"He's dead?"
It felt as though a huge bell had struck hard inside Li Shu's head, and a chill swept through his entire body.
Cheng Zhen didn't notice the momentary stiffness in Li Shu's expression. Propping up his chin, he sighed. "I'd only met Cheng Qi a handful of times growing up, but for a living person to just suddenly be gone like that... I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel anything else..."
Li Shu interrupted him. "How did he die? Was he murdered?"
"No, no. My mom said it was a sudden heart attack. It only took a few minutes. He was gone before they could even get him to the hospital." Cheng Zhen changed tack. "But I'd never heard of him having a history of heart disease, either. Life really is unpredictable."
Shaken, Li Shu took a conspicuous sip of juice to cover it up and hurriedly asked the system in his mind, "Did Cheng Qi die of natural causes?"
The system replied quickly: [No signs of human intervention detected.]
Li Shu didn't actually want to entertain any conspiracy theories, but after hearing about Cheng Qi's death, his first reaction was a single word.
Elimination.
"Pei Song'an had just learned something from Cheng Qi, and less than two days later, the guy died of a heart attack. That's strange no matter how you look at it, okay?"
"Wouldn't that overarching system of yours eliminate unexpected variables to keep the contents of the book balanced and stable?"
"Like bugs. They're pretty common in game programs."
The system was deeply shocked by Li Shu's occasionally razor-sharp intuition: [That can happen, but such factors can be disregarded as long as they do not interfere with the main mission.]
After spending so long here, Li Shu had long since stopped