At seven in the evening, on the broad stairs of the East Building.
Lan Yu carried a notebook in his black leather-gloved left hand and held a fountain pen in his right, recording observations as he climbed.
A strand of hair brushed against his rimless glasses. His eyes were clear and calm, and his steps remained unhurried as he paused and continued on.
His notebook was densely filled with countless words. At last, he circled one line and wrote his assessment of the previous hour:
"Tongue Extraction."
His left prosthetic hand snapped the notebook shut. Lan Yu raised his head and looked over the silent staircase, then seemed to sense something and glanced toward the corridor on his right.
That was the northwest section of the sixth floor. The elevator was slowly moving upward from there.
This small detail meant someone had already arrived at the gathering point on the Ninth Floor, but it also meant that before seven, the elevator had stopped on the sixth floor.
"Could someone have left early and remained on the sixth floor?"
Lan Yu might not have been the smartest Vice Branch Manager in Branch No. 1, but his ability to process information was unquestionably among the best of the Top Ten Branches.
It could be called talent, but what had truly brought him to such heights was the influence of a ghost during a past mission—one that had specifically targeted "logical thinking."
Rather than influence, it had been more like reconstruction.
A method that should have been able to alter the breadth and depth of human thought had instead doubled the abilities of Lan Yu, who had already been a master of information processing.
Thus, Lan Yu became a top-tier figure in information processing and real-time calculation.
With just one glance at countless