Based on the different rooms Xu Huo had passed through—the tea room, bedroom, living room, and dining room—they could each be divided into four states. First was the original state, as he had seen when he first arrived. The rooms were simply furnished. Next, the furnishings became more elaborate and complete. Then came the rooms in use, and finally, the rooms after they had been tidied up.
The tidied rooms looked somewhat like the second state, but a closer look revealed the difference. In the second-state bedroom, the toys—especially the dolls—were arranged as neatly as the furniture, as if someone with obsessive-compulsive tendencies had put them in order. The tidied rooms were different: the dolls and models remained in their original places, but their angles had changed.
The four identical rooms were almost always in the same state each time before the path became one-way. Usually, if the first room he opened was a tea room, then the next two courtyards also had tea rooms. Aside from the room that changed, the furnishings remained the same.
He could just barely make out a pattern. Three consecutive courtyards had the same room, the same furnishings, and the same state. But the order in which the tea room, bedroom, dining room, and living room appeared was not fixed. Sometimes a bedroom lay beyond a tea room, then another tea room appeared after the bedroom. After passing through that tea room, he would see a living room.
So, no matter which door he chose from a courtyard, the next three doors all led to the same kind of room. It wasn't until the third time he reached a point of no return that he could enter a different room.
Considering that every door might be a space-transmission portal, the room beyond it could