“This is the meeting room. The boss is currently occupied with a private discussion with another guest, so they won’t be joining us immediately. Please make yourselves comfortable and feel free to order any refreshments you desire.”
“Ah, in that case, I’ll have a brownie!” An Yueyin immediately raised her hand.
“Oh? For me, a regular strawberry sundae will be perfectly fine.”
“Chocolate for me.”
“Very well, please wait a moment.” With that, the server departed, leaving the three of us in the meeting room, waiting in silence.
Three minutes later.
“Ah, seriously! Why are they still not here!” An Yueyin impatiently rolled around on the sofa.
“It’s only been a little while. Could you perhaps be a bit more patient?” Bingying sighed, pulling her up from the sofa.
“But it’s so slow! Honestly, I can’t take it anymore! Let’s go on a treasure hunt?”
“While this meeting room is certainly quite large, how could there possibly be any treasure? Luo Tianchen, you too… What are you doing?!”
“Ah, me?” I responded, continuing my actions. “I was a bit bored, so I tore some notepaper and made origami. What do you think? My paper crane isn’t bad, is it?”
“Even you’re joining in! Honestly, we’re not children anymore…”
“Don’t say that. Here, it’s for you.” I casually placed the paper crane on Bingying’s head, then stood up and began to wander around.
“Eh?! Luo Tianchen gave me a paper crane… I-I need to find something to put it in quickly! Oh, my bag, my bag, it’s here!”
As Bingying had observed, this meeting room was unusually vast. It comprised a total of 361 floor tiles, arranged in a 19×19 grid.
I roughly estimated each tile to be a square with sides of about one meter, meaning the room spanned approximately 361 square meters. For a mere meeting room, this was excessively large.
Recalling the unusually spacious areas in the couple’s room I’d stayed in before, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was simply the designer’s peculiar sense of humor.
What struck me as even stranger was the scarcity of furniture despite the immense space. There was only a central round conference table, a tea table and sofa tucked into the lower-left corner, a computer on the right side of the room, an odd mural and a wooden grandfather clock at the front, and a single window on the left.
The rest of the room lay eerily empty, further accentuating its peculiar atmosphere. Would anyone truly conduct serious discussions in such an inexplicably vast and barren space?
For some reason, an unidentifiable sense of unease had been gnawing at me ever since we arrived. It felt as though something unsettling had subtly occurred, entirely without my knowledge.
“Ah, I found it!” An Yueyin suddenly cheered, startling me so much my heart nearly leaped from my throat. “Look, look! See what I found!”
“Eh, isn’t that just a blank piece of paper?”
“No way! Look closely, there’s a string of numbers on it!” An Yueyin brought the paper closer for Bingying to see.
“Oh, you’re right. 200318, 070615… I can’t make heads or tails of it. It’s probably just something someone wrote out of boredom during a meeting here.”
“No, it’s definitely a treasure map, a treasure map! It has to be!”
“But even if you say that, it still doesn’t make any sense…”
“Hold on, could I take a look?” I interjected into their conversation, raising my hand to ask.
“You can, but… it’s really nothing much…” Bingying handed the paper to me.
‘Hmm, on the surface, it truly looked like an ordinary blank sheet of paper. The quality was standard, not appearing to be made of any special material. So, the key must indeed lie in this string of numbers…’
“Hey, An Yueyin, where did you find this paper?” I suddenly asked.
“Eh? It was in the indentation in the center of that round table. I saw a magazine covering a piece of paper, so I just picked it up.”
“Bring me that magazine.”
“Eh? Here.”
I took the magazine. It was an early issue of *Reader’s*, with nothing overtly peculiar about it. However, if I looked at it with my hypothesis in mind… I quickly flipped through the pages, comparing them to the numbers on the paper, and a smile touched my lips.
“Luo Tianchen, have you… perhaps discovered something?”
“Ah, yes. Perhaps this really *is* a ‘treasure map’ after all.” I placed the paper with the numbers and the magazine on the glass coffee table.
“Really? Then, what do these numbers mean?”
“Well, it’s a rather basic cipher. The numbers themselves are meaningless; what’s important is the meaning they represent.”
“And what is that?”
“If you look closely, you’ll see these numbers are grouped in sets of six, separated by spaces. If you split the numbers in each group into pairs, and then relate them to this magazine, what comes to mind?”
“The magazine… page numbers, perhaps?”
“Bingo! That means, if you match them to the page number, line number, and character number in the magazine…”
“It forms a sentence!”
“You two should try it. That should be correct. While this encryption method is simple, the hardest part is usually finding the book corresponding to the puzzle. Yet, the puzzle setter just tossed the magazine right in front of us. Such an obvious hint—do they really take us for fools?”
“The puzzle setter? What do you mean?” Bingying finally snapped out of her daze.
“Most likely, this is a puzzle set by the boss for us.”
“…So what should we do?”
“Let’s keep solving it and see what tricks they’re playing.”
“Ah, I solved it! It says, ‘The clue is in the Qian-position.’ What does that mean? Did we get it wrong?”
“Qian-position? You mean thousands, hundreds, tens, ones?” Having realized this was a puzzle game, Bingying’s interest was piqued, and she began to ponder deeply.
“Regarding that, I have an answer too. The clue is right beneath our feet.”
“Beneath our feet?”
“Exactly. Look at the arrangement of these tiles and this square meeting room. Does anything come to mind?”
“…Ah! It’s like a Go board! I once saw my dad playing chess with someone, and the board looked just like this. I asked him what it was, and he told me it was Go!” This time, An Yueyin was the first to speak up.
“Your dad plays Go?” I couldn’t help but be surprised. From the stories she’d told before, her father’s image in my mind was fixed as a burly, brawny man, the type who’d rather act than think. If he played Go, I would have to adjust my impression of him slightly. After all, as a national treasure of China, the myriad variations in Go were incomparable to any other board game; a simpleton could never grasp its profound intricacies.
“Yeah, my dad’s really amazing! He can finish a whole game in just a few dozen moves!” she boasted proudly.
“That fast? How does he play?” ‘Could her father be a Go master? Or was his opponent just terrible?’
“Hmm? Don’t you just have to connect five pieces of the same color?”
“That’s Five-in-a-Row, not Go, thank you!”
‘Sure enough, he was still a simpleton.’
“But, in Go, is there such a thing as a ‘Qian-position’?” Bingying questioned.
“Yes, it’s a very old Chinese method for counting points. Nowadays, a Go board is divided into 19 columns and 19 rows, labeled A-S and 1-19 respectively. So, to indicate a specific point, you can just say ‘A19’, for example.
However, in ancient times, there were no Arabic numerals or English letters, so all 361 points were represented by different Chinese characters. If we take the direction of the door we entered as ‘down’ and the mural as ‘up’, then the Qian-position… should be right here.” I walked to the Qian-position and tapped the floor tile with my hand. A clear, hollow echo rang out. ‘It’s indeed hollow.’
“Hey, why are you two just standing there? Come help me, I can’t lift it alone.”
“Luo Tianchen, not only do you know such obscure facts… but you’ve even memorized the positions represented by all 361 Chinese characters?” Bingying stared, dumbfounded.
“Because I have a lot of free time.”
“This isn’t about having free time at all! Would a normal person actually memorize something like that?”
“Only a perfectionist would care about the details. See? It came in handy, didn’t it? Come on, let’s quickly see what the next puzzle is.”
“Hey, has he always been this amazing?” An Yueyin whispered to Bingying.
“More or less. He always comes up with strange but useful ideas when others are at a loss. But normally, he’s so lazy, as if he can’t be bothered to do anything. It’s only when faced with puzzles like this that he perks up a bit.” Bingying thought for a moment before replying.
“Oh? Could he secretly be a high school detective?” An Yueyin instantly grew excited.
“No, even so… well, it’s certainly possible.”
“If that’s the case, we could…”
“Hey, what are you two muttering about? Come over and help!” Seeing them suddenly whispering, a chill ran down my spine, and I quickly interrupted their conversation.
“Coming right away!”
“Wait a moment.” I pressed down on Bingying’s hand, which was about to lift the tile, and looked towards the door. “Who’s there?”
The door opened, and the server walked in, carrying a tray. Their voice was laced with apology: “My deepest apologies. Due to my oversight, the sundae was accidentally spilled. I’ve only brought the chocolate and brownie cake for now. Please wait a moment, and I’ll prepare a fresh strawberry sundae for you immediately.”
“Oh, it’s just the server. Thank you for your trouble. Please put the items on the coffee table; we’ll eat them later.”
The server acknowledged, turning to walk towards the coffee table. In that instant, I subtly gave Bingying an instruction: “Take him down.”
Trusting me implicitly, Bingying launched a flying kick at the server without hesitation. The server reacted with surprising speed, swiftly dodging the attack, but Bingying followed up with an elbow strike that brought him crashing to the floor, leaving him immobile.
“Now, do you have anything to say?” I crouched in front of the server’s head, meeting his eyes as I spoke.
“Um, did I displease you somehow? If you have a complaint, please voice it directly. Why resort to violence?” The server winced in pain; Bingying’s blow had clearly hit him hard.
“Still not admitting it? You’ve been waiting by the door for quite some time, haven’t you?”
“…Why do you say that?” The server dropped his pained expression, looking at me with equal seriousness.
“Because of the sundae. Of the three items on the tray, only the sundae was ‘accidentally spilled.’ That’s quite odd, isn’t it? And if it was genuinely an accident, why are there no traces of sundae on your pant cuffs or shoe soles? It wasn’t spilled by accident at all. It melted because you spent too long eavesdropping, forcing you to dispose of it to destroy the evidence. If you still intend to argue, why don’t we go check the trash can outside the door? I wonder if we’ll find a strawberry sundae there?”
“…” The server fell silent.
“So, who exactly are you? Are you someone our boss sent to monitor us? Or, perhaps, a spy?”