(6 of 11: Yajilin) What is Pyramid Cult's Favorite Places?

Question

<sub>Dear PSE users and moderators,
I’m new here in PSE, but I really need your help. There was this person who gave me a black envelope consisting 10+1 pages of puzzles, and also a scribble saying: “Find our favorites and you will be accepted to join our ‘pyramid cult’. Feel free to ask for help from your beloved friends on PSE. They will surely guide you into all the truth.” I’m also a newbie on grid puzzles, so, could you please give me any hint to solve these? It’s getting harder and harder later on..
- athin</sub>

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Rules:

1. Draw a line to make a single loop.
2. Lines pass through the centers of cells, moving in perpendicular direction with one of the cell sides, or turning. The loop never crosses itself, branches off, or goes through the same cell twice.
3. The numbers show how many shaded cells there are in the direction of the arrow.
4. The loop does not pass through the shaded cells or the cells with numbers, and shaded cells are not adjacent to their side.

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^{Special thanks to chaotic_iak for testing this puzzle series!}

Answer 1

First, some fairly trivial deductions:

Note that any "dead-end" triangle cannot be used, and so it must be shaded. This gives all of these:


And then if any of these cells were shaded, they would create a dead end cell next to them:

Then, a few less trivial deductions:

A single segment in the bottom left can be drawn. Then, consider the cells marked in red and purple:

Consider the [2↗] clue: one of the two remaining cells it points to is shaded. If it is the white cell, the lower red cell is shaded; if it is the red cell, the lower white cell is shaded. Either way, one of the two red cells is shaded, and so (because of the [3↖] clue in the lower right corner) the purple cells are all unshaded.

Finishing off the lower right corner:

With that knowledge, we can barely squeeze in the remaining required cells for the 4 clue:



And then we can keep making straightforward deductions from that to resolve the corner completely.

Using the last clue:

The only remaining clue is the 3↖ that's not in the corner. To allow enough space, one of the two shaded cells must be against the wall:



If either of the two endpoints in the center of the puzzle goes to the cell marked "c", it must then continue up and left to the cell marked "a" (or otherwise it would complete a loop too early). But one of those two cells must be shaded because of the 3 clue. So neither of those endpoints goes to the "c" cell, and therefore that cell is shaded.

And now the loop can be fully resolved:

Taking the letters on shaded cells, we see that the pyramid cult's favorite places are LOCHANS (a Scottish word for small lakes).