Very Good, Silence Makes My Brain Work

After the meeting, everyone in the conference room seemed to have blacked out, losing their memories of the moment Xu Chen said those three words. They looked at one another, sensing that something was amiss.

They immediately asked Xu Chen to explain what had happened.

Xu Chen tried to speak, only to find that his mouth moved without making a sound. After a brief examination, the doctor concluded that it was probably aphasia.

Captain Chu asked Xu Chen to try writing down what had happened. But as soon as Xu Chen put pen to paper, he produced the same circles as Old Ge.

Unwilling to believe it, he tried writing "Bring in the Wine" from memory. The entire poem came out as OOOOOOOOOO, densely overlapping.

Everyone in the conference room realized how serious the situation was. While some pulled up the surveillance footage, others had him try typing on a phone. Xu Chen thought he had typed it well enough, but when he looked, everything he had entered was garbled.

They tried having him point to characters in a dictionary. He knew exactly which characters he wanted, but for some inexplicable reason, he couldn't find or point to them, as though his hands wouldn't obey him.

Once they pulled up the footage, they found that the recording, which included audio, had frozen when Xu Chen said those three words. It didn't return to normal until he swore.

Everyone in the conference room was horrified.

They had a rough idea of why the recording device hadn't picked up any voices.

There were no fools in the conference room. Having found no clues in the footage, they turned around and devised a wholly manual way for Xu Chen to convey information.

One person would flip through a dictionary while Xu Chen held up one to ten fingers to form numbers from zero to ninety-nine, corresponding to the pinyin numbers. He would nod or shake his head to confirm or reject the selections. After checking repeatedly, the person with the dictionary would write down the characters.

But it still didn't work.

Xu Chen stared at the recorded text in confusion. He couldn't figure out how he had managed to get even the simplest numbers wrong.

"From the looks of it, Old Ge was probably silenced because he discovered something. Even Xu Chen ended up like this when he tried to say what he had wanted to."

"That's right. The enemy's methods are unheard of. They can actually cause errors in a person's cognition."

"Later, go to the military industrial institute and the Academy of Sciences. Ask how a weapon like this works, what principles it uses, and whether it can be countered."

"That'll be difficult. We don't even know why we fell victim to it."

"There are very few clues..."

While the people at the conference table debated heatedly, the people in the back found that Xu Chen's general understanding wasn't impaired. Once they established that he wanted a certain kind of book, they put the library catalog in front of him and had him select from it by a process of exhaustive elimination.

Chinese books... classic foreign novels... tags... starting letters...

Then Xu Chen stared blankly at the copy of Andersen's Fairy Tales in his hands, utterly speechless. What he wanted was the Cthulhu Mythos.

In the end, once he confirmed that he really couldn't convey any information, he had no choice but to give up.

The others were still discussing whether using binary to transmit information would work, but Xu Chen fell silent.

Just now, he had worked out a few things that had puzzled him.

They concerned what Old Ge had done.

He glanced around the conference room, where the discussion was growing more heated, and decided to sort the matter out himself.

After his last meeting with Xu Chen, Old Ge had learned about Special Corrosion. He had formed a hypothesis then and believed that the same mastermind was behind both the spread of the plague and the creation of Special Corrosion, with the goal of destroying human civilization.

If that was the case, Old Ge might have discovered something while researching Special Corrosion. That conclusion came from the notes.

Xu Chen had noticed that, no matter how absurd the circles he wrote were, a whole poem took up only a little space. Judging by Old Ge's circles, he had most likely written down a full page of information.

That information would expose the mastermind. After learning of it, the mastermind had not only interfered with Old Ge's cognition, but had even intended to kill him outright.

It seemed terribly afraid of any information leaking out.

Old Ge would originally have died of a mysterious illness, but after he summoned Xu Chen here, the mastermind feared that Old Ge would leak more information, so it arranged a more aggressive, unnatural death.

To make sure Xu Chen didn't leak any information either, it had also thrown his cognition into disorder.

As for why it hadn't simply killed him, perhaps it was to avoid provoking a reaction from the state apparatus.

One death could still be explained away, handled quietly without firing a shot. Two deaths would be an outright provocation. If the state apparatus went into full operation, what organization could withstand a torrent of steel and Dongfeng Express?

But it was also possible that it hadn't had time. Xu Chen didn't think that existence would have any such reservations.

As for the mastermind... it might be something from the Cthulhu Mythos... or it might be Cthulhu Himself? After all, His name was the one being called. Xu Chen had only seen derivative works and didn't know the details. At the moment he looked up at the starry sky, perhaps the starry sky was looking back at him?

There was ample basis for that conclusion. After all, few things in the Cthulhu Mythos bore humanity any goodwill. Destroying a human civilization for fun was only natural.

And the methods used to destroy humanity also matched Xu Chen's image of Cthulhu.

Dark, twisted, howling, crawling.

Erasing the traces of civilization, spreading all manner of plagues...

Unfortunately, he couldn't convey any of it.

Come to think of it, he was unlucky. He had thought this life would go smoothly: study medicine, become a doctor with a good salary, find a girlfriend, and live out his life.

He hadn't expected to end up in a world with Cthulhu, an octopus head.

Xu Chen sat in a daze for a while, then suddenly recalled something puzzling that hadn't seemed puzzling before.

Old Ge seemed never to have said what Special Corrosion was all about.

Special Corrosion was now widespread among cultural relics, and it was foreseeable that relics all over the world were still being destroyed. This was a form of destruction that belonged to Cthulhu. If they could find out how it worked, perhaps they could contain or counter it. That was extremely important for curbing the actions of that Cthulhu mastermind.

But Old Ge had never mentioned it. Had he forgotten? Or was telling Xu Chen what the existence behind it looked like more important information...

Or, going further, had he already conveyed the message he wanted to?

Xu Chen went over Old Ge's words again and again, but found that they really had sounded like meaningless murmurs.

He had obtained no useful information.