The second batch of patients arrived at the Octopus City Investigation Bureau that day, accompanied by two recording devices.
One of these special recording devices was an old-fashioned tape recorder, and the other was a digital voice recorder, one large and one small.
The Bandaged Man patted the top of the old-fashioned recorder and smiled at Ke Meng. "This is Koi City's 6-0984, a meat-eating recorder. It needs meat after recording a sound. If you don't feed it, it'll keep the recorded sound to itself."
The old-fashioned recorder remained motionless when the Bandaged Man patted it.
At that, Ke Meng tapped a bag of dried fish out of his scarf, took one out, and held it in front of the recorder.
The old-fashioned recorder seemed to catch the scent of meat. A black mouth suddenly split open on its surface and bit down on the dried fish.
It even tried to bite Ke Meng's hand, but he pulled back too quickly for it to catch him.
Once the dried fish entered the recorder, the machine closed its mouth and chewed. Ke Meng heard the dried fish being ground to pieces by its chewing mechanism.
A machine without digestive organs was digesting a dried fish. They were entirely different kinds of things, yet at that moment, nothing about it felt out of place.
Magical realism. You can't judge it by ordinary logic, Ke Meng commented to himself.
Then Ke Meng looked at the digital voice recorder. The Bandaged Man knew little about it, so Director Zhang eventually stepped forward to explain. "This voice recorder is numbered 6-4135. It records normally, but afterward, a random account of someone else's embarrassing incident gets added to the recording."
Ke Meng ran his fingers over the voice recorder. Its pen-shaped body was yellow all over,