Chương 54: Interrogation by Morse Code and Python

The fourth floor of the Grand Library sat in absolute stillness. Late afternoon sunlight streamed through the tall stained-glass windows, scattering rainbow light across the thousand-year-old oak table. The rhythmic Morse-code tapping suddenly stopped. Tack. Evelyn Wright set both hands flat on the table and looked up. Her dark eyes, behind silver-framed glasses, fixed on the ten-year-old boy who'd just pulled out the chair across from her.

Piled around the table were thick volumes on advanced metallurgy, arcane circuit diagrams, and mechanical design drafts. A few shelves away, two second-year mage students flipped through books cautiously, occasionally glancing over at the table with visible awe. Evelyn picked up a silver teapot and poured a stream of amber herbal tea into a porcelain cup, sliding it gently across to Lucian. She sat up straight and spoke in a refined, measured tone — every bit the proper young lady of a Ducal house.

"Blue skies, white clouds — a fine day for a little... Ctrl+Alt+Del of the soul, wouldn't you say?" Lucian picked up the teacup and took a small sip, his expression unchanged. He set it back down on the saucer and answered in an equally composed, aristocratic tone.

"Indeed. Though if the memory's already hit a Stack Overflow, a restart just gets you the blue screen of death." Clink. The silver spoon slipped from Evelyn's fingers, landing on the porcelain plate with a sharp, thin ring. Her eyes narrowed to two razor-sharp slits behind her glasses. She lowered her voice, each word carrying the tension of a spy interrogation.

"Python or C++?" Lucian leaned back in his chair and answered flatly.

"Excel." Evelyn slumped back against her chair, shoulders dropping, and let out a blunt line in Vietnamese.

"Ugh. A finance guy." If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. The elegant mask of House Wright's genius daughter disappeared instantly. For the first time since Lucian met her, Evelyn looked less like a noble scholar and more like a tired office worker who had just discovered another victim of the same corporate disaster. She pulled off her silver-framed glasses, ran a hand through her black ponytail, and let out a long, exhausted sigh.

"I died in 2023." Evelyn's voice became quieter.

"Software release. Seventy-two hours awake. I was fixing bugs until my body gave up." Lucian stared at her for a second. Then he silently reached into his coat, pulled out a bag of sunflower seeds, and pushed half toward her.

"I died the same year." Evelyn looked up.

"Financial report. Q4 deadline. Nine at night. Fell on my keyboard." A long silence followed. Then both of them looked away.

"... Corporate slavery really was an international problem, huh?" Two former citizens of Earth sat across from each other in silence. For a moment, neither of them said anything. There was no dramatic music. No emotional reunion. No tears about finally finding someone who understood. Just two exhausted people sitting in front of each other, realizing they had both escaped the same nightmare. A nightmare involving deadlines, meaningless meetings, and destroying their bodies for numbers on a screen.

Ten meters away, behind a row of history shelves. Two mage students and the librarian in charge of the fourth floor peered out from hiding, watching. They saw two great geniuses sitting face to face, caught fragments of strange words like "Excel," "Python," "blue screen," and read the somber, weighted expressions on their faces, as though the two of them were carrying the collapse of the universe on their shoulders.

The librarian pulled out a notebook with trembling hands, scribbling notes, whispering to the two students beside her.

"Do you see this... They're debating the ontology of magic itself, in the Ancient Sacred Tongue! Terms like 'Memory Overflow' and 'System Error' must be code for the fracturing of the world's fundamental laws!" Back at the oak table, Evelyn cracked a sunflower seed between her teeth and tapped a finger against the pile of metallurgy documents.

"House Wright controls seventy percent of the south's mana-ore mines and the entire royal mechanical engineering institute. I'm trying to rebuild a steam engine and an arcane rifle for self-defense, but this world's metallurgy is bottlenecked on impurity filtration for the ore." Lucian cracked a seed of his own, running the numbers silently in his head. Mining and metallurgy, holding no direct overlap with Vance Commerce's publishing, translation, or banking operations.

If anything, this was a perfect supplier — components and armor plating for dungeon-clearing operations.

"Vance Commerce holds the monopoly on maritime shipping and Tartarus ore imports from the Demon Realm," Lucian said.

"Send me a materials list through the Ancient Language Club, and I'll cut you fifteen percent off wholesale."

"Deal," Evelyn said, putting her glasses back on, letting out a relieved breath.

"At least there's one person in this school full of delusional power fantasies who talks like an actual human being." She propped her chin on her hand, looking out the sunlit library window, then suddenly clicked her tongue in irritation.

"Oh, that reminds me... some hack author in this world just published this garbage cheap-thrills wuxia knockoff... I read it and it made my blood pressure spike." Lucian, teacup halfway to his lips, froze in midair.