While Bai Youwei’s group were clearing their game, Su Man and Lu Yuwen remained trapped inside the maze.
This maze had been divided into a grid of 10×10 cells, with each cell averaging roughly 15 kilometers in length and width. They needed to pass through all 100 cells — in other words, they needed to explore approximately 150 square kilometers before they could form a comprehensive judgment and piece together a logical route.
Once the piecing-together was complete, the correct path would appear naturally.
All of this Lu Yuwen had already explained to Su Man.
Su Man felt like the luckiest person alive!
If she hadn’t run into Lu Yuwen, she would never make it out of the maze in a million years. Heaven never seals off all the roads — now all she had to do was keep following these arrows, and she’d get out safely, and then her left hand would heal, and her right hand too, and everything would be wonderful!
Thinking this, her pace quickened without her realizing it, and her mood lifted. The road ahead seemed open and clear, every problem swept away.
“Su Man!”
A voice reached her, faint and distant.
There was no one in this maze but her, Lu Yuwen, and the whereabouts-unknown Zhang Ke, so the person calling her must be Lu Yuwen… Thinking of Zhang Ke gave Su Man a slight pang of worry. Yesterday, when she and Lu Yuwen had hurried back to the spot where the three of them had fallen, the edges of the two map sections had already sealed perfectly together. The rope was gone.
A rope didn’t disappear on its own. Zhang Ke must have climbed up at the last moment and taken the rope to escape.
With the map this large, actually running into him again probably wasn’t easy.
As long as she and Lu Yuwen found the way out before that happened…
“Su Man!”
The voice came again.
Why was Lu Yuwen calling her again?
Su Man wanted to stop and look back — but strangely, her feet… wouldn’t stop.
No, wait…
It wasn’t that her feet wouldn’t stop. It seemed like it was her mind that didn’t want to stop…
“Su Man!” Lu Yuwen grabbed her by the arm, breathless. “You were walking too fast!”
Su Man finally halted, feeling slightly dazed. “…You called me?”
Lu Yuwen panted. “Not just once — I chased after you calling your name over a dozen times!”
Su Man stared at him in bewilderment. “I didn’t hear any of that…”
Lu Yuwen took a moment to catch his breath, then bent over his knees and said, “Don’t look at the arrows while you walk — they affect you. My legs aren’t as fast as yours; next time, I may not be able to catch up.”
He already walked with a limp; with his knee injured, moving was even more difficult.
Su Man came back to herself and asked in alarm, “You — you can’t look at the arrows?”
“Looking at the large arrows is fine, but don’t look at the small ones.” Lu Yuwen pointed to several human-shaped figures along the roadside. “If you keep following the arrows, you’ll end up like them — driven onward forever, until you lose your own consciousness and turn into a puppet.”
Su Man thought back to her dazed state just now, and felt a chill creep over her. “I don’t know what came over me… I just kept thinking, follow the arrows and you’ll get out, follow the arrows and you’ll get out…”
Lu Yuwen sighed. “Su Man. I never said following the arrows would lead you out.”
Su Man thought — yes, Lu Yuwen had never said that. Lu Yuwen had only said they needed to map all 100 cells. So why, as she walked, had her mind drifted and begun believing that following the arrows was the way out?
Earlier, while she was hidden away, she had never thought like this — because her attention then had been entirely focused on Lu Yuwen and those three thugs. Now that escape seemed near, she had unconsciously begun paying attention to the arrows along the path, and so fell under their influence.
The more Su Man thought about it, the colder the feeling that crept down her spine.
She raised her head and looked at Lu Yuwen seriously. “It’s a good thing you called out to me. You saved my life. From now on, whenever there’s anything I can do to help, I’ll do it without hesitation.”
—