"What are the workers’ wages like?"
"How good is the medical care at Kuangcheng Hospital?"
"Do you recognize Frandy?"
Frandy was the respiratory doctor Gu Mian had run over with his tricycle; his ID badge was still in Gu Mian’s possession.
Fatty listened to Gu Mian’s questions in confusion. He still remembered that the main task in this instance was to obtain "Jin Hu’s Redemption."
But so far, they had not found any clues about Jin Hu, and Gu Mian didn’t seem interested in asking about him either.
These three questions had clearly stumped Xiao En.
The face fell silent. It wasn’t sure which questions Gu Mian knew the answers to. If it lied, its face might be gone in the next second. It instinctively answered the question that posed the least threat to itself.
After some time, Xiao En reluctantly picked a question. "The workers’ wages... are certainly not low. Although they sometimes work overtime, they always receive overtime pay."
"I see." Gu Mian stroked his chin. "Time for the final round of questions. Answer them truthfully, and you’ll be safe."
Without giving Xiao En much time, he immediately asked three more questions.
"What’s the combination of your safe?"
"Have there been any disputes between doctors and patients in Kuangcheng Hospital?"
"How is the health of the miners?"
Xiao En relaxed slightly upon hearing these questions and was about to answer the first one.
"The combination to the safe is..."
But then it dawned on it: it was the only one who knew the safe’s combination. There was no way the person before it could know the password. It was absolutely certain that Gu Mian did not know the answer to the first question.
Smugly, Xiao En began to recite a fake combination.
Just as it had uttered two digits and was about to continue, its not-so-bright brain suddenly figured something out. Why are this person’s questions gradually leading toward the hospital? That’s precisely what it least wants others to know.
Xiao En desperately wanted to look at Gu Mian, but its face was covered so tightly it couldn’t see a thing.
"Are you tricking me!"
Gu Mian stroked his chin. "Oh, you figured it out?"
Gu Mian’s "trick" was primarily in his statement: "Answer them truthfully, and you’ll be safe."
In truth, from the moment Xiao En’s face lunged to bite his head, Gu Mian had no intention of letting that face stay.
Two minutes later, Gu Mian walked through the dark mine tunnel, clutching a forcefully torn-off face in his hand.
They were now heading back to the surface.
Fatty followed closely behind Gu Mian, still unclear about the purpose of Gu Mian’s earlier questions.
Fatty believed in asking questions when he had them. He asked in confusion, "Doctor, why did you ask those strange questions earlier?"
Moreover, Gu Mian had claimed he knew the answers to some of the questions.
As far as Fatty knew, Gu Mian didn’t seem to know any of them.
Gu Mian had already put his gown back on. He took a notebook from his pocket. "Of course, it was to elicit information."
"Actually, I don’t know any of the answers. However, I know a riot wouldn’t occur without a reason. If you lived in a peaceful and stable era where you had enough food to eat and warm clothes to wear, you wouldn’t rebel for no reason, would you?"
Fatty thought about it for a moment before nodding vigorously. "Yes, unless I wanted to get shot."
"So, I want to understand the truth behind the riot."
"If I asked Xiao En directly, even if it lied, I wouldn’t know. So, I changed my approach: I posed three questions, let it choose one, and told it that I knew the answers to some. That way, it would be less likely to lie and would instead try to evade the more threatening questions..."
Fatty was a bit confused. "Evade the more threatening questions?"
Gu Mian patiently explained, "Think about it. If you were a murderer..."
Fatty’s lips trembled at this. He seemed to want to argue that he wasn’t a murderer but swallowed his words.
"When the police arrest and interrogate you, you should understand what ’avoiding the important and dwelling on the trivial’ means, right? If the police posed three questions for you to choose from, you would definitely pick the one that poses the least threat to you to answer."
"I wasn’t asking it questions to directly get clues from its answers, but rather to analyze, through its choices, which questions it considered a greater threat."
"Its story was that the riot was about profits, but I noticed it carefully avoided all questions related to the hospital."
"Some of the hospital-related questions were actually very simple, for example, ’Do you recognize Frandy?’"
"That question only required a yes or no answer, but it was overly cautious, seemingly unwilling to touch upon any issue related to the hospital at all."
"So, I suspected that the riot back then might have been related to the hospital, and I deliberately steered the conversation in that direction."
"However, my last set of questions was a bit too obvious, and its not-so-sharp brain figured it out, so I couldn’t continue pressing it."
As he spoke, Gu Mian glanced at Xiao En’s face in his hand.
This face had been forcefully torn off. When it was ripped away, it had let out an incredibly ear-piercing scream, something about Gu Mian being a liar.
He glanced at Fatty behind him. "Understand now?"
Fatty nodded, then shook his head. "Sort of... Doctor, are we going to the hospital after we get out of here?"
Gu Mian replied, "Of course. I suspect Jin Hu was one of the coal miners and had some sort of dispute with the hospital. We should be able to find information about it there."
The two continued talking as they walked towards the mine shaft entrance.
"Speaking of which," Fatty then asked, "if we had run into some locals from here, we wouldn’t have had to go through all this trouble, right? All this business with games and questions is exhausting."
"Not necessarily. The locals participating in this Slaughter game might not know the history of the restricted area. They might only know that a riot occurred here, and that later on, some strange transformation happened, leading to it being designated a restricted zone."
"There might be such places in some corner of our world, but naturally, we wouldn’t know the specific details."