Chapter 214

Chapter 214

An Answer Sheet?

No one had expected the organizing committee to pull such a stunt at the very end of the competition.

“No skipping steps?” Murphy found it utterly preposterous. “Does the committee think this is a math problem?”

How was someone like him, who had coasted by on others’ success, supposed to survive this?

“Probably to prevent slackers like you from skating by,” Yang Haibo shot him a glance before turning back to the system message, chin resting on his hand. “But banning online communication clearly targets students who chose to stay at the shore base.”

Luo Lin nodded softly, murmuring, “After all, the underwater segment is the main event of this competition. The committee put most of its energy into designing the ghost ship instance. It’s only natural that those who never boarded the ship or didn’t reach the final world wouldn’t score high.”

“But some people did go into the water and still got tripped up by the competition rules. You can imagine how much they were slacking.”

“Are you calling me out?” Murphy dramatically feigned heartbreak, choking up as he leaned to his right. “Miss Eve, you must take responsibility! Your brilliance was so dazzling it blinded me, preventing me from seeing through the competition’s sinister intentions.”

Who could make copying answers sound so noble? Eve let out a soft sound of surprise and was about to dodge Murphy’s much more suspicious lean when a hand quietly reached from behind him, firmly gripping Murphy’s shoulder and holding him in place.

Lorca bent down slightly, his smile gentle and gracious. “My apologies, Young Master Garcia, but Eve has just woken up and hasn’t fully recovered yet. Could you please mind your distance from her?”

Murphy: “...O-okay.”

Memories of being fleeced resurfaced, and in Murphy’s eyes at that moment, perhaps no one on the ship was more chilling than Lorca. He shrank back, looking rather like a cat caught stealing cream and chased away by its owner. In contrast, Lorca naturally released his shoulder and took the empty seat deliberately left beside Eve.

It was a small round tea table tucked in the corner of the room, and with five people gathered around it, the space felt a bit cramped, their arms nearly touching. Eve, wearing gloves, fiddled with a crystal block in her hand and said, “I’ve mostly recovered. There’s no need to treat me like a porcelain doll.”

“But I don’t want to see you sitting so close to someone from another school. It’s better to be cautious,” Lorca shot a reproachful glance at Luo Lin, who showed no hint of apology and returned his gaze with her usual aloofness. He then turned and asked, “But why are Chairman Yang and Chairman Murphy here?”

Now Lorca was back to calling him ‘Chairman’ again. So, his earlier use of Murphy’s full name was indeed just a personal reprimand?

Yang Haibo weighed his words for a moment before settling on a diplomatic response: “Both of us were on the same team as Chief Eve in the door world, and we’ve developed some rapport along the way. After hearing about Chief Eve’s improved condition, we took the initiative to come check on her.”

That was the truth—though copying homework was also one of the goals.

The reply was characteristically meticulous, much like Yang Haibo’s usual style, so Lorca only frowned slightly. Before he could pick another fight, Eve stepped on his foot under the table without changing expression. Just then, his wristband buzzed again, drawing everyone’s attention.

The test paper had been distributed.

The organizing committee hadn’t sunk so low as to hand out a blank sheet and ask everyone to start from scratch. The paper lightly printed three lines as guiding questions:

“Question 1: Please outline the timeline of the [Doors] as completely as possible.”

“Question 2: What is your understanding of the [World]?”

“Question 3: Do you believe [Fate] can be altered? Please explain your reasoning.”

“......”

Even Eve, who had mentally prepared herself beforehand, was somewhat taken aback by the questions.

To be fair, these three questions were closely tied to the core of the Ghost Ship mission—three doors, perhaps more, each pointing to different points in time and forming interconnected tasks that together traced a coherent event trajectory. But the real challenge was that even grasping the concepts to this extent was already a high barrier.

No wonder there was no single correct answer. If it were just about recounting events and settings within the doors, there might have been a template to follow. But when it came to interpreting the worldview, how could there be only one standard for evaluation?

Time was limited. Eve skimmed the paper again and had a rough idea: “The last two questions are tougher, but at least there’s an easy point here.”

“What you call an easy point is what we expected to be the final challenge,” Yang Haibo pressed his temples and smiled wryly. “I spoke too soon—this test isn’t just targeting those who didn’t go into the water; it’s not letting those who braved the Ghost Ship off the hook either.”

“At least we could copy from the first question.”

How could he say that? Yang Haibo felt something was off—obviously, the latter two questions could also be copied in parts.

Fortunately, he eventually remembered that he wasn’t actually a student of First Empire Academy. Being able to sit here and get the answer to the first question was already a result of Eve’s kindness once again.

For a moment, the room fell silent. Everyone buried their heads in their work, first doing their best to fill in part of the answers on their own. Short-answer questions were the hardest to copy because no two answers could be exactly the same. No matter what, they had to rely on their own brains to write something first.

Digital exams allowed for much faster answering than pen-and-paper tests, so the committee had drastically minimized the time allotted, as if forcing students to provide their most instinctive answers in the shortest time possible, without time to think twice.

The first question was relatively uncontroversial. Though the world behind the door seemed to revolve around the Fuqiu family, the true protagonist was actually the Sacred Mountain. Its story appeared complex, but when broken down, it wasn’t hard to understand—it was simply the process of a world of faith collapsing.

Chronologically, the second world was the earliest, explaining the events of the Fuqiu family. In essence, it hinted at the believers’ corruption and how they used prayers to the god to fulfill their selfish desires. The third world was the central story: the god, displeased with the impurity of the believers’ faith and the erosion of the human world by hell, sent a flood to cleanse all impurities. As for the first world, Eve speculated it was the recreated world after the flood. The matriarch of the Fuqiu family, who was in her prime in the second and third worlds, appeared elderly in the first.

On the surface, this was a standard apocalyptic myth, with a clear beginning and end. Anyone who filled in their answer according to this template would likely get a decent score.

The exam only required outlining the timeline of the world behind the door, without examining detailed causal relationships, so students didn’t need to elaborate on the Fuqiu family’s affairs—though Eve herself hadn’t fully figured out the relationship between the matriarch and the crystal.

“Most people probably didn’t make it through the final three challenges. Among them were many intelligent and knowledgeable individuals who could piece together a basic truth from incomplete information. Of course, there were also those who, even if they reached the final challenge, relied on strong teammates or brute force. Their answers, even if they contained more information, would likely be disorganized and useless,” Lorca whispered to Eve. “After all, this round of the competition emphasized both survival and puzzle-solving. If I were the committee, I’d set a scoring benchmark here to ensure students who used their brains got the scores they deserved.”

The speaker had intentions, and the listeners picked up on them. Murphy, sitting at the same table, gritted his teeth, feeling inexplicably targeted.

Eve murmured in agreement, then stared at the exam paper and slowly said, “But this answer isn’t the most comprehensive. The further into the worlds, the more superficial the information and clues became, making it easier to arrive at a surface-level truth.”

For instance, most people would find it hard to imagine that the god on the Sacred Mountain had long fallen into slumber. Whether the flood was sent by the god in its dreams or descended upon the human world alongside Lilith’s arrival was another matter entirely.

In the third world, she had taken the divine magic learned from the Sacred Mountain to Fuqiu and, unsurprisingly, found traces of hell there as well.

Zhou Huixue claimed to have experienced two additional worlds, even obtaining powerful items from those door worlds that allowed re-entry into the ghost ship, as well as critical information such as the god’s death. It showed that arriving early indeed had its advantages. First Empire Academy had entered right after Imperial Arts and Sciences but hadn’t managed to secure even one extra room.

“Different doors likely correspond to different choices and storylines,” Eve mused. “The reason we all ended up in the final world together is that we happened to choose the correct doors leading to the next stage. But this also had a downside: the information we obtained was too concentrated. If only we could get Zhou Huixue over here.”

Murphy snorted lightly. “Even if we dragged her here, she wouldn’t tell the truth.”

That was true.

Lorca suddenly said, “I entered later and only went through one door world before directly reaching the final door. I might be able to provide some additional clues.”

“Which door did you take?” Eve asked in surprise.

“Bat,” Lorca recalled after a moment. “Its events didn’t take place in the human world but in hell, revolving around the Queen of Hell’s attempt to expand her influence into the human world. The tasks were also different from yours—strictly speaking, it wasn’t survival-oriented but management-oriented.”

None of those present had seen a door with a bat icon before, and they all looked at him curiously.

Lorca briefly summarized his experiences in hell and then said, “When I exited the bat door, I learned that choosing the snake door next would continue the story in hell. To continue from where I left off, I directly chose the snake door.”

The hell storyline primarily involved Lilith. Since it was possible to meet her personally, the information obtainable was far more substantial than that from the inaccessible Sacred Mountain.

For example, at the beginning of the story, Lilith was the first creation of the god, and the second was a crystal. The god generously shared its authority with its creations: Lilith, as a living being, was granted the power of destruction and sent to rule hell; the crystal, as an inanimate object, was endowed with extraordinary properties, allowing those who looked through it to see the future. As for the other beings, each was given traits according to their nature: humans possessed the wisdom to use tools, rabbits had the luck to avoid harm, lambs embodied piety and purity, snakes possessed venom and elegance, and the olive leaf became a symbol of the god.

It was hard to imagine what kind of unexpectedly informative place hell must have been to gather so much information. But as Lorca spoke, the others felt a sense of clarity, as if clouds had parted to reveal the moon.

Yang Haibo hurriedly revised his answers again. “Wait, then I think I understand how the doors and identities we chose were categorized.”

“They all had counterparts, but in the end, they all led to the same world,” Eve said, recalling how Tachibana Maki had been forced to cross-dress in the final door. Suddenly curious, she asked, “Can I ask what icons you chose in the final world? I chose the olive leaf.”

Murphy exclaimed in amazement, “There was an olive leaf option? I didn’t see it earlier. But the imagery certainly matches Miss Eve’s pure nature.”

Lorca gave him a cold look.

“We chose the camel, so our identity inside was that of merchants, which makes sense,” Yang Haibo said with a frown. “At the end of the second door, wasn’t there a hint? Both Luo Lin’s and my hints mentioned not to choose doors related to birds. Since we cooperated quite well, we went with the camel together. But Murphy—even though the hint told him to go straight to the pigeon door, he insisted on sticking with me into the camel door.”

“Chairman Murphy actually didn’t choose the pigeon door?”

Eve’s eyelid twitched. This guy… really got lucky there. Meanwhile, Murphy, unaware that he had avoided a cross-dressing farce, snorted proudly, “If I did whatever others told me to do, what kind of young master would I be if I just did whatever people told me?”

Luck favors fools. No one present felt like arguing with him. Thanks to Lorca’s additional information, the answer to the first question was almost pieced together. For some unknown reason, Eve didn’t include the events at the mountaintop shrine in her answer, instead glossing over it with a brief mention of “the god is dead.” The others didn’t think much of it—except for Lorca, they didn’t even give a second thought to the crystal in Eve’s hand.

Beautiful crystals are everywhere. Murphy, for instance, had spent his time inside the door worlds playing with pearls and gemstones. No one would have guessed that the very first crystal created by the god in the story was most likely the one Eve was idly poking at.

As for the latter two questions on the exam, although Murphy and the others had talked about copying answers when they first arrived, they all ended up writing their own answers.

“What is the understanding of the world?”

In the grandest sense, the world could be the orderly accumulation of countless materials, the layering of components, or the ceaseless process of evolution and transformation. It could even be a metaphysical philosophical concept. No one can give a precise definition for such a vast term. But to put it simply, the so-called world is nothing more than a pure combination of time, place, characters, and events. These combinations collide with one another, forming the framework of a world—the ghost ship deconstructed its “world” using “doors” as units.

Halfway through writing, Eve suddenly paused. Lorca, beside her, noticed her troubled expression. “What’s wrong? You look upset, Eve.”

“...It’s nothing,” Eve exhaled slowly after a moment, said reluctantly, “I just remembered something that’s been bothering me.”

“Is it about the ghost ship?”

“Not entirely.”

She had just realized how much this method of deconstructing an entire world into mere combinations of events was like writing fiction.