Published at 8th of October 2024 3:06 am

Chapter 1067: Mosaic Title

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Bohemia held her breath, sitting still in her chair, not daring to move a muscle.

The footsteps were slow and soft, with two to three seconds of silence between each step. In the deserted building after work hours, these almost inaudible footsteps were amplified by the long corridor, echoing through the vast walls, creating ripples in the silence.

It seemed like after reaching the final step, the footsteps came to a halt.

If one were to stand at the stairwell and look down the corridor, one would see a straight hallway and the office doors along it.

Bohemia glanced out of the window. In this season, the sun was setting quickly. The once blue-violet and orange-red horizon had gradually lost its strength, casting a layer of twilight. The desk lamp, alone on the table, cast a bright orange light on the surface.

The stack of documents she had pulled out had now turned into a mosaic. Even though no one could see the Descartes Spirit, who was not a player, it, like Bohemia, held its breath and remained still. Both of them waited for quite a while, but no more sounds came from the corridor, as if the person, upon seeing the light, hadn’t taken another step forward.

Bohemia squinted at the mosaic and nodded towards the door.

“Do you want me to go and check? But there’s no door,” the Descartes Spirit refused, “Don’t you watch horror movies? Characters who actively follow the sound to see what’s happening rarely make it back alive.”

Who could kill it in a Pocket Dimension!

Even outside the game, Bohemia could, at best, restrain it, but she couldn’t have any substantial impact on its existence. She used Higher Consciousness to knock on it a few times, like a game of whack-a-mole, and the Descartes Spirit finally gave in reluctantly and crawled out from under the door. Since entering the game, Higher Consciousness had become almost useless and could only be used to deal with the Descartes Spirit.

“No one’s outside,” it said, with half of its body still inside the room, as if ready to retreat at any moment, “Strange, what’s going on with that person… they came upstairs and then turned back?”

The entire corridor was now illuminated only beneath her office door.

That person must have seen the light under the door and realized that there was someone inside, so they turned and silently went back. Bohemia breathed a sigh of relief and slowly approached the window, looking outside through the cracks between the pages.

She stared for several minutes until the Descartes Spirit finally couldn’t hold back and floated up. “What are you looking at?”

“No one,” Bohemia whispered. “I’ve been watching the direction of the main entrance downstairs. If someone were leaving, I would see it from here. But no one has left… which means that person is still inside the building.”

What to do now?

She didn’t want to spend the night in this building with that person hiding in the shadows. But if she wanted to leave, she would inevitably pass the corner, go down the stairs, and walk through the darkness where her line of sight couldn’t reach. If she were attacked, would she fail to achieve her third-stage survival goal, and would she really die?

“I do have a solution,” the Descartes Spirit said.

She stared outside for a while, lost in thought, and the Descartes Spirit finally spoke.

“What?”

“As you said, I also believe that the person is still inside the building. It’s unlikely they climbed out the window on the other side. That person must have come for you or your office, right?”

Bohemia nodded.

“If that person thinks you’ll definitely go home tonight and doesn’t know they’ve been discovered, there’s no need to climb out the window. After all, they’ll have to come back later. If I were them, I’d find a room to wait in… and then strike when you leave.”

The Descartes Spirit paused, then cleared its throat in a feigned manner. “Of course, they could quietly sneak into your office, or they could hit you on the back of the head when you pass by. Well, that’s a matter of fate.”

“Get to the point, stop the chit-chat.”

The Descartes Spirit hesitated for a moment, not very pleased, and finally couldn’t hold back. “My solution is quite simple: don’t go downstairs… Turn off the lights here and go to the secretary’s room across the hall.”

“Eh? Do you want them to think I’ve left?”

“Yeah, this building is quite spacious. He might think he just didn’t hear you leaving. You stay in the secretary’s office, don’t turn on the lights, and find out who he is,” the Descartes Spirit sounded very excited. If it had hands, it would have been rubbing them together. “How does that sound?”

Seemingly with no other choice, Bohemia silently said to Lin Sanjiu on the other side, “You wait.” Then, she followed the Descartes Spirit’s instructions. She gathered the documents and the things from the safe into a bag and held it close to her chest. She turned the doorknob extremely slowly, not daring to make a sound with the lock. She watched as the door gradually opened just a crack, and only then did Bohemia sneak a quick glance into the corridor.

Under the dim, pale light, she could see almost half of the corridor at a glance. Only the stairwell was immersed in a deep gloom, with only a faint reflection on the handrail. She remembered that the maintenance checklist given to her by the maintenance man included a section on the lights at the stairwell.

“No one,” the Descartes Spirit floated out first. “The secretary probably locked the door. I’ll go in and unlock it for you.”

It was really enthusiastic about playing the game, especially when it could participate fully. After all, it was a game where it wouldn’t have to pay the price if it lost. Where else could you find such a good deal?

The Descartes Spirit that seemed to be a part of space blurred the crack in the door, melting into the space beyond it. Bohemia turned off the desk lamp, closed the door slowly, and tiptoed toward the secretary’s office. She turned the doorknob and, as expected, the door opened effortlessly.

In the dim light, the smell in this office was also very much like the Sandwich Secretary’s.

She closed the door quietly, and both Bohemia and the Descartes Spirit sat down behind it. This way, if someone were to come from the corridor, Bohemia wouldn’t miss a thing. Thinking that the person would still take some time to arrive, she used the faint light leaking in from the corridor to place the documents on the floor and asked the Descartes Spirit in a hushed tone, “Did you also notice the circular pattern?”

All the papers, photos, notebooks, and calendar pages scattered on the floor seemed to blur and sink into the darkness, barely visible in the faint light leaking in through the door. The remaining half looked even whiter when illuminated by the corridor light.

“To be more precise, it’s a bit different from a circle,” the Descartes Spirit attempted to float up several times to take a look at the documents but was shooed away by Bohemia. In the dim light, the glow was already so dim that you could barely make out anything; who needed an extra layer of mosaic?

“Although the overall shape is circular, it’s made up of segments, each with arrows pointing in the same direction. There are large black dots between the arcs, it’s quite strange.”

“Yeah, it’s the same as what I found.” Bohemia then described the scene she witnessed in the prison cell and asked, “What do these circles represent?”

“They are definitely related to these inmates. Some of these circles, I first discovered them behind the inmates’ case files.”

Bohemia, leaning over the papers, brought her face so close to the documents that her nose almost touched them, and finally managed to get a rough idea of the contents. After sorting and laying out the inmates’ files on the floor, she reviewed the inmate numbers and couldn’t help but mutter, “Huh?”

“What’s going on?” the Descartes Spirit suddenly rushed over.

“I recognize these numbers.”

The game had certainly undergone some simplification – after all, it wasn’t feasible to make her go through materials on thousands of criminals. But this simplified version of the materials made Bohemia more and more familiar with what she was seeing. “You see, 1702 is the one suspected of cannibalism, your fellow townsman. 1718 is the one that Snake-Skin wanted me to take care of, and I just discovered these two. But the remaining two… 1811 is another new inmate that the gang leader asked me to take care of, and I didn’t expect to see them here either. The last one, 1759, is the inmate that Old Shoes and Little Virgin initially said they were going to meet for an interview.”

“Oh, I almost forgot!” The Descartes Spirit suddenly realized, “They said they wanted to meet 1759… for what? It seems like they wanted to investigate communication inside and outside the prison… something like this?”

Inside and outside communication… inside and outside communication…

Bohemia frowned and carefully checked their entry times, finding that they were all quite close to each other.

“More than just being close in time,” the Descartes Spirit was quite pleased, “I examined it carefully, and they also have a common characteristic in their reasons for appeal. In the initial trial, the criminal evidence presented by the inspection party contains a disputed portion, something debatable, or falls under indirect evidence… after all, if the evidence is rock solid, they wouldn’t even get to the appeal stage.”

Bohemia stared at it blankly.

In her experience, once you had suspicions about someone, it meant pronouncing that person’s fate, and if you could kill them, you did it quickly. Deciding someone’s life and death without the use of force but relying on evidence was as absurd as having a giant wave flood your brain.

In many ways, although the Descartes Spirit was a Pocket Dimension, it was closer to an ordinary person than she was.

After explaining for a while and realizing that Bohemia was still clueless, the Descartes Spirit deflated. It gestured to some envelopes that were taken from the safe and said, “Take a look at these… do you see those bank statements?”

Bohemia cautiously opened the first one. She hadn’t eaten pork, but she had seen pigs run. She knew how important money was in this human society used as the backdrop in the game. She looked for a while, raised her head in astonishment, and asked in a low voice, “This… this is a lot of money? Wait, this number… it should be quite significant, right?”

“It would take a middle-level company employee about ten years to barely achieve this number. But this is only a quarter of the total amount. You see, these four bank statements are from different banks, and each account received the same amount… don’t ask me about the banks or the source of the funds!”

“Sandy Winters is this wealthy?”

The Descartes Spirit snorted.

“I don’t know. Because these four accounts belong to different people with different names, none of them belong to her.”

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