42: Mathematical Poems of Random Mazes

After the 'click' of the server fan subsided, the air seemed to have been partially sucked away. Cheng Mo crouched on the floor, a crumpled tissue held between his fingers, its dark brown edge still stained with a bit of coffee. He wasn't in a hurry to throw it into the trash can. Instead, he stared at it for two seconds before casually stuffing it into his hoodie pocket—a place already piled with three or four similar remnants.

Chen Hao's finger finally pressed down.

The spacebar was pressed, and the terminal interface refreshed. The log scrolled a beat slower than before, as if the system were swallowing something hard to digest. Green characters scrolled past in columns: path validation, memory allocation, node generation... everything was normal until the red text appeared again during the layer 17 structure parsing phase:

`CYCLE_DETECTED_AT_LAYER_17`

But this time, the system didn't freeze.

The red text flashed once, automatically turned gray, and a small prompt appeared at the end: 'Marked as a design feature, skipping repair process.'

Chen Hao let out a soft breath, as if afraid of disturbing something. He opened the version control panel, confirmed that `v0.17.cycle_locked` had been referenced by the main branch, then switched to the path generator configuration file. The cursor stopped at the `seed=` line. He raised his wrist to glance at his watch—2:07 AM, the numbers jumped to 02:08.

He typed a new parameter:

`seed=π*1

Enter.

This wasn't a random seed; it was a mathematical incantation.

Starting from the sixth decimal place of π, he took six digits, then performed a modulo operation with one million, producing a 'natural number' that was neither pseudo-random nor artificially intervened. Theoretically, this value would only appear once in the entire universe.

The screen went black for half a second.

Cheng Mo looked up, thinking it had crashed.

The next instant, green text began scrolling again, steadily and rhythmically clear. The path tree diagram generated automatically, its branches extending like neural synapses, each layer closing precisely—no dead ends, no repetitions, no redundant connections. When layer 17 expanded, that deadly loop was no longer an error, but a circular hub nested within the overall structure—three paths converged here, meshing like gears. No matter which path a player chose, they would be naturally guided back to the starting point, but with each return, the coordinates shifted by 0.3%. After accumulating seven times, the hidden transition condition would be triggered.

'Done,' Chen Hao said, his voice soft, as if afraid of waking a machine that had just fallen asleep.

Cheng Mo stood up, the knees of his work pants brushing off a bit of dust. He walked over to the main console and stared at the 3D labyrinth model on the screen. When he rotated the view, he noticed the underlying structure actually presented the outline of a Fibonacci Spiral.

'You fed it pi?' he asked.

'More than that,' Chen Hao replied, taking off his glasses to wipe them. 'I also added a golden ratio angle constraint, limiting the path curvature to within 1.618 times the standard deviation. Otherwise, the generated structure would be too wild, even I wouldn't understand it.'

Cheng Mo grinned: 'So now you're a mathematical poet?'

'I just don't want the algorithm to run wild,' Chen Hao said, putting his glasses back on, the lenses reflecting blue light. 'You wanted a 'perfect labyrinth,' not 'doodles drawn by a madman.''

'But sometimes, doodles drawn by a madman are true art.'

'Then go collaborate with Picasso.'

The two fell into a brief silence. The server load curve dropped from its peak, stabilizing at 78%. The heat vent of the labyrinth prototype emitted a faint hum, as if completing some ritualistic breath.

Cheng Mo turned and walked towards the wall.

A sheet of A0-sized adhesive paper was stuck to the wall, its edges secured with black electrical tape. An inverted triangle area had long been drawn, its interior blank. He pulled a fluorescent yellow pen from his pencil case, unscrewed the cap, and drew a circle at the triangle's vertex.

'Here,' he said. 'This is the entrance, and also the exit.'

He then switched to a red pen, drawing a thick line along the left sloping side, labeling it 'surface path,' then used a blue pen to extend from the right sloping side downward, writing 'deep recursion.' Just before the two lines converged at the bottom, he suddenly stopped.

'Here's the problem,' he said. 'This thing is a four-dimensional nested structure; flattening it will distort it. If we connect the lines directly, it'll look like we messed up the topological relationships.'

Chen Hao walked over and glanced at it: 'How do you plan to represent the Homology Group dimensions?'

'Huh?'

'Those spatial loops that can circle back.'

'Oh,' Cheng Mo thought for a moment. 'Color grading. Red to yellow to blue, like a temperature gradient. The deeper you go, the cooler it gets. The loop area uses purple, mixed with a bit of glitter, making it look like a damn disco ball.'

'Glitter?'

'Visual memory point,' Cheng Mo said, already mixing colors. 'People can't remember formulas, but they remember shiny things.'

He began to draw. Not in order, nor from top to bottom, but jumping around: first marking the location of layer 17, drawing a purple circle, then filling in the branches of the third layer above, connecting to the folded passage of the ninth layer below. Lines intersected, colors mixed, and the wall gradually turned into a glowing map.

Chen Hao frowned: 'Anyone looking at your drawing method would get dizzy at first glance.'

'Who said it's for ordinary people to see?' Cheng Mo replied without looking up. 'This is a poem for ourselves. Every stroke is a code translation, every color block is a function mapping. Look here—' He pointed to a red-blue junction at the upper left corner. 'The Euler Characteristic of this path segment is 2, meaning it's a contractible space, but we deliberately added a twist, making it non-contractible. Understand?'

'Understand. You're writing bugs on the wall.'

'No, I'm writing the solution on the wall.'

Chen Hao sighed, turned back to the main console, opened his tablet, pulled up the mathematical expressions for key nodes, copied them one by one onto sticky notes, then walked back and stuck them on the places where Cheng Mo had drawn incorrectly.

'The Homology Group dimension of this node is H₁=Z⊕Z₂, not just a simple integer ring,' he said, sticking a note with a formula next to the yellow line. 'And here, the path intersection angle exceeds the critical value; we need to add a Riemann Curvature correction.'

Cheng Mo glanced at it: 'If you stick so many words, the wall will become a thesis display board.'

'Otherwise, what do you think 'mathematical poem' means? Actually using rhyme?'

Cheng Mo didn't argue; instead, he smiled. He picked up the fluorescent green pen and drew an explosion box around the formula Chen Hao had posted, writing 'Extremely brain-burning here, do not imitate.'

And so, the two of them—one drawing, one sticking; one modifying, one retorting—gradually filled out the wall. The originally abstract structure turned into a readable symbolic system, where colors coexisted with formulas, intuition paralleled logic. In the end, the entire inverted triangle area looked like a lit circuit diagram, or perhaps the star chart carvings of some ancient civilization.

Chen Hao took two steps back, looked at the result, and, for once, didn't nitpick.

'Barely passable,' he said.

'Is that a compliment?'

'I'm saying the wall isn't ruined.'

Just then, the labyrinth prototype emitted a short beep.

Blue light lit up.

Not from the screen, but from the edges of the machine's casing, seeping out a cool-toned halo, spreading in circles like a heartbeat. The light projected onto the ceiling and floor, casting their shadows—one tall and thin, one slightly stooped, standing shoulder to shoulder in front of the wall, with that colorful topological map behind them.

Their shadows overlapped, indistinguishable as to whose action each stroke belonged to.

Cheng Mo looked down at his hand. Traces of fluorescent ink remained on his fingertips—yellow, red, blue—as if he'd accidentally knocked over a palette. He didn't wipe it off.

Chen Hao didn't move either. He still held the tablet, the last line of the log on the screen reading:

`STRUCTURE_VERIFIED: PERFECT_LABYRINTH`

Verification passed. Perfect labyrinth generated.

He gently tapped save, then placed the device on the table. The motion was light, as if afraid of breaking the balance of this moment.

Only the hum of the machine and the pulse of the halo remained in the room. The blue light shone on the wall, making the colors more vivid, the formulas seeming to glow faintly. Cheng Mo looked up at the ceiling light switch, walked over, and clicked it off.

Darkness fell for a second.

Immediately after, only the prototype's blue light held up the space. Their shadows were magnified, distorted, merging with the topological map, as if the people had become part of the map, and the map an extension of the people.

'You know...' Cheng Mo suddenly spoke, his voice not loud, 'is it possible that we're not designing a game?'

'Hmm?'

'We're creating a new way of perceiving space.' He pointed at the purple circle on the wall. 'In the future, when someone stands here looking at this map, they'll understand one thing—that the mind can turn more corners than the path.'

Chen Hao was silent for a few seconds, then said: 'Now you're starting with philosophy?'

'I'm not lecturing,' Cheng Mo smiled. 'I'm seeing it.'

He said no more. The two stood quietly again, neither moving. Outside the window, the night was thick; the glass reflected nothing, only a void of black. Inside the room, the blue light was steady, shadows intertwined, and the image on the wall was the only reality.

Cheng Mo raised his right hand and, with his fluorescent-stained fingertip, traced the outline of that inverted triangle in the air.

The ink was not yet dry.