Li Li had found an English-language book. Its cover was old and battered, its pages incomplete in places, and it documented many foreign folk legends.

Because it was not a fairy tale collection, many entries were missing their beginning or end. Some legends were only a few sparse sentences long.

Regarding the legend of the water monster, the book recorded:

*The water monster’s home lies deep beneath the water. Within its home it keeps shining treasures.*

Only those two sentences.

Li Li spent another two-plus hours reading the book word by word to the very last page — but, regrettably, found no further mention of the water monster.

The books the others had searched held nothing either.

No information on the spring bear or the autumn spike-toothed monster was found either.

Of course, there were still many books left unread, and perhaps the remaining clues were hidden in one of those — but it would require far more time and energy to read every single volume in the study. That wasn’t realistic. Without food or water, they couldn’t afford to keep burning through their reserves like this.

Everyone gathered in the attic again.

Yan Qingwen said, “Summer began at three in the afternoon. It’s now eight in the evening. If in three more hours we still haven’t found the treasure, summer will keep going.”

Under the game’s rules, seasons changed every eight hours — but if the visitor still remained at the door after those eight hours, time would continue to hold at that corresponding season.

Li Li asked, “Did anyone find anything shiny?”

Everyone looked at one another.

“The category of ‘shiny things’ is too broad,” Bai Youwei said. “The mirrors in the house, the glass windows, the silver forks and silver spoons that reflect light, and even the glass eyes on these doll figures — all of those could count as shiny. On that basis alone, there’s no way to pinpoint the target.”

“Since it’s something to be given to the visitor, it must be special… mirrors, glass, things like that probably aren’t it.” Zhu Shu looked around at everyone and said hesitantly, “How about… we do another search? There are still three hours — that’s enough time…”

“We’ve practically searched this place eight hundred times already. If there was something to find, we’d have found it by now.” Su Man was getting frantic. Even as she said it, her hands kept rifling through the miscellaneous items nearby.

She turned over a glass hourglass and muttered, “Does this count as shiny?”

Then she found a toy train and felt the metal locomotive head, asking, “Does this count?”

If anything shiny would do, the range was genuinely too large.

“I still think the treasure is on the first floor,” Li Li said, head lowered slightly, his voice a few shades quieter than usual from the injury. “The spring bear woke up. It was in a panic about losing its two children — what the bear was looking for was a small stuffed bear that looked like itself. Then… summer rain is so big, it’s pitch black and I can’t see where the treasure is — specially emphasizing ‘pitch black’ wouldn’t be without reason. Every word in the nursery rhyme has its own significance. We should be looking for the treasure in the dark place.”

“You mean go look on the first floor?” Tan Xiao stared. “The first floor is flooded!”

Li Li looked at him. “As long as you wrap the flashlight in plastic wrap and dive into the water, it should be doable.”

Tan Xiao was more surprised still: “Where are we getting plastic wrap?”

“If there’s no plastic wrap, use a plastic bag.” Yan Qingwen said, “I think Li Li’s method is worth trying.”

“The problem is we don’t have plastic bags either.” Tan Xiao stared at both of them, completely baffled. “Almost everything we could use is on the first floor! But the first floor is flooded!”

Shen Mo thought for a moment and stood up. “I can go down and take a look. Even in the dark I can’t search for the ‘treasure,’ but if I know its exact location and direction, finding things down there shouldn’t be difficult.”

—