Chapter 299 - 299 One hundred fifty-six

Words : 1335 Updated : Oct 3rd, 2025

299: One hundred fifty-six. Official Investigator 299: One hundred fifty-six. Official Investigator Lu Li and the evaluation committee investigators encountered a problem, and this problem had nothing to do with them themselves—there wasn’t a quiet enough place for them to record information. Of course, there were plenty of empty rooms inside the investigators’ base, but they lacked infrastructure, or in other words... because their arrival was so sudden, there weren’t enough chairs for them to use. It would be unthinkable to just move chairs from somewhere else and make do. This kind of situation would be unimaginable with the Night Watch, but among the investigators... “Then just find a place anywhere.” The team leader said, unconcerned. Then they were taken to the rest area. “A glass of milk,” Lu Li said to the Alliance personnel behind the counter after sitting down. The Alliance personnel responsible for the rest area had changed; the previous one had gone on vacation. The three committee members each ordered coffee and water, and after waiting for the Alliance personnel to leave, the team leader pushed a piece of parchment and a pen in front of Lu Li. “You can write the details of the incident on this. The neater the better, please don’t scribble.” Lu Li didn’t pick up the pen, as he had nothing to say. “You can write down any experiences you think are related to the incident,” the team leader said, seemingly noticing Lu Li’s hesitation. As a member of the evaluation committee, he could easily infer thoughts based on someone’s behavior. Lu Li hesitated no longer and began to write down his experiences after boarding the wooden boat. “I rowed towards the event marker. The searchlight on the sailboat followed me. After moving about thirty or forty meters, there were cries of alarm on the deck, the crew shouting and pointing to the right-hand side of the sailboat, scrambling into the cabin. I saw strange fog...” The pen paused here. It was only when the parchment blurred with an ink stain that Lu Li lifted it away. From “strange fog” onward, what had been written disappeared, though there was still ink in the pen. A few seconds after Lu Li paused, words suddenly emerged again on the parchment, appearing stroke by stroke, as if something were rewriting what Lu Li had originally written. It was as if there was a temporal distortion and confusion between Lu Li and the parchment, with the content he had written appearing in the future, a few seconds later. At that moment, the team leader’s voice resonated from across the table. “This kind of paper is called Oblivion Paper, and its function is the complete opposite of its name: no strangeness can appear on its surface, whether it’s information that decreases Sanity Value or knowledge that warps taboos, any form of contamination is unable to manifest, so what is written becomes completely harmless.” This was the reason Exorcists had been able to pass down their knowledge to this day. They could still fight against the increasing strangeness, but if all knowledge became an untouchable taboo, the human world would plummet into an abyss in an instant, with no hope of redemption. With a hint of melancholy and regret, the team leader said, “Unfortunately, they are too difficult to make, and way too rare.” Lu Li looked again at the parchment in front of him. He still couldn’t tell the difference between it and most other parchments, except perhaps it felt like one of those centuries-old treasure maps, old and mysterious. Thinking deeper, this could be why Oblivion Paper was used to record incidents: The Exorcists documented all the strangeness they encountered, just like a history book. This explained why the team leader insisted Lu Li not to scribble. Lu Li halted his thoughts and began to write new content after the smudged area. “The fog surged over the sea, enclosing the surrounding water within ten seconds. All sounds from around disappeared. The sea shrouded in fog no longer rippled, as smooth as a mirror.” Key words related to the fog temporarily vanished and then re-emerged seconds later. As Lu Li wrote, he wondered: What would happen if he wrote “door,” “Blood-Colored Tentacles,” and Friday? Would the information about “door” and “Blood-Colored Tentacles” he had handed in have been filtered by the Oblivion Paper just like now? Without stopping his pen, Lu Li wrote the subsequent encounters in relatively brief language on the Oblivion Paper. The dying whale, the unsettling black substance, clothes in the deep sea, the boat that ferried back spirits, Friday, Seaview Cliff, dark shadows, Fin Prints. Most of the keywords appeared with various delays in relation to Lu Li’s writing, but Friday, which he was particularly attentive to, showed no delay and appeared without any problem. Was it as the elder said, that Friday was just a passing investigator, or was it because Friday was not her real name? “Do the times when the words reappear have a connection to the source of the contamination?” Lu Li, noticing the different delays for the keywords, asked. “The greater the threat of the contamination in the written content, the slower the words reappear. This is how the difficulty levels of the incidents you see are ranked. Note down the strangeness locations, then divide the difficulty based on the interval it takes to appear on the Oblivion Paper.” “Friday told me that the rescue boat would show up in two hours and twenty-five minutes, then she fell asleep. The rescue boat appeared around two hours and twenty minutes later.” Having finished the last part of the content, Lu Li capped the pen and pushed the Oblivion Paper back. “I almost told you to stop, but good thing, you finished,” the team leader took the parchment, reviewed it once more, and then handed it to the two committee members for reading, continuing, “The amount of contamination that Oblivion Paper can bear is limited, you must have noticed, it has become even more worn than before.” Lu Li pondered, “So, the fewer words on a worn piece of Oblivion Paper, the more dangerous the things they point toward?” “That’s one way to put it if the wear on the Oblivion Paper isn’t caused by other factors.” After one committee member finished reading the content on the Oblivion Paper, he passed it to the next, saying to Lu Li, “We will use the information you provided to look for this ‘Friday’ among the investigators.” Lu Li asked, “Was my encounter this time considered a success or a failure?” “As long as the accompanying investigator doesn’t interfere, the assessment of the incident is not considered a failure. Outside assistance is not included in this rule,” said the team leader, standing up, his smile making the laugh lines on his face deepen, “So I preemptively congratulate you on officially joining the investigators.” At that moment, an Alliance personnel ran over and whispered to the team leader, “The Night Watch found a contaminant on Mr. Old Kite, a curse...” The smile on the team leader’s face vanished in an instant, and he frowned, “Follow procedures, I’ll be there shortly.” After the words fell, he said to Lu Li, “The physical and mental evaluations will be conducted at the local investigator base, so I’ll take my leave for now.” Lu Li watched the evaluation committee leave, downed his glass of milk, and entered the corridor they had just exited. It was rare to see two investigators in the base, speaking softly as they walked past Lu Li. They were discussing how a resentful spirit had been attacking humans and ghosts all over Belfast in the past two days, and the Night Watch was in pursuit of it. Lu Li’s eyes momentarily deepened, his black pupils drooping. His footsteps, silent as shadows, quickened.

Chapter 299 - 299 One hundred fifty-six

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