Chapter 280: First Time
The puzzle that Sylas recalled was abstruse and hard to grasp. But thinking back to it now, he felt that his solution was actually incorrect.
'No, not incorrect. Not complete. I was looking at it like a two-dimensional puzzle when in reality it's three-dimensional...'
Sylas' intelligence had obviously matured, but it wasn't just this. His Mental stats allowed his already great intelligence to bloom, exhibiting its truest strength in a way that it had never been able to before.
'It's a map... but it's not a map to a particular location, but rather is the map of a particular location.'
Sylas didn't know what this place was, but its layout was impossibly complex. It was a maze filled with danger.
'But who can distill such a complicated three-dimensional structure into a two-dimensional one?'
The puzzle that Sylas remembered was like a mass of cobwebs laid out on a single plane. It was completely unimpressive and looked like something a child could have scribbled onto a white piece of paper.
Sylas remembered that when he first saw this "puzzle" he didn't know what he was supposed to do with it. He didn't even get a prompt; the person he assumed must have been his handler, or maybe it was just a figurehead, just left him in a white room.
However, this white room was quite special. It didn't just have a desk and a table, but along a wall, there was a tall and long row of cubbies filled with all sorts of things. Some of the cubbies had toys, others had weird arts and crafts pieces like paints and crayons... at first glance, it looked completely like a child's room.
Sylas, though, wasn't a normal child. Even at nine years old, he didn't have much interest in toys other than Legos. There had been Legos there, and he might have wasted away his time on them, but the problem was that they didn't have any complicated models to work on.
Back then, Sylas liked to spend hours putting together Lego puzzles with thousands of pieces, but this room only had normal Legos, and he didn't find them nearly as fun.
That was when his mentality changed.
Sylas stood in the white room, looking at the Legos. He wondered to himself why he should waste his time finishing the puzzles of everyone else. Wouldn't it be far more fun to model something himself?
The Lego pieces here had everything that he could ever need. There were blocks, gears, even technic pins and things of the like. These were all the pieces that would be used in an official model.
'What should I create?'
His large green eyes blinked. He had forgotten about the piece of paper already. He didn't like wasting time on things that didn't make sense or didn't have a purpose.
However, when Sylas was reaching for the Legos, thinking that maybe he should start simple and recreate a perfect model of his house first, something caught his attention out of the corner of his eye.
It was another cubby, but this one had some yarn in it.
His head tilted to the side and he began to wonder why he was distracted by something like that. He might have been only nine years old, but he was very self-reflective and already obsessed with self-improvement... so long as it was something that interested him.
A flash of inspiration suddenly hit him in waves.
He took out a pinboard, a box of hundreds of sewing pins, and finally the yarn.
He returned to the table and began to press the pins into the pinboard. Once he was finished, he took the yarn and then slowly began to connect the pins using it, wrapping around each of the pins once before continuing.
However, after a certain point, he shook his head, pulled it back, and then started again.
Sylas didn't know how long he spent on this, but as he began his last attempt, he was already yawning. But he rubbed his eyes and had already shooed away the attendant that came in to try and get him to stop.
Suddenly, his gaze flashed as he wrapped the last line of yarn around the last pin. Then, he smiled.
He had done it.
Sylas held up the pinboard and the paper of scribbles. As expected, they were identical. However, running a line through all the nodes and replicating this cobweb of scribbles was difficult, but it wasn't worth being so proud over. Someone else might take pride in such a thing, but Sylas felt indifferent to it all.
No, the reason he was smiling was...
Sylas moved his hand.
According to logic, there were two locations on this pinboard where he could pull the line back in a single tug without it getting stuck. Well, if you ignored friction, that is. Those two points were the start of the yarn and the end of the yarn, that being the locations of the first pin and the last pin he attached it to.
However, in order for this puzzle to be completed...
Sylas suddenly took out a pair of scissors and cut a seemingly random piece in the middle.
With all the friction between the pins and the yarn, this insignificant piece shouldn't have done anything. And yet, two sides of the pinboard collapsed against one another.
Then, Sylas put the scissors down and grabbed the two ends of the yarn, the starting and ending position, and pulled.
What should have happened was the yarn being pulled away from both sides at the same time.
And yet, what actually happened instead was astonishing.
The patterns changed and suddenly Sylas felt a strong tug back.
One half took the shape of an eye. And that eye was staring right at what looked like a
delicately sculpted pinecone.
In a single tug, a tangled mess had become a beautiful picture, and in Sylas' young life, this was the first time he had ever felt true satisfaction.