RNP Chapter 4588 The Day of Brightest Day (47)
Chapter 4588 The Day of Brightest Day (47)
Chapter 4588 The Day of Brightest Light (Forty-Seven)
Fortunately, their final attempt succeeded, finally causing the pyramids to line up in welcome. Then, a road emerged from the sand, but they still had no vehicles and had to proceed on foot.
After walking for a while, the pyramids finally came into view, meaning they were on the right track. Then, not long after, they encountered the first pyramid, which they couldn't identify, but it was probably not the most famous Great Pyramid of Giza.
Deathstroke walked up to the pyramid, looked at it, shook his head, and said, "There's no door; we can't get in."
“Don’t tell me this is a mystery too,” Schiller said, looking at the pyramid. “I can’t work with my stupid crab companions anymore.”
“I don’t think so,” Deathstroke said after circling around for a while. “But there’s no way forward. Which way should we go next?”
Schiller quietly examined the pyramid. Even up close, it wasn't very large, not as majestic as many people imagined. Perhaps some pyramids are larger, but this one was small. It was completely enclosed on all sides; there was no way to get in. So, where was the passage?
“The shadow,” Schiller was the first to notice something was wrong. “One side of the shadow is longer.”
The tolling bell looked up at the sky; the moon hung high, but was slightly off-center. This caused the shadow cast on one of the four faces of the pyramid to be slightly longer.
"Is this really reliable?" Deathstroke asked. "What if it's wrong?"
"Let's give it a try first." Schiller walked in that direction. Not long after, they encountered a second pyramid.
“You’re right,” said Deathstroke. “We haven’t gone far. If the shadows were right, the north shadow would be longer this time. But this time it’s east, which is completely against the laws of optics, proving that it is indeed a guide.”
So they followed the shadows, walking and walking. Finally, they found themselves back at the first small pyramid. The death knell sighed deeply.
“I knew it wouldn’t be that simple.” He drew his greatsword and said, “Let’s try to cleave it in two.”
Schiller stopped him, saying, "The shadow is an answer, but not necessarily the only answer. Remember how many pyramids we passed?"
"About four?"
“We started by following the shadows, passed four pyramids, and returned here, which proves that the four pyramids form a circle. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have returned to the starting point.”
"That's true, but what are you trying to say?"
"The answer may not be in these four pyramids, but in the center of this circle. So we need to go diagonally across this rectangle."
“Let’s give it a try.” Deathstroke seemed to have lost all interest in thinking; he didn’t even quite understand what they were doing. Schiller had only come looking for the murals, but now they were playing an ancient Egyptian puzzle game.
Schiller and the Bell walked in one direction, and unsurprisingly, they soon came upon a disc engraved with mysterious patterns. In the center of the disc was a fountain, but it was dry. The patterns were all grooves, seemingly meant to be filled with water.
"Good heavens, where are we going to find water?! Could there be some kind of oasis nearby?"
Schiller looked around. They had already surveyed the surroundings during their previous walk. The area was entirely desert, devoid of any vegetation. Everything in this mysterious space was man-made; there couldn't be any extraneous natural scenery. This meant it wasn't solved with water.
He walked to the fountain, stood there for a moment, then stepped back a few paces, observed it again, and reached out to the bell, saying, "Give me your sword."
“You’re getting more and more skilled at blackmailing people,” Deathstroke said, but still handed the sword to Schiller. Schiller didn’t take the greatsword to chop at the fountain; he simply held it upright, placed the tip in the fountain’s basin, and twirled the blade with his hand.
At a certain angle, the entire blade of the greatsword lit up. The moonlight wasn't reflected; instead, it formed a silvery film. Then, to Deathstroke's astonishment, the moonlight transformed into a mercury-like liquid, flowing into the fountain's basin.
Then, the fountain erupted again, the silver liquid flowing into the patterned grooves, the entire magic circle lit up, and the ground rumbled.
"Come here!" Schiller shouted at Deathstroke. But Deathstroke was clearly suspicious of the thing, and he was just a step too slow. The magic circle lit up, Schiller disappeared, and Deathstroke remained in place.
Deathstroke stared in disbelief. He hurriedly picked up his sword, trying to refill the fountain, but no matter what he did, nothing happened. Enraged, Deathstroke swung his sword and knocked the fountain over.
Schiller, who had been teleported away by the magic circle, only felt a moment of disorientation. When the light faded, he found himself in a dark room. It was a completely enclosed room with four discs on each of the four walls. Two of them were inscribed with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, while the other two were murals.
Schiller couldn't understand the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, but the two murals depicted grazing and planting respectively, suggesting a need to match the text. Schiller should have been solving the mystery, but he should be more concerned with where the death knell was.
He didn't step onto the magic circle, which wasn't unexpected, as it certainly looked like a trap. As a mercenary, Deathstroke wouldn't easily step on something he didn't understand. However, this was clearly the correct way to the next level, and he had missed the teleportation. What should he do now?
Schiller felt they should wait for Deathstroke, mainly out of consideration for his teammate. He couldn't be the only one tormented by the puzzle. He could tell that Deathstroke didn't enjoy solving puzzles either.
After waiting for ages, the death knell still hadn't arrived. Schiller didn't know if the magic circle was a one-time use item or if he'd been teleported somewhere else. He could only spin the disc.
Then he discovered that the disc only had two orientations: upright and upside down. It seemed that all he had to do was match the text and the image together and rotate them to the same angle.
Schiller did notice some writing and patterns on the surrounding bricks, but he was too lazy to look at them, so he simply used exhaustive methods. There weren't many possibilities anyway, so he just tried them one by one.
As he expected, exhaustive search was indeed the key to solving the puzzle. He turned around casually, and the door opened. Then, in the room behind, there were sixteen discs.
Schiller was simply at his wit's end. Let whoever wants to solve this mystery do it; he'd rather be a fugitive on the Red Sea. He sat down against the wall, closed his eyes, and chose to switch places with another personality trait.
This time, no special methods were needed. During the last exchange, to evade his pursuers and to facilitate the next exchange, the agent sent the body back to Deathstroke's safe house in Hegarda and managed to lock it from the inside. In other words, the body was trapped, and whoever went there would go to jail—the agent preferred jail to solving the mystery.
When Schiller opened his eyes again, he looked around and then understood why the agent had run so fast. The key wasn't solving the puzzle, but that the puzzle was meaningless and didn't involve any mental effort; it was purely physical work.
It's simply a matter of deciphering the meaning of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs from the information on the bricks and then matching them one by one with the patterns. Spinning that disc is incredibly time-consuming; just spinning it can leave you exhausted.
Schiller had absolutely no interest in solving the puzzle. He simply sat down in a corner of the room, closed his eyes, and went to sleep. When the agent returned and found that the puzzle was still not progressing, he sighed resignedly, went back to the safe house, and took out his phone to look up the answer.
Deciphering it is impossible; comparing information one by one would take forever. It's better to just search online. Although ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs are no longer used, the information they contain is still quite comprehensive.
After checking the safe house, we returned to the secret room to solve the puzzle. The person who designed the puzzle was quite ethical; they used the literal meaning of the words, and after matching them with the pictures one by one, the door finally opened again.
Ahead was a tomb passage, not very low, but rather narrow, allowing only one person to pass at a time. As Schiller walked towards the other side, he suddenly heard some rustling sounds behind him.
He turned around and saw swarms of insects rushing towards him along the floor and ceiling. Great, so this is another mummy, huh?
However, Schiller wasn't in a hurry to rush forward. While researching ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, he had already looked up some information about the pyramids. In fact, some films about the pyramids have flawed understandings of ancient Egyptian culture; the most famous example is the *Mummy* series.
It's obvious that there are no insects inside the pyramids that would attack people, but even the story based on ancient Egyptian culture is a bit too far-fetched, because the scarab beetle is a sacred totem in ancient Egyptian culture; it neither bites people nor burrows into their brains to control them.
The scarab beetle is actually a dung beetle. Ancient Egyptians believed that scarab beetles were responsible for the rising and setting of the sun, representing light and rebirth. This belief stemmed primarily from the fact that dung beetles could clean up feces, helping to maintain the cleanliness of their settlements and reducing the breeding of bacteria and parasites. In ancient Egyptian culture, this was something to be praised.
In the dim light, Schiller could see that the insects crawling towards him were indeed beetles, or dung beetles. However, they were larger than normal dung beetles, and their bodies shimmered with a mysterious luster.
Schiller stood there motionless, and the beetles ignored him, crawling past him. It was as if this scene, reminiscent of a horror movie, was simply the beetles passing by.
Schiller turned around, carefully avoiding stepping on the beetles. The beetles disappeared at the end of the passage before Schiller began walking in that direction. Then, he arrived back at the Tomb Raider cinematic setting—ahead lay a large series of platform challenges.
This is a large tomb, with the exit above. Many steps float throughout the room, seemingly meant to be climbed one by one. When Schiller stepped into the room, the floor began to collapse, clearly indicating a time limit.
Schiller sighed and resignedly began to jump. He calculated the time and found it wasn't actually too difficult. To conserve energy, he waited until the steps were almost falling before jumping.
As if to punish his careless attitude, just as Schiller was about to jump to the door, the last step slowly descended and then fell into the void. This made it seem impossible for Schiller to reach the door by jumping.
Just then, a loud crash came from the other side of the door, as if something was banging on it. Just as the step where Schiller was standing began to descend, the door was flung open with a bang. Deathstroke nearly plunged into the void.
“Hey, throw me a rope!” Schiller shouted.