Noise from Beyond This Place and Debt Repayment Progress: 0.0167%
Herta grunted, pulled her hand away from the canvas, and took two steps back.
As Ruan Mei had just said, she noticed that the part of her memory concerning the painting's internal mechanism was missing, though some echoes of data remained.
"Good..." She cleared her throat. "It seems it really can affect someone at the Emanator level."
Ruan Mei said nothing beside her, but she softly hummed a tune from her hometown. Seeing Herta shaken into the same sorry state as herself by the painting lifted her previously gloomy mood.
I expect it would be the same for Screwllum, Herta thought. After all, the painting's first victim had been sent to the medical bay when an instrument exploded. As for Stephen, Herta didn't think she could get him to test something like this at all.
Soon, however, Herta found a short burst of noise in the stream of data remaining in her memory.
The "noise" was so brief it was almost invisible, yet it appeared repeatedly in her memory, like an undercurrent beneath the water.
Herta extracted the segment and overlaid it with the record from the first scan of Jingxing's eyes in her database.
Sure enough, Herta found that, just like the segment in Jingxing's eyes, this noise didn't belong to any known Path and could even disrupt her Solitary Wave Algorithm Formula. Without a doubt, it had to be a product from beyond this galaxy.
On the screen before her, the two segments of noise fitted together seamlessly, like two tributaries of the same river.
"It seems his anomaly permeated this painting, and when it was elevated into a Curio, it gained an ability perfectly to my liking," Herta concluded tentatively.
"In that case, rather than puzzling over the painting's mechanism, I'd be better off first figuring out what's going on with that data in his eyes," she mused. "I'll treat it as a diversion from building the Metaverse."
After all, whether it was the painting or the anomaly in Jingxing's eyes, Herta's ultimate goal was to use them to protect herself when she touched the knowledge singularity. The Metaverse, a project to unravel the origins and mysteries of the Aeons, was her top priority at present.
Ruan Mei walked over and glanced at the screen. "It seems my hunch was right. There really is something in his eyes."
"That's why I can't let you lay a hand on him," Herta said. "His existence may be unique in the galaxy, and your research methods are too unstable."
"But if you still haven't made any progress after all this time, Herta, why not let me study him from the angle I'm best at?" Ruan Mei still hadn't given up on putting Jingxing on the operating table.
Ruan Mei's purpose in participating in the Metaverse was to create an Emanator, and she had a vague feeling that the secret hidden in Jingxing's eyes could let her skip "creating an Emanator" and head straight into the realm of "becoming" or even "surpassing" an Aeon.
But Herta didn't answer. She looked at the screen, her fingertips tapping lightly on the edge of the console. The painting could counterattack the Path of Erudition because it had something inside it that didn't belong to this universe.
That made Herta think of the knowledge singularity.
It was the threshold of understanding closest to the essence of "Erudition." For mortals, it was something almost impossible even to imagine, yet Herta had sensed its existence more than once.
But the result was the same every time. The answer was clearly at her fingertips, and then equipment would start malfunctioning, data would become corrupted, and all sorts of perfectly timed accidents would occur, one after another, so precisely that it was as if someone had fabricated the whole thing.
Herta strongly suspected that a senior member of the Genius Society was secretly obstructing her, but she had no evidence whatsoever. After all, all she had to investigate was that string of "coincidences."
If she could fully understand this segment of noise, replicate its mechanism, and make a batch of protective items to keep those "accidents" away, she might be able to transcend the knowledge singularity and see what exactly made the "machine head" afraid.
But for now, Herta had no idea how to go about it.
Do I have to rely on Jingxing? The moment the thought surfaced, she pushed it back down.
Although she had tied him to herself with a debt of thirty billion, how would she study this noise once he paid it off?
Of course, Herta didn't think she needed to deliberately undervalue the painting just to preserve her "relationship" with Jingxing. Forcing the price down would be beneath her and didn't befit her status.
She picked up her terminal and sent Asta a message, telling her to value the Image of Ten Thousand Jun a tier above the high-risk Curios in the Herta Space Station.
After sending the message, Herta looked at the painting again. The Herta Mountain Range stood amid a sea of clouds, while seven-colored bubbles shimmered and drifted quietly, as if the probing she and Ruan Mei had just subjected the painting to had never happened.
"So, what do you plan to do with him?" Ruan Mei spoke again. Her tone was as detached as ever, but Herta could hear a trace of eagerness in it.
Herta didn't turn around. "He hasn't finished paying his debt. So until he does, as his creditor, I have an obligation to protect him and the right to study him, provided I don't infringe on his human rights."
In other words, Ruan Mei could only dream of studying him behind her back.
Ruan Mei said nothing more. She turned to return to the Seclusion Zone and continue her biological research. She had also made note of the noise Herta had noticed, so she could try to imitate it and see what would happen if she added it to her creations.
As Ruan Mei's footsteps gradually faded away, the office fell quiet again.
Herta walked over to the window and glanced at Azure Star through the porthole. Looking down from space, she could clearly see the "one-of-a-kind" Herta Mountain Range.
When Azure Star's government renamed the range, Herta had thought it was incredibly stupid. But now she thought the name was just right. The painting's subject had become very much to her liking as well.
"Interesting." Herta picked up the canvas, planning to frame it and then store it in her secret collection room. "This is truly fascinating."
Meanwhile, by the time Jingxing returned to the Herta Space Station, it was already noon the next day. Without even stopping to eat, he went to the stationmaster's office to ask Asta about the valuation of the Image of Ten Thousand Jun.
After receiving Herta's instructions the previous night, Asta had drawn up a list of the market prices of the Curios acquired by the Herta Space Station over the past astral year, then selected the median.
"Congratulations, Mr. Jingxing. The painting has been valued at five hundred million Credits." Asta smiled at Jingxing. "Will you put it all toward repayment, or purchase some travel essentials?"
"So I still have to paint fifty-nine more paintings like this to pay it all off?"
How should he put it? Jingxing had previously thought Asta was a gentle, kind person, but he no longer thought so at all. Asta and Herta were two of a kind.
Neither of them was a good person.