Join the management group, I've stockpiled millions of supplies for survival at sea.

Soon, Yin Leyao found out how they knew about the designer: on the world channel, that Butterfly Koi had exposed all the designer's information.

Of course, she didn't name names, but because the designers were also involved in the game, it made players suspicious of each other in each game.

Sister Hong tightened her grip on the dagger.

The ponytail's expression changed, and the notebook stared at Yin Leyao through the glasses with only one lens remaining.

"Are you the designer?" Sister Hong's voice was lowered by half.

"Impossible, I would have died long ago if I were one of you."

"You didn't design this game?"

"Yeah, how would I know what happened?"

Sister Hong raised her dagger: "But why do you know so much about this game?"

"I've studied it, and it's not like this is my first time here. Practice makes perfect," Yin Leyao denied to the bitter end.

Sister Hong was furious: "Who invented this game? So many of us have died!"

"Without this game, you'd still be fishing at sea." Yin Leyao's tone remained unchanged. "You'd only get a piece of wood, a piece of plastic, and you wouldn't catch a piece of iron in three days. Mission rewards would be halved, and resources would become increasingly scarce. If you don't want a new game, the system won't give you one. If you want a new game, someone has to design one, and that person will always exist."

"So what? We should thank him?" Sister Hong took a step forward.

"No need to thank me," Yin Leyao said. "But you need to know one thing: the rules of this game were written by people. We can predict the mechanism of every door, the trigger conditions of every item, and the way to enter every hidden room. Moreover, without me, you wouldn't be able to get the purple item box, and you wouldn't even be able to open the final door."

The notebook stopped Sister Hong: "She's right. The use of the two complete keys is the hidden information that Sister Hong just found out from the green props. Without Yin Leyao's complete key, we can't open the side room. If we can't open the side room, we can't get the purple prop box. If we can't get the purple prop box, this game is meaningless."

"I don't care about any purple item box," Xiao Zhou suddenly said. "I want to get out of here alive."

"The fragment is in your hands, you have leverage," the notebook said. "How about this, combining the fragment into a second complete key requires the agreement of both of you. Yin Leyao needs your fragment, and you need Yin Leyao's complete key to open the hidden room. You two will check and balance each other."

"And then?" Xiao Zhou asked. "The hidden room opened, the purple item box was obtained, who survived in the end?"

"Vote," the notebook said. "Five people vote. The person who gets the purple item box automatically forfeits their chance to survive. The remaining four people vote to choose one person to leave alive. The chosen person must share a portion of the gold coins with the others as compensation."

"There's only one living person left, what's the use of gold coins?" Sister Hong said.

"You can take the gold coins out after the game ends," the notes said. "The dead can't take anything out. The living can inherit all the gold coins of the dead. The person chosen to leave alive must distribute the inherited gold coins to the people designated by the deceased. If there are family members or fellow passengers, the gold coins will be transferred to them. If not, the gold coins will be donated to the public resource pool."

"How can you guarantee that the living will keep their promises?" Ponytail asked.

"The system can provide notarization," Yin Leyao said. "Survivors must distribute the gold coins according to the agreement; otherwise, the system will automatically deduct them."

"When were these rules added?" the notebook asked.

"Just now."

Everyone fell silent.

Xiao Zhou slowly walked up to Yin Leyao, extending his blood-covered hand. A fragment of the key, A, lay in his palm.

"for you."

Yin Leyao took the fragment and combined it with her own fragment B. The two fragments emitted golden light and merged into a complete key.

[Complete key successfully synthesized]

[Currently holding a specific item: 2 Complete Keys]

Yin Leyao walked to the door at the end of the road. There was no keyhole on the door, but when she held up two complete keys, the door opened automatically.

There is no hidden room behind the main door.

There are three doors.

Three identical doors, labeled A, B, and C respectively.

"A door within a door in a hidden room," Yin Leyao said. "This is a hidden mechanism designed by the system. The hidden room is not directly accessible; there is an intermediate layer of filtering. There are three doors, only one of which leads to the real hidden room, while the other two lead to death."

"Which one is true?" Sister Hong asked.

"I don't know. This part was randomly generated by the system and wasn't in the original design document." Yin Leyao was telling the truth. She had left an interface in the design document that allowed the system to insert random selection levels before the hidden rooms. She didn't know exactly what those levels were.

All three doors were gray and had no distinguishing markings except for the letters on them.

"A, B, C." The notebook squatted down to examine the door frame. "No patterns, no markings, they're exactly the same."

"Then let's guess," said Ponytail.

"If you guess wrong, you're dead," Sister Hong said.

Xiao Zhou has started biting his nails again. His fingers are already covered with no intact skin, but he keeps biting them.

Yin Leyao stood in front of the three doors and closed her eyes.

She wasn't lying.

She was recalling the data from the fourteen rooms in the surveillance footage. Had the hidden room in room 0032 triggered the door-in-door mechanism?

What is the hidden room in room 0058 like? How did Lu Chen get through the hidden room in room 0071?

Room 0071.

Lu Chen waited outside the trap room for thirty seconds until the two people died before going in to retrieve the purple item box.

Did a door within a door appear during the thirty seconds he waited?

Yin Leyao opened her eyes.

"Lu Chen didn't trigger the door within a door in room 0071," she said. "The cooperating group in room 0058 also didn't trigger the door within a door, nor did the last two survivors in room 0032. These three rooms have one thing in common."

"What do they have in common?" the notebook asked.

"None of them activated the red items before the hidden room was triggered."

"What do you mean?"

"The 'door within a door' mechanism might be a penalty system. If a player triggers a red item in a previous level, the system will add a filter before the hidden room."

"We triggered two red items this round: Yin Leyao in the first triangle and the bald guy in the second triangle. The bald guy's reflection even killed him. Two red items triggered, one death. The system determined that our group had a high risk level, so they added a door within a door."

"Then how do we choose?" Sister Hong asked, looking at the three identical doors.

"It's not a choice," Yin Leyao said. "It's an allocation. The rule of the door within a door is not to choose the correct door, but that each person must choose a door. All three doors open at the same time, and there are different challenges inside. Only those who pass the challenges can enter the hidden room, and those who fail die."

"How did you know?" Ponytail asked.

Yin Leyao did not answer, because she could not say that she designed it.

She designed the framework of a door within a door, but left the specific details to the system to generate randomly. She only knew the logic, not the answer.

"Then one door for each person," the notebook said. "But we have five people, and only three doors."

"Some people can choose not to go in," Yin Leyao said. "Those who don't go in will stay in the corridor and leave after the people who went in unlock the hidden room."

"I'll stay," Xiao Zhou said immediately.

"I want to stay too," Sister Hong said.

"Only one can stay," Yin Leyao said. "At least three people need to enter through the three doors. Are there three of us willing to go in?"

silence.

"I'll go in," Yin Leyao said.

"I'll go in too," said the girl with the ponytail.

The notebook looked around and sighed, "Count me in."

"Hongjie and Xiao Zhou will stay in the corridor," Yin Leyao said. "If the three of us die inside the door, you will abstain. If any of us survive and enter the hidden room and obtain the purple item box, we will distribute the items according to the voting method we discussed before."

Sister Hong nodded.

Xiao Zhou nodded vigorously.

Yin Leyao stood in front of Gate B.

The ponytail was chosen as A, and the notebook was chosen as C.

"Push the door open simultaneously in three seconds," Yin Leyao said. "No matter what's behind the door, don't hesitate, just rush in."

"Three." The ponytail placed its hand on the doorknob.

"Two." The notebook pushed up the glasses, which only had one lens remaining.

"one."

All three doors opened simultaneously.

Yin Leyao rushed in.

The door closed behind her.

She was standing in a circular room.

The walls are made of glass, and outside the glass is black seawater.

Something was swimming in the seawater; it was a black shadow, and its shape was indistinct.

In the center of the room was a table with a key and a note on it.

The note said that the key could open the door across the way. But there was only one key, and there were six doors in the room, one of which led to a hidden room, and the other five led to death.

Each door that opens releases something from the seawater, and you have sixty seconds to find the correct door.

Yin Leyao picked up the key and glanced around the platform.

Six doors are evenly distributed on the circular wall, with a glass wall separating each door.

Outside the glass wall, those dark shadows were already pressed against the glass, densely packed, like countless hands pressing on it.

Sixty seconds.

Yin Leyao didn't rush to find the door; she first observed the location of the six doors.

A circular room with six doors evenly distributed. The angle between any two doors is sixty degrees.

She crouched down to look at the ground.

There is an almost invisible line on the gray brickwork, extending from the bottom of the platform toward one of the doors.

She walked along the line.

The line points to the third door.

But there is more than one line on the ground.

Looking at it from a different angle, she discovered that there were six lines extending from the bottom of the platform, each pointing to one of the six doors.

Each line is so fine that you can't even notice it unless you look closely.

Six lines, six doors, no difference.

A crashing sound came from outside the glass; the dark shadows were hitting the glass.

Yin Leyao looked up at the ceiling, where there was a mirror.

The room in the mirror is the opposite of reality.

She saw a key on the table in the mirror, but the key in the mirror was inserted into the table, and there was a keyhole on the side of the table.

She inserted the key into the same spot on the real-world platform.

The platform cracked.

Inside was a turntable with six doors numbered on it.

The pointer on the turntable points to the fifth door.

But the turntable can rotate.

Yin Leyao did not touch the turntable.

The pointer on the dial in the mirror points to the second door.

Reality and mirror image are opposites; the mirror image of the fifth door is the second door.

The sound of the glass colliding grew louder, and a crack appeared next to the third door.

Yin Leyao walked to the second door and inserted the key into the lock.

The door opened.

There is a hidden room behind the door.

She went inside, and on the table in the center of the room was a purple prop box.

Yin Leyao didn't take it; she was waiting.

Thirty seconds later, the side wall of the hidden room opened, and Ponytail walked out.

Her ponytail was undone, her clothes were soaked, and there was a long, bleeding wound on her left arm.

But she is alive.

Ten seconds later, the other side wall opened, and the notebook stumbled in and fell to the ground.

His other lens was also broken, and he was covered in sweat.

The three were screened through a door-within-a-door system.

Current number of survivors: 5

[Hidden room is now open]

The purple prop box lay quietly on the table.

"I don't want the purple item box," Yin Leyao said. "As we agreed before, you two should discuss how to distribute it. Then you can vote on who survives."

The ponytail and the notebook exchanged a glance.

"You take it," the notebook said. "If I get out of here alive, I'll get half the gold coins."

Ponytail picked up the purple prop box.

[Player with ponytail obtains a purple item box]

[Hidden reward in room 0213 has been claimed]

A system notification sounded.

"Let's vote," Yin Leyao said. "I'll vote for the notes. Although he has no fighting ability, he's the only one who has thoroughly studied the rules."

"I vote for Yin Leyao," the notebook said. "She's smarter than all of us, and she's more useful alive than any of us."

Ponytail looked at the two of them and said, "I'll vote for Notes. Yin Leyao is smart, but she's too scheming. Of the three of us, Notes is the weakest. If he's alive, he won't pose a threat to anyone. Yin Leyao is too strong. I'm not comfortable with her being alive."

Two to one.

The notes survived.

"I disagree," Yin Leyao said.

"It's no use, I already said it would be decided by voting." The woman with the ponytail glanced at her, her attitude resolute.

"Okay," Yin Leyao said, "you can go now."

She walked to the notebook: "After you get out alive, publicly share the process of obtaining the purple item box in the chat channel, so that all players know that the Treasure Hunt game is not necessarily a dead end, and that you can win by cooperating."

The note-taker nodded.

[Player Hongjie gave up her chance to survive]

Player Xiao Zhou gave up his chance to survive.

Player Yin Leyao relinquishes her survival spot.

[Player with ponytail gives up survival spot]

[Survivor's Notes]

Room 0213 has ended.

The white light dissipated.

Yin Leyao returned to the ship, but did not have the purple prop box in her hand.

But she obtained the complete key data, feedback from the door-within-a-door screening mechanism, and three cases of collaborative success.

She opened her notebook and wrote on a new page:

Test results for room 0213.

The cooperative clearance model is feasible. The door-within-a-door screening mechanism is effective, but the difficulty needs to be adjusted.

The puzzle involving the spinning wheel and the mirror is too simple; it is recommended to add more distractors.

The collaboration between Mawei and Notebook exceeded expectations, and rule-researching players are starting to emerge in the player community, which warrants caution.

She paused after writing the last sentence.

Then the words "be wary" were crossed out and replaced with "can be exploited".

However, this puts his identity at risk of being exposed.