"Insufficient mass."
Yu Sheng opened the old book from the shelf and saw that the yellowed pages contained only those few large words.
He was stunned for a moment, then instinctively flipped to the next page, only to find the same words there: Insufficient mass.
After hesitating briefly, he continued flipping through the book, finally confirming that every page contained the same repeated message. The sentence appeared again and again—
Insufficient mass, insufficient mass, insufficient mass...
The pitch-black letters, formed from rigid strokes, looked as though they had been carved into the paper with a knife, as if they carried some heart-stopping power. Whether it was an illusion or not, Yu Sheng even felt that he could sense something obsessive and despairing within the pages—some kind of... despair and oppression seeping toward him through the book, through the Old Bookstore, and through the entire Dark Alley.
Little Red Riding Hood immediately noticed the strange expression on Yu Sheng's face. After injecting herself with a blocker, she came over and cautiously leaned in to glance at the book, only to reveal the same bewildered astonishment as Yu Sheng.
"...What does this mean?" the girl murmured.
"You don't know either?" Yu Sheng looked at Little Red Riding Hood in surprise and raised the old book in his hand. "Has nothing like this happened before?"
"I've never seen it, and none of the publicly shared materials from the other investigators mentioned that this sentence could appear in the Old Bookstore's books. Besides, this doesn't conform to the 'format,'" Little Red Riding Hood said at once. "Under normal circumstances, the contents of these books have context, and they fabricate a source of information. The recorded material also consists of specific events. It wouldn't be... this inexplicable."
She hesitated for several seconds when saying that