The moment his fingers touched the blood, the dead world constructed of black, white, and gray instantly descended, and all sounds vanished in a blink, with every perception from the real world becoming hollow and distant.

The towering "Director" and the nearby Erin and Little Red Riding Hood all turned into phantoms suspended in the air. Yu Sheng looked up in the direction of the headless corpse, seeing a middle-aged man in shirt and trousers sitting dazedly by the desk, seemingly calculating something intently.

Yu Sheng stepped forward and patted the man's shoulder, "Hey, I have some questions to ask..."

"Give me a little more time, just a little," the middle-aged man said without raising his head, "I know, I know I'm already dead, 'He' has given me the power to see through the calamity, but I'm just a bit short... I'm about to figure out what this thing really is..."

Yu Sheng was suddenly bewildered.

This wasn't his first time communicating with the dead, but this situation was clearly different from any before!

The dead man named "Sun Chen" continued to scribble furiously at the desk, seemingly indifferent to his fate of death—he wasn't even curious about why a Yu Sheng suddenly appeared in the world after death, a stark contrast to the muddled "dead" Yu Sheng had encountered before!

In the next moment, Yu Sheng forcefully restrained the surge of curiosity in his heart. He didn't interrupt the busy figure bent over the desk but cautiously leaned over to see what this "Sun Chen" was writing that made him unwilling to stop even after death.

He saw dizzying numbers and calculation symbols, even making him feel lightheaded—just like the ones on the surrounding walls.

It was a thick notebook in which Sun Chen was quickly sketching lines of content on a new page. They looked like calculations, but the symbols and rules of operation exceeded Yu Sheng's understanding. Amidst the numerous equations were a series of complex and chaotic geometric figures, as if they were not only part of the equations, but also illustrative structures to describe spatial relationships. In those geometric lines, a large number of annotations were added—Sun Chen wrote and erased, erased and wrote again, repeatedly.

"Still not right, still not right... I still can't understand this structure, maybe I got some condition wrong from the start..."

Sun Chen suddenly began to mutter, seemingly trapped in a dead-end within his calculations, but suddenly it was as if he figured something out and began to continue calculating and recording in the notebook.

However, his figure was already starting to become faint, clearly running out of time.

"Knowledge," the figure becoming thin suddenly spoke, still not stopping his writing, but his conversation was clearly directed at Yu Sheng beside him, "What killed me was 'knowledge,' knowledge from another world."

Yu Sheng was taken aback, but just as he was about to speak, he saw the dead man waving his hand without looking up.

"Don't ask, let me speak, I know what to say," that faint figure said quickly, "I know you're here to investigate, sent by the Special Service Bureau? Or did that 'Director' notice the abnormality here? Or something else... it doesn't matter. I know I will die, but I can't stop, the first thing I calculated was my death omen when the calculation started, but I must keep going.

"This is the thing from my nightmares, from the moment I first saw 'Him,' it has been lurking in my mind. I don't know what happened, but at some instant, I suddenly realized its existence and understood its first level of interpretation, then the whole process went out of control... I remember I heard some melody, or a whistle? That seemed like a starting signal...

"I don't know exactly what I'm calculating, this... 'knowledge,' it runs in my mind like a living thing, and there is a perception barrier between me and them. They reorganize themselves and try to find their resolution; I only have a vague impression, roughly knowing it's an ultimate answer about the 'convergence' of the world. Now I am almost about to calculate it, its resolution should be..."

Sun Chen's figure wavered, the thin shadow floating in the black, white, and gray afterlife world like a mist about to evaporate. He completed another line of writing, but suddenly, his movements stalled, and his words were abruptly cut off.

Yu Sheng saw him slowly lift his head, the dead man's hollow visage seemed mired in immense shock and bewilderment.

The surrounding black, white, and gray world began to collapse, with colors and sounds from the real dimension quickly flooding in. But in the last second of this collapse, Yu Sheng still heard the other's voice enter his ears—

"Not enough mass..."

The dead world collapsed with a bang, and all colors and sounds instantly restored.

Yu Sheng abruptly looked up, seeing a pair of scarlet eyes staring intently at him nearby—the little Puppet was gripping his head, while Little Red Riding Hood beside and the "Director" not far away remained in their initial positions.

To the real world, Dead Communication only lasts for an instant, and no one ever moves from their place.

"Did you find anything?" Erin was most familiar with the "process," so she knew Yu Sheng had already "returned" when she saw the flash in his eyes and immediately asked, "How did the person die?"

Yu Sheng, just returning from the state of Dead Communication, had prepared a bunch of things in his head to explain what happened to "Sun Chen," but as he was about to speak, he met Erin's clear and transparent eyes—he had to admit they were a bit too clear, so clear that he swallowed back more than eighty percent of his prepared explanation, and after opening his mouth a couple of times, he finally organized his words: "Yes, um, 'knowledge,' the deceased came into contact with knowledge beyond human comprehension and involuntarily tried to calculate it..."

As Erin listened, her eyes gradually widened, and without knowing how she thought and understood it, she turned to look at the headless corpse by the desk, with a look of sorrow and sympathy: "...Ah, suffocated from not being able to solve the problem, math is really terrifying."

Yu Sheng: "..."

His emotions were a bit disjointed, but he suddenly didn't know how to continue explaining this to the little puppet—especially since he could feel that Erin was sincerely sympathizing with the deceased.

Though in her understanding, the person died from being unable to solve a math problem.

"Let's... clean up this place first," Yu Sheng coughed twice, turning to the "Director" and said, "And carefully search the scene to see if there's any other information."

"Okay, I'll arrange for the cleanup team to enter." The "Director" said solemnly beside him.

A cleanup team, dressed in special protective suits and marked with the Special Service Bureau's insignia, quickly entered the area. After sealing off the corridor leading to the Deep Layer, these professionals began cleaning up the gruesome scene in the ward with extreme efficiency.

Considering the very obvious mental contamination factors in this incident, the deceased's body was cautiously transferred into a meticulously structured metal container, along with tissue fragments collected from the scene being properly placed into the containment device. Meanwhile, the vast amount of blood in the room was evidently more troublesome to clean—a meticulous and time-consuming task, and much more challenging than simply cleaning bloodstains were the symbols and geometric figures scrawled across the walls and floors.

The "Director" ordered the cleanup team to record all the symbols left by the deceased, which would later be handed over to Special Service Bureau experts for research. Additionally, while cleaning the bloodstains, they were instructed to preserve the traces as intact as possible.

Yu Sheng stood in an unobtrusive place outside the ward, watching the busy cleanup team inside, frowning slightly: "...They look very professional. Does this kind of thing often happen here?"

"Not quite," a low, raspy female voice emanated from the towering humanoid shell as a goldfish swam slowly in the spherical fish tank, "Extreme incidents of patient death are very rare. Most patients entering the asylum maintain stable conditions—however, correspondingly, the occurrence of 'minor incidents' here is not low, typically involving situations like nightmare manifestations, soul separation syndrome, multiple personality conflicts, and so on, which can be handled by regular mental health professionals or security forces.

"The cleanup team's job is mainly to handle the aftermath post-incident, eliminating any 'hazardous factors' left at the scene. Some patients' 'nightmares' leave a significant amount of pollution in the real world, and those things are troublesome to deal with. Sometimes the situation is even worse — over time, naturally, they've honed their professionalism."

Yu Sheng nodded lightly, while his mind involuntarily recalled what he saw during Dead Communication.

As he was lost in thought, Little Red Riding Hood beside him curiously asked, "Was Sun Chen always normal before? Were there really no warning signs before the incident? Has he ever started calculating or written a lot of stuff out of the blue before?"

"No," a stream of bubbles floated up in the fish tank, "I monitor every patient here—Sun Chen wasn't a scholar, and during the few months of his stay, he didn't show any interest or talent in this area. His daily life consisted of resting in the ward, watching movies in the recreation room, taking walks in the courtyard, and occasionally chatting with the on-duty medical staff. Overall, it was routine and monotonous."

"Has he recently been in contact with anyone? I mean 'extra' people, or anything else," Yu Sheng suddenly asked, "The 'knowledge' that killed him had been lurking in his mind for a long time without incident, but it suddenly erupted now. I have a feeling there's a trigger in between—the deceased mentioned a 'melody,' or a whistling sound, saying it led to his sudden understanding of the first layer of knowledge and beginning to calculate it."

"...Melody?"

"Yes, a melody, but the deceased could provide little information, and he didn't clarify what it was."

The "Director" seemed to fall into thought—Yu Sheng couldn't make out any expression from the goldfish circling in the fish tank, he could only guess from its silence that it was pondering—and after a while, that raspy female voice broke the silence: "This clue is too vague, but I will check the surveillance records in this area from the past few days, and the various audio materials the victim recently encountered, but to be honest, don't hold too much hope."

Yu Sheng wasn't surprised by this answer, just sighed: "Well, let's just do our best."

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