Alien Hotel.

Chapter 504 Deadly Knowledge

The instant the finger touched the blood, the afterlife constructed of black, white, and gray descended in an instant, all sounds vanished in the blink of an eye, and all perceptions from the real world became hollow and distant.

The tall "Dean" and the Eileen and Little Red Riding Hood beside him all turned into phantoms frozen in the air. Yu Sheng looked up in the direction of the headless corpse and saw a middle-aged man in a shirt and trousers sitting blankly at the desk, seemingly still concentrating on calculating something.

Yu Sheng stepped over and patted the other person on the shoulder: "Hey, I have some questions for you..."

“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 calamities, but I’m still a little short… I’m almost there to figure out what this thing is…”

Yu Sheng was immediately taken aback.

This wasn't the first time he had communicated with the deceased, but this time the situation was clearly different from before!
The deceased, named "Sun Chen," was still hunched over the table, writing furiously, seemingly indifferent to his own fate of death—he wasn't even curious about why Yu Sheng had suddenly appeared in the afterlife, which was completely different from the other "deceased" people Yu Sheng had seen before!
The next moment, Yu Shengmeng suppressed his curiosity. He did not interrupt the figure who was busy at the desk, but carefully peeked over from the side to see what this "Sun Chen" was writing, so much so that he was unwilling to stop even after death.

He saw a dazzling, even dizzying array of numbers and calculation symbols—just like those on the surrounding walls.

It was a thick notebook, and Sun Chen was rapidly sketching line after line of content on a new page. They looked like calculation formulas, but the symbols and operational rules used were beyond Yu Sheng's comprehension. Among the numerous formulas, there was a series of complex and chaotic geometric figures. These figures seemed not only to be part of the formulas, but also to be some kind of example structure used to describe spatial relationships. Between those geometric lines, there were a large number of annotations. Sun Chen wrote and erased between several of these annotations, repeatedly writing and erasing them.

"It still doesn't work, it still doesn't work... I still can't understand this structure, maybe I got some condition wrong from the beginning..."

Sun Chen suddenly started muttering to himself, seemingly stuck in a dead end in his calculations, but then he seemed to have figured something out and started working out and recording in his notebook again.

However, his figure was gradually becoming thinner, clearly indicating that there was not enough time left.

"Knowledge," the fading figure suddenly spoke, still writing, but clearly addressing 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 deceased wave his hand without even raising his head.

“Don’t ask, let me speak. I know what to say,” the slender figure said quickly. “I know you’re here to investigate. Were you sent by the Secret Service? Or did that ‘Director’ discover the anomaly here? Or something else… it doesn’t matter. I know I’m going to die, but I can’t stop. When the calculations started, the first thing I calculated was my own death, but I have to keep calculating.”

"This is what's in my nightmares. It's been lurking in my mind ever since I first saw 'Him.' I don't know what happened, but at some point, I suddenly became aware of its existence and understood its first layer of interpretation. Then the whole process started to get out of control... I only remember hearing a melody, or maybe a whistle? It seemed like a signal that something was starting..."

"I'm not entirely sure what I'm calculating. This... 'knowledge' operates automatically in my mind 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, roughly knowing that it's an ultimate answer about the 'convergence' of the world. Now I'm almost there; its solution should be..."

Sun Chen's figure swayed precariously, his thin shadow floating like a wisp of dew about to evaporate in the black, white, and gray afterlife. He finished writing another line, but suddenly, his movements froze, and his words stopped abruptly halfway through.

Yu Sheng saw him slowly raise his head, the dead man's empty face seemingly trapped in immense shock and bewilderment.

The black, white, and gray world around him began to collapse, and colors and sounds from the real dimension rapidly filled the surroundings. But in the last second of this collapse, Yu Sheng still heard the other person's voice enter his ears—

"The quality isn't good enough..."

The world of the dead collapsed with a roar, and all colors and sounds were instantly restored.

Yu Sheng suddenly looked up and saw a pair of scarlet eyes staring straight at him from close range—the little doll was clinging to his head, while Little Red Riding Hood and the "Dean" not far away were still standing in their original positions.

In the real world, the conversation between the dead happens in an instant, and none of them have moved.

"Did you get anything out of him?" Eileen was most familiar with the "process," so when she saw a flash in Yu Sheng's eyes, she knew he had "come back to his senses." She immediately asked, "How did he die?" Yu Sheng had just snapped out of his conversation with the deceased. He had prepared a whole host of explanations for what happened to "Sun Chen," but just as he was about to speak, he met Eileen's clear, bright eyes—almost too clear, to say the least. So clear that he instantly swallowed back more than 80% of his explanation, opening his mouth two or three times before finally managing to organize his thoughts: "Yes, uh, 'knowledge,' the deceased came into contact with knowledge beyond human comprehension and uncontrollably forced calculations..."

As Eileen listened, her eyes widened, and then, without her noticing how she thought and understood, she turned to look at the headless corpse beside the desk, her expression filled with sorrow and sympathy: "...Ah, I was so frustrated when I couldn't solve the problem. Math is really terrifying."

Yu Sheng: "..."

His emotions were somewhat disjointed, but he suddenly didn't know how to continue explaining this to the little doll—especially since he could sense that Eileen was genuinely sympathetic to the deceased.

Although she understood that the other person had died because they couldn't solve a math problem.

“Let’s clean up this place first,” Yu Sheng coughed twice and turned to the “dean” to say, “and while we’re at it, let’s search the scene carefully to see if there is any other information.”

“Alright, I’ll arrange for the cleanup team to enter the site,” the “dean” said in a deep voice.

A cleanup team dressed in special protective suits and bearing Secret Service insignia quickly entered the area. After sealing off the corridor leading to the deeper areas, these professionals began cleaning up the horrific scene in the ward with remarkable efficiency.

Given the very obvious psychological pollution involved in this incident, the deceased's body was carefully transferred to a sophisticated metal container, and the tissue fragments collected at the scene were also properly placed in the containment device. Cleaning up the large amount of bloodstains in the room was obviously more troublesome—it was a meticulous and time-consuming task, and the symbols and geometric patterns covering the walls and floors were clearly more challenging than simply cleaning up the bloodstains.

The "director" instructed the cleanup team to record all the symbols left by the deceased and then hand them over to Secret Service experts for study. He also instructed them to preserve the traces as intact as possible while cleaning up the bloodstains.

Yu Sheng stood outside the ward, out of the way, watching the cleaning team bustling around inside. He frowned slightly: "...They look very professional. Does this kind of thing happen often here?"

“Not necessarily,” a deep, hoarse female voice came from the tall, humanoid body of the goldfish swimming slowly in the spherical fish tank. “Extreme events such as patient deaths are rare. Most patients who enter the sanatorium remain stable. However, correspondingly, the probability of ‘minor accidents’ here is not low. Most of them are things like nightmare materialization, dissociative identity disorder, and multiple personality disorder fighting. Ordinary psychiatrists or security forces can handle them.”

"The cleanup team's main task is to handle the aftermath after the incident and eliminate any remaining 'hazards' at the scene. Some patients' 'nightmares' can leave a lot of pollution in the real world, and those things are very troublesome to deal with, sometimes even worse than this. Over time, they naturally develop expertise."

Yu Sheng nodded slightly, but at the same time, he couldn't help but recall what he had seen during the "conversation with the dead".

While he was deep in thought, Little Red Riding Hood asked curiously, "Was Sun Chen always normal before? Was there really no warning before the incident? Had he ever suddenly started calculating or writing a lot of things like this before?"

“No,” a string of bubbles floated in the fish tank. “I will keep an eye on every patient here—Sun Chen is not a scholar, and he has not shown any interest or talent in this area during the months he has been admitted. His daily life consists of resting in the ward, watching movies in the recreation room, taking walks in the courtyard, and occasionally chatting with the medical staff on duty. Overall, it is 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, and it had been peaceful with him for a long time, but now it suddenly erupted. I always feel that there must be a trigger for this—the deceased mentioned a ‘melody’ or a whistling sound. He said that it was that thing that caused him to suddenly understand the first level of knowledge and start calculating.”

"……melody?"

"Yes, it's a melody, but the deceased could only provide limited information; he didn't explain what it was specifically."

The "dean" seemed to be deep in thought—Yu Sheng couldn't see any expression on the goldfish circling in the fish tank; he could only guess from the other's silence that it was thinking—and after a long while, the hoarse female voice broke the silence: "This clue is too vague, but I will check the surveillance records of this area in the past few days, as well as various audio materials that the victim has recently come into contact with, but to be honest, don't have too much hope."

Yu Sheng was not surprised by this answer, but simply sighed, "Well, I'll do my best."

(End of this chapter)