Where Did This Person Go

“Tweet, tweet! Stand up straight! Line up!”

While considering his options, Lynch suddenly heard a commotion. Following the noise, he saw a small loading area not far from the entrance where about a dozen raggedly dressed workers had gathered.

Three men in formal attire, looking every bit like overseers, were blowing whistles and brandishing wooden batons to maintain order. The short wooden sticks whooshed through the air, occasionally striking the unruly crowd of workers.

“You! Thirty seconds late! That’s three pennies docked from your pay! Don’t give me excuses—be late next time and I’ll dock three more!”

“No, you can’t go! Going to the privy the second you enter the factory—you think this place is your home? Hold it in!”

Smack! “You lazy bastards, hurry it up! Get to work the moment you sign in! Dragging your feet—do you expect to be paid for nothing?”

The overseers shouted with swaggering arrogance, but watching from the side, Lynch's eyes lit up. Right! Unlike back home where workers clocked in and out with fingerprint scanners, attendance here relied entirely on sign-in registers.

Before long, the foreman, eyeing the workers as if they were thieves, finished checking off each face with a tick. Only then did he carefully return the logbook to the duty room, cautiously checking the area once more before leaving. Yet the moment he turned and walked away, a figure materialized out of thin air inside the duty room, swiftly flipping through the densely packed roster.

The attendance records were dense and meticulously detailed, recording every shift's start and finish. Recalling the question scrawled on the back of the doodles—Where did they all go?—Lynch thought for a moment and began examining the roster thoroughly.

The clock-in and clock-out times for these people were recorded in exact detail; there was no instance of someone having a sign-in record without a corresponding sign-out. However, there were indeed many workers who showed up daily before suddenly never returning one day. For day laborers, this was completely normal.

Could that child have simply been referring to these workers?

Lynch felt doubtful. Had little Janet's condition not been so conspicuously abnormal, he might have believed that explanation, but suspicion lingered in his mind.

As he pondered, noises sounded outside the duty room again. Lynch swiftly activated lurking. Sure enough, the three overseers returned to fetch the attendance book.

More people were arriving outside—this time, workers finishing their shifts.

These workers were visibly numb and utterly exhausted, shuffling toward the factory gates like a horde of zombies before lining up to dully await roll call. The three overseers thoroughly searched each person's pockets first to ensure no factory property was being smuggled out before calling out names from the roster one by one.

“Peter.”

A hand raised trembling in the air.

“William.”

A feeble voice responded, “Here.”

“Mary.”

A middle-aged woman answered just as feebly, “Yes, sir.”

“Lika. Where’s Lika? Hasn’t he clocked out?”

Who's Lika? someone asked, but most workers merely exchanged blank looks, too tired to even speak as they shook their heads wearily.

Naturally. No one cared about a coworker they didn't know.

The overseer pressed no further, skipping the name to continue roll call. Soon, they had verified every departing worker's identity, brandished their batons to chase the workers out of the factory gates, and finally returned the register to the duty room.

Lynch noticed that all three overseers wore rather stiff expressions. Without exchanging a word, they shared a single glance and hurried off toward the factory workshops. Frowning, Lynch opened the register and discovered that among this batch of workers, there was indeed an empty slot next to the name Lika.

Flipping further back, every day looked virtually the same. This group of people had been finishing shifts together for at least half a month. How could none of them know Lika?

Shouldn't they at least have had some impression of him?

As he pondered this, the three overseers hurried back into the duty room. They exchanged evasive, hesitant looks until the leading one finally opened the register, jotted down a few notes, and left the room in silence. Soon after, the deliberately exaggerated sound of their laughter drifted in from outside.

Lynch materialized again and reopened the register, his lips twitching slightly. Next to Lika's name, the sign-out time for the recent shift had already been filled in, looking completely identical to previous days.

Lynch realized something was amiss. The previous records had looked entirely normal—had they all been fabricated like this?

Seeing how practiced and calm the overseers were, this certainly wasn't their first time doing it. They were definitely hiding something. Had this Lika died in an industrial accident? Or was it just like little Janet's question—they had all vanished?

The more he thought, the more baffled he became. Lynch shook his head, deciding to set the question aside for now.

He hadn't found any tangible abnormalities yet. With only conjecture, it would be far too easy for them to brush off his inquiries with excuses. Interrogating the overseers now would only put them on guard, which wouldn't help uncover the truth at all.

It was better to head inside and look around first. These overseers weren't temporary day laborers; they weren't going anywhere. Once he pinpointed the problem, he could settle scores with them.

Having made his decision, Lynch took another glance at the register: Janet Scott, worker number 324, Workshop 8C. Lika Hollin, worker number 122, Workshop 10E.

Restoring everything to its original state, Lynch lurked his way out of the duty room. Ignoring the three overseers who had already resumed laughing and chatting normally, he slipped into the interior of the factory workshops with ease.

Though called a screw factory, it also produced small components such as gears and connecting rods. Each factory building was divided into several workshops, where workers spent the vast majority of their time confined to their designated stations, performing monotonous, unchanging labor.

The air was thick with the stench of grease and metallic dust. The roar of steam-powered lathes echoed ceaselessly in his ears, while escaping steam made the atmosphere sweltering and humid. Coal smoke and ash choked the factory, turning it into a foul, hellish quagmire.

In such an environment, dozens of workers endlessly repeated their monotonous tasks, numb and mechanical, like living corpses.

Two overseers were stationed inside the workshop as well, patrolling back and forth across the floor. From time to time, they raised their batons, slamming them down in front of workers while bellowing harshly to startle them out of their half-asleep stupor.

The first step of the investigation was to determine whether there was anything related to mystery presently inside the factory building, be it a mystery relic or documents. Without alerting anyone, Lynch swiftly circled the building several times, ensuring he passed within three meters of every single location.

Little Janet's Workshop 8C appeared fairly normal; his inspiration sensed no oppressive weight, nor did Lady Luna give any warning. After some thought, Lynch slipped toward Workshop 10E, where Lika Hollin worked. Since he hadn't clocked out, he should theoretically still be here—the attendance overseers had likely entered earlier to verify his status.

The situation in this workshop was no different from 8C—lifeless and devoid of energy—yet there was no sign whatsoever that a coworker had gone missing. This made Lynch wonder if he was perhaps being overly sensitive.

To be safe, Lynch activated his phantasmal sound ability, projecting his shout several meters above overhead:

“Lika! Is Lika here? Your family’s looking for you!”

None of the workers reacted, not even bothering to glance up. Instead, an overseer stomped over gripping a baton, looking around in confusion for the person shouting while grumbling curses:

“You damn pigs, looking for him again? I already told you, there’s never been anyone named Lika here! Get the hell out of here, now!”

Having searched around without finding the caller and assuming the intruder had fled before he arrived, the overseer turned and left in frustration. From behind the shelter of the machinery, Lynch wore a strange, unsettled expression.