Fortunately, on the last try, they succeeded and finally got those Pyramids to line up like a welcoming passageway. Then, a road rose up from the sand—but they still didn't have a car, so they could only go forward on foot.
After walking for a while, the Pyramids finally grew larger in their field of vision, which meant they were heading the right way. Not long after, they came upon the first Pyramid; no one could tell which one it was, but it probably wasn't the most famous Hufu Pyramid.
Deathstroke walked up to the Pyramid and took a look, then shook his head and said, "No door. We can't get in."
"Don't tell me this is another puzzle." Shiller sized up the Pyramid and said, "I refuse to work with my stupid crab companion ever again."
"I don't think it is." Deathstroke circled a large loop around it, then said, "But there's no road here. Where do we go next?"
Shiller studied this Pyramid in silence. In fact, even up close, it wasn't very big, not as majestic as people imagine. Maybe some Pyramids are large, but this one was a small Pyramid. All four sides were sealed; there was definitely no way in. So where was the path?
"The Shadow," Shiller was the first to notice something off. He said, "One side's Shadow is longer."
Deathstroke looked up at the sky. The Moon hung high but was slightly off-center. This made the shadow at the base of one of the Pyramid's four faces just a bit longer than the others.
"Is this really reliable?" Deathstroke said. "What if it's wrong?"
"We try first, worry later." Shiller walked off in that direction. And sure enough, before long, they ran into a second Pyramid.
"You were right," Deathstroke said. "We haven't gone far. If the Shadow weren't rigged, the longer one would still be pointing north this time. But now it's pointing east. That completely violates optical principles, which proves it really is a guide."
So they followed the guidance of the Shadow again, walking here and there. In the end, they realized they had returned to the first small Pyramid. Deathstroke let out a long sigh.
"I knew it wouldn't be that simple." He drew his Great Sword and said, "Let's try chopping it open."
Shiller stopped him and said, "The Shadow is the answer, but it might not be the only answer. Remember how many Pyramids we passed?"
"About four?"
"We followed the Shadows, passed four Pyramids, and came back here. That proves these four Pyramids form a circle. Otherwise, we wouldn't have ended up back at the starting point."
"Fair enough, but what are you getting at?"
"The answer might not be on these four Pyramids at all, but at the center of this circle. So we need to walk along the diagonal of this rectangle."
"Then let's try it." Deathstroke seemed no longer in the mood to think; he didn't even really understand what was going on. Shiller had come here just to look for murals, and somehow they'd ended up playing an Ancient Egypt puzzle game.
Shiller and Deathstroke headed off in one direction, and as expected, before long they saw a circular disc carved with mysterious patterns. In the middle of the disc was a fountain, but the fountain held no water. All the patterns were grooves, clearly meant to be filled with some kind of liquid.
"For god's sake, where are we supposed to find water?! Don't tell me there's an oasis nearby or something?"
Shiller looked around. When they'd walked in a circle before, they'd already surveyed the surroundings. It was all Desert nearby, not a single plant. And everything inside this Mysterious Space was deliberately placed; there couldn't be any extra natural scenery. That meant this wasn't meant to be solved with water.
He walked up to the fountain and stood there for a moment, then stepped back a few paces to look again. He held out his hand to Deathstroke and said, "Give me your sword."
"You're getting more and more practiced at extortion." Deathstroke said that, but still handed him the sword. Shiller didn't use the Great Sword to hack at the fountain; he just set the sword upright, its tip resting in the fountain basin, and turned the blade with his hand.
At a certain angle, the entire blade lit up. The Moonlight didn't reflect outward; instead, it formed a thin silver film. Then, under Deathstroke's astonished gaze, the Moonlight turned into a mercury-like liquid and flowed down into the fountain basin.
After that, the fountain burst back to life, and that silver liquid ran along the grooves of the patterns. The entire Array lit up, and the ground rumbled.
"Over here!" Shiller shouted to Deathstroke. But Deathstroke was clearly suspicious of the thing and hesitated that one beat. The moment the Array lit, Shiller vanished, and Deathstroke was left standing where he was.
Deathstroke stared, dumbfounded. He hurriedly picked up his sword, wanting to refill the fountain again, but no matter what he did, there was no response at all. Enraged, he swung his sword and smashed the fountain apart.
As for Shiller, who'd been Teleportation-ed away by the Array, he just felt a wave of dizziness. When the light faded, he found himself in a dark chamber. It was a completely sealed room, with four disks on the four walls. Two were carved with Ancient Egypt text, and the other two were murals.
Shiller couldn't read Ancient Egypt, but the two murals showed herding and farming respectively. It looked like they had to correspond to the texts. Shiller was supposed to be solving puzzles here, but what he really ought to be thinking about right now was where Deathstroke had gone.
The fact that Deathstroke hadn't stepped onto the Magic Array wasn't surprising, because it did look very much like a trap. As a Mercenary, Deathstroke definitely wouldn't casually step on something he couldn't figure out. But this was clearly the correct way to the next level, and Shiller had missed the Teleportation. So what now?
Shiller felt he should wait for Deathstroke for a bit, mainly out of team-care considerations. He couldn't be the only one getting tortured by puzzles. He could tell Deathstroke didn't like puzzles either.
He waited forever and Deathstroke still didn't show. Who knew whether that Magic Array was one-use only, or whether Deathstroke had been sent somewhere else. Shiller had no choice but to start turning the disks.
Then he discovered the disks only had two directions, forward and backward. Looked like all he had to do was match the words and the images, then rotate them to the same angle.
Shiller had noticed there were some text and patterns on the surrounding bricks, but he couldn't be bothered to look. He simply used the Exhaustion Method. There weren't many possibilities anyway; he'd just try them one by one.
As he'd expected, the Exhaustion Method really was the god of puzzle-solving. He spun them a few times at random and the door opened. Then, in the room beyond, there were sixteen disks.
Shiller was honestly about to lose it. Whoever liked this puzzle could solve it; he'd rather go live a life on the edge out on the Red sea. He leaned against the wall, slid down to sit, closed his eyes, and chose to switch places with his other Personality trait.
This time he didn't need any special method. Because during the last switch, in order to evade the people hunting him—and to make the next switch more convenient—the agent had directly sent the body back to Deathstroke's safe house in Hurgada and somehow locked it from the outside. In other words, this body was trapped; whoever switched in was basically in jail—and compared to solving puzzles, the agent would rather go to jail.
When Shiller opened his eyes again, he took a look around, and instantly understood why the agent had run so fast. The key wasn't the puzzle itself, but that the puzzle was no fun at all. It didn't involve any real brain work; it was pure Physical Strength labor.
All you had to do was decode the meaning of the Ancient Egypt text from the information on the wall bricks and then match them to the patterns one by one. Those disks were also extremely hard to turn; just spinning them all would leave you half dead from exhaustion.
Shiller had no interest in solving anything. He just sat down in a corner of the room, closed his eyes, and started to sleep. Until the agent came back, saw that the puzzle progress hadn't budged, sighed in resignation, returned to the safe house, and took out his phone to start searching for answers.
Decoding was impossible; he'd have to compare information character by character, which would take until the Monkey year and Horse month. Better to just search the internet. Even though Ancient Egypt text is no longer in use, the information on it is still very comprehensive.
After finishing his research in the safe house, he went back to the secret room to do the puzzle. The person who designed the stage still had some honor; they really were using the literal meanings of the words, and once everything was matched to the patterns one by one, the door finally opened again.
Ahead was a tomb passage, not very low, but a bit narrow—only one person could pass at a time. As Shiller walked toward the other side, he suddenly heard some rustling sounds behind him.
He turned and saw a dense mass of insects surging toward him along the floor and ceiling. Wonderful, so now we're doing The Mummy, huh?
But Shiller didn't rush forward. When he'd been looking up Ancient Egypt text just now, he'd also checked some information about Pyramids. In fact, certain movies set in Pyramids completely misunderstood Ancient Egypt culture—the most famous being The Mummy series.
There are no people-attacking bugs in Pyramids; that much is obvious. But even if you're making things up based on Ancient Egypt culture, they still went way too far, because Scarab are a sacred totem in Ancient Egypt culture. They don't bite people, and they don't crawl into brains to control anyone.
Scarab are actually Dung Beetle, also known as dung rollers. The People of Ancient Egypt believed it was the Scarab that pushed the Sun to rise in the East and set in the West, representing light and rebirth. The source of this belief mainly lay in the fact that Dung Beetle clean up feces, helping to maintain the cleanliness of settlements and reduce the growth of various bacteria and parasites. In the culture of the People of Ancient Egypt, that was something worthy of praise.
With the help of the dim light, Shiller saw that the bugs crawling toward him really were Tombstone—in other words, Dung Beetle. They were a bit larger than normal Dung Beetle, and their bodies shimmered with a Mysterious Space-like luster.
Shiller stood there without moving, and the Tombstone ignored him, crawling past on either side. As if this horror-movie-like scene was nothing more than the Tombstone just passing by.
Shiller turned around, taking care not to step on any Tombstone. Only after that swarm disappeared at the end of the passage did he start walking in that direction. Then he arrived at a Tomb Raider film set again—the front was a large platform-jumping stage.
This was a huge burial chamber, and the exit was up above. The entire room was filled with floating steps that looked like you had to jump up Level 1 by Level 1. As soon as Shiller stepped into the room, the floor began to collapse; clearly there was a time limit.
Shiller sighed and resigned himself to jumping upward. He timed it and found it actually wasn't that hard. To conserve Physical Strength, he always waited until a step was just about to fall before jumping up to the next one.
Apparently to punish this laid-back attitude, just as Shiller was about to jump to the door, the very last step slowly descended and then dropped into the void. This way, it seemed impossible for Shiller to reach the door by jumping alone.
Just then, a loud crash suddenly came from the other side of the door, as if something was rammed against it. Just as the step Shiller was on also started to sink, there was a bang—the door burst open. Deathstroke almost pitched headfirst into the void.
"Hey, throw me a rope!" Shiller shouted.