absurd deduction game.

Yu Xing and the other two looked over cautiously.

That thing... is hard to describe. It has no fixed form and is more like a distorted aggregate formed by countless crazy desires for knowledge and fragmented knowledge itself. Just looking at it is quite shocking.

Its main body consists of the afterimages of constantly tumbling and recombining books, the flowing light of mathematical formulas, and unrecognizable written symbols, with a core that flickers with an extremely obsessive, bloodshot light of "rationality".

Distorted human faces constantly emerge on the surface of this concrete form of knowledge. Those faces open their mouths, uttering silent screams, their eyes filled with an extreme yearning for "understanding" and the eternal pain of being unable to obtain answers.

Its appearance made the incessant chatter clear, and Yu Xing's mind clicked, keenly catching the most familiar voice among them.

"...the coordinates of the fifth dimension...no...a variable is missing..."

"...Flesh and blood are weak...Only ascension...the ritual...needs more..."

"...He is watching...He has always been...The answer lies among the stars..."

"...Why...why can't I understand...knowledge...give me more knowledge!"

The shattered thoughts came crashing down like fragments, carrying with them an intense thirst for knowledge and the ensuing madness and despair. It wasn't Edgar they were looking for, but the astronomer Riel!

This seems to capture the mental fluctuations of Riel before his madness, mixed among layers of whispers.

So, did Edgar also leave behind some mental disturbances here?

Just as Yu Xing was thinking this, the newly formed monster moved.

It seemed to "sense" the vibrant consciousness of the three intruders, which contained power and knowledge, and instantly "locked on" them!

The monster rushed toward them.

It moves like a viscous liquid, yet with a speed that defies the laws of physics, arriving in front of you in the blink of an eye.

"Hiss... knowledge... new knowledge... understanding... I need to understand!"

The mental shock, a mixture of countless chaotic fragments of knowledge and negative emotions, transformed into a stream of cold, viscous information that forcibly poured into his consciousness.

There is no way to avoid it.

The scene of the library before my eyes instantly distorted and dissolved.

For a moment, Yu Xing's mind went blank. When it cleared again, he found himself standing on an endless, undulating plane made of grayish-white matter, with deep ravines and countless flickering symbols and broken formulas hanging in the sky, like distorted stars.

The ground beneath his feet undulated rhythmically. Yu Xing examined it for a moment, revealing the expression of an elderly person on the subway looking at their phone.

Wait, isn't he stepping on a brain magnified countless times?
The ravine-filled ground beneath his feet was composed entirely of countless neurons and thought pathways, pulsating slightly. A strange sense of connection made Yu Xing realize that he was not only stepping on a brain, but on his own brain.

This seems to be the consciousness space formed after the library monster rushed in with "knowledge." He is the master of this place, so he can perceive everything here.

Qu Xianqing and the actors were not in this place, perhaps they had stepped on their own brains.

However, this territory, which should have belonged entirely to him, was not without others.

Yu Xing raised her head slightly.

"Thud." A large worm fell down.

Immediately afterwards, countless insects of various shapes and sizes fell down and crashed onto his cerebral cortex.

Some resembled multi-legged centipedes pieced together from constantly changing geometric shapes, leaving behind sticky data trails as they crawled; others looked like miniature, rotten books with fangs, their pages scraping and creaking as they opened and closed; and still others were indescribable, bizarre, twisting and deforming insects, their surfaces covered with shimmering runes and constantly repeating broken whispers.

Yu Xing: "..."

A "rain of insects" fell from the sky, which was composed of symbols, formulas, and unfamiliar characters.

The forcibly instilled, distorted, and contradictory fragments of knowledge quickly materialized into countless repulsive insects upon entering this space. They frantically tried to burrow into the grayish-white "skin" beneath their feet, gnawing with their mouthparts and digging with their appendages, attempting to take root in Yu Xing's mind, pollute his cognition, distort his logic, and assimilate him into another knowledge monster.

"It's a bit disgusting."

Yu Xing disliked insects to begin with, especially moths, and the thought that these insects were now crawling into his brain made him feel even more nauseous.

He clicked his tongue, and countless dark red, cursed branches, carrying an aura of misfortune and destruction, suddenly erupted from the bottom of his consciousness space, precisely binding the burrowing insects!

Centipedes, composed of mathematical paradoxes, were tightly strangled by tentacles. Their bodies twisted and broke as they struggled, eventually turning into a cloud of dust that shimmered with erroneous light.

One by one, the "bookworms" that tried to gnaw on the path of memory were pierced by branches, the pages were forcibly torn apart, and the twisted words inside disappeared with a scream, as if they were alive.

More insects were roughly pulled from their skin by the tentacles, their tiny appendages still clinging tightly to the "soil" of their thoughts, stirring up wisps of mental fragments.

Then, these insects were mercilessly crushed—under the entanglement and compression of the tentacles, they burst open like cysts filled with pus, and the chaotic fragments of knowledge and frantic thirst for knowledge inside splattered like foul-smelling juice, but were quickly annihilated and devoured by the power of the curse.

This process is not without its costs.

With each insect pulled out and each piece of contamination crushed, Yu Xing felt a sharp pain and weakness in his mind, as if part of his thought process was also damaged. The places where the insects had burrowed left temporary, burn-like marks that would take time to heal.

But he did not pause for a moment. The branches of curse, like the coldest cleaners, raged across this battlefield of thought, clearing away and disintegrating the insects wherever they went.

The surging black mist intertwines with the chaotic colors that erupt when insects die, creating a crazy and eerie scene.

After an unknown amount of time, when the last insect, resembling a transparent leech and attempting to disguise itself as a fragment of memory, was pulled from beside a main thought path by the tentacles and crushed with a sharp hiss—

The entire space of consciousness suddenly fell silent.

All external pollution has been temporarily removed.

Yu Xing felt the cold, forceful flow of information completely cut off. The scene before her vanished like a shattered mirror.

He suddenly snapped back to reality and found himself still standing among the bookshelves made of skin and bones, bathed in the eerie green light of the library.

The ground beneath my feet was cold and slippery, and the background whispers, still noisy but seemingly less so, echoed in my ears.

Ahead, the monstrous embodiment of knowledge, which had originally radiated a violent thirst for knowledge and chaotic light, began to rapidly collapse and dissipate as if it had lost its core support.

The lingering shadows of books, the flowing light of formulas, and the symbols that made it up crumbled like sand in the wind, and the last bit of stubborn "rationality" flickered a few times before being completely extinguished.

There was no earth-shattering explosion, nor any lingering filth. It vanished silently without a trace, as if it had never existed.

The mental attack on Yu Xing was fundamentally dismantled as he thoroughly purified all the invading "knowledge insects" within his consciousness space. The unknown monster also naturally perished because it lost its carrier and "connection" to its target.

Yu Xing was slightly out of breath and frowned as she looked at the investigator's ring on her hand.

Since entering the City of Horrors, the system hasn't announced any side quest notifications about monster sightings. While the Shadow and Mycelium could be excused as "not counting as monsters," this one in the library clearly should have been announced.

So, according to the setting, is it because the aura of the ancient god covered the range of the ideal country's abilities that the equipment could no longer record contribution points?
He glanced at Qu Xianqing and the actor beside him out of the corner of his eye. They seemed to have just emerged from a somewhat morbid mental state, and their expressions varied.

"This is exhausting," Qu Xianqing complained. "I'd rather face a parade of a hundred ghosts than see my brain covered in the slime from exploding bugs again."

Yu Xing's eye twitched: "...I agree."

However, such an experience wasn't entirely without its benefits.

This library is a place where knowledge and spirit are in a state of great confusion, and after being baptized by the "knowledge insects," their mental fluctuations finally became connected with the library itself.

The library seemed to have captured their desire to come for Edgar; the fragments of memories of Edgar in their minds, the presence of him perceived from notes and echoes, and the intense desire to find him at this moment formed a clear spiritual coordinate within the library.

Suddenly, the huge bookshelves around them, which had been motionless and made of skin and bones, began to creak with a low, groaning sound, like bones grinding together.

Under the curious gazes of the three, these enormous bookshelves began to move on their own.

Like living guardians of a maze, they slowly slid to the sides or rotated to change direction in a precise and eerie manner.

The skeletal spines rubbed together, producing a teeth-grinding sound; the skin-like pages moved without wind, rustling softly; and a ghostly green light flowed between the moving bookshelves, casting countless swaying, distorted shadows.

This process lasted less than a minute.

When everything came to a standstill, a straight passage that had not existed before suddenly appeared before the three of them.

The bookshelves on both sides of the passage stood like solemn guards, neatly arranged. At the end of the passage, it disappeared into a deeper darkness, but a spiritual remnant belonging to Edgar White, which was more intense than the surrounding area, was clearly emanating from there.

This peculiar library, as if acknowledging their "qualifications," proactively guided them in the right direction.

"I don't know whether to say this library is too autonomous or too brainless." Lingren looked at the deep passage and smiled. "The City of Terror itself obviously doesn't want us to find out the truth, but after this library treated us as one of its own, it actually did us a favor."

Without hesitation, the three of them walked forward along the path "made way" by the bookshelves.

As they drew nearer, some of Edgar's whispers finally surfaced.

“…Record…It must be recorded…the city’s breathing…its rhythm…”

"...No...that's not it...they...are deceiving us..."

"...Lina...I'm sorry...Brother can't go back..."

"...Mother Goddess...Starry Sky...Why...why choose..."

Those rambling words appeared and disappeared intermittently, and Yu Xing's footsteps echoed in the silent corridor. The "books" on the bookshelves on both sides seemed to be silently watching them.

They soon reached the end of the passage.

It was a relatively secluded corner, near a wall supported by huge ribs, unlike other places that were filled with bookshelves, and instead had a small, relatively open space.

The organic cover on the ground is thin, revealing the dark red "foundation" underneath, which looks like a congealed blood clot.

There stood a shocking spinal workbench, pieced together from several thick, twisted human spines, its surface covered with a hardened, smooth biofilm that formed the shape of the tabletop.

The legs of the spinal workbench are deeply embedded in the ground, as if they have grown out of the library itself. Scattered on it are pens made of finger bones and nails, arranged haphazardly. In addition, there are skull ink bottles filled with starlight sap and several manuscripts with messy handwriting.

Through this subtle mental connection, they immediately realized that these things had been used by Edgar, and a new clue was indeed right in front of them.

Yu Xing stepped forward, picked up the manuscript, and immediately felt that the texture was not quite right. After examining it carefully, he frowned again.

The material of these manuscripts was surprisingly a kind of tanned, relatively smooth skin, pale in color, with faint blue traces of subcutaneous capillaries visible. It was cool and supple to the touch, carrying an unsettling sense of life.

On the skin-like paper, dense, extremely messy, yet desperately focused handwriting was written in that dark blue starlight liquid.

"...The City of Terror is not entirely chaotic; it 'breathes' and 'heartbeats'...The 'breathing' cycle is approximately three hours in real time, during which the activity of the shadowy figures increases and the probability of architectural anomalies rises...The source of the 'heartbeat' is suspected to be the clock tower in the west, which is the energy core that sustains the city's existence..."

"...Whispers exist in layers...The surface layer is chaotic fragments of knowledge, the middle layer is mixed with individual obsessions and echoes of memories, and the deep layer...the deep layer seems to be guided and filtered by a unified 'consciousness'...I cannot reach it, to reach it is to go mad..."

"...Many of those shadows are products of the desperate souls trapped here, combined with the city's rules...They are 'playing' the roles they played in life, repeating the fears they experienced..."

"...I tried to find a way to leave... 'Key'...I need a 'key'...but not the kind I used to get in...I need a 'key' that can deceive or temporarily disrupt the city's 'rules'...perhaps it's related to 'heartbeat'..."

"...They are watching me...I know...the gaze of the ancient gods has never left...I am not the first person to be brought here to be 'recorded'...and I will not be the last...My time is running out...I..."

"I need to go check out the clock tower." (End of Chapter)