Smack!

A red mark immediately appeared on Liao Jingjing’s face. She froze for two seconds before looking at Chen Hui in shock: “You hit me?!!”

Liao Jingjing’s eyes widened, feeling utterly wronged: “I’m not the one who made Teacher Tu become like this! It was those puppets! What right do you have to hit me!!!”

Chen Hui was about to strike again when Zhang Tianyang stopped her: “Chen Hui! Come back and watch Teacher Tu!”

Chen Hui bit her lower lip and glared at Liao Jingjing with resentment. After a moment, she finally lowered her hand and turned back to Tu Dan’s side.

Tu Dan seemed completely unaware of the students’ conflict.

Her thoughts seemed to have become extremely sluggish, and her speech slowed accordingly. In an ordinary tone she said, “It’s very late… Everyone, go back to your tents and rest…”

The students stared at her fixedly. No one moved.

Chen Hui supported Tu Dan’s upper body with one hand while helping wipe the water from her face with the other, asking softly, “Teacher Tu, how do you feel right now? Do you feel uncomfortable anywhere?”

“No…” Tu Dan weakly lowered her eyelids, her voice gradually growing fainter, “Just no strength… A little sleepy… I need to sleep for a while, sleep for a while…”

Tu Dan closed her eyes.

Her students surrounded her on all sides. No one left, and no one spoke.

All emotions sank into this deathly silence…

After watching for a while, Bai Youwei and Shen Mo returned to their own tent.

Meanwhile, Cheng Weicai and Tan Xiao remained outside, afraid these students would make more mistakes.

Tu Dan’s accident was like a bolt from the blue for everyone. They hadn’t yet found a way out of the maze, but people were disappearing one after another. They were helpless—this place was full of mirrors, impossible to guard against. Even if they wanted to cover them, they couldn’t possibly cover them all!

As long as they survived in this maze for one day, they faced threats from the mirror puppets for one day.

By tomorrow, who knew how many more people would be gone.

Shen Mo sat in the tent with no desire to sleep. He picked up the paper Bai Youwei had used for drawing. Through counting and deduction, Bai Youwei had already restored about one-third of the maze map. If they accelerated the pace going forward, in at most two days they could restore the entire maze map.

But Shen Mo felt no relief whatsoever.

Because the ultimate purpose of restoring the map was to find the exit, and the exits had already appeared before their eyes.

It was just that they currently had no way to determine which exit was real, which exit was fake, or… whether they were all fake.

“Maze, maze… When you get down to it, it’s still just a game.” Bai Youwei held her pen thoughtfully. “As long as it’s a game, there must be rules and a solution.”

Shen Mo looked at her: “But this game hasn’t given us any rules, and hasn’t even arranged a supervisor.”

“No, the rules were already given to us—we just might not have understood them…” Bai Youwei stared at the unfinished map before her, murmuring, “If I were the maze, what would I do?”

“If I were the maze…”

She drew a circle on the paper.

“First, I would give players a starting position.”

She drew another circle of horizontal lines outside the circle.

“I would use mirrors as markers for the starting point, letting players know this is the starting point.”

She drew several small black dots scattered at more distant positions.

“Then, I would determine the endpoint positions. But the true endpoint is only one, and the path out of the maze can only be unique.”

“Just distinguishing true from false—that difficulty isn’t enough to match such a large-scale game. I need to continue creating difficulty for the players. After all, I’ve already given them enough food and water—”

She drew danger symbols one after another near the black dots, murmuring to herself:

“I need to increase the difficulty, so I create mirror puppets. Players must find the true exit amid layers of danger…”

She stopped speaking here.

“What is it?” Shen Mo asked her. “What did you think of?”

Bai Youwei stared blankly. “Mirrors can bring death, so they should also bring life. Tomorrow I want to go look at the first exit.”