The Road Is Made by People

The final passage led straight into a space filled with mirrors.💢♣  🐺👍

As soon as he stepped into the space, the passage behind him vanished. There was only one path ahead.

The end and both sides of that sole path were also made of mirrors.

"That guy really did use his game administrator privileges to sneak out, didn't he?" Su Wu stood still, rubbing the back of his neck as he grumbled.

Every mirror in the space was damaged. Some were so badly broken that only one or two shards remained, yet they stubbornly stayed in place.

Each mirror was broken in its own distinctive way.

Shards and even tiny fragments littered the floor.

Mirrors packed tightly together reflected countless versions of him, all making the same movements.

"Could this be a jigsaw puzzle?" He bent down, picked up a shard from the floor, and ran a finger along its sharp edge as he studied the broken mirrors around him.

The mirrored space was about a hundred and fifty square meters.

There were at least ten thousand fallen mirror shards on the floor, by his conservative estimate, and every one of them was irregularly shaped, with no pattern to them.

Even if the puzzle pieces had markings on their backs, ten thousand of them would still take a long time to put together.

"Ah... I'm going to die of blood loss, aren't I..." Looking at the broken mirrors around him and the shards covering the floor, Su Wu stuffed a piece of paper up his nose preemptively.

Then he carefully sorted the shards on the floor, arranging them neatly by size. He memorized the shape of every shard, even carefully picking out the tiny, nearly invisible fragments from among the jagged edges and setting them aside.

The process took quite a while.

After that came the long, tedious work of putting the puzzle together.

He had no marker, and there was no way to mark the shards, so he had to memorize the size and shape of each one, allowing him to recall it quickly when he needed it.

It was an incredibly complicated task for his brain.

Before he knew it, the white paper stuffed up his nose had turned dark red, but he paid it no mind. Without blinking, he stared at the mirror shards in his hands and pressed them one by one against the mirrors.

The moment a shard touched the wall, it seemed to stick there, as if held in place by invisible glue or something similar. He didn't have to worry about it falling off.

Faster. He had to be faster.

He didn't know whether there would be more trials ahead. If there were, he had to reach Banato Port by January first. Once he accounted for the journey and left time in reserve in case anything went wrong along the way, he had very little time to waste here.

The faster his mind worked, the steadier his hands became.

Soon, it seemed he was about to complete one of the mirrors, but he stopped.

"There isn't a shard that fits here..." He looked at the mirror, which needed just one more piece to be complete, then glanced at the shards arranged on the floor.

He had memorized the size and shape of every shard, so he was certain there wasn't one on the floor that fit the final gap.

He lowered his eyes, replaced the paper stuffed up his nose with a fresh piece, then began working on another mirror.

This time, too, a gap appeared that he couldn't fill.

Or rather, it wasn't that he couldn't fill it. A shard was missing.

Hundreds of mirrors were gradually pieced together, but each one had a gap somewhere.

The bloodstained papers in the corner had piled up into a small mountain.

"Ugh—" He suddenly stopped, set down the shard in his hand, and bent over on the floor, breathing hard as he dry-heaved.

His body was numb, and he was freezing all over.

The effects of losing too much blood, overworking his brain, and low blood sugar hit him all at once.

After a bout of rapid, ragged breathing, he lay flat on the cold floor, his chest heaving. His face was pale, and blood streamed from his nose. Dried blood and fresh, sticky blood covered his lower face and the collar of his clothes.

He looked as if someone had beaten him up over and over again.

"Hahahahahaha..."

"Hahahahahahahahahahahaha..." His laughter was extreme and almost hysterical. Crystalline tears even welled up in his pale blue eyes.

This game was pretty great.

Sixty-four thousand eight hundred and ninety-two shards.

It could be even harder. They might as well make it hundreds of thousands of shards.

He seemed to have laughed himself out. He sat halfway up and listlessly pulled bread and an apple from his backpack, then quickly ate.

"From when I started the puzzle until now, 162,891 seconds have passed..."

"Not quite two days. It should be the twenty-seventh now."

"There should still be time." After finishing his food, he closed his eyes to steady his breathing for a while, then stood back up and burned the bloodstained paper scraps nearby.

He stepped into the only passage and felt along the mirrors on either side. Suddenly, he heard a click beneath his hand. The mirror sank inward, revealing a small space behind it.

It had a full set of tables, chairs, and benches. There was even a skeleton in the corner, clutching a small, exquisite box in its arms.

It looked like iron, but wasn't, and it was extremely hard. It also needed a password to open.

Of course, a single shot of Cang would probably open it, too.

But whatever was inside would likely be reduced to dust along with the box.

Remembering the missing shards from the mirrors outside, Su Wu had a hunch that he couldn't break the box open by force.

He rubbed the box and felt a line of unevenly carved text on the bottom.

[How many mirrors are here in total?]

How many mirrors? Did the individual shards count as mirrors? If not, how many complete mirrors were there?

"The password is... five digits, so the answer should be..." Su Wu turned the dial.

Counting the pieces on the floor and those that weren't, there were sixty-six thousand six hundred and sixty-six shards in all.

What a number the devil would love.

Most people probably wouldn't bother counting all those shards.

Click. The box sprang open.

Su Wu looked down and saw a shard inside.

His memory quickly matched it to a gap in one of the mirrors outside.

"So there should be a shard waiting for me to find in each of the other rooms, too..." He put the shard away, left the room, and entered another one.

The bottom of the second box had no words carved into it, but four strings of letters from Hunter World.

The password was four digits.

It was simple. He had to write out the full chart in the original order of Hunter World's letters, then connect the four strings of letters on the box's underside with lines. The result was the answer.

2733.

The second box opened successfully.

The bottom of the third box had some symbols of unknown meaning. He tried overlaying them to cancel them out and failed, then tried splitting and moving them around. That worked.

The bottom of the fourth box had twelve symbols carved into it, and the password was four digits.

All he had to do was group the different symbols and link them together to form a four-digit number.

Without stopping for even a second, he continued into another room.

The fifth, the sixth, the seventh...

Finally, he finished searching all the rooms and returned to where he started with the shards he had found. He filled in each of the gaps one by one.

Once all the mirrors were complete, the walls began to move.

They rotated and rearranged themselves. The original passage vanished, and all the mirrors that had been restored disappeared, leaving a huge door in their place.

→

The door was enormous and heavy, but its keyhole was tiny—and... there was no key.

"After solving the puzzle, I have to find a key?" Su Wu looked at the huge door before him and smiled faintly, the corners of his mouth lifting.

These time-wasting trials were never-ending.

"Well, let's see if I've still got the knack..." He released his aura from his fingertips, shaping it into a thin strand, then slipped it into the keyhole. He pressed his ear against the door and listened for any movement, using his aura to sharpen his hearing.

He was using an aura thread as a piece of wire, and what he was doing now was... picking a lock.

Back then, he'd learned how to pick locks specifically to cosplay Dazai Osamu, known as Yokohama's lock-picking king. Wire, hairpins, cards, stiff paper... In his hands, they could all be used to pick locks.

With a click, he reached out and pushed, and the door swung all the way open.

"I made it out." He picked up his backpack and stepped through the door.

But there was no exit beyond it, just an empty hall.

"...I don't care what the next trial is. I'm done playing." Su Wu looked expressionlessly at the dead end and changed into a clean outfit with no bloodstains right there.

"You have to make your own way. If that's the case—" A vicious smile suddenly spread across his face, and he raised both hands.

"Cang—"

A black-blue glow of energy filled the entire hall in an instant. The pitch-black underground space seemed to be under an unending bombardment. Cannon fire struck the surrounding walls again and again, destroying every obstacle in its path.

Fine sand trickled into the underground maze through the cracks. Amid a series of cracking sounds, the walls finally collapsed, and the yellow sand that had been kept out of the maze poured in, threatening to bury it.

"Wow." Su Wu remained expressionless and immediately launched himself upward.

Taking advantage of Cang's teleportation, he forced his way upward through the heavy sand.

He stopped in midair, brushed the sand and dust from his hair and clothes, and looked down at the sunken ground below, which had caved in like a whirlpool. He let out a sigh of relief.

"Good grief, I nearly got buried alive and given a proper burial by myself." He muttered to himself, looking relaxed and happy to have escaped disaster, and unconsciously used the catchphrase of a cringey chuuni otaku: "Good grief."

"What on earth did you do down there?!" A bewildered, disbelieving voice came from nearby below him.

The leader, who had always acted like a cheerful, well-off middle-aged man, had finally lost the leisurely air of someone with money, free time, and status.

What had this white-haired kid done inside the desert maze?! Why had it collapsed?!

And why had he come out so quickly?! Even though the leader had great faith in the kid's abilities, he hadn't expected him to finish this fast.

The desert test site had been so difficult that not a single examinee had passed since it was designed...

And yet the kid had made it out! It hadn't even been three days!

As the leader ran, questions raced through his mind.

"Well..." The white-haired boy suddenly vanished from midair, only to reappear beside him. He put his hands behind his head and ran alongside him.

The leader spared him a glance while continuing to run.

"I was too lazy to play the puzzle game, so I just blasted my way out."

"By the way, I don't have to pay for damaging the test site, right?"

The smile on the white-haired, blue-eyed boy's face was dazzling, and he made no attempt to hide his arrogance or... malice.

The demonic malice in his smile overshadowed the divine quality of his appearance.

He seemed nothing less than a... thoroughly wicked child.

The commotion behind them finally died down, and the two stopped running.

The leader looked back. The desert was still a desert, with yellow sand as far as the eye could see.

"That certainly isn't the usual way of doing things..." The leader seemed a little troubled as he scratched his head.

Well, there were plenty of Hunters who didn't do things the usual way.

"You won't have to pay for it. The Hunter Association covers all losses during the exam." He sighed and answered the boy's question.

Besides, the funding was someone else's problem, not his.

"Then there's no problem. By the way, do you know how to get to Banato Port?" Su Wu nodded and asked, perfectly naturally and with absolute confidence.

The map had told him that the Gordo Desert was east of Banato Port, but...

He had no idea where he was in the Gordo Desert.

"Banato Port is that way," the leader said, pointing in a direction.

As the guide, there was nothing wrong with pointing an examinee in the right direction.

"Got it. See you." The white-haired boy glanced in the direction he'd pointed, nodded slightly, then abruptly vanished again.

"I'm starting to look forward to seeing what this kid gets up to as a Hunter." The leader didn't even see him disappear, but smiled and shook his head. His words were full of anticipation.

Using Cang, Su Wu crossed the Gordo Desert in the shortest time possible and reached the nearest city.

"It's... December twenty-eighth."

"There are three days left until January first."

"Hmm... There should be some way to get to Banato Port..." he mused as he entered the city's jewelry store. He went straight to the counter and dumped all the "garbage he'd picked up" from his bag onto it.

The gold and gems gleamed under the bright lights, dazzling the eyes with their brilliance.

"You mean..." The clerk behind the counter was briefly surprised, but quickly regained her composure and spoke politely.

"Will you buy them?" The impatience between the white-haired boy's brows was almost tangible.

"Well..." After the clerk made a phone call, a man in a suit soon arrived.

Three minutes later, Su Wu left the jewelry store and headed straight for a hotel that looked expensive.

He booked a luxury suite. After washing up and changing into fresh clothes, he stood before a full-length mirror and looked at himself.

White hair, blue eyes, snow-white skin, black markings on his face.

Aside from his features, which still bore some resemblance to his former self, everything else had changed so much that he could no longer be called the same person.

"I still look great." He brushed his teeth while looking at his reflection, then nodded in satisfaction.

As expected of him! A cosplayer with over a million followers!

Cosplay wasn't just about looks, but if you wanted to get popular, both your appearance and the quality of your work mattered. If he hadn't been good-looking, he wouldn't have gained a million followers.

Of course, he could also have edited his photos and pretended to look better than he did. He'd had a few people on his contact list whose real faces had nothing whatsoever to do with their pictures. They looked so different that you wouldn't recognize them in person.

Su Wu shook his head, sat down on the edge of the bed, and used the phone on the bedside table to call the front desk downstairs.

"Please arrange breakfast service and have it sent to my room tomorrow. Also, could you book me a ticket for tomorrow to Banato Port, either by bus or another form of transportation..." he instructed as he turned on the television in the room.

After hanging up, he immediately flopped onto the bed and fell asleep.

P.S. [Today's chapter is another two-in-one.]

Wuwuzi: I'm done playing. Flip the table (╯‵□′)╯︵┻━┻

P.S. Come on, hit me with your recommendations, investments, and monthly tickets. And help boost my follows, too.

When will I finally get a hundred investments? Two digits looks a little pathetic.