until others saw the crowd and instinctively joined in, assuming the people at the front knew the way, following with hope in their hearts — only to end up…

Death arrived without a sound.

Su Man closed her eyes, unable to bear imagining it any further.

But Lu Yuwen, beside her, spoke again. “There’s one thing, though, that strikes me as strange.”

She opened her eyes. “What’s strange?”

“Even with the arrows’ influence,” Lu Yuwen said, “it seems unlikely that not a single person with a clear head survived. Suppose there were ten thousand people here — is it really possible that not one out of ten thousand saw through the arrows’ trap? Not even a one-in-ten-thousand chance? That seems very unlikely…”

Su Man thought about it. “The ones who saw through the trap must have gotten out — it’s perfectly normal that they’re no longer in the maze, isn’t it?”

Lu Yuwen still shook his head. “Something isn’t quite right…”

“What isn’t right?” Su Man couldn’t see it.

Lu Yuwen explained patiently. “Imagine the maze is a 10×10 sliding puzzle. Someone solves it and finds the path out. Then the puzzle is handed to you — what state do you think the puzzle would be in at that point?”

Su Man blinked, and then her eyes slowly widened. She thought she was beginning to understand.

“…A… solved state?”

“Exactly.” Lu Yuwen furrowed his brow and continued, “If someone had left using my method, the puzzle should currently be in a solved state. But as you’ve seen — after all the distance we’ve covered, we’ve encountered at most three consecutive grid cells connected correctly, and almost every other cell is in the wrong position.”

Su Man stood dazed for a moment. Now that Lu Yuwen had pointed it out, she too realized something was off.

“Does that mean… not a single person in this maze made it out alive? But… even if no one completed the whole puzzle, shouldn’t at least some progress have been made?”

The maze showed absolutely no sign of having been worked on at all.

Lu Yuwen looked around, a frown creasing his brow. “Either leaving the maze doesn’t actually require solving the map — or they encountered some obstacle while solving it that they couldn’t get past.”

After a pause, apparently not wanting Su Man to worry, he added: “Whatever the case, let’s keep to our own method for now. We’ll find the answer eventually.”

“Right.” Su Man nodded.

The two continued forward for a stretch, and at the edge of one section, they unexpectedly came across another enormous pit.

Though “pit” wasn’t quite the right word.

The previous pit had a flat bottom with nothing in it — an empty cell of the maze map.

What lay before them now looked more like a section of land that had subsided, entire buildings having sunk into it, with the ground at the pit’s bottom sitting roughly one story below where Su Man was standing.

Su Man quickly worked it out and said, “A city’s surface follows a curved plane — when a low-elevation section and a high-elevation section are placed next to each other, the height difference creates a drop like this. This patch of land really is extremely low. Let’s go around.”

She turned her head toward Lu Yuwen, then stopped short.

Without knowing why, Lu Yuwen’s face had gone utterly pale.

—