Chapter 243 - 109: Deciphering the Puzzle
On September 10th, as usual, after tidying up the pile of wooden planks and stones on the beach and building a new wooden stone wall, Chen Zhou caught a few pigeons at Pigeon Cave and checked the rabbit traps before returning to the cave with a full load of harvest and a strange blue cube.
That night, lighting an oil lamp, sitting at the table, Chen Zhou began to study what kind of mystery this cube represented and how to unlock it.
When placed under the lamp for careful observation, it became apparent that this cube, besides emitting a blue light and having a special, indestructible material, was not all that complex internally.
The simple-looking "sword" inserted at the top of the cube seemed to be the key to solving this puzzle.
Just like the legendary Sword in the Stone, to solve the puzzle, one must pull out this Treasure Sword.
Knowing that the material strength of this cube was beyond his imagination, Chen Zhou did not attempt a brute force approach; instead, he fiddled with various parts of the cube to see what peculiar features it might possess.
Through experimentation, he found that the Treasure Sword at the top of the cube was almost immovable, whether trying to move it up, down, left, or right; it was tightly gripped in the middle of the cube.
Meanwhile, the cubes distributed on the four sides could be pushed forward and backward, and even moved up and down.
However, this movement was limited to small adjustments of one or two pushes; pushing too many times would cause it to get stuck.
After fiddling with the cube for a while, Chen Zhou gradually understood the principle of this puzzle—
In essence, this thing was an advanced version of a Luban lock.
Unlike a regular Luban lock, it had more components, a more three-dimensional and complex structure, and added frames that limited the solver.
If the steps of disassembly did not follow the correct sequence, at a certain stage, due to internal blocks conflicting, the disassembly process would surely get stuck and could not continue.
To solve this puzzle and pull out the "Sword in the Cube", the simplest and slowest method was trial and error.
Just like the last safe, keep trying, and eventually, the correct combination will be found.
Of course, the trial-and-error method, while simple, was also the clumsiest.
Humans aren't monkeys; when faced with problems, they have to think things through.
Chen Zhou thought the key to cracking it lay partly in thoroughly understanding the sequence of cube movements and partly in understanding its structural composition.
Every move made on the cube and every time it got stuck could bring valuable information. If he could deduce the tenon-and-mortise structure of this "advanced Luban lock" based on this information, he could quickly solve the puzzle.
However, putting thoughts into practice wasn't as simple as imagined.
Since the entire cube was only the size of a fist, when moving the side puzzle mechanisms, the gaps to observe the internal structure were terribly narrow.
Most of the time, Chen Zhou had to rely on guesswork to reconstruct the internal structure of the cube.
If it weren't for the cube's own luminescent material, reducing the pressure for additional light, the observation process would have been even more laborious.
...
On September 10th at night, Chen Zhou studied late into the night, and the results were not optimistic.
Despite numerous attempts, he hadn't even figured out the first few moves to make with the cube, let alone analyze the internal structure.
Understanding that this was no simple puzzle, brimming with fatigue and frustration, he went to bed.
...
For the following week, Chen Zhou devoted at least two hours each day to figuring out how to pull out the "Sword in the Stone".
To this end, he mixed quite a bit of white clay, drawing out his conjectured internal structure diagrams on clay slabs, and occasionally molded complex cubes matching these diagrams using the clay.
In addition to drawing and "hand modeling" with clay, Chen Zhou also brought over a piece of driftwood—this wood was soft and could be easily carved with a Dagger, suitable for creating simple models.
The accumulation of time brought him closer to the puzzle's answer.
The wooden blocks and clay strips, resembling building blocks, on the table grew in number.
The diagrams drawn on clay slabs, eventually negated, piled up to more than a meter high.
After countless attempts, he had advanced the "solving steps" to over fifty moves and gained a correct understanding of the cube's general internal structure.
But this was not enough.
Because even after fifty-some moves, the cube still hadn't loosened enough to break into pieces, nor could any part be extracted.
...
On September 18th, it was another monotonous morning of deduction.
Sitting at the table, looking at the cube in his hands, Chen Zhou's mood grew increasingly annoyed.
As the decryption steps progressed step by step, from this small cube, he could feel no joy in exploring the puzzle, nor any pleasure in learning or thinking, only sheer malice.
This contraption was unlike mathematical problems or a Rubik's cube; there was no logic to be found in its disassembly process.
Even though Chen Zhou had drawn so many diagrams and created so many models, the essence of solving the puzzle had actually never changed.
That is trial and error, using various methods to explore.
Probing, deciphering the correct answer through countless wrong attempts.
This process was no different from guessing a safe's combination.
Moreover, since the cube required more operational steps, drawing diagrams and creating models consumed more time and produced a higher trial-and-error cost.
This process not only drained Chen Zhou's time but also tormented his body and mind, exhausting his energy.
During this over-a-week period, due to the decryption effort, he had postponed nearly all work, including expanding the cave, laying the floor in the storage room, and digging for the new rat ring construction project.