From the Ship of Fools to Earl of Wugang

The sunlight was shining obliquely across the lake. Rebecca parked the car in a familiar spot, turned off the engine, and picked up the file bag from the passenger seat.

This contains the server schedule she revised last night, as well as a draft implementation plan for that MUD.

Strictly speaking, Mr. Black's "multiplayer online text game" has begun to develop into a truly feasible concept.

Although we now have telephones and the internet, face-to-face collaboration is ultimately different.

Working with Mr. Black made Rebecca feel like she had reached a new level of efficiency, and she liked it.

Just as she was thinking this, the mansion gate opened, and Thomas bowed slightly to Rebecca.

Good morning, Miss Rebecca.

"Good morning, Thomas," Rebecca asked casually. "Is Mr. Black upstairs?"

"I regret to inform you that Mr. Blake has had to leave on urgent business."

Rebecca, who knew Thomas very well, noticed the pauses in his speech.

"He received an urgent message yesterday evening and had to leave Flamingo temporarily."

"Oh, what urgent message is it? He could at least have called me before he left." Rebecca frowned.

Thomas explained, "It's related to some personal matters he was handling. He left in a hurry, so he didn't have time to explain to you in person. He specifically asked me to tell you that the server can continue operating as usual."

It sounds reasonable. In a sense, it aligns with the impression Rebecca had formed of Mr. Black during their time together on the BBS, and it also fits his style of doing things.

"Did he say when he'd be back?" Rebecca asked.

"There's no specific timeframe," Thomas said, lowering his eyes. "But I believe Mr. Blake will contact you later."

Rebecca stood there holding the file folder, feeling as if the sophisticated machine that had been running smoothly for so long had suddenly come to a halt.

"Then I'll go to the third floor first."

Everything was normal in the temporary studio on the third floor. Rebecca saw a stack of manuscripts next to Edmund's computer.

The title at the top reads "A Study in Scarlet," and below it is Mr. Black's consistently neat but rather thin handwriting.

Rebecca picked it up and flipped through it briefly, confirming that this was the novel Mr. Blake had mentioned.

As she put the manuscript away, she noticed a fountain pen next to her with its cap off.

Rebecca raised an eyebrow. In her opinion, it seemed odd that Mr. Black, who was overly cautious, would leave an uncapped pen and a half-finished manuscript on the table.

She first walked around the room to make sure there was nothing unusual, then sat down, turned on her computer, and dialed "Golden Dome".

Checking the online list, she didn't find "Storm Eye," and searching through her private messages on the site yielded no results.

Rebecca stared at the silent account and suddenly realized that she had no way of actually finding Mr. Black.

She knew he called himself Evan Black, knew about computers, and had some strange skills and hobbies.

Apart from that, she knew nothing about his family, past, address, or usual phone number.

Rebecca stared at the forum for a while, pondering, before continuing with her actions.

About twenty minutes later, she received the mansion's phone bills and call logs for the past few days.

There was no number that suddenly connected yesterday evening; the manor's landline was completely silent around that time.

Of course, urgent messages don't necessarily come from a telephone; they can also come from a telegram or a letter.

Rebecca stared at the bill for a while, then began searching through the dial-up connection history.

A series of numbers, connection durations, and timestamps appeared on the screen.

She recognized the number for "Golden Dome," and she could also distinguish the numbers for several databases and public BBS forums.

However, some unfamiliar numbers kept appearing in the records, with one number standing out in particular.

Rebecca copied these records onto paper, sorted them by time, and then made a simple comparison with the phone book at hand and the server numbers she was familiar with.

It wasn't the address of any BBS or server she knew, which made her somewhat hesitant.

From the most direct perspective, she could certainly try dialing. As long as the line is still active and the other end is still accepting connection requests, she has a chance to find out exactly where it is.

But that would be too reckless. If Mr. Blake was indeed dealing with some private matters that were "inconvenient to explain," then making a call rashly would only leave a new access record.

Rebecca temporarily copied down the unfamiliar number and drew a small question mark next to it.

She then turned to the computer she had sold to Mr. Blake and opened a widget in the Tools directory.

This widget lists the cache logs of the most recent terminal sessions. It was originally used for troubleshooting, but now it seems to be helping her figure out the problem.

Rebecca entered a command to sort the records by connection time and target number, and soon several residual records appeared on the screen.

Most of them were cached "Golden Dome" content. She glanced at them, confirmed they were irrelevant, and continued scrolling down.

Then, Rebecca saw a completely different scene.

It looks like a fragment of a screen hastily left before the terminal disconnected. Many characters are damaged, but at the top, you can still make out a crooked crucible made up of characters.

There is a line below that is missing a few characters.

[...the alchemist's cauldron]

Rebecca's brow furrowed slowly as she retrieved the next cached segment.

The second paragraph is even more fragmented than the first, like several scraps of paper torn from a single sheet.

[All materials are available...] [All recipes require...] [Notice board/material market/dreamscape...]

Rebecca switched the encoding format, ran the program again on the garbled parts, and then tried to piece together adjacent fragments using her usual text repair script.

A few lines of fragmented content appeared on the screen.

[Southern coast of Veridisque...massive insomnia...]

[Suspected to be related to infiltration from the lower spirit realm. Local members should avoid...any attempts at dream entry in the near future.]

Rebecca's fingers stopped.

Massive insomnia in the southern coastal towns of Veridias—she'd read about it in the newspapers.

Of course, the newspapers called it "a regional sleep disorder suspected to be caused by a combination of polluted water sources, abnormal climate, and collective psychological stress."

The report was inconspicuous; Rebecca had only glanced at it casually at the time. Now, this cached log interprets it as a different kind of fact.

She continued scrolling down.

There are more cached fragments in the materials marketplace, probably because Mr. Blake stayed there for a long time or repeatedly opened certain posts.

However, these fragments are incomplete. Some only have titles left, some only have a single line of price quotes, and some are the end of transaction notes.

Seeking high-purity silver powder...without industrial anti-oxidation treatment... [Deep-sea sand, sourced from the western shore of the Riftheart Sea...] [Aconite extract...buyer assumes all risks] [Dried hawk tail feathers...delivered face-to-face in Green Lake City...]

Rebecca unconsciously made a "hmm" sound as she saw something familiar.

She not only saw them, but she even personally processed the corresponding purchase orders.

Mr. Black's explanation of "heat dissipation material experiment" has now been exposed.