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As the final piece slotted into place, a key dropped out of the lower compartment and clattered to the floor. Xiao Jingyan bent down to retrieve it, inspecting it from all angles with a look of suspicion. He passed the key to Mei Changsu, who also gave it a close examination.
Mei Changsu handed it back with a nod. “Shall we?”
Xiao Jingyan fitted the key into the lock and turned it. The tumblers shifted, the lock opened and allowed them through the door to the “manor house.” They had managed the courtyard “room” part of the escape room they were in rather more quickly than anticipated. The puzzles there hadn’t been very difficult.
The scenario was that they were martial artists roaming the jianghu and had come across the abandoned home of a genius master from a few generations ago. The rumor was that he’d hidden a scroll with his secret techniques somewhere in the house. So of course the objective was to solve puzzles to get to where the scroll was.
It wasn’t that Xiao Jingyan minded escape rooms; they were relatively straightforward in their purposes. It was just that he wasn’t a fan of puzzles. Or at least the kinds of puzzles that required that sort of backwards sideways thinking that hid traps and dead ends. He’d always been more of a spot-the-differences type of person. Lin Shu had been the one who liked the tricky puzzles. Xiao Jingyan frowned and turned his mind away from that direction.
He pushed the door open and gestured for Mei Changsu to go in first.
The room they entered looked like it belonged in a period drama. It was the sort of rich-but-sparsely decorated room that wealthy characters lived in in wuxia dramas. There were vases and sculptures on shelves, calligraphy pieces on the walls, and an assortment of other props and things on the furniture.
Xiao Jingyan headed for the picture window that had something attached to it. When he got closer, he realized it was a bow, and the landscape outside was painted to look distant enough to shoot at small targets. He plucked at the bowstring.
“Stop,” Mei Changsu called. “What are you doing?”
“...A puzzle. It’s an escape room, remember?”
Mei Changsu looked at him like he had grown a second head. “Yes. But why are you doing that one.”
“Because we have to solve it.”
Mei Changsu blinked at him. was it just him or was there a flicker of irritation in that blink?
Xiao Jingyan frowned and added, “The quicker we solve all the puzzles the quicker we get out of the room. I’m just doing my part to help.”
All that got him was a raised eyebrow. “Are you sure you’re really helping?”
Ah, yes, there was the attitude. If Xiao Jingyan didn’t know that plenty of people found his own personality lacking and abrasive, Mei Changsu’s sarcastic tendencies might have bothered him more. As it was, he tended to take the other man at his word rather than his tone.
“What do you mean?” he asked. “Would you like to solve this puzzle instead?”
Mei Changsu shook his head, looking slightly exasperated. “We need to know what other puzzles there are first. There may be pieces we need.”
Now it was Xiao Jingyan’s turn to be exasperated. They were just escape room puzzles, no need to think that deeply. “I don’t think they need to go in any particular order.”
“…would it hurt to be cautious?”
“Why?”
Mei Changsu held out a hand, gesturing to the room. “Puzzles might have pieces that need to be solved in order. If we do them the wrong way we’ll fail the course.”
It still sounded like paranoid nonsense to Xiao Jingyan, but wasn’t that how these things were designed? He hadn’t done enough escape rooms to know if having multi-piece puzzles and certain orders were common or not. It hadn’t been on the few he’d done so far, but perhaps this one was different. And though it wasn’t how he would solve it, he had to admit that Mei Changsu probably knew more about puzzles than him. Or at least knew more about trickery.
“Fine, we’ll do it your way,” he conceded. “What do we do first?”
Mei Changsu looked around. “Search the room. We need to know what puzzles there are.”
Xiao Jingyan didn’t quite sigh, but it was a close thing. He started at one corner to search while Mei Changsu started at the other.
It wasn’t long before Mei Changsu said he’d found something. Xiao Jingyan was eyeing a strange-looking dragon sculpture on one of the shelves.
“I found something too,” he said, reaching out to better inspect the sculpture. There really was something strange about it. And there was more wear around it on the shelf than other places.
“Wait, don’t—“
The lights all went off simultaneously.
There was a moment of silence before Mei Changsu sighed and said, “Try doing whatever you did again and see if the lights come back.”
They didn‘t.
By then, Xiao Jingyan’s eyes had mostly adjusted to the relative darkness of the room. There were still some emergency lights, a low blue glow, seeping in from the false windows, imitating moonlight. They could still see, it was just going to be a little harder to manage.
Mei Changsu shuffled over to where Xiao Jingyan was standing and leaned in to inspect the thing that had caused the lights to shut off. Xiao Jingyan didn’t know what else he hoped to find. Clearly it was a trap of some sort, or at least an obstacle to make the room more difficult. But when Mei Changsu straightened again, he had a look of satisfaction on his face.
“What have you found?” Xiao Jingyan enquired.
Mei Changsu nodded at the sculpture. “This is the key to getting out of the room, I think. But when activated too early, it turns off the lights. We need the other pieces to fit into place first.”
“And where do you think the other pieces are?”
“I expect we’ll find them once we do the other puzzles.”
Xiao Jingyan paused a moment, glanced over at the puzzle he’d wanted to do earlier, and gave Mei Changsu a flat look. “Does that mean I can do that puzzle now?”
Mei Changsu returned his look for a moment but nodded with only a hint of indignation.
The puzzle was not really a puzzle. it was essentially an accuracy test. There were targets to hit with a more or less stationary bow and terribly balanced arrows. It only took six arrows to hit all three targets, which was frankly a terrible run or Xiao Jingyan, but inevitable considering how bad the equipment was.
When the last target fell, something else shook loose and clattered down into a drawer below the window he’d been shooting through. He deftly plucked it from the drawer and held it up in the dim light to see what it was. It looked like a dragon’s foot, with little claws, and a long flat part above the leg part for it to attached to the dragon sculpture he’d found earlier.
Mei Changsu had gone back to his own puzzle and just as Xiao Jingyan approached him, there was a similar clatter and another piece of the dragon appeared in a nearby basket. It seemed that Mei Changsu had been correct in his guess that they would find the pieces for the final puzzle in the other puzzles. Either way, they would have figured out they needed the pieces from the other puzzles. All it would have taken was Xiao Jingyan doing the puzzle he’d had his sight set on in the first place. Then maybe the lights would still be on.
Or not. It was very possible they still would have turned the thing before they had all the pieces when they were looking for the remaining puzzles.
Mei Changsu handed his dragon’s foot over to Xiao Jingyan and pointed at the slots in the dragon statue. “Try fitting them in there.”
Xiao Jingyan had noticed them before, but it hadn’t quite occurred to him that there needed to be something to fill them. He held up the two feet to two of the slots.
They looked like they would fit.
He changed positions, holding the feet at other slots.
They also looked like they would fit.
That might be a problem. He looked over to Mei Changsu for guidance.
“Just put them in for now. We can check the other two when we find them and see if there’s any difference in where they go.”
Xiao Jingyan nodded and put the feet in the slots for the back legs.
“So,” started Xiao Jingyan, having learnt his lesson about trying to move things randomly, “there are likely two puzzles left. Where do you suggest we start?”
Mei Changsu looked around in contemplation for a minute before gesturing towards one side of the room. “The chest over there. Try there.”
Sure enough, there was a puzzle there, involving matching pieces and fitting them together in the right formation to unlock the inner box of the chest where they found another leg. Xiao Jingyan had been fairly certain he could figure it out, but after only two minutes of arranging pieces, Mei Changsu batted his hands away and deftly fit them together himself.
The fourth leg was the most difficult to uncover. It was only when Xiao Jingyan resorted to reading the calligraphy pieces on the walls aloud that Mei Changsu realized the puzzle they were looking for was a riddle in the poems themselves.
After throwing out whatever suggestions he could think of, Xiao Jingyan took the hint from Mei Changsu glaring daggers at him and shut his mouth to let the other man think. Only a minute later, he was regretting giving all of his suggestions so quickly. The silence was grating on his nerves. He started pacing.
“It’s in the brazier.”
“What?” Xiao Jingyan thought he hadn’t heard correctly.
“The brazier, it’s in there. Obviously, it would be a problem if it were real, but it’s just a prop.”
It took a bit of force to open the brazier, but Xiao Jingyan didn’t think they’d broken it, and they’d found the last foot. With the final feet stuck in their slots, there was a loud clunk and the sound of gears and mechanisms.
A section of wall caught their attention as it moved. Of course it was a secret room. In a wuxia-themed escape room, what else was it going to be?
The door to the final, inner sanctum opened and the two of them shuffled through the opening. It wasn’t much brighter there than it had been in the previous room with the lights out, but there were shafts of light cutting through the relative dark and falling on various objects on pedestals and shelves.
Xiao Jingyan automatically reached out for one of the objects, but Mei Changsu stopped him with a word. Slightly sheepishly, he pulled his hand back.
They stopped in front of a locked cabinet that was bathed in light from on of the small spotlights hidden in the ceiling. Xiao Jingyan and Mei Changsu exchanged a questioning look. Out of all the things in the room, this one was the most suspicious, and therefore the most likely to hold the final puzzle.
The lock was a simple one, and only took a bit of fiddling to realize the pattern the combination had to be on in order to unlock it.
The hinges creaked slightly as Xiao Jingyan opened the doors of the cabinet. Inside was a single object.
A scroll.
Xiao Jingyan narrowed his eyes in confusion for a moment before remembering that it was the scenario of the escape room. They were supposed to find the legendary scroll and learn its secrets in order to escape.
Carefully, Mei Changsu took the scroll out of the cabinet. The two of them held their breaths for a few seconds, but nothing happened.
They exchanged a glance, and turned their attention to the scroll.
On the scroll was a diagram.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Xiao Jingyan moaned.
Mei Changsu stared at it for a few more moments before letting out a sigh. “It’s that or we fail the escape room.”
“Fine, then we’ll fail it. I’m not doing the damn fusion dance.”
Mu Nihuang snorted in amusement and popped another kernel of popcorn in her mouth as she finished watching the timer on the escape room run out on one of the screens in front of her. Xia Dong reached over and took another handful from the bowl in Mu Nihuang’s lap.
“Well?” Xia Dong asked.
Mu Nihuang laughed and turned to another screen. Yan Yujin and Mu Qing were clinging to one another in terror while Xiao Jingrui fought off a “ghost” in their haunted house room. She grinned.
“You’re right, Dong-jie. You’ve got the best job.”