The secretary froze briefly. Seeing the glimmer of hope in the minister's eyes, he fell silent.
He knew what the minister was asking. Two days earlier, countries around the globe had all received the same set of signals. According to their technicians' analysis, the source appeared to be outside the Solar System.
Although much of the signal had been lost, everyone suspected that whoever had sent it was most likely an examinee who had been dragged into the Death Exam.
Once that possibility was confirmed, nations around the world were shaken. They immediately devoted every effort to pinpointing the source and sent messages toward the region it came from. Yet two days had passed, and the other party seemed to have vanished without a single response.
"Minister, there's still been no progress. According to the European Union's analysis, the signal source disappeared after a very brief transmission. Almost everything decoded afterward was meaningless gibberish. They therefore suspect we may have misinterpreted it. The signal could have been an electromagnetic pulse produced by some cosmic phenomenon, or simply cosmic noise."
The middle-aged man listened to the secretary-general's report in silence, unable to utter a single word.
In truth, every country had been swept up in excitement at the time, believing they had found hope of locating the missing people. But after receiving no response, no matter how many messages they sent or how many satellites they deployed, they all began to sense the answer.
No one had contacted them.
Perhaps they were only deceiving themselves, imagining they could still find those who had disappeared.
For an entire half year, none of the people they had sent in had transmitted so much as a scrap of information. That place was like a genuine hell. They could not even be sure anyone inside