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In the fourth round, 007 rolled a number one.

Gu Mian and Liu Ruyan only walked one square before stopping, but this time the room was no longer empty. It seems that the "emergency repair" of the instance was very effective.

Gu Mian encountered the first ghost she had faced since entering this instance.

【Arithmetic Grid】

What does 1+1 equal? ​​The floor of the room is evenly divided into sixteen squares, each filled with a random number from one to nine. The chess piece in this room has half a minute to memorize all the numbers in the sixteen squares. After half a minute, the numbers will disappear. There is a math-loving ghost in the room. It will give you a number. The chess piece must choose two empty squares so that the sum of the original numbers in the two squares equals the number given by the ghost.

[After the ghost poses a question, you must answer it within one minute. If you successfully write the equation, you will receive a reward; if you fail, you will lose your life.]

There was also a countdown timer above the room, and the 30-second countdown had already begun.

The rooms on the chessboard are all squares. The floor of this room is divided into sixteen squares by black straight lines, and each square is marked with a number.

The two squares next to Gu Mian's right foot are two adjacent ones.

But instead of looking at the numbers in the squares, he turned to search for the ghost in the room.

It took quite a while to find the ghost—it was trembling and huddled in the corner, so small that you couldn't see it unless you looked closely.

Gu Mian stepped over the two obstacles and picked up the trembling ghost hiding in the corner.

"Oh dear," Liu Ruyan said with a look of glee, "She's not gentle at all, look how scared she's made him."

"Do you know where the evil god is?" Gu Mian threw the ghost in her hand to the ground. She had finally encountered something alive, and could finally interrogate it severely.

The math whiz plopped down between two squares, shaking his head in fear, seemingly not understanding what Gu Mian was saying.

"The ghosts here probably don't know where the person you're looking for is. After all, he's always been sneaky, and even if he comes into the instance, he won't let anyone know." Liu Ruyan believed that the ghosts here didn't know that the evil god had come into this instance.

The math devil was very grateful to Liu Ruyan for speaking up for it, and nodded hurriedly.

As expected, nothing could be gotten out of these ghosts. Gu Mian didn't really have any hope of getting the evil god's location out of the torture ghosts. If everyone already knew that the evil god had come to this instance, he should have been kicked out long ago.

It seems I still have to figure it out on the chessboard myself, but with such a big chessboard, I wonder how long it will take to find the evil god.

Furthermore, we don't know where the treasure chest hidden in the chessboard is. It would be bad if other players found the treasure chest and ended the dungeon.

"Do you know where the treasure chest is?" Gu Mian asked the ghost on the ground again.

When Gu Mian asked about the location of the treasure chest, the math ghost's eyes lit up. It probably thought that Gu Mian wanted to take the treasure chest and leave so that they, the ghosts, could escape their misery.

Then its eyes dimmed again, because it didn't know where the treasure chest was and couldn't help Gu Mian finish the dungeon quickly.

At this moment, 007 was staring intently at the chessboard.

Gu Mian and Liu Ruyan have been in the arithmetic grid for more than two minutes, but there is still no information on whether the piece has successfully passed or failed. In the past, the success or failure of a piece in the grid would be displayed.

The pieces in group two have already made their moves. He moved down one space and entered a good square. He will pause for one turn next round.

Next, it was the third group's turn to act, but no information appeared in Gu Mian's room for a long time.

Not only was 007 watching Gu Mian's room, but the other players in the group were doing the same.

"This group must be cheating, right? They immediately produced two pieces, and both pieces landed on empty squares for four consecutive squares. I suspect the emergency repair in the dungeon just now detected this group cheating and fixed it. Now they've been stuck in that arithmetic square for so long and still haven't given a result. That square should give them half a minute to memorize the numbers and a minute to give the equation. At most, it should only take a minute and a half, but it's already been more than two minutes."

Beside the chessboard in the second starting room, the two groups of players were complaining loudly to the people around them.

The second group of players had a bruise on their left cheek and scratches on their right cheek, clearly indicating they had been through a major battle.

The person next to him was no less impressive; his entire right eye was bruised and black, as if he had been punched hard in the eye.

"Let's hurry up and figure out where to go next round. You still have time to worry about other groups? They might have drawn a buff that allows them to have four empty rooms in a row. Didn't we also draw an amazing buff?" The most handsome guy in the world rubbed his black eye socket and rolled his eyes at the passerby.

He was walking down the street when he was inexplicably pulled into this instance. Once inside, he saw that the other two were strangers. None of the three knew each other. They could only see from the player panel that one person was called Passerby A and the other was called Iron Pot Stewed Chicken.

After learning the rules of this special instance, the three of them fought fiercely for the position of the player, none of them giving an inch.

After all, the rules are there, and whoever plays the game is the safest. The three of them don't know each other, and none of them want to die.

As the game progressed, the countdown reached its limit, and the instance helped them decide who would play the game and who would be the first and second place players. Passerby A was the lucky one who drew the role of the player.

Since things have already come to this point, it's not good to continue with internal strife; we can only grit our teeth and move forward.

However, the world's best player looks down on random players, believing that they are just moving around the board without any strategy or basis.

Although he was completely clueless about the chessboard and wouldn't know where to go if he were to play it himself, that didn't stop him from looking down on random passersby.

However, one set is indeed a bit strange.

Thinking about it, he looked at the positions of the two pieces on the chessboard. He guessed that the group must have drawn some kind of bonus that allowed the two pieces to be played together, but the two pieces had to be bound together.

But thinking about it carefully, this bonus doesn't seem to be very useful. If two pieces are always bound together, what's the difference between them and one piece on the board? They also lose the second chance to play.

Moreover, if two pieces move together, it is easy for them to enter a two-space break, at which point one of the two players will die.

Perhaps the four empty spaces encountered at the beginning of a set are also linked to the bonus of playing two pieces together?
Two pieces are bound together on the field, and the first four squares will definitely contain empty pieces. That should be it, I thought to myself, the best in the world, guessing the bonus I would get from the draw.

However, those two pieces in group one have been in the arithmetic square for too long. Now all three groups are about to make their moves, but the arithmetic square still hasn't produced a result.

"I'm the best in the world!" I stared at the squares where the two chess pieces were now. Meanwhile, the numbers on the floor of Gu Mian's room had long since disappeared, and the mechanical voice that kept echoing in the room was, "Please give me the numbers, ghost."

The math devil shakily got up and continued his work, his hand trembling as he made a "two".

A hoarse, unpleasant voice came from its mouth: "Two, please pick two squares so that their original numbers add up to two..."

The mechanical, repetitive sound in the room finally stopped, and at the same time, a one-minute countdown appeared on the ceiling.

Now that the ghost has given the number, Gu Mian has one minute to answer.

That's simple, just add one to one. There were two ones sitting under its butt just now, and it was confident that Gu Mian had definitely seen the two ones under its butt, so Gu Mian would definitely be able to give the correct answer!

The math devil was very confident in the numbers it had given. Just as it was looking forward to the future with hope, Gu Mian looked at Liu Ruyan beside her.

What number plus another equals two?

"do not know."

The math whiz who had just stood up gaped wide-eyed and almost fainted again.

It raised its two withered hands and drew a "1" with one hand, then, like a kindergarten teacher instructing children, it earnestly taught Gu Mian and Liu Ruyan: "One... plus one... equals two."

"Oh, I see!" Gu Mian suddenly realized, then turned to look at Liu Ruyan, "Where is Yi?"

"do not know."

This time, the math idiot really did faint.

The chess piece failed to write an equation within the allotted time. [The equation was not written within the allotted time.]

At this point, I, the world's best, finally saw a change in the room containing the two chess pieces, and the arithmetic result came out.

"Wait, what is this?" He frowned, looking at the information that appeared in the room with a puzzled expression. "What does it mean... 'failed to write the equation within the specified time'? I already said that before, do I need to repeat it?"

The second half of the sentence should be "already dead," right?

If two pieces in a group fail to complete the equation, they should be eliminated.

The player, currently the most skilled in the world, continues to observe the arithmetic grid, waiting for the announcement of a piece's death.

But what he was hoping for never happened, and the two little figures inside still looked lively and energetic.

"It's a ghost!" he exclaimed.

"This is unbelievable!" shouted a passerby. "They're cheating! I'm reporting them for cheating!"

At this point, the three groups of chess pieces had finished their moves, and it was the fourth group's turn. However, the two of them didn't pay any attention to the fourth group's moves; they were only focused on a heated discussion about what had happened in the arithmetic room.

"The pieces in group three have moved up again." Gu Mian looked at the message Liu Ruyan sent in the group.

Because they moved to the "small step" square in the previous round, the three groups can only move forward one step each time for the next three rounds. This time, the three groups moved forward one step and entered the "coin" square.

After reading the message 007 sent in the group chat, Liu Ruyan also realized that something was wrong: "This Group Three has never changed direction from the beginning; it has been moving upwards."

"You've noticed it too, the players in Group 3 have been maneuvering their pieces towards Group 4's starting room." Gu Mian calculated that Group 3's pieces were now only two squares away from Group 4's starting room, but one of those squares was a trap square.

"Can chess pieces also enter the initial room?" Liu Ruyan squinted her eyes.

"The rules do not stipulate that pieces cannot enter the initial room; on the contrary, I think this version even encourages pieces to enter the initial room."

"So they're letting the players kill each other? One group's players move their pieces into another group's starting room and kill the players in that group's starting room. That would greatly reduce the competition," Liu Ruyan speculated about the three groups' motives. "The players in the three groups are very clever; they must have realized this from the beginning."

"Is that why you guessed that if Ren Leshan is in this instance, he is most likely in group three? But group four also started moving downwards at the beginning, but they were unlucky and encountered a trap. The second piece moved towards us and then clashed with us, so it turned. We can't conclude from this that the player in group four didn't think about killing the players in other rooms at the beginning."

Gu Mian shook her head: "You've killed people before, right? You know that killing is a very difficult thing."

Liu Ruyan was taken aback, wondering why Gu Mian had brought up the topic of her.

“Yes, it was very difficult.” Liu Ruyan recalled, “Even killing a person who is fast asleep is unlikely to be a one-hit kill; you have to hit them many times to kill them completely.”

"It's already difficult to kill someone who is completely unprepared, let alone someone who is prepared. With the pieces of the third group about to reach their starting room, I believe the player of the fourth group will not be unresponsive. Even the most dull-witted person can guess the opponent's intentions at this point. He will definitely be well-prepared, making it even more difficult to kill him."

“Yes.” Liu Ruyan was a little puzzled, not understanding why Gu Mian was telling her these things.

"Group Three is very clever; he chose the right direction to make the killing easier," Gu Mian thought about the layout of the chessboard and the rules of the game.

"Compared to Group 4, which decisively chose their positions during the preparation period, Group 2, with its members locked in a fierce struggle, was clearly easier to deal with. However, Group 3 did not choose to go towards the initial room number 2, but instead chose the more decisive, calm, and difficult-to-deal-with Group 4. When Group 3 started its first round of action, the pieces from Group 2 that moved to the right had already been teleported away, so there was no situation where they chose Room 4 out of fear of encountering Group 2's pieces on the way."
"Going towards room number four is also a clever move by the third group of players. If the third group of players had initially sent their pieces to move left to the second group's initial room to kill someone, then the situation we discussed above would have occurred. The third group's pieces would have needed a difficult process to kill the player in the second group's room, and might not have been able to kill the opponent even after ten minutes, and might even have been killed by the opponent in return."

"Wouldn't it be so much easier to kill people in the initial rooms of Group Four?" Liu Ruyan frowned.

"Yes, it's very easy for three groups of pieces to kill the players in four rooms. Do you remember the rule that the players have to roll the dice according to the room number each round? After the previous group of pieces has finished their turn, the next group of players must roll the dice within one minute;
"Once the pieces from the third group have entered the initial room of the fourth group, it is the turn of the player in the fourth group to roll the dice."

"The players in Group 3 want to use the rules to kill the players in Group 4's room." Liu Ruyan understood. "It doesn't have to be a difficult struggle or even a counter-kill like we mentioned before. As long as we suppress the four players for one minute and prevent them from rolling the dice within the allotted time, the players in Group 4 will be eliminated even if they commit a foul. In this way, we can easily kill the four players in just one minute."

However, if the three groups send their pieces to room number two on the left to kill the player in room number two, it won't be so easy.

Because it's impossible to use the countdown timer from the dice roll to kill the person in room two. (End of Chapter)