Shut Up, You Old Gambler!

“That sounds like a very accurate description.”

The old man muttered deep within Elias’s mind.

“But that phrase, ‘brilliantly clever’...”

Old Ed chewed over Elias’s wording, sounding a bit suspicious.

In the Velen language of this world, the word for the ‘top’ of one’s head and the ‘top’ of a building or object share the exact same root.

Usually, in spoken language, the two terms could be switched seamlessly.

The old man pondered it for a long while.

“That doesn’t sound like a compliment at all!”

“Are you using some roundabout way to mock me for being bald?!”

Elias sat on the sofa and let out a somewhat helpless sigh.

Dammit.

How did this old man manage to hear the hidden meaning?

“You’re overthinking it, Lao-Deng,” Elias replied silently in his mind.

Meanwhile, in reality.

Ophelia was staring intently at the yellowed register. Hearing Elias’s sigh, she looked up with a curious expression.

She studied the man, whose expression seemed to be shifting unpredictably.

“Did you find something?” the female reporter asked, her eyes filled with an inquisitive urge.

“Nothing,” Elias replied dismissively.

However, he soon looked up, leaned back against the sofa, and asked, “What did you mean earlier when you said there are more survivors than the records show?”

He needed to deflect the conversation away from himself, and he also needed to understand this logical discrepancy.

At this question, Ophelia immediately perked up.

She extended a slender finger and tapped heavily on the names in the folder that were covered in dense red crosses.

“Look.” The female reporter’s expression became serious.

“See? The records show that a huge number of people died, right?”

Elias looked down.

Indeed, glancing over the register, it was almost entirely filled with jarring red ink.

Large patches of red crosses looked like a field of miniature tombstones.

“But according to what that old sailor said in his dream, many people are transported to the West Bank by the supply fleet every year.”

Ophelia spread a blank sheet of paper on the table.

“That at least contradicts the mortality rate shown in these documents.”

“It’s obvious if you just do a bit of math.”

She picked up a fountain pen and quickly listed a few simple numbers on the paper.

“The documents show that there are twelve lighthouses in Moon Bay in total.”

“Each lighthouse requires an average of six to seven keepers per year.”

“Which means...” Ophelia paused and looked up at Elias. “The total annual consumption is roughly seventy to eighty people.”

“But according to that old sailor, last year alone, they transported more than twenty ‘sick keepers’ to the West Bank.”

“In other words, the number of people who actually died is likely much lower than what’s recorded in this file.”

“Wayland falsified the archives.”

Ophelia’s pen tip stopped dead on a red cross.

Those who were marked with a red cross and declared dead in the official records...

In reality, they were very likely still alive and had been secretly sent to the West Bank.

Hearing this deduction, Elias’s brow furrowed.

He took the folder and began to flip through it carefully once more.

It was exactly as Ophelia said.

The documents were filled with vast amounts of red marks.

In contrast, the blue circle marks interspersed among them were very sparse.

The ratio between the two was as disparate as a regular army compared to a small guerrilla unit.

According to normal logic, these people judged to be dead should never appear in the physical world again.

Unless Wayland had some unspeakable motive that required them to ‘legally erase’ these living people.

While flipping through a document from the year before last...

Elias’s gaze suddenly stopped on a line of extremely hidden small characters.

His pupils constricted slightly.

Because he noticed a name that caught his attention—

Oliver Brown.

That was it.

This was the name engraved on the dog tag.

He had actually appeared in a document from the year before last.

He was also one of the names marked with a sparse blue circle.

However.

At the very beginning of the name, the table clearly stated the lighthouse he was responsible for.

The Fourth Lighthouse.

Heaven knew which godforsaken corner the Fourth Lighthouse was in.

Elias didn’t particularly care about that.

He didn’t need to clock in for work at the Fourth Lighthouse right now.

The real problem was...

If this Oliver Brown had also been an ordinary, defenseless person before going to the lighthouse.

Then in just two short years...

What had turned him into a human bomb containing a massive amount of pure spirituality?

This was definitely not something ordinary evil god pollution could achieve.

Evil god pollution only made people grow tentacles and long hair; it would never be this ‘clean.’

This gave him a very bad premonition.

“Could it be those alchemists?”

Old Ed spoke up abruptly in his mind, suggesting a possibility.

The old man’s voice sounded somewhat mysterious at this moment.

“Crazy alchemists love using living people for spirituality purification experiments.”

“I don’t think that’s likely,” Elias replied quickly in their ‘team voice chat,’ cutting off the old man’s baseless speculation.

His thinking was much clearer than this dead old geezer’s.

“If alchemists did it, why would they blow up the Wayland Shipping office?”

“What would be the point of bombing a mundane company?”

“Isn’t that easy to understand?” Old Ed analyzed in his mind, even letting out a smug hum.

“Think about it. He hated Wayland for some reason.”

“So he found a crazy alchemist to turn himself into a spiritual bomb, then ran to the Wayland Shipping office to take revenge on society.”

“Isn’t that logic perfectly self-consistent?”

It sounded like the logic was self-consistent...

My ass!

Elias cursed fiercely in his mind.

“Old man, is your brain full of embalming fluid?”

“Weren’t the Wayland people the ones who sent him to the West Bank?”

“Old man, your IQ fluctuates wildly. Maybe you should just stop with the analysis from now on.”

Elias rubbed his throbbing temples.

“Isn’t it obvious?!”

“The Wayland people were the ones who experimented on him!”

“That sanatorium sounds like anything but a proper medical facility!”

It was clearly a secret laboratory operating under a false front.

Wayland Capital was using these blue-circled keepers who survived the lighthouses to conduct some kind of insane spirituality purification experiment.

In the end, something must have gone wrong. They turned a man into a pure bomb, and he managed to escape and dismantle their own office.

“Don’t get excited, kid.”

Seeing that Elias’s mood was a bit off, the old man quickly tried to soothe him.

“I was just offering you a possibility.”

“But you’re not wrong. That sanatorium is beyond suspicious.”

Indeed.

Looking at the handwriting on the register, Elias suddenly felt like he was about to be sent there himself.

Think about it.

If blue-circles like Oliver Brown could enter that so-called sanatorium...

He might very well be part of the Wayland high command’s plan.

Currently, due to the lag in information transmission...

It was likely that the documents regarding his survival at Wayland Shipping simply hadn’t reached the Landon headquarters yet.

If the big shots at the Landon headquarters found out about his situation—that he had not only survived but possessed such immense spirituality...

He would probably be the next one sent to that damn sanatorium on the West Bank.

At the thought of this, Elias couldn’t help but sneer.

Who said this boss was selfish?

This boss was fantastic!

Other companies at most made employees work overtime; this company directly provided a placement service.

Go in for ‘convalescence’ and come out as a human bomb.

They even saved on cremation fees; you just ascended on the spot.

“Besides, there might actually be crazy alchemists in that sanatorium.”

The old man seemed a bit stubborn, still insisting on his ‘crazy alchemist’ theory.

He felt that since Wayland was so rich, it was perfectly reasonable for them to hire a few alchemists as chief physicians.

“How about a bet?” The old man’s tone grew a bit more cunning. “You find an opportunity to go to the West Bank?”

“If there aren’t any, I’ll give you fifty shillings?”

“Shut up, you old gambler!”