Chapter 2

After Bai Yan read the explanation, thirty seconds had passed.

There is an hourglass-shaped icon on the upper right side of the phone, and a countdown is displayed below the icon.

Thirty minutes seems like a lot of time, but no one knows how many pieces of the puzzle need to be completed.

Time was running out, so Bai Yan didn't talk to the randomly matched players. He stood up and walked to the desk behind him, opened a drawer and checked it.

Seeing someone leaving, the others had no intention of talking and left their seats one after another, each finding a place to rummage.

There were two drawers in the desk that Bai Yan searched. He originally thought that the puzzle would be difficult to find, but unexpectedly, when he opened the second drawer, he found a pair of disordered puzzle pieces, which were quietly being found. Lying in the drawer.

"The difficulty of the game is shown as 'easy', but is it really that easy?"

Bai Yan scanned the base of the puzzle, and the one he found was a 7*9 pattern puzzle with a total of 63 pieces.

Generally speaking, it takes an ordinary person about 15 minutes to complete a 63-piece puzzle. As long as they are not mentally retarded, no matter how stupid they are, they can complete it within 20 minutes. The game allows a full 30 minutes. In any case, there is too much time. .

What's more, he found that the pattern in this puzzle happened to be a panoramic view of the room. With a physical comparison, even kindergarten children could successfully complete it.

This game deliberately brings a group of people here and threatens them. If the purpose is just to make them play jigsaw puzzles, it is really unreasonable.

Bai Yan remembered that the name of the game was Supernatural Puzzle, and felt that the difficulty of the game probably did not lie in the puzzle itself, but in the supernatural phenomenon attached to the puzzle.

In this case, he is not in a hurry to put the puzzle together.

With a physical reference, his speed can be further improved and he can complete the puzzle in about ten minutes.

But just in case, Bai Yan decided to use fifteen minutes to complete the puzzle and the other fifteen minutes to collect clues.

Putting the puzzle on the table first, Bai Yan began to look at the desk carefully, trying to find something useful.

On the tabletop of the desk, in addition to the puzzle piece he just put on, there were also some stationery piled messily.

The tabletop of the desk was littered with discarded drawing paper, broken oil pastels, and food remnants.

Bai Yan picked up a piece of drawing paper with content and took a closer look. He saw that a large area of ​​the drawing paper was blackened with pencil, and in the center of the drawing paper, four little red people with strange smiles were painted with crayon.

"There are two little people who are obviously taller than the other two. They are probably parents and two children, a family of four?"

The stick figure on the drawing paper is very clumsy and looks like a child's doodles.

Judging from the lines, Bai Yan guessed that the person who drew the picture must be a primary school student. He turned over the drawing paper and found two lines of words on the back of the paper -

[Class 1, Grade 2, Xin Meng. ]

"He is really a kid who has just entered elementary school. Xin Meng, judging by his name, he should be a girl." He said to himself.

In order to make sure that no information was missed, Bai Yan opened other drawing papers and found that the contents on each drawing paper were similar, so he put the drawing papers away and began to look through a schoolbag on the chair in front of the desk.

The school bag on the chair is bright pink with cute cartoon patterns printed on it.

There are several Chinese and mathematics textbooks in the schoolbag, as well as some homework books.

Bai Yan flipped through it briefly. Except for Xin Meng's name, the textbook was clean and had no trace of use.

Finally, he found a diary from the middle of his schoolbag, and Xin Meng's name was also written crookedly on the cover.

Judging from the blood stains on her schoolbag, the little girl named Xin Meng was already in danger.

So, Bai Yan opened the diary and found that a lot of things were written intermittently on it——

"April 16, Qing. Xiaohua and Huanhuan didn't come to school today. School is boring. I don't want to go to school."

"May 2nd, cloudy, my brother passed away. My parents were very sad, and so was I."

"It's cloudy on May 19th, and I still haven't found my brother. My parents are afraid that I won't see him either, so they asked me to stay at home and not go to school. But I want to go to school to play with Xiaohua and Huanhuan."

"It was cloudy on May 28th. My parents didn't go to work and frowned every day. I asked why and they were even more embarrassed. My mother hugged me and kept crying. She was thinking about my brother. I miss my brother too. ”

"It was cloudy on July 1st. My father was gone. My mother cried all day long. I cried too. I couldn't find my father."

"On July 6, Qing, my mother went out to buy things, but she didn't come back, and she disappeared. I was scared and didn't dare to go out. I closed the door and wanted to wait for my mother."

"July 7th, cloudy, mother didn't come back."

"July 8th, cloudy, mom still hasn't come back."

"July 9th, cloudy, I can't find my mother. I eat chocolate every day. I counted, and I still have twelve yuan left. I have to wait for my mother."

"On July 10th, it was cloudy. My mother came back and brought my father and brother back. I was very happy, but I was also very scared. My mother's face was so pale. I held her hand worriedly. My mother's body was liangliang. It was scary, she said she was so cold."

"On July 11th, it was cloudy. My father was very hungry. He tried to force me to eat my food. I was very angry. My brother was not obedient, but my parents did their own thing and ignored him. My mother nailed the door. She said that our family Don’t go out anymore, it will be safe.”

"July 12, ?, it hurts so much, it hurts so much, I can't move, I'm in so much pain, I can't move, mom holds me and helps me write my diary, but I'm in so much pain. Mom, can you take me to see a doctor, I'm really in pain."

"July 13, ?, I'm in so much pain, I watch dad eat, watch my brother play, but I can't move, I'm in so much pain. But mom said our family will be together forever, we are very happy..."

The diary ended on July 13, Bai Yan flipped a few pages back, until the end, there was no other handwriting, it seems that Xin Meng's diary ends here.

After quickly flipping through the diary, Bai Yan closed the diary and sorted out his thoughts.

From the content of the diary, this little girl named Xin Meng is still in school, but one day her brother disappeared, and then her father also disappeared, and finally her mother.

After her mother disappeared, the little girl has been waiting at home, afraid to go out, and three days later, her mother came back with her missing brother and father.

If you read this far, it is still a relatively normal story. However, from Xin Meng's description, her parents behaved very abnormally after returning. One of them was frighteningly cold, and the other kept eating like a bulimic, even snatching the daughter's food. Obviously, something terrible happened to these two people.

In connection with the theme of "supernatural puzzle", Bai Yan felt that he probably knew what would happen next. Combined with the content of the diary, it is possible that the ghosts of the four members of this family will come out to make trouble when the puzzle is put together?

Of course, the diary only describes the weirdness of the parents and the little girl, and does not describe the younger brother too much.

In Xin Meng's diary, it was only mentioned that "the younger brother was disobedient", but Bai Yan did not think that this child would live well. His whole family was already abnormal, and the door was nailed up. The family of four were trapped in the room, with no extra food source. Can he, a child under six years old, "live" safely in human form?

Maybe Xin Meng's younger brother, like her parents, had died before returning. Xin Meng completely let the wolf into the house, letting three ghosts who were no longer her relatives into the originally safe home!

While thinking, Bai Yan heard a noise coming from the right.

Next to the closet, the new man and the junior high school student quarreled, because after communicating, they found that both of their puzzles were printed with terrifying "ghosts", but the area of ​​the "ghost" on the junior high school student's puzzle was much smaller than that of the man, so the man threatened the junior high school student, wanting him to hand over the puzzle, and throw his puzzle with a large piece of "ghost" to the junior high school student.

But the junior high school student was not stupid, so no matter how the man threatened, he would guard the puzzle tightly and not let go. The naive junior high school student might think that this would protect his puzzle, but based on Bai Yan's many years of experience in fanning the flames, if he didn't let go, the strong man would not be able to help but take action.

However, they said there was a ghost on the puzzle, why wasn't there one on his?

Bai Yan reflexively looked at the woman who was standing in front of the food cabinet and looking at the puzzle with her face sideways. The woman also found the puzzle, but the bad thing was that Bai Yan's eyesight was too poor. The woman's face was blurry in his eyes, and he couldn't see her expression clearly, so he had no way to guess whether there was a ghost on her puzzle.

... Forget it, let's just assume that there was a ghost on her puzzle.

Bai Yan still wanted to intervene in the conflict between the junior high school student and the boy, but he didn't ask the woman rashly for fear of arousing their vigilance.

Anyway, there are two possibilities, the woman's puzzle has a ghost, and the woman's puzzle has no ghost.

If it is the former, then it is obvious that there is something wrong with his puzzle, which means that there must be a key clue hidden in the puzzle. And if it is the second, then it means that this game is divided into two modes, and the two people without ghosts on the puzzle are another way to play, which may be more difficult or easier.

But no matter which hypothesis is, it is necessary to check the puzzle again.

So, Bai Yan decided to look at the puzzle again.

His eyesight was poor, so he bent down and got closer to look at the puzzle on the desk. He separated the overlapping pieces so that he could see every piece.

After looking at it for a full minute, he finally saw the weirdness of this puzzle.

On one piece of the puzzle, there was a distorted face on the fragment corresponding to the chair -

Upon closer inspection, the face was stuck to the backrest of the chair, and the limbs were twisted into a knot, entangled on the four chair legs.

Bai Yan looked carefully and found that it was a person on all fours, her neck was twisted painfully so that the whole deformed face was stuck to the chair.

The moment he saw this fragment, Bai Yan had an epiphany in his heart. He finally knew why the little girl in the diary was so painful in the end.