As they continued through the dungeon, they encountered more contraptions and machinations. There was no more trap, but the contraptions they met were not any less troublesome.
There was a hall with floating blocks of stone, going in a fixed direction. Left-right, front-back, up-down, and diagonally. Some had combinations of several directions in a single block. They had to jump from one block to the other to reach the other side, crossing a bottomless abyss. Bowler took a small rock from the ground and threw it down the abyss. No sound of a rock hitting the bottom could be heard.
Then there was a narrow hallway filled with apertures which arrows came out from occasionally. The hallway was too narrow so by the time they saw the arrow came out of the aperture, it would have instantly gone in the other holes at the opposite side. No amount of reflex would be able to save them if they stood in the arrow’s path. The density of the apertures was rather compact, so there was no safe zone once they tried to cross the hallway. They had to memorize the timing of when an arrow was shooting out from each aperture to determine the timing of when to advance and when to stop.
There was also a room where they were not in danger. In this room, they had to find corresponding tiles with ten pairs of matching diagrams amongst thousands of tiles of random diagrams. There was an hourglass with sand in it hanging from the ceiling. They had to find the matching diagrams before all the sand in the hourglass fell to the bottom. They failed several times. When they failed, the hourglass flipped to have the sand on top again, and all the tiles were reset magically. They had to start all over again. Though there was no danger, this room took a rather huge chunk of their time within the dungeon.
And then there was also a place where they had to hop onto a train of carts. The carts would then move on a railway that went haphazardly like a roller coaster. During their time on the cart, there would be projectiles thrown at them, they had to either hit these projectiles to deflect them or use defensive moves to block.
There was even a hall where they were at a loss, as to solve the hall they needed to pull a lever which was located inside a room that they could not access. Luckily, the room was not thoroughly concealed, there were some small gaps in the wall.
While everyone was looking for a clue as to how to get inside the room. Flame did a motion, a slim wolf which was slightly larger than a normal wolf appeared out of thin air. Its fur was green with some silvery lines running from its head to the tip of its tail. The fur kept on flowing as if there was a breeze blowing at it despite the absence of wind within this hall.
“Is that… your Savage Wind Wolf?” Jack asked.
Flame nodded.
“So the cub had reached adulthood?” The Man commented, “why didn’t you summon it out when we were fighting with monsters outside the temple?”
“My pet can die. If it dies, it is permanent. I have to look for another one,” Flame explained. “Those monsters in this expedition are all over-leveled for us. Sending my pet at them is simple suicide.”
She then sent her wolf through the gap in the wall. The wolf was large, but its slim body allowed it to squeeze through the gap. Once it was inside, it bit on the lever and pulled it. The locked door of the hall opened and they could proceed to the next hall.
“Is that consider cheating?” Bowler asked.
“Whatever works, man,” The Man said with a grin.
Flame unsummoned her pet as they all go through the open door.
There were more other contraptions they had to deal with. Throughout the ordeals, they lost another two members, Salty Trade and another one of The Man’s subordinates.
“Another victim of this ill-fated quest,” John commented when the first of the two died.
“Hey! I will really kick you out if you jinxed this quest,” Jack warned.
There were only eleven of them left now if not including Sunset, who was still nowhere to be seen. Jack checked his radar and was alarmed to see his green dot was not seen anymore. But when he opened his party system, Sunset was still alive in the party.
While passing those rooms, they had occasionally met some traps again. Jack gave it a try and found that the difficulty was not as high as those they met at the first section of this dungeon. So he decided to try diffusing the traps instead of giving his Disarm Tools to Viral Cora. If he was left with only twenty, he then would give them to Viral Cora. He managed to disarm most of those traps in a few tries, resulting in his Detect and Disarm Trap skill increasing to Intermediate Apprentice grade.
After passing through several rooms, they were now in one that displayed a large wall painting which was divided into numerous sections. Each section’s placement was completely not in the correct position. Hence, the painting made absolutely no sense. It was a wall jigsaw puzzle. Jack and John stood in front of the wall staring at the painting with full attention while the others wait for their instruction.
In solving the contraptions, it was always the two of them that figured out the solutions. So, the others just happily stepped aside and gave them the spotlight. Two out of three were solved by Jack, while John solved the remaining one-third. Such a pattern prompted Bowler to voice out his curiosity.
“Bro, as irritating as it is, I do admit that this fellow is smarter than all of us,” Bowler talked to Jack as he pointed at John. “But how come you seemed to perform better than him in this dungeon?”
“Oh? Hm. Not sure? Maybe because I played lots of these kinds of puzzle and mystery games in the past?” Jack replied with a shrug.
“Well, in that case, how about I offer you my conjecture?” John said.
“Are you trying to make excuses?” Bowler asked.
“Why would I be making excuses?” John asked back with a clueless expression.
“Never mind… Please share your thought.”
“To explain it, let me first explain to you the difference between autism and savant.”
“What? What do those have to do with my question?”
“Do you want to listen or not?”
“Fine, fine, proceed,” Bowler replied with a sigh.
“All right, now I believe you know about people who had autism, right? What about savant, do you know?”
“If I’m not wrong, it is someone with a condition similar to autistic disorder but exhibit extraordinary talent in one specific area, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Now, mind you, I need to say first that there is not yet a definitive cause of autism and savant, but if I am to use an analogy to explain the differences between them, let me use the example of computer file organization. You see, a regular person’s mind has a very organized storage system. Organized persons would separate their thoughts and memories into different classifications and store them in a folder that corresponds with the files. They will then label the folders accordingly. Files about fried rice or chicken wing will be stored inside the Food folder, files about dogs and cats will be stored inside the Pets or Scary Animals folder, depending on the owner’s point of view, and so on. This way, when it is needed, they can quickly search the required folder and access the information stores within.”
“Now, an individual with autistic disorder, however, has no such folders. Can you imagine if you have thousands of files on your computer and you simply put them all on your desktop? Can you imagine the hassle to shift through those jumbles of files to look for one particular file about fried rice? That’s why autistic individual appears slow and difficult in social interaction, they have to work through their complicated memories before they can formulate a proper response. They are not in any way less intelligent, their mind simply works in a different way compared to a regular person. Imagine if you are working with two computers that have the same processor speed. One was with the neatly arranged folders while the other was with jumbled files without any organized folder. You will surely take more time to work with the latter even if the two computers’ specs are the same.”
“What about savant? You ever wonder why people with this syndrome, despite exhibiting slow response and significant challenges in every other field, yet display superbly on one specific subject? Such as music, or art, or maths. Why such contrast? If let says we take the computer filing’s analogy again. If on your desktop, there is only one folder titled Music. All the files that go inside this computer, are separated between music and non-music. Music files will go into the folder, while non-music files go directly to the trash bin. Now imagine if a person, does nothing but spend his waking hours simply thinking about music. Don’t you think he will become a genius musician?”
Bowler gave him a dull look. When he noticed John had stopped talking, he said, “dude, that’s all very fascinating, but again, what does it…”
John cut him before he finished his words, “even a mentally challenged person if focuses his or her mind into doing the same thing over and over again, he will eventually become good in it.”
It took Bowler a few beats to grasp what John had just said. Once he did, he swiveled to Jack and uttered, “bro, he just called you a mentally challenged person!”
“My goodness! Did you only listen to the bad parts?” John facepalmed his face. “What I trying to say is, hard work matters! If you keep on doing the same thing over and over again, even if you have no talent in a field, you will eventually become good at it. Better even than a talented person who treats his or her talent poorly.”
Jack never turned when Bowler called, he was too absorbed trying to solve the jigsaw painting. “Got it!” He exclaimed not long after.
