Chapter 17 Inspiration

I hesitated for about two or three seconds, knowing that the present situation was very bad.

Black Glasses had taught me before to quickly classify the problems I was facing and then come up with the fastest solution to deal with them. Otherwise, in many cases, it would take too much time to understand the problems and would instead compress my own survival time to the limit.

As a result, my classification of the current situation was that I was playing at a weak level.

Xiao Hua had always advised me not to let myself wind up at a weak level.

While Xiao Hua would probably never encounter such a situation, Black Glasses didn’t pay attention to such things and still had a few ways to play at a weak level.

The first was to face the reality of your situation, and the second was to find the only thing that was good for you at that moment and embrace it tightly.

I knew I had at least one thing going in my favor: the rock wall was very thick and the weight of these rocks was heavy enough, so no matter what was on the other side, it was absolutely impossible for it to come through the crevice.

The next thing I had to do was find the opponent’s weakness.

I actually had two opponents, one of which was the layer of rocks all around me that weighed God knew how many tons. This opponent had no weakness, except for the large crevice running down the middle of it. I could breathe and I still had dry food on me. Although answering the call of nature may not be convenient in this narrow space, Black Glasses had said that when facing a dilemma, any extra object around you could wind up being your weapon and savior.

I never had time to think about how the products of my bodily functions could save me, but I believed everything that Black Glasses had said. After all, I had done some training with him before, so I knew that his way of thinking was right.

My second opponent was the mysterious thing on the other side, which was completely beyond my understanding. I looked at the watch again. Either it had broken, some function I wasn’t familiar with had activated, or I was hallucinating right now. In any case, this monster was trying to lure me into putting my hand into the rock crevice.

So, this meant that it couldn’t get through.

Even if it flew into a rage, it couldn’t get through. Otherwise, it wouldn’t need to try and outsmart me like this.

Black Glasses had once described Poker-Face as a guy who would never try to win by outsmarting people. Now, that wasn’t to say he was an idiot—after all, he could do the most difficult jobs, especially after he disguised himself and fully committed himself to the role—but he was so capable and strong that he always ended up using the fastest speed to overpower the opponent instead of wasting time trying to outsmart them.

Those who had to rely on outsmarting others must be unable to attack their opponents directly.

If that were true, then I could try to provoke or even destroy my relationship with the monster on the other side by trying to insult it.

Personally, my only advantage was that I had systematically studied some theories in school and learned a lot from various people so I could quickly analyze the enemy’s situation.

First of all, this monster was trying to lure me. Was it a monster with conscious thought that was intentionally trying to lure me or a monster without conscious thought, which was only able to affect my brain through some kind of mechanism?

The way in which horsehair worms⁽¹⁾ controlled mantises was very simple: they would let the mantises see a shining surface and then make them jump down. It seemed that horsehair worms were able to remotely sense all rivers and would guide the mantises to the lake they had in mind, which showed a great deal of intelligence. The truth, however, was that they just made the mantises jump onto any shining surface.

So, any mantis infected with a horsehair worm would not only jump into a lake, but also hit a mirror. This reminded me of that one time I visited my hometown and saw a lot of mantises jumping on a new stainless steel pot lid that was shining in the sun.

If I followed this line of thought, then the monster might be reflexively using the sutra to try and control my thoughts so that I would stretch my hand into the crevice. I was certain that after it grabbed my hand, it would have a way to kill me.

The second thing of note was that the monster was intelligent, but I had yet to meet a monster that truly had the same intelligence as humans and could directly talk to people.

Plus, after arriving at this place, we all kept having mental problems, from receiving the heavenly gift to Fatty seeing strange things at night—wait a minute.

As soon as I thought this, I suddenly recalled Fatty’s expression at that time.

What happened when we first entered that crevice?

Like a bolt of lightning in the darkness, I suddenly had a flash of inspiration.

<><><><> 

Author’s daily message:

For the time being, I can only update “Ghost Banquet” a bit at a time, so everyone can store them up and binge them.

There’s been a lot going on recently.

The problematic areas that have been written will be corrected when published, and as always, the electronic and published manuscripts will be overhauled.

<Chapter 16><Table of Contents><Chapter 18>

****

TN Notes:

(1) Horsehair worms (aka nematomorpha) are a parasitoid animal that range in size from 50-100 mm. They live in damp areas, such as watering troughs, swimming pools, streams, and puddles. The adult worms are free-living, but the larvae are parasitic on arthropods, such as beetles, cockroaches, mantises, grasshoppers, crickets, locusts, and crustaceans. More info here. They had a brief mention in the Zombie Turtle extra when Poker-Face trolled Fatty.

****

Roads are too bad to drive to my parents’ house today so I’ll have to try again tomorrow. Ain’t no way I’m trying to die on Christmas Eve lol. In the meantime, hope you enjoyed your DMBJ Christmas miracle ❅*⋆⍋⋆*❅