From Robinson Crusoe

Early in the morning on February 2, after washing up and eating, Chen Zhou put together two tables and officially began to restore the "Pure Blue Hell" in front of the bedroom window.

Having watched a video on the restoration of Pure White Hell, he knew some restoration techniques for similar puzzles.

For example, you need to restore the border first.

Solid-colored puzzles with only a border are the easiest to restore.

All borders have a distinctive feature, that is, they have a straight edge or a turning corner, which is obviously different from other parts.

Moreover, the number of borders is limited, so the enumeration is fast.

……

Chen Zhou found a few wooden boxes and poured all the blue puzzle pieces in his backpack onto the floor, preparing to carefully select and sort them.

The kittens that hadn't left the house last night heard the sound of puzzle pieces spilling on the floor and came over.

Tiger Head was the most mischievous one. He earned a delicious meal by acting cute last night. He thought that his relationship with Chen Zhou was good enough, so he stretched out a paw to grab the puzzle piece, trying to take it somewhere else to play.

The result was naturally a blow on the head, which scared it so much that it jumped to the side, looking around with an indignant look on its face. I don't know if it was pretending nothing happened to avoid embarrassment, or if it wanted to pull away a few fragile items and do some minor damage in retaliation.

The puzzle pieces are small in size, numerous in number, and of great importance. Chen Zhou dare not let the cats and dogs at home move them.

If it was stuffed into some corner, or taken out of the cave and thrown into some place in the forest, he might not be able to find it even if he was given a year.

The reason why these wooden boxes are taken out is because the boxes have lids. After the puzzle pieces are selected, the lids are closed and sealed to prevent these impatient little guys from losing the puzzle pieces.

……

According to his plan, he should first pick out all the border parts of the puzzle, and then classify the remaining puzzles.

Although this puzzle has as many as 3000 pieces, in fact, no two pieces are the same. In the absence of pattern and color differences, restoring the puzzle mainly depends on the shape and cutting lines of the puzzle pieces.

According to Chen Zhou's observation, except for the puzzle pieces on the border, the other puzzles can be roughly divided into four types.

There are puzzle pieces that have only one convex corner and two concave corners.

There are also puzzle pieces with two convex corners and one concave corner, puzzle pieces with two convex corners and two concave corners that are relatively symmetrical, and puzzle pieces that are of different lengths and asymmetrical.

After selecting all these puzzles and putting them in wooden boxes, the preliminary classification work is completed.

Because the puzzle pieces were too small, there were too many of them, and they emitted a faint blue light that interfered with his vision, Chen Zhou worked from morning to noon before he finished sorting out all the puzzle pieces.

……

After a quick lunch, he took advantage of a lull in the rain and went outside wearing a straw hat, looking out at the lush forest and the crops under the platform for a while.

The puzzle work puts too much strain on the eyes. When he was in the second half of the selection in the morning, his eyes felt sore and dry, and he had no energy at all.

If you continue to work in the afternoon, you must work for a while and rest for a while, combining work and rest, otherwise you will not be able to persist.

……

After a short period of eye protection, Chen Zhou returned to the cave and officially began to restore the puzzle.

Restoring the border is the easiest, and you won’t be able to restore many pieces even if you try.

On the large table put together, a rectangular frame quickly took shape under his hands.

The progress visible to the naked eye made people happy. Before they knew it, it was dark and the lights in the cave were lit.

After an afternoon of hard work, Chen Zhou completed the border of the entire pure blue hell.

As for the highlight inside the frame, he plans to leave it until tomorrow to start the challenge.

……

The workload of restoring the entire puzzle is undoubtedly not small, and there is no specified reward for this decryption, nor is there a time limit. To be honest, he does not have a particularly strong motivation.

Moreover, the restoration process is time-consuming and laborious, and is also a torture to the eyes. He does not want to devote all his time for the next half month to restoring the puzzle.

Life goes on and there is still a lot of important work to be done.

If this puzzle was not a reward from the Space-Time Administration, he would have probably used fish bladder glue to glue it into a ball and hung it under the bedroom ceiling to use as a night light.

……

Starting from February 2, Chen Zhou would spend at least six hours every day to restore the puzzle.

The initial work of sorting the puzzle pieces reduced his workload significantly, but it was still a heavy and tedious job.

Before starting recovery, he always reminded himself not to regard the puzzle as a burden, but to treat it as a game, a challenge with a little difficulty, and enjoy the fun of it.

But it is easier said than done.

Once you really start to restore the puzzle, and repeat the process of selecting puzzle pieces one by one and placing them into the grooves or raised edge lines to test them out, you will find that there is no fun in this job at all.

Just like what most people on the Internet say about "Pure White Hell" -

This thing is not designed for ordinary people to play. Those who like it are either puzzle lovers who are looking for more challenges, or masochists who feel uncomfortable if they are not tortured.

……

Even if the classification work separates all the puzzle pieces, it will take at least 1000 attempts to assemble a single puzzle. If the initial idea is wrong, the number of trial and error may double.

The "visible to the naked eye" progress bar on the table is indeed moving forward bit by bit, but its progress is shockingly slow.

Before restoring the puzzle, Chen Zhou's mood was getting better due to the gradual improvement in his diet quality and living environment.

After he started to restore the puzzle, his mood took a sharp turn for the worse. He had to drink several large glasses of fruit juice or sugarcane juice every day, using the dopamine brought by the sugar to calm his increasingly irritable mood.

Drinking orange juice and sugarcane juice was not enough for him, so he even opened two cans of yellow peaches that he had never been willing to eat, to make up for the mental trauma he had suffered.

……

The recovery progressed slowly and steadily, and Chen Zhou had always thought that this would continue until the entire puzzle was completed.

Unexpectedly, on March 3, when he had completed about a quarter of the work, he encountered an unexpected trouble.

There was a gap that I couldn't find any corresponding puzzle piece for.

……

At first, Chen Zhou thought he was not careful enough, so he took out the puzzle pieces from the wooden box and tried a few more times.

The puzzle piece corresponding to the gap is two convex and two concave, but it is asymmetrical and does not account for a large proportion of all the puzzle pieces. He tried it three times over and over again, and the total number of attempts exceeded two thousand times, but he still could not find a suitable puzzle piece.

Then he tried again by taking out puzzle pieces from several other wooden boxes, and the result was the same - there were no perfectly matching puzzle pieces.

After confirming this fact, Chen Zhou immediately shifted his suspicion to the cats and dogs in his home.

He thought maybe they had stolen a piece of the puzzle, making it impossible to match.

To this end, he carefully counted the number of all the puzzle pieces, and counted them six times. The result puzzled him.

Because all the puzzle pieces together add up to exactly 3000 pieces, which means there is nothing missing, and the little animals at home are all being wronged.

"So what's going on with this gap where I can't find a matching puzzle piece?"

Chen Zhou was puzzled and came up with an idea - the total number of pieces of the puzzle was not 3000, but 3001, so a piece of the puzzle must have been left on the beach.

At this point, more than a week had passed since I received the puzzle.

Even though Chen Zhou had a pretty good memory, when he recalled whether he had missed any puzzle pieces that day, he could not be sure that he had collected all the puzzle pieces.

After careful consideration, he felt that according to the Space-Time Administration's usual bad taste, it was reasonable to give him 3001 pieces of the puzzle.

Maybe the last piece is placed vertically at the highest point above the beach, so that when looking up from the bottom you can only see a narrow blue line. If you are careless, you may miss it.

After thinking it over, Chen Zhou felt that his guess was completely correct, so he put on a leather raincoat, put on a straw hat, and went to the beach in the rain.

However, after arriving at the beach, the most devastating thing happened to him——

No matter how hard he looked, he couldn't find the missing puzzle piece above the wooden and stone wall.

In order to find the "3001st piece" that he didn't know whether it existed, he even dismantled the wooden and stone walls and turned the entire beach upside down.

In the end, what he got was - nothing.

……

It rained heavily that day. Chen Zhou set out at noon and worked on the beach in the rain until the sun set.

After removing the wooden and stone walls and digging up the beach, it was the time when the rain was at its heaviest, as if someone was pouring water down from the sky.

His mentality gradually collapsed in exhaustion and despair.

After moving a few steps feebly in the rain, Chen Zhou slumped down beside a messy wooden and stone wall. He looked up at the top of the reward, at the space filled with rain, his eyes dull.

The thin brim of the straw hat on his head had already been bent by the heavy rain.

An untimely sea breeze blew, and the straw hat suddenly flew away. It rolled several times on the beach with the help of the wind, got covered in sand, and was pressed to the ground in a miserable state by the pouring rain.

Chen Zhou's face and clothes had already been wet by the rain. The cold water flowed down his neck madly, soaking his underwear.

He just sat there, wondering where the last piece of the puzzle had gone.

“Was it taken away by a seabird?

Or was it blown away by the wind?
I couldn’t find it on the beach. Where did it go?”

Countless questions emerged in Chen Zhou's mind. They were noisy and quarreling, almost turning his brain into a complete mess.

……

Chen Zhou didn't know how long he sat on the beach in the rain that day. He only knew that it was not until the rain stopped that he rebuilt the wooden and stone walls like a lost soul and staggered back to the cave.

Although his body has been made very strong by years of labor, he never gets sick.

But this time it rained for almost the entire day, and even a strong man couldn't stand it.

Chen Zhou fell ill.

……

From March 3 to March 3, Chen Zhou lay in bed for two full days.

The typical symptoms of a cold include fear of chills and wind, dizziness, muscle aches, sneezing, and runny nose.

Compared with the last time I was ill, this cold is much more serious.

What's worse, there is still no medicine at home.

Chen Zhou could only use the old method, soaking tobacco leaves and drinking them, and then chewing a few cloves of garlic, but it had little effect.

Fortunately, there was sufficient food supply at home and enough firewood.

In order to dispel the chill that felt like a bone in his body, he boiled water all day long, then sat in front of the fire wall wrapped in a sealskin blanket and drank hot water all the time.

The tightly closed doors and windows blocked out the wind and rain, and the fire, which burned for more than ten hours once it was lit, raised the indoor temperature and seemed to have some limiting effect on the condition.

……

On March 3, the day before the 7th coming, Chen Zhou's physical condition finally started to improve, with a clear trend of improvement.

In just five days, he lost weight visibly.

When his illness was at its worst, his appetite decreased so much that even a packet of fragrant braised beef noodles was difficult for him to swallow, and he even felt nauseous.

But Chen Zhou never followed his body's instincts.

He knew very well that the immune system needed nutrients and energy to fight the virus, so he would force the food into his mouth no matter how much he didn't want to eat.

At least there must be consumable food in the stomach and intestines, otherwise the virus will become more and more rampant.

What comforted him was that although the other symptoms of the cold were serious, he did not show any dangerous signs such as high fever, bloody sputum, and severe dizziness and headache.

On an isolated island with a lack of medical care and medicine, if the cold deteriorates into a bacterial infection, bacterial pneumonia or viral meningitis, he will most likely lose his life.

Unless you are lucky enough on March 3th and get a large amount of cold medicine.

Otherwise, no amount of tobacco and garlic can snatch his life back from the hands of the King of Hell.

……

I stayed in the cave for the whole day and played with Lai Fu and a few kittens.

During the lunch break, after some consideration, Chen Zhou gave up the idea of going to the beach to pick up the reward tomorrow.

His health had just improved and the rainy season was not over yet. It was obviously unwise to take the risk of worsening his condition to get the reward.

……

He managed to get through another day, and on March 3, he decided to stay at home as planned until his cold recovered.

His head no longer hurt at this time, but he still had symptoms of runny nose and chills. He needed to wear thick clothes at all times and put a few handkerchiefs in his pocket to wipe his nose.

I am always busy with various tasks on weekdays and have never been idle for such a long time.

Feeling that he had regained his strength, after walking around the house for a few rounds, Chen Zhou subconsciously wanted to find something to do.

As if by some strange coincidence, he walked to the puzzle table that had been restored a quarter of the way through. Looking at the wooden box and the puzzle that glowed blue on the table, he suddenly had a bold idea -

“Who says this puzzle will be complete once it’s put together?
Is it possible that it does have 3001 pieces, but the missing piece was not lost somewhere, but was never delivered?

To restore the entire puzzle, you only need to put the limited 3000 pieces into matching positions, and there is no need to fill in every gap. "

Standing in front of the table, staring at the puzzle quietly, the more Chen Zhou thought about it, the more he felt that this was the truth.

He didn't know if he was deceiving himself.

But then I thought, the puzzle has already been restored to this point, it would be a shame to give up halfway. Even if a piece is really lost and can never be restored, at least I can glue it together and hang it on the wall as a decoration.

Besides, I'm so bored now, I might as well find something to do to kill time.

……

With the idea of just giving it a try, Chen Zhou worked hard until March 3.

During this period, except for a few times when he went out to check on crops and sheep, he basically stayed in the cave to restore the puzzle, and his working hours increased from six hours a day to more than ten hours a day.

……

Huang Tian deserves a caring person.

In the early morning of March 3, an excited shout was heard from the cave.

Chen Zhou, with bloodshot eyes, cheered and held the last piece of the puzzle, carefully pressing it into the gap.

The "Pure Blue Hell" made up of 3000 puzzle pieces is like a tranquil lake, gathering into a pure blue.

If it weren't for the discordant hole that still remained in it, it would look like an expensive work of art.

When the last piece of the puzzle was pressed to the bottom and completely fell into the gap, the faint light of the entire puzzle suddenly became stronger, as if all the invisible circuits had suddenly been connected.

In the blink of an eye, all the tiny gaps on the surface of the puzzle blended into one, creating a mirror-like texture, reflecting Chen Zhou's astonished face.

The blue light that previously could only illuminate the surrounding three or four centimeters gradually rose and turned into a bright light like an incandescent lamp, dyeing the entire front of the bedroom with a layer of light blue.

This unusual phenomenon also proved that Chen Zhou's guess was absolutely correct - the gap was not caused by the accidental loss of a puzzle piece, but was actually a trap set for him by the cunning Space-Time Administration.

The most hateful thing is that this trap was obviously designed specifically for him.

Because he has significant obsessive-compulsive disorder and perfectionism, he will do his best to find things that most people would usually choose to skip.

What made Chen Zhou particularly uncomfortable was that he clearly knew that the puzzle had 3001 pieces, but he didn't expect that the missing piece didn't exist at all.

He stepped into the trap without any preparation, fell down with a bloody head, and almost lost his life.

It is difficult to describe what Chen Zhou felt at this moment as he was enveloped in blue light.

All I could hear was the sound of his teeth grinding together, and I could vaguely hear the dirty curses coming out from between his teeth. (End of this chapter)