At the same time, Xu Yishen looked at the sunflower garden downstairs through the window and said, “Wait a minute, I’ll take a look in the garden.” After saying that, he used mitosis skill to instantly split into five, leaving one of them by his teammates, and the others jumped out of the window and disappeared into the sunflower garden in a blink of an eye.
The sunflowers in the garden were in full bloom, their huge petals fluttering in the wind against the moonlight, neatly organized as a spectacular golden sea wave.
Xu Yishen ran back and forth in the garden, and soon returned to the room on the 2nd floor. He held the sunflowers he picked in his hand and said, “The whole garden is full of sunflowers, I didn’t see a single rose, and the castle we are in is not the same time and space as the original castle.”
Qin Miao calmly asked, “Continue to look for clues, or join Xingwen and the others first?”
Everyone glanced at each other and looked at the oldest senior brother, Liu Zhaoqing, in unison.
Liu Zhaoqing said decisively, “Let’s find Xingwen first. I’m worried that they will wait for us in the original world, in case everyone is walking through a maze, and we can’t contact each other. Even if we find clues, we won’t be able to pass them on.”
Xu Yishen agreed. “That’s right, this time and space shouldn’t be one-time, since we’ve been here before, we can come back again. Meet with others first, discuss the next strategy, and then find clues.”
Zhuo Feng said, “The question is, how can we go back?”
Xu Yishen thought for a moment and said, “Perhaps, we can try to return to the path we took before?”
Lin Manluo said, “At first, we separated from Xingwen at the entrance on the 2nd floor, and then we entered the right room, and when we came out, we found that the woman in the <Mona Lisa> painting opened her mouth wide, and her weird laughter was everywhere in the entire castle, and then later, we entered the left room together and saw the sunflower garden outside the window.”
Zhuo Feng nodded and said, “En. Let’s follow Manluo’s suggestion, go backwards and take a look.”
In order to prevent everyone from getting separated again, Lin Manluo simply summoned a green vine. The soft vine quickly extended and wrapped around the right hands of the six students, in this way, everyone was bound together and no students would fall out.
Everyone followed Zhuo Feng out of the left room and came to the entrance, where the lower half of the woman’s face in the painting turned into a bloody mouth, and a spine-tingling laughter once again came from the hallway.
Ignoring the eerie laughter, Zhuo Feng forced himself into the right room, where Van Gogh’s <Sunflower> oil painting was hung on the wall, just like when they first entered the right room.
Coming out of the room on the right, the hanging painting at the entrance actually returned to normal.
Zhuo Feng saw the paper attached to the hanging painting at a glance. The size and material of the paper was torn from the <Modern Idiom Dictionary> by Xingwen, and a 3D spatial structure diagram was drawn on the paper with a colored brush, and a dashing line was written next to it. “Spatial maze, return to the original path. The staircase is the portal, where world A converges—— Xingwen & Pingce here.”
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
We Tlrtfc’r fsfr ila eq. “Pa gfjiis lr j rqjalji wjhf, atlr lr atf mief ifoa yftlcv ys Wlcukfc jcv Ulcumf!”
Iteb Mfcu kjr jirb gfilfnfv lc tlr tfjga jcv rjlv, “Ofa’r ub vbkcrajlgr.”
Ktf rlz bo atfw delmxis mjwf ab atf 1ra oibbg, jcv atfc atfs rjk atflg afjwwjafr kjlalcu bc atf rboj lc atf ilnlcu gbbw.
Yue Xingwen immediately got up and greeted him. “Senior brother Liu, are you guys alright?”
Liu Zhaoqing laughed. “It’s fine. After we separated on the 2nd floor, we were transported to an illusion in the painting.”
Ke Shaobin asked curiously, “Does the woman in the painting shed tears of blood and attack everyone with her hair?”
Xu Yishen shook his head. “No. The woman in our entrance painting has a mouth as big as half a face and keeps making strange laughing noises, but doesn’t attack us. There are no black roses in the garden downstairs either, but sunflowers.”
Lin Manluo was confused. “Listening to Xiao Ke, the world you entered is very dangerous, and the woman in the painting will attack you?”
Ke Shaobin said, “Yes. The woman in the painting floated out in the steady stream. There was blood everywhere and Xingwen was strangled by them and almost strangled to death! Luckily, Pingce reacted quickly and cut off those hairs with a triangular ruler.”
Recalling the experience just now, Yue Xingwen also had palpitations in his heart. He coughed lightly, and said with a smile, “It’s just a false alarm. I’ve been worried that something might happen to you guys, and it’s just as well that no one’s hurt.”
Jiang Pingce walked over and held Yue Xingwen’s shoulder gently and whispered, “Sit down and talk. There is no time limit for this course, so we can analyze it slowly and try to capture all the details.”
Yue Xingwen nodded and pointed to the sofa in the living room. “Let’s sit down.”
The people sat down on the sofa in turn, and Yue Xingwen then spread out the spatial structure curated by Jiang Pingce and said, “I left this picture at the entrance on the 2nd floor, did you see it?”
Zhuo Feng nodded. “We saw it. It was drawn by Pingce, right?”
He drew each world into a 3D space, marked with letters A, B and so on. The whole picture looked very intuitive, like an analytical answer to a 3D geometry exam question.
Jiang Pingce said, “The fact that both of our groups returned the same way and managed to gather in world A shows that my speculation was correct. The interior of this castle is actually a spatial maze, and the different illusions in the painting represent that we enter different worlds.”
Liu Zhaoqing scratched his head and said, “In that case, since we separated on the 2nd floor, every time we walk through a door or pass a flight of steps, we enter a different space?”
Jiang Pingce nodded. “Yes. What did you see on your side?”
Qin Miao handed Xu Feixue the painting they had copied and said, “In the right room at the very beginning, we see Van Gogh’s <Sunflower> oil painting; Later, I saw three paintings in the room on the left, and we simply copied them and brought them back.”
Xu Feixue said in surprise, “The painting you saw after we separated was completely different?”
Yue Xingwen leaned over and took a closer look, saying, “What we saw in the left room was <Starry Night> and the right room was <The Last Supper>; Senior brother Liu and the others saw three paintings in the room on the left; And saw <Sunflowers> in the room on the right.”
Ke Shaobin said, “Sure enough, in that half hour just now, everyone has been in different spaces, and saw different clues.” He looked at Xu Feixue and said, “What do these three paintings mean?”
Xu Feixue explained, “The first painting <La Donna Velata>, was painted by the Italian painter Raphael, and it’s said this beautiful woman in the painting was the woman he loved; The second painting <Woman with a Parasol> was painted by Monet. The woman and the child in the painting are his wife and son; The third painting <Lady with an Ermine> was the work of Leonardo da Vinci and depicts a mistress of the Duke of Milan.”
Yue Xingwen looked at the three paintings, his brows frowned slightly. “The woman he loved, mistress, wife, there’s a gradual progression in the identity of the people in the paintings. It seems to connect with the theme of substitution and exchange proposed by Pingce before?”
Qin Miao added, “There are also flowers in the flower bed, black roses and sunflowers can represent love. We see a large area of sunflowers in time and space, but now the garden is full of black roses.”
Yue Xingwen speculated, “In other words, the family first planted sunflowers in the garden, and then the murderer killed them, replaced one of them, and shoveled the sunflowers and planted black roses in the garden?”
Jiang Pingce said, “It’s very likely that it’s a case of love murder, the murderer is a woman, and the motive is to kill the other person to take their place.”
The three women’s oil paintings hanging on the walls and the Mona Lisa oil painting at the entrance were all women. A second face appeared in the Mona Lisa painting, as well as strange illusions such as a woman shedding tears of blood, opening her bloody mouth.
There was a high probability that the murderer was a woman.
Ke Shaobin concluded, “This bloody case, was it a woman who killed the innocent ‘Mona Lisa’ and replaced her with a second face? Therefore, the woman in the ‘Mona Lisa’ painting shed tears because she died unwillingly?”
Liu Zhaoqing reminded them and said, “But the bodies we found were a man and two women.”
Jiang Pingce said, “Senior brother Liu judged at that time that two of the deceased had obvious osteoporosis and were older, and the other was very young. Such a combination is very similar to a family of three.”
Yue Xingwen said, “This young girl may be the real target of the murderer, she wanted to kill this girl, but was bumped into by the girl’s parents, and simply killed the other’s whole family?”
Ke Shaobin scratched his head suspiciously, “However, there are three women’s oil paintings, there is a little boy next to the woman holding the parasol, where is the little boy? Are these paintings related to the murder in the castle?”
Yue Xingwen and Jiang Pingce glanced at each other, at present, they only sorted out the main logic, and many details were still not right. For example, what was the role of the little boy in the painting, as described by Ke Shaobin, in the whole case? Or, does this little boy really exist? What exactly do these paintings mean?
Yue Xingwen was silent for a moment, suddenly remembered a key, looked back at Qin Miao and said, “By the way, I ate sunflower seeds from sunflowers when I was a child, I remember that it was autumn, did sunflowers bloom and mature in autumn?”
Qin Miao said, “It usually blooms in July and August, and the seeds mature in September.”
Yue Xingwen then asked, “Qin Miao, do you know when the black rose blooms?”
Qin Miao said, “It should bloom in May and June, and it will slowly wither after July,”
When the surrounding students heard this, they immediately understood the purpose of Xingwen’s inquiry about the blooming time of the two flowers—— Liu Zhaoqing and the others saw the blooming sunflowers, and they could deduce that the time of that world should be in August; At this time, outside the castle, black roses are also in full bloom, and the time should be June.
Assuming that at the beginning, the family planted sunflowers all over the garden in front of the house, and that the murderer killed the family and then razed the garden and planted black roses instead, 2 months would be too late for the roses to bloom.
The corpses dug out in the rose garden have turned into white bones, and it takes about 2 years for normal people to be buried in the ground to whiten, so the world of the old castle they were in would have been 2 years after the murder.
And in the world where the sunflowers were blooming, the murders might not have happened yet. The real time of the crime was likely to be after September, when the sunflowers bloom in autumn!
Realizing this, Lin Manluo immediately said excitedly, “The world where we saw the sunflowers, this family is still alive, so maybe we can find more clues about them?”
Yue Xingwen nodded. “En. The current world is the world after the crime. The sunflower world was before the crime.”
Jiang Pingce looked at him and said, “Continue to investigate in separate groups, or together?”
Yue Xingwen said, “No more splitting up into groups, waiting for each other will waste time, moreover, without Xu Feixue, it’s not easy to analyze when you see the painting, and there’s a chance to miss out the details when copying.”
He stood up and simply said, “Let’s go to the sunflower world first.”
Thanks for the update 😍
Art is too complicated for normal students
Thank you for your translation 🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍