Don’t Pick Up Boyfriends From the Trash Bin

When he stepped into the room, Chi Xiaochi felt like the floorboards beneath his feet felt very strange.

It took a long time for the lights in the room to turn on. Just as they started to become suspicious, their surroundings suddenly lit up all at once. The area around them shone brightly, as bright as a snowfield.

Meng Qian took in a cold breath and covered his eyes, cursing loudly, “Fuck!”

Meanwhile, Chi Xiaochi adapted rather well.

When the lights had come on, a palm had blocked his sight.

That hand helped block most of the light for him. It was thin, straight and slender. The light that shone from around its edges lit up the lines of his palms.

It was Gan Yu’s hand.

He had been standing next to Chi Xiaochi the entire time. It wasn’t known how long he’d kept his arm raised in the darkness, just to help block him from the strong lights which could suddenly turn on.

When everyone’s eyes had just about adapted to the light, that hand retracted from before Chi Xiaochi’s eyes, and closed naturally around the gold framed glasses hanging from Gan Yu’s chest pocket, who calmly put them on, returning to that gorgeous and refined proper gentleman.

The timer had already started, there was no time to waste. Chi Xiaochi cast away all other thoughts, readying himself to observe their current situation.

With a look, Chi Xiaochi’s eyebrows furrowed.

The eight of them were currently standing in a huge, open rectangular glass room of about one hundred square metres. The walls, the floor, and the ceiling were all made of transparent glass.

And Chi Xiaochi clearly remembered, the two groups of people had clearly walked into the same corridor.

……But now, they weren’t in the same room.

To be exact, there was a thick glass curtain wall spanning east to west, dividing the entire room into two from the centre.

Chi Xiaochi’s group was on the left, and Meng Qian’s group was on the right.

Immediately after that, the heavy door closed behind him with a bang.

Yuan Benshan said, “We went through the door at the end of the corridor.”

Qiao Yun, “……There was no door at the end of the corridor. We found the entrance on the right side of the end of the corridor.”

With this exchange of information, a lot of the confusion in Chi Xiaochi’s heart was cleared up.

It seemed, the clown had deliberately divided them into two groups.

This was one of the common tactics used in escape rooms, splitting the players participating in the game into two groups, as well as setting up a barrier, letting the two groups of players each search for clues and find the way to leave one room and enter the next by exchanging information.

Sure enough, after observation, he found that at the east end of the glass curtain wall was a hole that was about 20cm long and 10cm wide, which was probably meant to let both sides exchange information.

Chi Xiaochi found it a little strange.

In most such escape rooms, the wall in the middle of the room was truly solid, in order to prevent both sides from being able to communicate easily, thus prolonging the game time.

Glass was completely transparent, so what was the point of putting up this curtain wall?

He wanted to investigate the glass wall, but the moment he took a step forward, he heard a soft crack from beneath his feet.

Instantly realising something was wrong, the skin on the back of his neck tingled and he instantly tipped back, falling to the floor.

Meng Qian, also sensing that something was wrong, yelled out loudly, “Something’s wrong, all of you, stop standing, get down!”

After Gan Yu went down, he reached out to feel the glass surface of the floor, then knocked his knuckles against it. The look on his face was ugly. “……It’s not reinforced glass.”

This was merely the most ordinary glass, just a little thicker than the usual glass pane. If an adult man stood on it and casually walked around, if he wasn’t careful, the glass would break.

“Do you remember what the clown said just now?” Meng Qian shouted, “We can’t break anything here!”

The price of breaking something, was something no one there wanted to test.

However, he quickly thought of a plan. “All the guys stay down, don’t move. The women will be in charge of searching for clues.”

Gan Tang moved according to his instructions, getting up and moving as lightly as a cat, beginning to search for clues to get past this room.

Meanwhile, Chi Xiaochi lay on the ground, four limbs pointing to the sky like a bastard of a turtle, as his gaze turned in all directions, gathering as much information as he could.

The theme of this round was written on a wooden placard in colourful paint and hung above the door they had just entered through.

The theme was “the person in the gap”. Below, in a childish, bubbly font, was scrawled one of 《Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes》:

There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile.

He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.

He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse,

And they all lived together in a little crooked house.

And corresponding with this song, were countless little paper cutouts of people inlaid in the transparent glass walls.

These little people seemed to be the handiwork of kindergarteners. They’d been made by folding stiff paper and were cut with huge heads and tiny bodies, all holding hands with each other.

As if…… they would start to move closer, singing, at any moment.

Chi Xiaochi tried to find some corresponding number pattern in the arrangement of the little people, but after his graduation a long time ago, his shallow knowledge of mathematics had long since been returned to his teacher.

He turned to face Yuan Benshan to ask for assistance. “Old Yuan, look at these people……”

“There isn’t a pattern.” Next to them, Gan Yu cut in, “The little people aren’t arranged according to any number sequence, nor do they have any special colours. There’s a section of the little people that are connected that goes over ten, so if we don’t consider the possibility that they’re numbers for a password, I’m inclined to think of it more as some kind of hint.”

Chi Xiaochi looked at him. “Or some kind of danger warning.”

The two met gazes and nodded.

This kind of inexplicable tacit understanding made Yuan Benshan, who was watching everything from the sidelines, feel very suppressed.

He broke off the two’s conversation, saying forcefully, “Don’t put all your attention on investigating those little people, it’s very likely that they could just be a red herring.”

Gan Yu also agreed with Yuan Benshan. “There’s a wooden cabinet in the corner. Tangtang, open it.”

When Gan Tang reached out and pulled open the cabinet, a piercing whistle exploded from within, almost making Jia Siyuan on the other side of the wall drop the clock she’d taken down from the wall.

What jumped out was a strange-faced cymbal-banging, drum-playing monkey toy (Warning: This is a jumpscare I’ve put in for you guys. Click at your own risk.).

The drum in its hands was already broken, and from time to time, its eyes would glow with a mechanical purple light. Half the paint on its face had worn away, exposing eerie pale wood. Its entire face looked like it had been pulled off a monkey’s rotting corpse. Just one look made one feel incredibly uncomfortable.

Every time it hit the drum, it would speak in a warped, piercing voice, “Only—— one chance, only—— one chance.”

Surrounded by the silence of the faceless paper people, Meng Qian’s forehead had gradually begun to bead with sweat. Now, upon hearing the toy’s strange, piercing voice echo intermittently through the room, his irascibility grew.

“Quickly turn that thing off!”

Gan Tang replied pleasantly, “I can’t find its spring.”

But she didn’t put aside this toy which was clearly just meant to scare them.

As time trickled by, and Meng Qian saw that she was merely holding up that toy monkey, inspecting it with focus, he couldn’t help but criticise, “That female over there! …… Yes, you, don’t keep looking at the monkey, go look somewhere else! There are so many little people on the wall on your end, go find a pattern! Why do you keep holding on to that disturbance for no reason?! Do you know how to play, you useless idiot?!”

Gan Tang walked over to the glass curtain wall with light footsteps, and showed him the toy she was holding.

After an intent look, Meng Qian’s face instantly started to burn, as if he’d been slapped.

In the monkey’s broken drum, was inlaid an exquisitely made miniature mechanical watch. It had both an hour hand and a minute hand, both of which were currently pointing exactly at 12 o’ clock.

As the monkey faced him, it let out its strange screech, “Only—— one chance, only—— one chance.”