Chapter 38 - 4 Ascension 5K

38: 43, Chapter 4 Ascension (5K) 38: 43, Chapter 4 Ascension (5K) The window glass is extremely thick, like the explosion-proof glass on a presidential limousine, capable of withstanding machine gun fire.

Brute force clearly isn’t an option to break through it.

Outside the window, the night is deep, and city lights twinkle.

Judging from the light positions, the secret room where Li Cheng is must at least be in a high-rise on the fortieth or fiftieth floor.

“This is unexpected…”

He originally thought the secret room would be in some abandoned factory, or a remote wilderness.

“But one thing is certain, the geographical location here isn’t Cuba, and the time isn’t noon.”

Ding-a-ling.

The red landline phone on the coffee table rang.

Li Cheng walked up to it, first wrung out the water from his sleeves, then tucked his hands inside, using a blanket from the sofa as a barrier, before finally picking up the phone.

Given the previous secret room’s drowning trap, all these rooms seem designed to kill.

There’s a chance they could coat the phone with poison or electrify it, so he needs to be cautious.

The call connected successfully, and a mechanically pleasant AI female voice came through, “g=t,p=e,r=s,b=o,z=d.”

Li Cheng nodded, spoke into the phone: “锟斤拷, 锟斤拷?

锟斤拷, 锟斤拷!”

锟斤拷 is a classic Chinese garbled character, essentially the UTF-8 hexadecimal “?” replacement symbol, which becomes corrupted when translated into GBK encoding.

By saying this, Li Cheng was testing the controller on the other end of the phone.

And if there was no controller, perhaps he could use encoded language to get chummy with the AI sister on the phone line, maybe even exchange WeChat contacts.

There was silence on the other end of the phone for a moment before repeating: “g=t,p=e,r=s,b=o,z=d.”

Tsk, no response, playing hard to get, huh.

Li Cheng curled his lip, hung up the phone, and when he lifted it again, it was still reciting that string of code, clearly not allowing him to call for outside help.

Boom!

A loud noise came from outside the room, and the wall at the back started to move, slowly advancing forward.

Desks and chairs toppled, the sofa shifted, and a glass table lamp fell to the floor and shattered.

“The room is eight meters wide, the moving wall’s speed is roughly two centimeters per second, it’ll completely close in just over six minutes, squashing me into a pancake.

Also, since only the back wall is moving and not the side walls closing in, it means I can’t use some kind of hard object to pry open the window on the right side and escape outside.”

Li Cheng calmly assessed the situation.

Whether it’s the prolonged soaking in seawater leading to loss of body temperature that’s causing his mind to wander, or being in the script task unleashed his scatterbrained nature,

part of his mind was still floating away, quipping: “Turned into a pancake; is the designer of this secret room trying to send me to a two-dimensional world?

Eh, it seems Your Excellency’s understanding of ‘two-dimensional world’ is full of misunderstandings☆~!

Well, even the most basic ‘courtesy, integrity, thrift, and shame’ have long been lost…

(laughs) Listen, I say — with such a you, do you even have the right to claim to be ‘two-dimensional’★?

Fufufu — in the end, aren’t you just ‘disqualified for the two-dimensional world’?

Hmm~♪”

While reciting words with an overdose of adolescent affectations, he quickly scoured the room.

On the side of the fireplace, he found an eight-digit electronic keypad lock.

At the edge of the carpet, he found an old photograph.

In the photo were a young man and a young woman, dressed in European Renaissance attire with long gowns, standing on an opera stage gazing affectionately at each other.

The boy looked quite similar to Owen Hedges, whom Li Cheng was impersonating at the moment.

Considering the photo was yellowed with age, the boy was likely not Owen’s son or relative, but a young Owen himself.

As for the girl in the photo, she was probably Owen’s wife mentioned in the mission briefing, who had passed away?

“The two in the photo are performing a drama…

drama…”

He thought of something, avoiding the encroaching wall, and looked towards the bookcase beside the fireplace.

The bookcase was stuffed full of various books, related to economics, law, politics, and the only one related to drama was a book called “Shakespeare’s Sonnets.”

He took down this book from the shelf, opened the pages, but instead of a password, there was a whole lot of repeated English gibberish.

kbsp wr h rwdt gthg rgwor mn rxbvp

wg wr gtp nmowawpz rnhov wq gtp kbspor pipr

wg wr gtp uhspr rgwoopz mn il gtp kbspor gphor

wg wr gtp uwrprg abox ba xhzqprr

gtp iwggpo ghrgp wq bqpr gtobhg

hqz gtp tbqpl gthg opxhwqr bmg ba ophft

Every page was filled with this.

Crackle and pop—

The space continued to narrow, the curtain hooks all came off, and even the seemingly sturdy leather sofa was easily crushed under the terrifying pressure of the hydraulic machines, bursting and crumbling.

Li Cheng stepped on the scattered wood chips, thinking rapidly.

The only eight-letter word in the English gibberish was nmowawpz.

He entered it into the keypad in the fireplace, which indicated failure.

“g=t,p=e,r=s,b=o,z=d…”

The phone on the coffee table was still broadcasting that string of code until it was run over by the wall, ripping the phone line apart, finally stopping the repetition.

“I see, g=t, p=e, are the hints for decoding the gibberish.

The most frequently occurring word in the gibberish, gtp, is actually t*e, most likely being tie or the.

Considering that the occurs much more frequently than the former in English, let’s assume t is h, then the fourth word in the last line, gthg, is actually that, meaning h=a…”

With rapid decoding, the entire string of gibberish was deciphered, meaning “Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs; Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes; Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers’ tears.

What it is else?

A madness most discreet, A choking gall, and a preserving sweet.”

The eight-letter code, nmowawpz, thus becomes purified.

Entering the password, the fireplace buzzed and slowly shifted to the side, revealing a passage just wide enough for one person to pass through.