Chapter 21: Collecting Evacuation Tools

Jon returned to the living room with the utensils.

If you're temporarily stumped by a problem and can't find an answer, there's no need to rack your brain.

Doing something else might spark an idea at some point.

So, Jon decided to fill his stomach first.

He also wanted to test if cognitive distortion was caused by hunger.

However, Jon believed that psychic energy consumption should be relatively gradual.

It shouldn't show such a drastic difference in just a few minutes...

He scooped out some butter from the pantry and started frying meat in the pan, also slicing some pickles as a garnish.

Looking at it this way, his meal was not much different from the dog's food, except the puppy might get more "canned tomatoes."

Soon, the aroma of smoked meat filled the room.

Jon swallowed hard, and the puppy, having finished its food, still looked unsatisfied, sitting nearby with eager eyes.

"No, you've already eaten." Jon ignored the puppy's pitiful eyes and started eating with a fork.

After breakfast, Jon began to clean up the dishes.

He poured the leftover tomato juice from the puppy's bowl into the toilet and checked again for any new notes from the puppy.

It was now 8:30 in the morning.

With time still early, Jon felt a bit bored.

As someone with Super Memory Symptoms, boredom was his greatest fear, as it wasted his limited brain capacity.

It felt like buying a hard drive to download AAA games but having it filled with undeletable junk files.

If the daytime continued to be this dull, Jon might even look forward to nightfall.

Since he had nothing else to do and no clues to his puzzling questions,

Jon's plan was to thoroughly search the cabin for anything useful.

He also wanted to search carefully for any clues about Grandma.

And to solve the question that had puzzled him since yesterday—

How did Grandma actually die?

And where did her body go, living alone in this forest cabin?

With these questions in mind, Jon went to Grandma's room.

He started searching the room, opening the drawer of Grandma's bedside table and rummaging through it.

In the bedside table, there was a large tin cookie box.

Opening the lid, it was indeed filled with sewing tools like needles and thread. It seemed grandmas worldwide loved using cookie tins for sewing supplies.

However, these sewing tools could indeed come in handy for Jon.

Rule 13 mentioned that to leave, one needed to head north when the blizzard weakened on the seventh day.

Setting aside whether the direction in the rule was correct,

Jon had already determined that to escape, he had to leave the cabin.

In a snow-covered forest, without the sun to guide the way, it would be a miracle not to get lost, let alone head north.

A compass would make things much easier.

But Grandma wasn't an outdoor adventurer, so she likely didn't have a compass at home.

So there are only two ways to use a compass:

1.Make a simple compass using a needle and a magnet. Rub the needle on the magnet to magnetize it. Then hang it using a thin string, and it can serve as a simple compass.

2.Go to the ranger's station and steal a compass.

As a ranger responsible for patrolling the forest, carrying a compass is a must.

For now, option one seems safer and more reliable.

After all, it has been deduced—

The ranger might not be human either and could steal his psychic energy.

And there's what Hanson mentioned, the mutated red light that affects players, which is also suspiciously related to the ranger.

So Jon thought it best to avoid contact with him as much as possible.

Ideally, he would leave unnoticed when the time comes.

Jon continued searching Grandma's house.

He wanted to find a magnet, thinking it would be a simple task, but after searching for half an hour, he found none.

Jon even considered finding something like a radio to take a magnet from the speaker unit.

But Grandma seemed to live like a primitive person...

There was nothing electric in sight, let alone anything with a speaker.

Without a magnet, he would have to sneak into the ranger's station.

Without a compass, Jon had no confidence in leaving the snow-covered forest.

In such extreme cold, the temperature difference between day and night is significant.

If he couldn't find his way out and back home, he might freeze to death at night.

There's another reason worth the risk… even with a compass, knowing the direction doesn't solve all the problems. He couldn't be sure if "head north" as Grandma said in the rules was correct.

There was only one rule related to this, and there were no clues at home.

Jon couldn't gamble with his life, if the direction was wrong, he'd be heading the opposite way.

But the ranger's station should have a map of the forest.

Just a quick look at the map should reveal the correct evacuation direction.

After all, in such cold weather, even if the snow stops, it's tough to leave here by sheer human effort. So Jon believed that the evacuation point Grandma left must be something like a station.

Ordinary cars might slip, so a train station is the most likely.

So, when the time comes, he could look at the map to find any locations that might be train stations.

As long as he had the map and compass, leaving the forest would be quite easy.

...

Meanwhile, in Jon's class.

Many students had stayed up all night, and under Hanson's arrangement, they had started taking turns to rest.

Hanson yawned, feeling a bit tired himself.

What puzzled him was that, despite feeling some physical and mental fatigue, he didn't feel thirsty or hungry.

This was not a good sign.

Hanson looked around. The classroom was completely sealed, with almost no fresh air coming in.

He quickly calculated the classroom's area, about 45 square meters, with a ceiling height of 2.5 meters, giving roughly 100 cubic meters of oxygen. Under normal breathing, an average person consumes about 0.3 cubic meters of oxygen per minute.

With 40 students in the classroom, the oxygen concentration should drop within two hours.

People would start experiencing breathing difficulties, and in severe cases, hypoxia could lead to brain death

Yet, nearly six hours had passed.

Hanson still didn't feel any discomfort, which was very strange

He began to suspect—

Could he and his classmates already be dead?

At that moment, something strange appeared on the live stream.

Hanson immediately looked up. He had noticed that time in the eerie game seemed to flow faster.

But that was when nothing special was happening.

During special events, the live stream's speed would slow down to normal time flow.

On the electronic whiteboard, in the two remaining live streams,

Jon was still rummaging through the house, but something odd was happening with Player 4, Helen from the first-year Environmental Engineering class.

There was a loud, violent banging on her first-floor door.

"Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang—"

It sounded like some monster was trying to break in.

Helen climbed out of bed, looking bewildered and curling up in fear.

She was the only player in Exam Room 42 who hadn't eaten dinner last night.

She had also died once after being exposed to the red light from the ranger's station when she opened the window. After leaving Grandma's room, Helen's body was extremely weak.

She probably wanted to rest a bit on the bed to regain some energy.

But she didn't expect to sleep until the next day.

During this time, her classmates had tried to wake her up, but to no avail.

Helen had not only broken the rule by not eating, but she also went to sleep unprotected on such a dangerous first night.