Which person here doesn’t look annoying? The one with the calmest and most composed face.
I thought for a moment and suddenly felt something was off. Would the girl think my face was calm because I was as lazy as a puddle of mud at that time?
Moreover, it’s hard for me to discern the state of these people when they are about to die. The one who looks the calmest and most composed might actually be the most desperate at the moment of death; it doesn’t necessarily mean they look like that all the time.
I shook my head, knowing I was wasting time like this. There wasn’t enough time for me to ponder aimlessly, so I took a deep breath and looked at the heads again.
It’s said that during moments of extreme tension, the brain’s thinking speed can increase by several times. This time, although it was only a matter of seconds, all the details of the seven heads still lined up in my mind. I suddenly noticed that one of the heads wasn’t like the others; its eyes were slightly squinted, and I could see its eyeball.
“Let me through, let me through,” I said. “Pull back all the eyes of these heads for me.”
“Eyes?”
Eyeballs cannot be disguised. I thought to myself, the person who looks most like me must have all the details resembling mine, so their eyeballs must also be similar.
I had studied disguise techniques during this time and read a lot of literature, some of which recorded the simplest methods to identify disguises, namely observing the other person’s eyeballs. The color depth of the eyes, the whites of the eyes, the blood vessels in the whites, and the size of the pupils all differ from person to person.
Details of the eyeballs can only be seen up close, so unless it’s someone particularly intimate with me, it’s generally impossible to see them. In fact, I don’t have anyone particularly close to me, and I wouldn’t even pay attention to the details of my own eyeballs. Coincidentally, I had been reading about this recently, which prompted me to take a good look at my own eyes, allowing me to seize the opportunity.
Regardless of whether the other party considered this direction, at least it was a line of thought that kept me from feeling completely desperate.
They uncuffed both of us. Anyway, time was running out, and the fake Wu Xie began writing his answers on paper while I lifted the eyelids of those heads to look at their eyeballs.
After observing, I realized I was a fool because all the dead people had their eyes rolled back, except for the one with slightly open eyes, who was staring straight ahead, indicating that they died with their eyes open.
The eyeballs of that person who died with their eyes open were not the same as mine.
I turned to Zhang Longban and asked, “Can I damage these heads?”
“How do you want to damage them? Eat monkey brains?” he asked.
“I want to scoop out their eyeballs.”
“Give it up; the preservation treatment can’t preserve the eyeballs, they’re all resin,” Zhang Longban shook his head. “And you don’t have time; make a decision quickly!”
“Wait a minute. Haven’t you considered that because of your actions, the real Wu Xie will definitely make a wrong choice out of panic due to his character flaws, and in the end, you might mistakenly kill me?”
“We don’t care,” Zhang Longban replied without a hint of hesitation. “We are absolutely confident about your choices.”
“Can you not be so confident in me? I currently have zero confidence in myself.”
At this moment, the fake Wu Xie next to me said, “Can you hurry up? If you can’t, just pick one at random. Stop with the damn nonsense.”
I looked at the fake Wu Xie’s face and thought to myself, picking one or two would be fine, but the probability of getting all seven right is just too low—what the hell!
Wait a minute, picking, picking, picking.
I furrowed my brow—the words from those people just now echoed in my ears.
“We don’t care.”
That was Zhang Longban who said it.
What does “we don’t care” mean? It can’t mean they really don’t care. If their goal is to find Wu Xie, they must consider that if I get so scared I lose my mind, it could lead to a blunder, and then they wouldn’t be able to find Wu Xie.
They don’t care, yet they have complete confidence in their choice.
Could it be that their focus isn’t on which of the seven heads I pick? This is just a ruse; they are judging whether I am real or not based on other factors?
For instance, my reaction to these seven heads might be the key aspect they are examining, while the heads themselves hold no significance.
Thinking of this, I suddenly felt enlightened. Yes, it makes sense. With such a meticulously arranged trap and someone with such cunning ability behind it, they wouldn’t make such a mistake.
The choice itself must be meaningless.
If the question is meaningless, then what they are observing is human behavior. In other words, the process I just went through was the real test.
Then this fake Wu Xie must have known it all along, which is why he has been handling the test in another way, while I was just standing here foolishly.
“Time’s up, are you going to choose or not?” asked Miss Zhang.
“Do you really want to cut off my head?” I snapped, pointing at the person whose eyes were opened, and said, “This one.”
Zhang Longban and Miss Zhang exchanged a glance, looking at the paper the fake Wu Xie had handed her—presumably containing his answer. Then Miss Zhang sighed, drew a dagger from her lower back, and came to stand in front of me, saying to the people next to me, “Bind him up, find a spot in the yard, I want to use the knife to cut.”
I was stunned. It wasn’t until they bound me and pushed me into the yard, pressing my head down onto a stone mill, that I finally reacted, saying, “Damn it, did I answer wrong?”
I turned my head and saw Miss Zhang walking to my side, the dagger sweeping past my face, a delicate hand pressing down on the back of my neck, pinching my artery. She said, “Don’t be afraid, I’ll start cutting from the spinal cord. When you feel no pain at all, that’s just the very beginning.”
“I’m really Wu Xie, you’ve got it wrong!” I shouted. I felt a chill at the back of my neck, and warm blood began to flow down. Then, I realized I suddenly couldn’t feel my body anymore.
It’s over, I’m dead, I thought.
This time it’s for real. I had expended so much energy, used so much luck, and faced hundreds of situations that could have killed me a thousand times without dying. Yet here I was, because I was foolish and answered the question wrong, dying so easily.
Life is indeed marvelous!
At this moment, I surprisingly didn’t feel too regretful; instead, I felt a bit of schadenfreude. I thought to myself: When the young man comes out from the bronze door, he will surely discover that I was mistakenly killed by his kin. I can’t wait to see the expressions on this girl’s face and that Zhang Longban’s when that happens.