46: Chapter 46 The Master, His Laughter Gone Wild

The alloy door slid open silently once again.

This time, there were no restraint straps, nor was anyone supporting him.

A man walked in by himself.

He was in his fifties, with thinning hair, thick-rimmed glasses, and wearing a well-fitted hospital gown; he looked refined.

A smile hung on his face.

The smile stretched wide, from the left corner of his mouth all the way to his right earlobe, revealing two rows of smoke-stained yellow teeth.

His eyes were hollow, unfocused, staring straight ahead.

He just kept smiling like that, walking step by step to the center of the room and sitting down on the stool opposite Jiang Feng.

He sat upright, his hands resting on his knees.

Then, he looked up at Jiang Feng and continued to smile.

The entire process was silent.

The containment room was stifling.

In the observation room, Qian Li's Adam's apple bobbed.

Professor Sun instinctively pushed up his glasses, a chill creeping down his back.

The previous two patients—one demented, one manic—were still within the realm of emotional expression.

The one before them, however, didn't act like a patient; rather, he was closer to a malfunctioning machine.

Jiang Feng looked at the smiling man before him, and a thought popped into his mind.

The first two were a system crash and hardware overheating. This last one—was he infected with a virus and turned into a smiling clown?

【Name: Liu Jianjun】

【Status: Information Pollution - Severe, deeply bound with "Pathological Compensation Psychology"】

【Deep Mapping: Eternal regret, an unending apology.】

Jiang Feng moved his gaze from the system panel and back to Professor Liu's smiling face; his teeth felt a bit sour.

Professor Sun's voice rang out over the broadcast, his tone unable to suppress a tremor: "He is Liu Jianjun, Professor Liu, our chief expert on ancient scripts, and also the first person to come into direct contact with the bamboo slip."

"He has been ill for three days."

"He hasn't eaten or drunk anything, hasn't slept, just sits there smiling like this."

"We administered the maximum dose of sedatives, but it had no effect at all."

Jiang Feng ignored the broadcast. He stood up, paced around his small stool twice, and then walked over to Professor Liu.

He crouched down to look Professor Liu in the eye.

Then, he asked a question that had absolutely nothing to do with the bamboo slip, archaeology, or mental pollution.

"Professor Liu," Jiang Feng asked softly. "Thirty years ago, in midsummer, did you lose a daughter who had just turned five?"

In the observation room, everyone froze.

Qian Li opened his mouth, forgetting what he was about to say.

Professor Sun jerked his head up, his face full of astonishment.

How did the topic jump to this?

What does a family tragedy from thirty years ago have to do with the phenomenon before them?

He instinctively wanted to retort, but was stopped by a gesture from Qian Li beside him.

Qian Li said nothing, just watching the young man crouching on the floor on the surveillance monitor.

Intuition told him that the crucial part was coming.

Inside the containment room.

As Jiang Feng's words faded, Professor Liu showed no reaction.

Professor Liu was still smiling.

The arc of that smile didn't change; it was frozen on his face.

Jiang Feng just crouched there, watching him, not speaking either.

Just when everyone in the observation room thought Jiang Feng had "guessed wrong" this time, a change occurred.

The smile on Professor Liu's face, that arc stretching to his earlobes, began to tremble slightly and irregularly.

Immediately after, that smile solidified.

It didn't disappear; it just stiffened on his face and then began to distort.

The muscles in Professor Liu's face twitched violently and uncontrollably.

He wanted to maintain that smiling expression, but his body betrayed him.

The smile twisted into a strange expression.

Two lines of murky, yellow tears welled up from his hollow eye sockets and slid down the wrinkles etched across his face.

"Nan…" A hoarse, broken syllable squeezed out from his cracked lips.

"Nan… Nan…"

He wanted to say that name, but his vocal cords hadn't been used for a long time, making it difficult to articulate.

"Nannan…"

Finally, a complete word, accompanied by tears, roared out from the depths of his throat.

The roar didn't sound human; it was filled with pain suppressed for many years.

In the observation room.

Everyone stood up.

They looked through the bulletproof glass at the refined and elegant old professor, who was now wailing.

The sound of crying came through the microphone, causing everyone's heart to tighten.

Jiang Feng stood up and took two steps back, leaving space for this person who had been suppressed for thirty years to vent.

He spoke, his tone flat, simply stating facts.

"The bamboo slip amplified his deepest inner regret."

"Thirty years ago, he was a top young scholar in the country, held back by an important overseas project and unable to get away."

"And his only daughter, suffering from sudden acute meningitis, was rushed to the hospital for emergency treatment."

"By the time he took the fastest flight back, he only saw that small body in the hospital morgue."

In the observation room, the psychology expert Zhou Ming took off his glasses and rubbed his temples hard.

Remembering something, he rushed to a computer, his hands typing on the keyboard to pull up Professor Liu Jianjun's personal file.

The marital status column read "Divorced".

The children status was "None".

Jiang Feng's words continued.

"He missed his daughter's final window for treatment."

"He lived his whole life in guilt and self-reproach. He felt that it was his research that killed his daughter."

"His only self-consolation was a pathological delusion."

Jiang Feng looked at the old man who was trembling all over from crying.

"He told himself over and over that his daughter loved to see him smile the most. If he had been in the hospital, not crying but smiling, maybe his daughter would have been happy and would have woken up."

"This thought became the only pillar of support for the rest of his life."

Jiang Feng turned his head to look at the one-way glass, as if talking to Professor Sun and the others.

"And that bamboo slip, that so-called source of information pollution, scanned this pathological obsession."

"Then, it twisted this self-consolation into an infinitely looping, irresistible computer command."

There was no sympathy in Jiang Feng's tone, only the analysis of a technician dismantling code.

"So, he isn't smiling."

"He is using the rest of his life to perform a silent apology, one that has lasted thirty years and never stops, to his daughter who can never come back."

"The bamboo slip merely pressed the loop playback button."

The observation room was silent.

The pen in Professor Sun's hand was creaking as he unconsciously squeezed it.

Zhou Ming looked at Professor Liu's file on the computer screen, then at the wailing old man on the monitor, feeling that his decades of psychology knowledge were useless at this moment.

Qian Li closed his eyes and let out a long sigh. They had always thought they were facing an unknown enemy, but in the end, it was just one person's wound.

Inside the containment room.

Professor Liu's wailing subsided into low sobs.

He lay on the floor like a lost child.

Jiang Feng waved to the two security personnel in the corner.

The two burly men's eyes were red.

They walked forward, and without using rough movements, carefully helped Professor Liu up from the floor.

"Take him to rest," Jiang Feng said. "Find a psychologist to accompany him; you don't need to say anything, just let him cry."

"Once he cries it all out, he'll be fine."

The two security personnel nodded, supporting the still-sobbing Professor Liu as they walked out of the containment room step by step.

The alloy door slowly closed.

The entire room was left with only Jiang Feng and the metal box containing the bamboo slip.

【Ding! Effective fortune-telling count: 3/3】

【Ding! Three-fortune task completed!】

Jiang Feng stretched, his bones making a crackling sound.

He walked to the small stool, folded it up, and tucked it under his arm.

Then, he picked up his thermos, unscrewed the lid, and drank the remaining effervescent water inside in one gulp.

He looked up, toward the direction of the observation window, and raised his empty cup.

"Alright, wrap it up."

His voice transmitted through the microphone, carrying the lightness of punching out after work.

"Consultant Qian, Professor Sun, everyone experts."

"It's lunchtime."

Jiang Feng tucked the thermos back into his canvas bag and looked around the alloy room.

"For lunch, I want braised pork belly with extra rock sugar."

"And a smashed cucumber salad, with extra garlic."

In the observation room.

A group of the country's top scientists, archaeologists, and psychologists, watching the young man on the monitor carrying a small stool and a canvas bag while ordering food, were collectively speechless.

Jiang Feng looked up and knocked on the alloy door.

On his face was a simple, plain anticipation for lunch.