Mark was left speechless.
Of course he hadn’t tried it with live chickens — but they had tried with other things.
“We’ve thrown a lot of things into these rooms: clothes, socks, torn-off fingernails, pulled-out hair… and items we had no use for. We tried all of it! Everything disappeared! Unless there’s a living person in the room, nothing can be kept there.”
Mark gazed at the basket with a pained expression. “These chicks… what a shame if they vanished…”
Bai Youwei smiled. “You just said living people were fine. These chicks are alive too.”
“But the chicks belong to you…” Mark grew anxious, his hands starting to gesture. “You’d have to be in the same stone chamber as the chicks — otherwise they’ll disappear!”
Bai Youwei gave an indifferent shrug. “These chicks don’t belong to me.”
Mark froze. “Ah…”
“To be precise…” Bai Youwei smiled. “These chicks belong to themselves. ‘Unclaimed objects’ is a concept you came up with — it’s not an explicitly defined rule of the maze. Since we’re playing with concepts here, let’s play at a higher level. Every life is an independent entity. No life belongs to another life. So, if living people aren’t erased, living chicks shouldn’t be erased either.”
She set down the basket, selected a chick from inside, tied a length of cotton thread around one of its feet, then walked to a door and said: “Open this door.”
Du Lai, standing beside it, opened the door. Inside was complete darkness.
Still the same stone chamber.
Bai Youwei tossed the chick inside. Everyone gathered around, shining their flashlights in, observing the chick’s condition in the stone chamber on the other side.
The little chick cheep-cheeped, seemingly calling out to its companions. Its small, tender yellow feet trembled faintly.
The environment in the stone chamber was far too cold and dark for it.
It was somewhat cruel, but there was no helping it — it was the same as how tomb raiders, after digging open a passage, would send in a small bird or a cat first, all for the sake of survival.
……
The little chick cheep-cheeped in the stone chamber for about a minute, without disappearing.
Bai Youwei pulled on the cotton thread, drawing it back little by little, and placed it back in the basket.
“Which door was that?” she asked Shen Mo.
Shen Mo glanced down at his compass. “The south door.”
“Then take three more chicks and test the stone chambers behind the east, west, and north doors.” Bai Youwei instructed everyone. “Make sure to tie them securely with thread — don’t let the chicks slip free. If a chick gets loose, you’d have to go in and catch it — and entering one room is the same as giving the Minotaur one room’s worth of movement. Be careful.”
Du Lai, Chen Hui, and Leonid each took a chick, tied thread around its feet, and tossed them into the rooms behind the east, west, and north doors respectively.
Whether by good fortune or not, every chick survived — each one safe and sound, cheeping away in its respective stone chamber.
Bai Youwei decided to continue heading south. She wanted to determine just how many of these identical stone chambers there were, and where the end lay.
She led the group into the southern stone chamber. Mark, Dylan, and Slade hurried after them, terrified of being left behind.
Upon arriving in the new stone chamber, Bai Youwei repeated the same method — sending the chicks out to probe the three adjacent rooms.
This time, however, the chick sent through the eastern door disappeared.
The thread tied to its foot vanished along with it.
“It seems this stone chamber is a teleportation point. Even without knowing whether the teleportation destination is fixed…” Bai Youwei grabbed a handful of millet from her bag and tossed it into the eastern chamber. A few seconds later, the millet also disappeared.
“In this temperature, the chicks may not survive very long.” Shen Mo reminded her.
Bai Youwei thought for a moment, then turned to ask Mark: “Hey — you said earlier that living people inside stone chambers are fine. What about dead people? Do dead bodies disappear?”
She wasn’t concerned about the chick out of sentiment — she was worried that if a chick died, it would vanish immediately without leaving even a feather, which would make it impossible to determine the destination of the stone chamber’s teleportation jump.
—