Yang Zicang hadn’t expected that the Director would show up again.
Moreover, as soon as she entered, she exuded a horrifying aura of slaughter, as if her entire psych world was on the verge of collapse, the presence of a demon king about to descend into the world.
Yang Zicang and Boppoli quickly and properly sat down on the grass. He conjured a small table into place, inviting the Director to sit across from him—effectively maintaining a psychological safe distance.
Huan Bao’er, seated across the small table, glanced back and forth between the two.
“What makes you think you can construct a Demon Spirit Hall?”
Even posing such a question, she herself felt like a fool—immature, fanciful, delusional!
What could have possessed her to come here?
“Because I believe in my friend.”
Yang Zicang looked to Boppoli: “I… trust Boppoli. Maybe he can’t quite yet…”
“I can!”
Boppoli, who had been burying his head, lifted it up: “I’ve thought about it countless times in my mind since the moment I received this task.”
He opened his hand, and some fragmented luminous blueprints materialized from it.
“The moment I accepted the design materials that everyone helped me memorize, I suddenly felt a strange… call it an emotion, or an idea. Anyway, I feel that I can become the person to open this Magic Hero Hall. It’s like…”
Boppoli, who had been confused, now unraveled his mental block and said:
“It’s like everyone memorized the information about the Magic Hero Hall for me, but also their understanding of it, and most importantly… I could feel their wishes!”
Huan Bao’er cast a puzzled glance at him.
Boppoli said excitedly:
“It feels like I’m standing before a mysterious door. That afternoon of effort from those people gave me the ability to enter that unknown Magic Hero Hall! I’m not creating the Magic Hero Hall; I’m discovering it! I long to experience the unprecedented adventures within it, as well as the hope of fulfilling my own desires.”
“Heh…”
“I start pushing open the door, I start exploring the unknown there… From that moment on, many ideas, many scenes appeared in my heart.”
“Amazing, as expected of someone who played games so much that they entered another world.”
“Ahaha.”
Boppoli scratched his head awkwardly.
Huan Bao’er sat on the grass, looking up at the similar images arranged in the air.
Though rash, the fact remained that relying on just three people, plus himself, to build a Demon Hero Hall was indeed a pipe dream.
“Why do you keep making so many identical things?” Huan Bao’er asked, speaking casually as if chatting, her mood much calmer now.
“Because of time.”
Boboli fiddled with the various manifested parts on the table: “I calculated that for an arena city with a minimum capacity of twenty thousand, calculating based on ten people per team, we would need two thousand rooms for them to complete just one competition.”
Huan Bao’er became intrigued.
“Hmm, then what? What do these identical rooms have to do with that?”
“We don’t have that much time or manpower to modify all sorts of complex terrains, so I made them all the same.”
Although naive, the kid had indeed put some thought into the problem. Huan Bao’er nodded, her curiosity now satisfied.
Just then, as the two kept using the “Right of Mental Manifestation” in their models, taking advantage of their manifestation of this spiritual illusion, Boboli, the master of this spiritual field, instantly conjured the phantom of a massive clock.
He slightly raised his hand, and the clock floated and magnified to the size of a house, revealing the rotating kinetic structure behind it.
“This is…?” Huan Bao’er looked on in confusion.
“Gears!”
“Gears?”
“Make the scene into interlocking gears that collide with each other.”
As the boy spoke these words, Huan Bao’er was stunned for a moment, then a strange light suddenly burst from her eyes!
She instantly imagined the scene.
“So! So they’re all that trapezoidal shape! These rooms, are they the gears?”
“Exactly!”
Boboli jumped up, pointing at the skyline and said:
“Once all the gears are polished, we can freely mount them on the wheel. No matter which scenario we pick, there won’t be any errors!”
“My god, this saves at least over ninety percent of the time!”
“Exactly, exactly! That’s why I said I don’t need to spend too much energy on designing the Magic King Palace’s structure, because its structure is just a few big sticks!”
Huan Bao’er was stunned by what she heard. She felt a long-lost tingle rise on her skin.
What she had originally thought was a pipe dream now seemed as if it was about to burst forth at any moment!
“The impossible… might actually…”
Her heart tightened instantly. She turned around and quickly confirmed:
“So, how many scenarios have you completed so far?”
Yang Zicang said, “We’ve been working tirelessly day and night lately, and we’ve finally gotten close to over two thousand. We had made quite a few before, but later we found the precision was insufficient and had to redo everything, adding many scene decoration techniques we learned from Comrade Croft. I dare to say the scenarios inside are good enough for most teams to fight at a level matching their strength.”
Huan Bao’er sighed:
“But even so, this only provides enough for each team to have one trial run. The number is still rather small.”
This number of scenes is far from enough, and time is already running out. Unless I mobilize more people to work on this and apply for a looser temporal expansion state, but at the Lost Illusion Company, we can’t do anything that alters the temporal state too much.
Can it really be done?
If it were just the three of them
However, if we increase the number of personnel…
Huan Bao’er’s eyes showed the look of someone making a decision—should she go all in with these little brats? But although this Demon Lord Hall has formed a prototype, it’s still missing something.
“If a team is too strong, can’t they clear out a lot of gear rooms? Your rooms simply aren’t going to be enough.”
Yang Zicang turned to look at Boboli.
Seeing the expression on the young man before her, Huan Bao’er looked at the boy: “Do you have another consideration?”
“Yes. Because of the five elements—Metal, Wood, Water, Fire, Earth—I’ve divided all the rooms into five colors.”
Boboli pointed at the scattered trapezoidal gear scenes floating in the sky.
“Even without a fixed path, everyone must traverse through the shuffled gear rooms of the five colors. So, they can’t take the easiest route; instead, they have to move back and forth among the various colliding gear rooms to find the piece they’re missing.”
“That way, they won’t have enough time to randomly attack the gear rooms and will instead have to search.” Huan Bao’er nodded—it was truly an ingenious design.
Boboli waved his hand, and in front of him, the reverse structure of the clock face appeared like a mirror image.
A mechanical device composed of two gears of different sizes, like a pair of doors, lay flat in front of Huan Bao’er.
He looked at Huan Bao’er: “And I’ll make the wheels interlock, two cities intertwined, with traces of each other within.”
“This is!”
Boboli said: “Isn’t it a competition between two cities? As Team Leader Jiaoma mentioned, the stability of a terrain scene is actually just a snapshot of it in a specific period, right?”
Huan Bao’er stared at the mirrored image of the two gear cities, her face showing increasing astonishment.
“We just need to mirror it, modify the time coordinates of the mirrored gear rooms, and display their terrain as it was hundreds or thousands of years ago. Some places that were once lakes turned into farmland centuries later, others that were mountains became temples hundreds of years later, only to later fall into ruins as relics.”
Yang Zicang said: “Chief Executive, that’s why when we initially chose the scenes, we deliberately selected terrain configurations that had stabilized across at least two distinct era nodes. After mirroring and duplicating them, we can activate the appearances of these terrains from a different era.”
This way, we instantly have double the number of rooms.
Huan Bao’er couldn’t help but clap her hands.
Boboli said, full of confidence: “No time to design the routes? No problem, the wheels will rotate up and down like an elevator, colliding with different gears.”
“Excellent.”
“Not enough scenes? No issue—every encounter they face will vary each time.”
Huan Bao’er looked up, “But what about the trial monsters?”
“Not enough monsters? That’s not a problem either.”
“What? You can skimp on that too?”
Boboli grinned:
“The team that gets the room’s color becomes the monster of that room! If latecomers encounter an empty room, well, too bad—they’ll have to chase down the shadows of the strong, or else be eliminated.”
Yang Zicang said, “In that way, the number of teams decreases, and the survivors become stronger.”
Boboli now stared at Huan Bao’er without any stage fright, his eyes growing more spirited as he faced the two before him.
The woman said, her whole body radiating heat, “A competition city like this—even if it’s used ten times, the configuration can be random! If we swap out the gears and add some rooms and wheels, it can be used a hundred times without ever having an optimal route!”
Yang Zicang added, “Exactly, Chief Executive. Even if there were an optimal route, it would change after a few turns of the gears. What’s more, more strong challengers would know the route, raising the likelihood of fights among elite teams.”
“We both think this is a competition city that can be used multiple times. And there’s no risk of secrets being leaked.”
“Yang Zicang, this is the ‘chief designer’ you found, isn’t it? The two of you have done an outstanding, absolutely outstanding job!”
Huan Bao’er stood up, radiating the confident, powerful charm of a leader.
“Your Hall of Demon Heroes will be a fantastic—an absolutely fantastic—competition city! However…”
The woman said seriously, “Let me tell you some bad news. The key to fast-tracking the approval for the Hall of Demon Heroes might not be the Five Elements.”
“What!” Boboli screamed in disbelief.
Yang Zicang’s mind lit up, and he immediately grew tense, saying, “Could it be that the Green Lotus Crown didn’t pass the review?”
“Yes, and Croft’s design has passed again!”
The two finally realized why Huan Bao’er had come running over at this time.
But if that was the case, all their hard work these past days would be completely wasted.
That damned Croft—what exactly was he hiding in his design? Why had he been involved from start to finish, yet had never found it?
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