Chapter 54 Mental Defense

I looked at the empty cliff and saw some lingering fire. Fortunately, I was immediately able to recover my calm since I was quite experienced.

The people in Xiao Hua’s team had all followed behind us, so I waved them back while saying to them, “Everything’s fine. They’ve gone somewhere else to implement the plan.”

“What plan?” Jin Xingsan asked.

How should I know? I asked myself. I was just saying those words on a whim to stabilize the troops’ morale, but I also knew that it wouldn’t work if I didn’t do a good job lying, so I said to them, “If you want to get out of here, don’t ask any questions. The stones here can understand people’s words.”

This sentence was also complete nonsense, so Jin Xingsan and the others all looked at each other. Xiao Hua’s people were not idiots and were clearly skeptical, but they were helpless in the face of my great reputation. When I looked back at Jin Xingsan, he didn’t dare ask any more questions.

I turned and pointed my flashlight at the cliff where Xiao Hua had been resting just now and discovered that the bronze piece had also been taken away. I felt a little relieved since this indicated that they had left voluntarily. Or it meant that Poker-Face at least had time to take the bronze piece with them when they left. I just didn’t know what exactly had happened.

As long as they hadn’t received the heavenly gift, then it should be the opponent’s bad luck with these two people together. The only thing was, they hadn’t worked together before, so I didn’t know what the situation would be like.

I checked up and down carefully, but didn’t see them around. Fatty also climbed up and looked everywhere, but there was nothing at all.

I recalled that it took no more than ten minutes from the time Xiao Hua fell asleep to the time I went down to see Fatty and then discovered that something was wrong and shot the imposter, only to climb back up here.

When it came to climbing in this place, you couldn’t go very far in ten minutes so you’d definitely appear in our flashlights’ glow. Unless the two of them had also jumped or were eaten by the rocks here.

We would have definitely felt it if they had jumped, so did that mean that they were eaten by the rocks?

It was only when I asked everyone to go back below that I finally understood the setup here. This appeared to be a vertical campsite that Xiao Hua had carefully designed. There was no need for complicated hanging beds and tents; everyone simply found a rock protrusion and rested on it. The rock crevices were filled with safety buckles, snack wrappers, and portable mountaineering lamps—this kind of lamp had a clamp on the bottom so that it could be inserted into the rock crevices and become a kind of street lamp.

There were a lot of bags hanging up around the area, all of which contained bronze pieces that had been taken from the Zhang family’s suicide temple.

These bronze pieces must have formed a magnetic field that protected everyone in this area.

“Little Master Three, what should we do next?” Jin Xingsan asked me. “What part do we play in your plan?”

I told him not to talk and then swept my eyes over everyone’s faces, my mind calculating quickly.

Honestly, my way of thinking was very simple because what was happening here was just so strange. A person would suddenly come out of the darkness around the cliff and make us feel as if he had been with us the whole time.

Based on what had happened just now, he could even take on any appearance, including ours.

So, the first thing I needed to be sure of was who was my enemy.

If this bee man was just an illusion, then that meant that my enemy was myself. If there was a power here that was affecting my mind, then I had to overcome it by myself. But if this bee man was really a person, then I just couldn’t understand what was going on. But if it was human, it also meant that we should be able to kill it.

There were some details I wanted to verify, so I asked Jin Xingsan, “How do you know about the bee man?”

He gave me a blank look, “What bee man?”

“When we first appeared, didn’t you fire at us directly to keep us from approaching? Someone was even pretending to be me. Who was it? Didn’t you fire because of the bee man?” I looked at everyone in the group.

Jin Xingsan gave me a puzzled look. He obviously didn’t know what a bee man was, so I had to explain it to him, “Have you never experienced an extra person suddenly appearing in your team? You all feel like you know each other, but in fact, this person suddenly mixed into the team while you were on the cliff? You don’t know where they came from and it’s like they appeared out of thin air?”

Jin Xingsan was still very confused, so I continued, “Master Hua and I only recognized each other when we mentioned the calculus problem. Don’t you remember?”

Jin Xingsan nodded and said, “Everything we do is by Master Hua’s orders. We don’t know the logic behind it, we just do it. We don’t know what a bee man is, but Master Hua said that we must have two sets of identities in order to keep the strange phenomenon from happening here. In fact, we don’t even know what the phenomenon is.”

“So Master Hua told you that something strange will happen here and ordered you to do this?”

Jin Xingsan nodded again. “We each have two identities: one is our own and the other is fictitious. We use celebrities from the business that we’ve encountered in our day-to-day lives. For example, this guy is you, Little Master Three.”

He pointed to a person in the team, who greeted me and nodded.

I thought about it and realized that Xiao Hua’s method was called information blocking.

“If I’ve guessed it right, Xiao Hua is the one who gave all of you your second celebrity names, right?” I asked him.

When Jin Xingsan nodded, I looked at Fatty. Fatty’s mind also worked very fast, so he immediately winked at me to show that he understood.

There had to be some hidden logic to the way Xiao Hua chose their names, but this logic was only known to him and would be something very insignificant. As long as the power here was unable to read his mind, it wouldn’t know what logic he used.

Xiao Hua had taught me this mental defense exercise, which was used to fight against hallucinations, so I knew that there was a limit to the number of celebrity names you could utilize with this logic.

So, if something showed up and this thing needed two identities, then it must also have a celebrity nickname.

Suppose the initial logic behind the nicknames was: all twelve people owe me money.

He lent money to twelve people in total, so he used all the names of people who owed him money. If that weirdo wanted to mix in with the group, then he needed to create a person and make Xiao Hua think that this person owed him money.

This could hardly be done, because if the weirdo had that kind of ability, then it could prevent us from finding its words suspicious.

But I knew that the logic behind Xiao Hua’s actions would be very complicated, with more than one level. For example, the second level might be: people who owe me money who I met before 2007, went to Hangzhou together in 2012 and 2013, and paid back some of the money in 2015 and 2016.

The third level might arrange these people by taking their age differences from youngest to oldest and then subtracting the number of the youngest from the oldest. This would be consistent with the unpopular finite mathematical sequence.

The fourth level….

When this weirdo wanted Xiao Hua to believe that he had been with the team from the start, he’d have to create an extremely detailed lie. Every level of this logic-based blockade had a special direction at which the blockade was set up so Xiao Hua’s illusion maker would need to be widely read and study both the arts and sciences.

For example, with the third level, there was a special number sequence. You couldn’t insert another number in the middle, so all you could do was put one more in the front or one more in the back.

But because the number sequence had its own logic to it, if you put one in front, then the number would have to be very small. You couldn’t say that you were three years old, so you could only put this other number at the back. But that meant that the number would be very large, and you’d probably end up admitting that you were over two hundred years old.

I’m not sure if I’m making much sense, but in short, many hallucinations in horror films could be ruined through the use of psychological traps.

Mathematics could destroy any drama’s plot device.

Moreover, Xiao Hua could quickly come up with a bunch of these things in no time at all.

So, after utilizing such a complicated method, they didn’t encounter the bee man here.

There was no way for the bee man to show up. Xiao Hua may not have found it strange initially if some dumbass reported an age that didn’t conform to the sequence when everyone was reporting the age of their second celebrity persona every time before going to bed, but he would realize that this person didn’t conform to the sequence and would wonder why he didn’t put this person in the sequence.

As long as he thought like this from the beginning, then the weirdo couldn’t run away. Plus, even if the opponent really was so powerful that he could give an age that was in line with the sequence—whether it was three years old or two hundred years old—he would still immediately expose himself.

At this time, we could all determine that the other party was incapable of directly confusing us into forgetting our own plans, so Xiao Hua’s mental trap was clearly a great deterrent.

But now Xiao Hua was missing, and as I looked at his team, I couldn’t help but feel that the number of people had been wrong since just a moment ago.

The bee man had appeared.

<Chapter 53><Table of Contents><Chapter 55>