Chapter 902: A Mere Cluster of Data

The knocking echoed a few times in the narrow hallway.

She lowered her hand and waited quietly for a few seconds.

No response.

Only the wind through the half‑open little window at the hallway's end and the distant hawker's shout from the rice‑roll stall, "Add egg, add meat, five yuan for a portion!"

Heimu narrowed his eyes slightly.

Not at home? That shouldn't be.

According to Hua, his father has been ill lately and hasn't gone down to the Martial Arts Hall for several days; logically he should be lying in bed recuperating.

She waited another five seconds.

Still nothing moved.

No shadow shifted under the door crack, no footfalls inside, not even a cough.

The whole building was as quiet as an empty box muted.

Heimu withdrew his right hand from the door panel, let it hang at his side, and his fingertip twitched.

"I knocked."

Heimu said to the empty air, "Politeness is in place."

She reached out, grasped the door handle, and her palm met the cold metal.

The System Panel's permission lightly touched the Lock code, and the lock core emitted a "ka‑da" click.

So the handle turned smoothly half a turn, and the door swung open just enough for her to slip through.

Heimu slipped sideways into the doorway, closed the door behind him, his movement as natural as entering his own home.

Convenient.

Then she turned and saw the living room scene, and froze completely.

The living room was small, its furnishings plain to the point of poverty: an old cloth sofa, a wooden coffee table, a dust‑covered TV cabinet in the corner, a few picture frames on it, the frames holding old photos of Hua in training robes as a child.

The curtains were drawn halfway, and afternoon sun slanted through the other half, cutting a bright blade of light across the floor.

At the edge of that light, a middle‑aged man lay on the floor in an extremely undignified posture.

He wore a gray tank top, dark‑blue cotton pajama pants, one foot in a slipper, the other bare, the slipper having slipped into a corner beneath the coffee table.

His right hand stretched forward, fingers slightly curled as if trying to grasp something.

His face was pressed to the wooden floor; his expression was not so much pain as a sudden power‑off before he could react—brows furrowed, mouth half‑open, eyes closed, looking as if he had been training and abruptly decided to nap on the spot.

But the nap position was clearly bad, for a pool of dark‑red fluid spread beneath and around him.

The fluid spread on the wood in an irregular fan, its edges beginning to solidify and blacken in the air, glistening with a viscous, dim sheen under the sun.

The air was filled with a rust‑like metallic‑sweet odor, mingling with the hallway's herbal scent, creating a strange aroma that tightened the back of one's head.

Heimu let out a "ah".

Roughly, "Ah, I knew it—this checkpoint couldn't have let me pass so smoothly."

She stood in place for about a second and a half, then quickly crouched beside the corpse.

The hem of her black short skirt spread on the floor, the ash‑gray stockings‑clad knees almost touching the edge of the bloodstain.

She extended her right hand, pressing two fingers together on the man's carotid artery.

The skin still held residual warmth, about two degrees below normal body temperature.

But there was no pulse; the vessels beneath the skin had ceased beating.

She lifted the man's eyelids again to check his pupils; they were dilated and unresponsive to light.

With her limited but sufficient forensic knowledge, she judged the time of death to be within twenty minutes.

In other words, while she was chatting with Hua in the Teaching Building, Hua's father was here undergoing the last inexplicable moment of his life.

And as she leisurely walked from the school to the old town, went upstairs, knocked, entered, she perfectly missed everything.

Heimu's mouth twitched.

She straightened, shifting from a single‑knee kneel to a half‑squat, right hand on her knee, left hand supporting her chin.

Dark‑purple eyes flashed in the shadow of her lashes; deep within the pupils a stream of data raced, and the System Panel was conducting a full scan of the corpse before her.

The scan results popped up much slower than usual, the pixelated interface borders looking faint, as if a webpage were being forced to load on a poor signal.

"Biological data completely terminated. Damage type: blunt weapon—wait."

"Damage assessment incomplete? It only gave a fatal external force injury and nothing else? At least tell me what blunt weapon caused it— a stick? a brick? a flowerpot that fell from upstairs?"

The System Panel gave no response; the data bar stalled at 67%, the loading icon spun twice before a prompt popped up: 【Insufficient permission, cannot perform full trace.】

"……"

Heimu stared at the prompt, was silent for a moment, then tapped his temple with a finger joint.

Insufficient permission.

In the Painted World, she, Emperor III, hand holding Joy, Destruction, Harmony, Patrol Hunt, watched by the four Star Gods, was stumped by a low‑level puzzle that couldn't even identify the murderer?

The Rule suppression of this picture book truly leaves no blind spot; even the detection permission at the murder scene is locked.

Forget it, tracing won't work, so let's go the most direct route.

She crouched again, extended her right hand over the corpse's chest, fingers slightly spread, a violet‑black aura shimmering at her fingertips—her most basic repair module, efficient as if on overdrive.

The repair module's aura pulsed at her fingertips for about two seconds, then vanished with a "puff".

It vanished completely, leaving not even a spark.

Another prompt popped up on the System Panel:

【Target Vital Signs zeroed, repair module cannot act on terminated biological unit.】

In plain language: she can't repair something that's dead.

Heimu lowered his head, watching the lingering violet‑black speck on his fingertip, and twitched his eyebrow.

The Rule restriction is harsher than she expected.

In the real world, even if you've been dead for several hundred years, they can still knead you back.

But in this picture book, the definition of death is locked very tightly; once judged as "biological termination," even the repair module goes on strike.

Just a mere cluster of data.

Just a mere cluster of NPC data in the picture book, and she still can't revive it?!

Heimu stood up, patted the non‑existent dust on her skirt, clasped her hands in front of her chest, lowered her head to look at the corpse on the ground with a comically tragic pose, and fell into a complex mix of professional frustration and Absurd feeling.

Hua's father died.

Cause of death unknown.

The time of death happened to be on the road she was traveling.

Hua's wish is to make her father's body get better, but now the vessel of that wish is gone, how can this Task be completed?

Does she have to change Hua's line from "Hope father's illness gets better quickly" to "Hope father can come back to life"?

That already counts as a wish upgrade that crosses species boundaries, right?

And there's an even more pressing question: who did it?

She began recalling the contents of that picture book.