Chapter 64: Parents (Part 1)

"Are you alive?"
"Didn't quite manage to die."
These two sentences, so brief as to be almost entirely devoid of emotion, echoed across the concrete wall that served as their partition, each striking the other's heart, yet carrying no hint of the celebration of surviving a calamity.
Facing the coming and going of the Grim Reaper, their reactions were chillingly, inconceivably calm.
Then, seemingly sensing each other's [abnormality], the two of them chuckled in unison.
"Now that we're safe, I want to ask, what differences did you find?" The female neighbor only knew that the game was won; she had no idea what tricks Zhou Ke had actually played.
"Hold on a second. I'm a bit far away right now, and talking is too much of a chore."
Zhou Ke casually ripped down the room's curtain, roughly bandaging his bleeding wound before moving closer to the wall.
Along the way, in an act of petty retribution, he kicked the battered stuffed rabbit twice, unearthing an F-grade magic crystal from a pile of cotton stuffing.
Reaching the wall, Zhou Ke found that after the steel cable vanished, it left a small hole in the masonry.
Peering inside, he didn't see anyone, guessing that the female neighbor must have sat down on the floor to rest, so he simply followed suit and sat with his back against the wall.
"Explaining the deduction process is rather troublesome," Zhou Ke intoned with a deliberate air of profundity, followed immediately by, "but I'm not afraid of trouble."
Mr. Zhou had always been fond of displaying his own wisdom.
The female neighbor offered no comment on this.
"Let's talk about that children's crayon drawing first."
Pointing the ruler in his hand at the drawing on the table, regardless of whether the other person could see it, Zhou Ke said:
"The reason you felt the children's crayon drawing was wrong is because your room misled you, making you subconsciously assume that the owner of the room was at least a seventeen or eighteen-year-old girl, or even older."
"But in reality, that is not the case."
Hearing Zhou Ke put it this way, the ineffable sense of incongruity in the female neighbor's heart suddenly vanished.
According to Zhou Ke's explanation, the presence of a children's crayon drawing on the table suddenly made sense.
Yet she immediately developed a new doubt: "You said the room misled me? How did it pull that off?"
Zhou Ke replied, "It's very simple. The size of the bed, the height of the chair, the size of the water cup—everything within your line of sight was misleading you."
People live by common sense; people are bound by common sense.
Just as the two of them had never gathered any identity information about the room's owner, yet they were dead set on affirming that the room's owner was female.
Pink tones, numerous plush toys, printed curtains—these and those were the impressions of a girl instilled in us by common sense.
"Our rooms look identical, but there is a substantive difference, and that is—size."
Normally, abnormalities in the size of an object can be judged by referencing nearby objects, but if all the objects in a room, including the room itself, change proportionally, it becomes difficult to notice.
"Size? No wonder you asked me about the length and width of the bed." The female neighbor experienced a moment of realization.
"Right, the room on my side is at a true scale," Zhou Ke responded.
"The bed is a space sized for a six-year-old little girl to sleep in, the chair is at a height a six-year-old little girl can climb onto, and the water cup is a size a six-year-old little girl can lift."
"Naturally, the children's crayon drawing didn't make me feel out of place, because my room is indeed the room of a little girl who would draw crude crayon sketches."
"Then my room is an enlarged version of yours." The female neighbor's comprehension wasn't bad; she grasped the general idea, leaving only one final point: "So what exactly was the [difference] between these two rooms?"
"Since your room is a proportional enlargement of mine, it means that the enlargement itself definitely cannot fall under the scope of [Spot the Difference], otherwise every single object in the room would have to be counted."
"That way, the answer practically leaps off the page."
Zhou Ke deliberately paused here for a long time, leaving the female neighbor utterly clueless as to what was leaping off any page.
"If it didn't get bigger, then it's the only thing that didn't get bigger along with everything else."
"What kind of object do you think would be very easy to see through once it gets enlarged?"
Zhou Ke threw out a rhetorical question, without leaving time for an answer, and went right on talking:
"A bed one and a half meters long becomes one point eight meters long, a magnification factor of twelve."
"If other things become twelve times larger, you wouldn't feel anything is amiss; after all, these common objects vary in size in real life."
"But this is different." Zhou Ke gently tapped the wall with his ruler. "This ruler is different. There's no way to fake it."
"Twelve times fifteen centimeters is eighteen centimeters—a full three-centimeter discrepancy. You might not notice it ordinarily, but if you inspect it closely, you're bound to find something wrong."
As he spoke, Zhou Ke made a finger-gun gesture. "And for two proportionally altered rooms, remaining unchanged is the biggest change of all."
Having finished his explanation, he couldn't help but let out a self-deprecating laugh.
If this kind of anomaly had occurred in Zhou Ke's room, counting from the moment he saw that crayon drawing, he would have noticed it in less than thirty seconds.
"I went through all that painstaking trouble searching everywhere, only to find out I was running around in circles for nothing. This game really relies on teammates..."
Zhou Ke had no intention of maligning the female neighbor; on the contrary, he felt she could be considered sharp.
Remaining calm at a critical juncture and accurately identifying the point of anomaly—
If it had been Li Hua, he reckoned he would have died eight hundred times over, unlocking the achievement "Practice More If You Suck."
"This time, I really owe it to you," Zhou Ke said, resting his hands behind his head.
"I should be the one saying that," the female neighbor replied, failing to understand Zhou Ke's eccentric temperament and feeling somewhat baffled.
Pausing for a couple of seconds, she spoke again: "I'm pretty much done resting. How about you?"
"Ah."
Zhou Ke understood what the female neighbor meant. Even though [Spot the Difference!] had been cleared and reality had returned to normal, there was still no prompt for teleportation.
The implication was obvious: the trial of the [Ghost, Metal, Sheep Gate] was still ongoing.
He looked toward the left side of the room, where a door stood.
He lowered his gaze to look at the wound on his arm. The bleeding had temporarily stopped, but if he made any drastic movements, there was still a risk of it tearing open.
There was no help for it; the room lacked medical supplies, and this was already the best-case scenario for treatment.
"Let's go, then."
Zhou Ke didn't ponder for too long, figuring that if they encountered danger later, he could use that helpful female neighbor next door to block it.
Creeak—screeak-creeak—
Two sounds of doors being pushed open rang out in quick succession, except one was pushed wide open in broad daylight, while the other involved sneaking, peeking, closing, opening, peeking, closing, and opening again.
"There's no danger, come out," the female neighbor's helpless voice came from close outside the room.
"I'm just being cautious. Who knows if there'll be a ghost running out in the middle of the night to ring the doorbell?"
Seeing someone else brave the risks for him, Zhou Ke stepped out with peace of mind.
Yet the moment he stepped out, he was struck dumb.