IWUAaDNW: Exploit 4.5

The third wall I was entirely expecting to lose, and I did, although not in the way I had expected. I dropped it in the solo chest room, where it blocked the opening to the room that only led to my core room. It sat there for a few minutes, entirely blocking the way and raising my hopes that I might have found an exploit in the system. Then, without warning, it started glowing as if something was rapidly heating it up from inside. Within moments, it––

OW!

A lance of pain ran through my mind, and I knew exactly why. I was being punished for having tried to block off a room, which wasn’t good. I was never going to do th––

Yeah, no. Fuck that. That wall had blocked a critical entrance for several minutes. I wasn’t going to ignore an advantage like that. This Pavlovian conditioning wasn’t going to work on me.

I looked at the result of my experiment. The wall had pretty much evaporated; only about a foot of material still existed on the left and right, leaving a wide open, clean entrance to the forbidden room. I had a few ants move them out of the way while I prepared my next test. I had a fourth wall moved to the nine-by-nine grid with my spider rooms––the spider grid, I mentally named it––and used the slab to block one of the accesses to the spider hatchery.

Nothing happened. A fifth wall was moved to block the other entrance, and after a few moments both slabs started glowing. I moved the new slab out of the way immediately, and the walls’ destruction was aborted. I let a few moments pass by, then blocked the second entrance again, mentally counting the seconds. The glow only started around the time I reached the count of forty. I put it aside, counted a few seconds, then put it back, when it started glowing again immediately.

After a few more experiments of the sort, I figured out the rules. First, the system only reacted if I actively blocked every path to a room. If another route existed, then it didn’t care. Blocking my bug hallway had no effect, probably because those hallways didn’t actually lead to any rooms. The system only checked every minute or so, and checked for about ten seconds before going dormant again. The system took about five or six seconds to blow a wall, which left me just enough time to react if I had ants nearby.