It has been about seventy minutes since I left the new boy alone with the corpse of his room neighbor. Areo himself asked me to have him perform the autopsy on the body, he said it was necessary to test his mental strength.

  Cruel, but understandable.

  In this place, the ability to maintain composure is everything.

  As I make my way toward the medical tent, I glance around the camp. Tall stone walls surround the area, and the interior can be divided into four sections:

  The central zone, where there is barely enough space for five thousand people and Areo delivers his strategic speeches to his soldiers; then there is the southern zone, the entrance, with a large wooden gate reinforced with Sciarra, capable of withstanding extremely high temperatures and great brute force; to the west lies the soldiers’ tent, and to the east the tent of the important figures of the camp—such as myself, modestly speaking; and finally, to the north area, the medical tent where the newcomer is located.

  Honestly, I expect him to lay on four hands and beg me to go home. It would be better for me, less work. But this world will never grant me such luck.

  I open the folding door gently.

  A familiar smell hits my nose, a metallic sense, sharp.

  “Did he actually do it...?”

  The table with the corpse I had left to Eda is the first thing I see. Behind it stands a board covered with… brain fragments placed across its surface, all connected by blue wires. I step closer, my boots splashing in the blood still pooled on the floor, that wet sound following each step. My eyes drift between the board and the body now to my right, drawn by an uneasy curiosity.

  The upper part of the head, from just above the eyebrows to the crown, had been removed. A clean scalp. The skull itself had been split horizontally, and the brain extracted from within.

  My attention returns to the board. The pieces were not arranged randomly, they seemed to follow a pattern. Beneath the wires were multiple rectangular sections with notes written inside them—but I can’t make out a single word.

  “Look who’s here. My snow-haired friend.”

  A thin, cold voice reaches my ear, its tone hovering somewhere between threatening and familiar. I turn to my left to face the speaker.

  “Simel Eda. I’m glad to see you’ve taken to scientific research without hesitation.”

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  He was in the western side of the room, sitting on a wooden chair in full uniform, yet not a single drop of blood stained him. It’s true that Sciarra makes getting clean on the spot easy, but doing so would still require a calm mind and a controlled place.

  He looks straight into my eyes, his gaze stoic and emotionless, deep, pitch-black eyes. Then he stands, an annoyed grimace briefly crossing his face.

  “You really sound like an old lady when you’re surprised.”

  “What did you say?” I reply, my tone sharp with irritation. Who does he think he is?

  He stays silent for a moment, then takes a breath. “Nothing, nothing. Just a thought.”

  “You seem calmer.” It’s strange. He feels slightly different from when I left him.

  “Did you find anything interesting?” I’m not expecting much, but with all these shifts in personality, I at least expect some kind of result. One thing’s certain: he passed the mental test with top grades.

  “Of course.”

  He sounds so confident. Almost happy.

  He points to his own temple, tapping it twice with his fingers.

  “The theory for an experiment has already been formed here,” he says, grabbing a few sheets of paper from a nearby table.

  Beyond those papers, I catch sight of a peculiar device as well, a semi-circular structure made of metal. Did he build that on the spot, using the lab’s resources? We had left him some materials… but what exactly has he done with them?

  He hands me one of the sheets. About twenty centimeters long and thirty wide. On it are sketches of a brain, sectioned from different angles, along with more writing in an illegible hand.

  “Could you translate these hieroglyphs?” I ask.

  “How offensive. Thanks to my device, I managed to reverse the brain’s processes and recover Silla’s electrical signals from thirty minutes before her death. Then, with another of my inventions, I automatically transcribed the brain’s thoughts—translating electrical impulses into written language with an accuracy of sixty percent. In a sense, you could say I read the mind of the dead.” He says while pointing out a small notebook in his hands.

  My mouth goes dry at the revelation.

  “That’s… extremely impressive…”

  I’m genuinely stunned. Every second since I met him, he seems to become a different person.

  “At the orphanage, I used this thing often—to help the new kids who were a bit insecure,” he says, his tone tinged with vanity.

  “Orphanage?” The word slips out almost naturally.

  “Yes, when I—” Simel cuts himself off mid-sentence.

  “What’s that sound…?”

  I hear it too. An irritating buzz, like two insects trapped and circling inside the ear.

  “It’s coming from the defensive antennas around the camp.”

  “And what does that usually mean?”

  “Intruders.”