49: The collective awakening of the 17th level of the maze

The fund flow stopped at 500,041 yuan and stopped ticking.

Cheng Mo's finger was still suspended above the Enter key, like a jammed mechanical arm. He didn't record a log, nor did he pull up a new window; he just stared at the central screen—where the achievement screenshot of player #A7X9K2 had been displayed, but after three seconds, the screen automatically switched to a pitch-black top-down view of the labyrinth. The heat map points were densely packed in the 17th-floor area, so red they were turning purple, like glowing pieces of charcoal.

He blinked.

In the next instant, the screens of all online players froze simultaneously.

It wasn't a disconnection, nor was it a crash prompt; instead, the entire 17th floor of the labyrinth suddenly fell into absolute stillness. Character movements were frozen mid-jump, mid-turn, or at the moment of a keypress; the UI interface hung motionless, and even the flashing frequency of the health bars solidified. Fifty thousand players worldwide who were currently operating were simultaneously locked into the same frame, as if someone had pressed pause on time.

Cheng Mo didn't move. He knew this wasn't a bug.

A few seconds later, the labyrinth walls began to fade.

First, the edges turned white, like paper being stained by water, and then the entire wall structure became transparent, revealing the intersecting paths inside. It wasn't just the player's own branch; even the positions of others were visible at a glance—thousands of character models suspended in the air, stuck at corners, or hanging off the edges of platforms, all maintaining their postures from the moment before death, like pinned specimens.

The bullet chat exploded.

"Holy crap, who turned on a wallhack?"

"What's the situation? Are we being live-streamed?"

"Don't be stupid, the whole world can see you've been stuck on B-7 eight hundred times."

"Damn, that one on the left in the blue clothes is Steel Coin's alt account, right? His head is tilted like that and he hasn't crashed yet?"

No one logged out of the game.

Some tried to move their characters, only to find an input delay of up to three seconds; others clicked the chat box frantically, only for their strings of question marks to be immediately buried. Panic had just begun to surface when it was suppressed by an even more absurd scene—as the walls became completely transparent, the spatial logic of the labyrinth began to twist. Some passages clearly didn't connect end-to-end, yet visually formed a closed loop; some platforms appeared independent, but when viewed from above, their projections actually overlapped on the same coordinate point.

A player with the ID 'Quantum Instant Noodles' uploaded a screenshot to the forum with the caption: 'Brothers, I used a cubic spline fit on this map; it's not a labyrinth at all, it's a Klein Bottle.'

No one paid him any mind.

Until a voice rang out.

That voice had no source; it didn't come through the speakers, nor was it transmitted via headphones. Instead, it appeared directly in every player's mind, as clear as a thought of their own:

"Now, you must collectively deconstruct the essence of this space."

The tone was flat, without any special effects, not even an echo. Yet everyone heard it clearly.

The entire place was silent for two seconds.

Then the bullet chat went from 'WTF brain broadcast' to 'What does he mean by deconstruct?' Someone sneered, saying the devs were just slacking off, someone suspected they were having auditory hallucinations, and someone else immediately screenshotted and posted a thread titled 'The Game Has Become Sentient, Countdown to Developer Imprisonment.'

But there were also a few people who didn't type.

A player with the ID 'Greyscale Observer' silently opened a drawing tool, imported the screenshot of the transparent labyrinth, and began to mark the angles and light reflection patterns of each path; another user called 'Pain of Recursion' posted a string of Morse code in the public channel, which decoded to: 'Note the zenith light spot displacement in the third quadrant, period is 7.3 seconds'; immediately following that, a new player who had never spoken before uploaded nine spliced images from different death perspectives. Once the edges were aligned, a hidden etching appeared, its shape resembling the Mandelbrot set in fractal geometry.

The forum servers began to struggle.

At the main console, Cheng Mo finally lowered his hand. His right thumb rubbed against his earring, and his left hand lightly tapped the desk three times—tap, tap, tap—the exact same movement as when he celebrated the fifty thousand yuan arrival in the previous chapter, only this time no one brought him coffee, and no one stood behind him watching the data.

He stared at the multi-channel display split on the central screen: the left side was a real-time stream of refreshing forum threads, the right side was a screenshot of a collaboration channel spontaneously organized by anonymous players, and the middle was a dynamic reconstruction animation of the global perspective within the game. Those originally isolated individual behaviors were slowly piecing together the true structure of the labyrinth through information sharing.

No one gave an answer.

But they began to verify each other.

'Greyscale Observer' deduced from light refraction that the actual inclination angle of a certain slope was 11.25 degrees, with an error of no more than 0.3 degrees; 'Pain of Recursion' used audio analysis tools to capture low-frequency vibrations in the background sound, inferring that the labyrinth floor would slightly sink by 0.7 millimeters every 13 seconds; and that new player who uploaded the collage was found to be an architecture school dropout, currently using CAD software to reconstruct the 3D model, marking seven gravity anomaly zones.

Someone exclaimed: "This isn't playing a game anymore, it's doing scientific research!"

More people responded: "It always was. Did you really think Cheng Mo made an entertainment product?"

The forum blew up.

The top ten posts on the homepage were all dominated by related topics. The titles were varied: 'We've Broken the Fourth Wall,' 'This Isn't a Level, It's a Cognitive Experimental Ground,' 'Suggest Nominating for the Nobel Prize in Physics,' 'Requesting a Count of How Many People are Writing Papers While Playing.' The most popular one was posted at 2:41 AM, and the author wrote only three sentences:

"I just saw the memory afterimage of someone else.

He died seventeen times in front of me.

I know how to go now."

The comments below exceeded ten thousand. Someone posted a screen recording showing visual distortion at the moment the walls turned transparent: in that single frame, there was indeed a blurry human silhouette superimposed behind the protagonist, with an action synchronization rate of over 92%.

No one explained how this happened.

But more and more players began to give up on clearing the stage alone, instead exchanging clues in the public channel. Some were responsible for recording death coordinates, some analyzed step patterns, and others specifically collected the operation trajectories of other players in the final half-second before death. An unofficial 'Collective Decision Protocol' quietly took shape—whenever a plan received over 70% vote support, a group of players would simultaneously execute the test.

The first attempt failed, resulting in a total wipeout.

The second attempt got stuck at the seventh step, and the system judged it as an illegal operation.

On the third attempt, thirty people triggered the correct path at the same time. A crack split open in the center of the labyrinth, and the UI popped up a new prompt:

> [SYSTEM] Collective_Insight_Level → 1

> Unlocked: Shared_Vision_Mode

The vision changed.

A translucent network of connecting lines appeared before all players, linking the previously scattered exploration results into a massive cognitive map. Next to each path were notes on verification counts, death tolls, and success rates. Some key nodes even had player messages attached: 'Stepped into the void three times here, suggest a running start,' 'There's invisible wind resistance above, don't jump too early.'

Someone cried.

Not because they were sad, but because they suddenly realized—they were no longer the trapped, but the co-builders. This hellish level that they had cursed countless times was being personally transformed by them into a monument of thought.

The latest trending forum post was titled: 'We didn't beat the game; we became part of the game.'

Cheng Mo watched all this, his lip twitching as if he wanted to smile but held it back. His right hand slowly slid toward the keyboard, his index finger landing on the spacebar, but he didn't press it. His left hand habitually reached for his earring, gave it a half-turn, and then let go.

On the screen, the status of fifty thousand players was still changing. The heat map was no longer a mass of anxious red, but was gradually differentiating into flowing blue-green veins, spreading orderly like neurons firing. Some people quit the game, but even more logged back in, bringing notes, calculators, and even external drawing tablets.

A user with the ID 'Patient Zero' initiated a poll:

【Is this design or a bug?】

Option A: A carefully planned cognitive leap (Current support: 68%)

Option B: Collective hallucination caused by system crash (Support: 23%)

Option C: We have already been taken over by AI (Support: 9%)

The voting was still ongoing.

Cheng Mo didn't close the monitor, didn't switch to the background, and didn't even stand up to stretch. He still sat before the main console, hands resting on either side of the keyboard, leaning back against that gaming chair with worn-out holes. The hood of his sweatshirt had slid to the back of his neck, revealing a bit of his hair roots; his stubble was longer than last night, and his dark circles appeared deeper under the screen light.

His gaze remained locked on the central screen.

New collaborative results were constantly popping up there: one group of players used sonic resonance principles to crack a hidden access control; another team triggered a safety passage by synchronizing their heartbeat frequencies; someone else discovered a Bach fugue structure in the labyrinth music, and tapping the ground to the rhythm actually opened an entrance to the underground level.

No one reached the finish line alone.

But together, they had reached a place never seen before.

He had long since stopped paying attention to the fund balance.

The fan speed remained stable.

The coffee cup had long since gone cold, a thin skin forming on the surface.

Cheng Mo raised his right hand and lightly tapped the desk three times.

Just like the time he celebrated the fifty thousand.

Just like when he heard the news of the first clear.

It was like a form of confirmation, and also like he was counting.

The screen suddenly refreshed.

A new update jumped out:

> [FORUM_POST] Title: "We Broke the Dimensional Wall"

> Author: Anonymous_User_8872

> Views: 1,023,456

> Status: Sticky_Top

He didn't click it.

He just put his fingers back on the edge of the keyboard, staring at that line of text until the next wave of information flooded in and buried it.