Chapter 504 Fatal Knowledge
The moment the fingers touched the blood, the afterlife constructed of black, white and gray descended in an instant. All sounds disappeared in the blink of an eye, and all perceptions from the real world became empty and distant.
The tall "dean" and Irene and Little Red Riding Hood beside him all turned into phantoms suspended in the air. Yu Sheng looked up in the direction of the headless corpse and saw a middle-aged man in shirt and trousers sitting blankly at the desk, seemingly concentrating on calculating something.
Yu Sheng walked over and patted the other person on the shoulder: "Hey, I have something to ask..."
"Give me a little more time, just a little bit," the middle-aged man said without looking up. "I know, I know I'm dead. 'He' gave me the power to see through disasters, but there's still a little bit left... I'm almost figuring out what this thing is..."
Yu Sheng was suddenly stunned.
This was not the first time he had communicated with the dead, but the situation this time was obviously different from before!
The deceased named "Sun Chen" was still lying on the table, writing furiously, and seemed to not care about his own fate of death - he was not even curious about why Yu Sheng suddenly appeared in this world after death. He was completely different from those confused "dead" people that Yu Sheng had seen before!
The next moment, Yu Sheng suddenly suppressed the curiosity in his heart. He did not interrupt the figure who was busy at the desk, but carefully leaned over from the side, wanting to see what this "Sun Chen" was writing, so that he was unwilling to stop even after his death.
He saw a dazzling, even dizzying, array of numbers and mathematical symbols—just like those on the walls around him.
It was a thick notebook. Sun Chen was quickly sketching line after line of content on a new page. They looked like calculation formulas, but the symbols and calculation rules used were beyond Yu Sheng's level of understanding. Between the large number of formulas, there was a series of geometric figures with complex and chaotic structures. Those figures seemed not only to be part of the formulas, but also some kind of example structure used to express spatial relationships. Between those geometric lines, there were a large number of annotations - Sun Chen wrote and erased, erased and wrote again between several of the annotations, repeating this process continuously.
"It still doesn't work, it still doesn't work... I still can't understand this structure. Maybe I made a mistake in one of the conditions from the beginning..."
Sun Chen suddenly began to mutter to himself, as if he had reached a dead end in his calculations, but suddenly he seemed to have figured something out and began to continue calculating and recording in his notebook.
However, his figure gradually began to fade, and it was obvious that there was not enough time left.
"Knowledge," the thinning figure suddenly spoke. He hadn't stopped writing, but his target was clearly Yu Sheng, who was standing beside him. "What's killing me is 'knowledge', knowledge from another world."
Yu Sheng was stunned, but just as he was about to speak, he saw the dead man waving his hand without even raising his head.
"Don't ask, let me talk. I know what to say," the thin figure said quickly. "I know you're here to investigate. Was it sent by the Secret Service? Or was it that 'Dean' who discovered something unusual here? Or something else... It doesn't matter. I know I'm going to die, but I can't stop. When the calculations began, the first thing I thought of was my own death, but I had to keep going.
"This is what I dreamed about. From the moment I first saw 'Him,' it's been lurking in my mind. I don't know what happened, but at some point, I suddenly became aware of its existence and understood its initial interpretation. Then the whole process began to spiral out of control... I only remember hearing a melody, or a whistle? It seemed like a starting signal...
"I'm not sure exactly what I'm calculating. This... 'knowledge' runs automatically in my brain like a living thing. There's a cognitive barrier between me and it. It reorganizes itself and tries to find its own solution. I only have a vague impression that it's the ultimate answer to the 'convergence' of the world. Now I'm almost figuring it out. Its solution should be..."
Sun Chen's figure was shaky, and his thin shadow floated in the black, white and gray afterlife like a ball of dew that was about to evaporate. He finished writing another line, but suddenly, his movements froze and his words stopped halfway.
Yu Sheng saw him slowly raise his head, and the dead man's empty face seemed to be in great shock and confusion.
The black, white and gray world around him began to collapse, and the colors and sounds from the real dimension quickly filled the surroundings. But at the last second of this collapse, Yu Sheng still heard the other party's voice entering his ears -
“The quality is not good enough…”
The world of the dead collapsed, and all colors and sounds were restored in an instant.
Yu Sheng suddenly looked up and saw a pair of scarlet eyes staring at him from nearby - the little doll was scratching his head, while Little Red Riding Hood next to him and the "dean" not far away were still standing in the same position as before.
To the real world, the conversation between the dead only takes place in an instant, and no one has moved.
"Did you find out anything?" Ai Lin was very familiar with the "procedure," so when she saw Yu Sheng's eyes flash, she knew he had "resurrected." She immediately asked, "How did he die?"
Yu Sheng had just come back from his conversation with the deceased, and he had a lot of things prepared in his head to explain what happened to "Sun Chen". But just as he was about to open his mouth, he was met with Irene's clear and bright eyes - a little too clear, it must be said, so clear that he instantly swallowed back more than 80% of his explanation. He opened his mouth two or three times before finally organizing his words: "Yes, um, 'knowledge'. The deceased was exposed to knowledge beyond human comprehension and was forced to calculate uncontrollably..."
As Irene listened, her eyes widened. She didn't know what she was thinking or understanding, but she turned to look at the headless corpse beside the desk, her expression filled with sadness and sympathy. "...Ah, I'm dying of frustration when I can't solve the problem. Math is really scary."
Yu Sheng: “…”
His emotions were somewhat incoherent, but he didn't know how to continue explaining this matter to the little doll - especially since he could feel that Irene was really and seriously sympathizing with the deceased.
Although in her understanding, the other party was suffocated to death because he couldn't solve the math problem.
"Let's... clean up this place first," Yu Sheng coughed twice and turned to the "Dean" and said, "And by the way, search the scene carefully to see if there's any other information."
"Okay, I'll arrange for the cleanup team to come in." The "dean" on the side said in a deep voice.
A cleanup team wearing special protective clothing and Secret Service insignia quickly entered the area. After blocking the corridor leading to the deep area, these professionals began to clean up the tragic scene in the ward with extremely high efficiency.
Considering the obvious mental pollution factor involved in this incident, the body of the deceased was carefully transferred to a precisely constructed metal container. The tissue fragments collected at the scene were also properly placed in a containment device. Cleaning up the large amount of blood in the room was obviously more troublesome - it was a meticulous and time-consuming task. Moreover, compared to simply cleaning up the blood, the symbols and geometric figures written all over the walls and floors were obviously more difficult to deal with.
The "Dean" asked the cleanup team to record all the symbols left by the deceased and then hand them over to Secret Service experts for research. When cleaning the bloodstains, they also had to keep those traces as intact as possible.
Yu Sheng stood outside the ward, out of the way, watching the cleaning team busying around inside. He frowned slightly and said, "...They look very professional. Does this kind of thing happen often here?"
"That's not the case," a low, raspy female voice emanated from the tall, humanoid body as the goldfish swam slowly in the spherical aquarium. "Extreme incidents of patient death are rare, and the majority of patients admitted to the sanatorium remain stable. However, correspondingly, the probability of 'minor accidents' occurring here is not low. These are mostly things like nightmare materialization, dissociative disorder, and multiple personality conflicts, which can be handled by ordinary psychiatrists or security forces.
"The cleanup team's primary mission is to clean up after an incident and eliminate any remaining 'hazardous factors' at the scene. Some patients' 'nightmares' can leave behind a significant amount of contamination in the real world, and dealing with that is incredibly troublesome. Sometimes, the situation is even worse than this. Over time, this naturally develops professionalism."
Yu Sheng nodded slightly, but at the same time, his mind couldn't help but recall what he had seen during the "Talk with the Dead".
While he was lost in thought, Little Red Riding Hood beside him asked curiously, "Has Sun Chen always been normal before? Was there really no sign before this incident? Has he ever suddenly started calculating or writing a lot of things like this before?"
"No," a string of bubbles drifted in the fish tank. "I pay attention to every patient here. Sun Chen is not a scholar, and he hasn't shown any interest or talent in this area during his months here. His daily life consists of resting in the ward, watching movies in the recreation room, strolling in the courtyard, and occasionally chatting with the medical staff on duty. Overall, it's very regular and monotonous."
"Has he been in contact with anyone recently? I mean, 'extra' people, or something else," Yu Sheng suddenly said. "The 'knowledge' that killed him had been lurking in his mind for a long time, but now it has suddenly erupted. I always feel that there must be a trigger—the deceased mentioned a 'melody' or a whistle. He said that it was that thing that caused him to suddenly understand the first level of knowledge and start calculating."
"……melody?"
"Yes, a melody, but the deceased could only provide limited information. He didn't specify what it was."
The "dean" seemed lost in thought. Yu Sheng couldn't discern any expression from a goldfish spinning in a tank; he could only guess from its silence that it was thinking. After a long moment, the hoarse female voice broke the silence. "This clue is too vague, but I'll check the surveillance footage in this area over the past few days, as well as any audio recordings the victim has recently come into contact with. But honestly, don't get your hopes up."
Yu Sheng was not surprised by this answer. He just sighed and said, "Well, I'll do my best."
(End of this chapter)
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