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At the Special Affairs Bureau, deep divers were combat elites who, through strict selection and brutal training and countless trials, had managed to stand out from ordinary operatives. They were always sent to the most dangerous places, to face the most extreme and difficult challenges—ones that even exceeded human reason. They knew how to survive in the deadly environments of alien worlds; they knew how to hunt down mad Angel cultists in the lawless zones; they could even fight their way into foreign domains to battle the most dangerous entities, or descend into nightmares to rescue lost souls from the treacherous labyrinths woven from mind and consciousness—deep diving: descending from the peaceful mortal world down into the darkness beneath reason. That was their job. But there will always be things in this world that human minds cannot comprehend or combat, and even the most elite deep divers fail sometimes—often, in fact. Yet the current situation still exceeded Song Cheng's professional experience. It even seemed to exceed the director's expectations. Six deep divers had been moved out of the "water tanks" immediately, their power armor having automatically executed the emergency rescue protocol the instant they returned to the reality dimension. The injection system built into the armor had pumped large doses of sanity blocker and protective drugs into their bodies, quickly putting them into a calm state. Then support personnel stepped in, checking each person's contamination status, while confirming whether their consciousness had actually returned to the material world along with their bodies—and confirming whether anything else had followed their consciousness back. Song Cheng and Baili Qing stood to one side, brows tightly knit, watching this unfold. "Math questions?" After a long stretch of silence, Song Cheng finally couldn't help breaking it. "...Math questions flooding their brains could hit them this hard?" Baili Qing shook her head slightly. "The professors of Terra's 'Academy' can indeed attack an opponent by instantly infusing an ordinary person's brain with an overload of knowledge, but it wouldn't produce this kind of effect. And our deep divers are professionally trained; they're adapted to knowledge-based attacks. Beyond a solid degree of learning ability, their brains can actively go dormant when facing a 'knowledge infusion' that exceeds their processing capacity." Song Cheng frowned. "You mean..." "That 'math questions' the deep diver mentioned before passing out might just be some kind of concrete image they saw during the dive. What actually caused the contamination... should be something else," Baili Qing said grimly. "The end of the passage... there was no Nightfall Valley... but then why would it be math questions?" Song Cheng didn't dare speak, afraid of interrupting the director's train of thought. After a moment of quiet, Baili Qing suddenly turned her head. "Little Song, you haven't contacted that 'Yu Sheng' yet, have you?" "Mm. I was planning to reach out to him today, but I didn't expect to run into all these accidents..." "Don't go," Baili Qing said flatly. . Yu Sheng heard some faint noise. He raised his head and looked around, but couldn't find the source. Business was slow; there weren't many people in the café. Only a scattering of customers sat at a few tables in the distance, and two staff members were idly scrolling their phones nearby. The place was pretty dead. Now and then someone would curiously glance his way—probably wondering why a young guy in his twenties would be sitting in a café at this hour, hunched over copying out a thick high school assignment. Yu Sheng sighed, looking at the half of the test papers still left, feeling his hand starting to ache. He'd already filled things in as carelessly as he could get away with, and plenty of the big questions underneath were practically scribbled like some kind of spirit-drawing, but after all these years he'd gotten used to a keyboard; he hadn't picked up a pen to write this much in a long time, and this job was turning out to be far more tiring than he'd expected. Though he couldn't tell whether it was the copying-out-homework-for-a-high-schooler part or the dragging-a-clueless-fox-around-the-mall-to-buy-clothes part that was more exhausting. Yu Sheng thought it over and decided copying papers here was the better option—he truly didn't have the nerve to walk Hu Li into a lingerie store. It would make him feel like a pervert. Especially when Hu Li displayed that pure, clear-eyed ignorance, he was genuinely at risk of being taken for a pervert and reported to the police by the staff. Just then, Irene's voice suddenly came into his mind: "Hi hi~ Yu Sheng, how much have you written on your end?" Yu Sheng's hands didn't stop: "About half. High schoolers today are seriously exhausting—how do they have this much homework!" "Keep at it. I just heard Little Red Riding Hood muttering—she actually has a physics assignment too, but she forgot to bring it..." "Let her write it herself at home. I'm not dealing with that one," Yu Sheng shot back irritably. "How are things on your side? Going smoothly?" "Not bad. Hu Li isn't great with zippers, Little Red Riding Hood spent ages teaching her, and now the two of them have gone into the fitting room together... I got parked on the stool outside the fitting room door," Irene sounded like she was in a good mood. "Little Red Riding Hood even bought me a hairpin! Bought it at a doll shop, red..." Yu Sheng thought for a second, then caught on: "That's my money!" "I know, I know," Irene said quickly. "Just treat it as a gift from you... I didn't ask for anything else, just a hairpin, and it wasn't expensive..." "All right, all right, I never said you couldn't buy it," Yu Sheng said, half exasperated. "Just a heads-up—don't get too carried away shopping. And don't forget to get some toiletries for Hu Li, and bedsheets and covers—you didn't forget the size, right?" "Oh, I've got it, I've got it, don't worry, my brain..." Irene cut herself off there, her tone shifting. "Hu Li's brain..." A strange, awkward silence settled over Yu Sheng's mind. That's just what happens when your team won't come together. "How big is her bed again?" Irene's voice sounded unusually unsure of itself. "One and a half meters by two meters," Yu Sheng sighed. "Give that number to Little Red Riding Hood and have her remember it for the two of you. And tell her everything else you need to buy—she's a high schooler, her brain works better than yours." "Yes, yes, right..." Yu Sheng helplessly ended the conversation in his head and lowered his eyes to get back to the test papers. But just then, he suddenly sensed something off about his surroundings. Quiet. At some point everything around him had gone so quiet he hadn't even noticed—even the low chatter from those few tables of customers was gone. Yu Sheng jerked his head up and quickly scanned the room. He was still in the café. Countless tables and chairs stood neatly arranged, stretching infinitely forward, stretching infinitely back. The boundless café was completely empty; as far as his eyes could reach there was only an endless run of tables and chairs. And to his left was the street-facing window—the window now also stretched on endlessly ahead and behind, yet outside it there was no street scene, only a vast expanse of white fog. Something enormous and shadowy moved slowly through the fog, occasionally drifting close to a nearby window, as if casting a gaze into the café, but no matter how hard he looked, the shadows were only vague, blurred outlines. Yu Sheng stared at all this in astonishment and slowly rose from his chair. But just as he was about to simply open the door and leave, a voice suddenly came from across the table: "Hello." A slightly husky female voice—very young. Yu Sheng was surprised to find someone now seated across from him without his having noticed, a woman who looked to be under thirty—wearing a fitted white skirt suit, gray-white long hair pulled into a ponytail, very pretty, but with an unnameable aloofness and coldness in her bearing. Yu Sheng's attention was fixed more on her eyes. She had a pair of pale, faint gray irises, as though drained of color, so that even the boundary between pupil and the whites of her eyes seemed indistinct—enough that at a glance she looked a little... not like a normal human should. Then Yu Sheng noticed an incredible sight—everything around this woman was rapidly losing its color. From the nearest coffee table and seats, to the nearby floor and the other tables and chairs, everything was being washed into a pale gray-white; the fading spread outward for more than ten meters before it finally began to taper off. In the end, only this woman herself—and Yu Sheng—still kept their original color. Yu Sheng steadied himself. He remembered what Irene had told him—in foreign domains there could be sentient entities, but no matter how human-like an entity looked, there were always glaringly obvious eerie, inhuman traits. The woman before him looked a bit strange, certainly, but clearly not to the point of "eerily inhuman," which meant she should be a human. Since she was human, and had moreover greeted him on her own initiative, then she was obviously someone he could talk to. Yu Sheng temporarily gave up on shoving the door open and walking out, settled back into his chair, and looked at her with curiosity. "You're...?" "Baili Qing. Director of the Special Affairs Bureau under the Boundary Council," the woman across from him nodded slightly. "I apologize for meeting you this way—it's for maximum secrecy, and for some security considerations." Yu Sheng was stunned. The Special Affairs Bureau really had come looking for him—but at this level? The director personally showing up?! And while Yu Sheng sat there dazed, Baili Qing's gaze drifted seemingly casually across the table in front of him. She saw the pile of test papers Yu Sheng had set out, and her expression froze for an instant. Math questions. All math questions. Authentic gaokao problems from past years, the major ones.