Chapter 15 • Three-Day Rotation
879 Words
All eyes turned, almost as one, to the light behind Shen Zheng and Cui Xun.
"…What does this mean?"
"Why is there a light behind them?" someone asked, their voice trembling slightly.
It was an unnervingly cold, pale white light, flickering to life in the shadows like some kind of marker, as if whispering a single phrase:
Your turn.
Ji Yuan stood rooted to the spot, unable to move for a long moment. His mind replayed the words Lu Zhibai had spoken only moments before:
"When we start treating each other as variables too—and turn on one another."
Those words had driven into a tender spot in his heart like a blunt nail—slowly, but with unerring precision.
It dawned on him then that they might never have escaped the so-called "script" at all, not from the very start. They had merely been acting it out this entire time.
"This might have something to do with the logic of time."
Lu Xu's voice cut through the silence suddenly, jolting Ji Yuan out of his reverie.
He spoke in a calm, even tone, as if he were not describing a mortal danger, but a simple, ordinary math problem.
"What did you say?" Ji Yuan snapped back to his senses, frowning at him.
Lu Xu did not hurry to reply. He sat on the edge of the bed and spread open a notebook filled with dense, scrawled writing.
His fingers flipped through the pages, the edges of the paper rustling softly—a motion he had repeated countless times over the past few days, as he recorded, calculated, and deduced.
"We've been trapped in this room for three days now."
He lifted his head to look at the others, his voice carrying an odd note of certainty.
"Three days. Seventy-two full hours. Don't any of you feel like everything here is moving like clockwork?"
"The timing of the light changes, the intervals between the radio broadcasts, the frequency of food drops… even your own actions."
He pointed at his notes. "Its rhythm has never once faltered."
"And right now…" He tapped the time scrawled on the page. "It's seventy hours and twenty-seven minutes."
"It's about to shuffle the deck."
The air in the room seemed to freeze the moment the words left his mouth.
"You mean… we're going to be separated?" Yi Ran asked in a low voice, anxiety etched across his face.
"I'm not certain." Lu Xu closed his notebook, his tone still unshaken.
"But it will most likely take the groups it's initially sorted us into over these days—and scatter us all over again."
A frigid silence descended.
"Sorted?" Xie Chuan raised an eyebrow. "Is it stratifying us?"
Lu Xu did not answer directly this time. Instead, he lifted his gaze to Lu Zhibai, his voice sharper than it had ever been before:
"The system fears us uniting. It fears us figuring out its rules."
"So before the fourth day arrives, it will shuffle the deck—tearing apart anyone who's getting close to the truth, for good."
A brief hush fell over the room.
Lu Zhibai said nothing, but a faint furrow appeared between his brows. Xie Chuan let out a low whistle, a faint smile playing on his lips as he spoke. "You sure know a lot, don't you?"
Lu Xu only murmured, "I've just been watching how it sifts through people."
He sounded as if he were talking to himself. He had never been a conspicuous presence in the room, yet he had recorded every single change that had unfolded, quiet and unobserved, from the very beginning.
He was no leader, but a calm observer—waiting for some pattern to reveal itself.
Just then—
Beep.
A sharp chirp blared from the camera overhead, and a cold, mechanical system voice cut through the silence an instant later:
[Target: Lu Xu.][Observation Level: Upgraded to Level 2.][Abnormal Trajectory: Active analysis of system behavior detected. Recording imminent.]
For a split second, everyone froze.
Ji Yuan s*ck*d in a sharp breath, his gaze darting to Lu Xu almost instinctively. "It… it's started monitoring you too?"
Lu Xu's eyelids drooped slightly, his expression unchanged. He simply closed his notebook and set it back on the edge of the bed slowly, his movements rigidly controlled—as if he had known this day would come all along.
"You're marked by the system now too." Ji Yuan said in a low, grave voice.
"It doesn't matter." Lu Xu's voice was soft, but unwavering. "If my deductions are correct, it will initiate the First Round of Division tonight—or tomorrow morning."
He paused, his gaze sweeping across the room, his tone losing all trace of warmth:
"When that happens, we won't be in the same room anymore."
At that very moment, the system's voice blared out again:
[Approaching Time Node: 72 Hours.][Behavioral Data Updating…][Adjustment Preparations: In Progress.]
As the system's voice faded, the overhead lights flickered twice, and a sharp click echoed from the corner of the room—as if some hidden mechanism had just been triggered.
Lu Zhibai lifted his head slowly, his gaze fixing on the camera's cold, black lens, and spoke in a soft voice:
"It's… starting to choose."
[End of Chapter Fifteen]
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