At three in the morning, Hell Headquarters was as silent as a graveyard, with only the hum of servers echoing between the walls.
He widened his eyes and checked again, even thinking he had misread it. He hurriedly pulled up the historical data, placing the curves from last week and the week before side by side.
The two lines should have overlapped, but last week's was noticeably lower.
He recalculated it once more.
It was real!
The number of newly born demons in Hell had plummeted by forty percent over the past week. He pulled up the soul reception records from the invasion portals and checked them digit by digit, but there was nothing wrong with those records either.
He calculated the discrepancy, his fingers freezing over the keyboard.
Then he immediately picked up the phone and called Renault. The phone rang three times before Renault answered, his voice hoarse, clearly having just been dragged out of bed. "What is it?"
"Sir, the Internet Addiction system detected anomalous data. The number of newly born demons in Hell has dropped by forty percent within half a month, and it doesn't match the soul reception records."
There was three seconds of silence on the other end.
"I'll be right there."
Renault arrived within five minutes. He was wearing a coat he had thrown on at random, his hair a mess, but his eyes were fully awake.
He stood behind the technician and stared at the numbers on the screen for a long time without speaking.
Numbers did not lie.
The number of souls Hell was supposed to receive every week was fixed. The death rate in the human world did not lie either. Over the past week, at least six hundred thousand souls were missing.
He picked up the phone and called