Chapter 132: Mathematician

Adam exchanged a glance with Nie Yiyi and Shae, then entered the room without saying anything.

After closing the door, Adam turned to his two friends.

"Which one should we do first?"

"Let's go with the fat one."

Adam invaded the fatso's consciousness as he spoke, and he was immediately greeted by an astonishing sight.

Never had he seen such a strange psychic world. He was standing on a string of numbers, and looking up at all of the symbols drifting across the sky, he had no idea where he was, nor where he was supposed to go.

Immediately thereafter, Nie Yiyi also arrived in the psychic world, and her reaction was much the same.

"What is this place? Why does it seem like we entered a database?"

"Why did you also come in?"

"I'm here to give you a hand. Don't try to keep me out of a fight," Nie Yiyi replied as she continued to inspect her surroundings.

She was standing on a “π” symbol, and there were numbers and symbols all around her, some of which she recognized, while others were completely unfamiliar to her, but she was able to develop a rough idea of what these symbols were. "These all seem to be mathematical symbols."

"It looks like it. I can recognize many of them, but I have no idea what they're supposed to mean when strung together like this."

"Why does his psychic world look like this?" Even now, Adam was still reeling from what he was seeing. "I've only been attending Layton Academy for a short time, so my theoretical knowledge isn't great. Have you learned about anything like this?"

"I remember a brief mention of a situation like this in a textbook. There are very few examples of this." Nie Yiyi jumped from the “π” symbol onto an “α” symbol, then leaped onto the number "7". "This guy is probably a mathematician, and a really good one, at that. Otherwise, his psychic world wouldn't look like this."

"What did the textbook say about this?"

"It says that when someone excels in a certain field, particularly extremely standout figures in fields like art and mathematics, there are very few material things in their psychic worlds, and they can subsist virtually solely on their psychic worlds."

"Even so, there should still be substantial psychic modules. You go take a look over there, I'll go search in that direction."

"Alright."

Having devised a strategy, the two of them jumped away in opposite directions.

Only after jumping over the numbers and symbols for a very long time did Adam catch sight of a cluster of very small psychic modules. He hurriedly jumped out of the mathematical universe, finally landing on something substantial.

As a safety precaution, Adam immediately invoked Mummy before fusing with it.

What a tiny module.

Adam could see that this was a primary school, and after entering the school, he quickly spotted the fatso in a classroom after a brief search.

At that point, the fatso wasn't fat yet, and Adam was only able to identify him purely based on the sense of familiarity that he felt toward the psychic body.

In this memory, the fatso was in his formative years, and he was arguing with his teacher in the classroom. There were some basic mathematical equations on the blackboard, but he was telling the teacher that his equations weren't sufficiently clean and concise. He proclaimed that there were clearly better substitutions, and that the equations didn't have to be so long and complicated.

Of course, his criticisms were only met with ridicule from his classmates and exasperation from his teacher.

"This equation has already been used for over a century, and it was developed by mathematicians. It's a good thing to have critical thinking skills as a student, but blindly questioning and disputing things will only make the learning process more difficult for you. At the same time, you also run the risk of becoming overly cynical."

Thankfully, the teacher was quite lenient, and he only offered the fatso some constructive advice rather than stern criticism.

However, it was clear that the fatso felt very uncomfortable after returning to his seat. He looked at the students around him and the teacher standing at the front of the classroom, and his eyes were completely dazed and confused.

Slowly, those students and teachers began to mutate into aberrations.

These aberrations didn't possess any offensive tendencies, and they certainly weren't going to evolve into anomalies. In fact, they belonged to the weakest class of emotional aberration. However, they released a type of disturbance that made the fatso appear even more ostracized, misunderstood, and confused.

That's probably one of the reasons why you're so reclusive and averse to social interaction.

Adam heaved a faint sigh before helping him clear away his emotional baggage.

I wanted to find a psycho, but I ended up finding a genius!

After leaving the psychic module, Adam searched through the man's psychic world for a while longer, but ultimately didn't find anything worthy of note.

After that, he traveled to another psychic module, where he was reunited with Nie Yiyi.

"How are things going on your end?"

"I haven't found anything. He seems to be relatively healthy, just a little reclusive. This guy's a genius, but he has a set of stupid and stubborn parents. His family was rather underprivileged, and his parents and siblings didn't understand him. They felt like he was a bit of a nutcase. Have you found anything on your end?"

"No. I went to his primary school first, and I saw some childhood trauma there, but it was all pretty run-of-the-mill stuff. After that, I found out the reason why he came here. Through his mathematic calculation, he seemed to have developed a way to make certain Metaverse engines release more data. As a result, he became targeted by some powerful people, so he fled to this place."

"The situation on my end is pretty much the same. This guy barely has any substantial psychic modules. All of his thoughts are in the form of numbers and mathematical symbols. Let's get out of here, there's nothing to fight in this psychic world."

"Sure."

Thus, Adam and Nie Yiyi departed and returned to the real world.

"How did it go?"

"He's not a psycho, just a genius." Adam gave Shae a brief recount of the fatso's past, then turned to Nie Yiyi. "What do you plan on doing with him?"

"He's not a bad person, and our Green Gang isn't a nefarious organization, so we have no intention of hurting him. In fact, if possible, we can even provide him with some help." Nie Yiyi picked up the fatso as she spoke and prepared to drag him out of the room, only to wince in dismay as she grumbled, "How long has it been since this guy last showered? He stinks! No wonder his entire family hates him."

"We'll never understand what's going on in the mind of a genius."

Adam gave Nie Yiyi a hand, and the two of them carried the fatso out of the room.

After Nie Yiyi had given everyone outside a brief rundown of the fatso's past, they returned to the room and turned to the other subject.

Hopefully this is not another wasted trip.

He had already worked with Red Turtle and Crocodile quite a few times, but most of the people that they had brought to him were unsuitable for his needs. The population of Shadow City was far smaller than that of Sandrise City, and with the director periodically scouring the city for mentally ill individuals, as well as the mental health benefits provided by the chaotic nature of the city, it was very difficult for Adam to find a suitable subject.

According to gamblers' logic, surely all of my bad luck must've already run out with all those failures. I'm sure this one will be a suitable subject.

Adam took a deep breath before invading the second subject's psychic world.

As soon as he arrived in the man's psychic world, he immediately knew that something was wrong.

Everything around him was extremely dark and sticky, and the air was as viscous as glue, while the ground beneath his feet resembled a swamp.

The environment of this psychic world alone was already extremely terrifying, and Adam had only seen two psychic worlds with such noticeably oppressive environments.

One of those psychic worlds was Li Qi's, but even though his psychic world was filled with darkness, there were still some glimmers of light. Most importantly, it seemed that his psychic world wasn't that terrifying during the day, and it was only extremely forbidding at night.

The other psychic world belonged to Deranged Pig's daughter, Kim Garcia. The overall environment in her psychic world was even darker and more oppressive than Li Qi's and most importantly, that environment remained constant regardless of whether it was daytime or nighttime.

Li Qi had a level three anomaly residing in his psychic world, while Kim had been plagued by an even more powerful anomaly, yet here in this psychic world...

"It feels even worse in here than it did in Kim Garcia's psychic world," Adam said as he inspected his surroundings. "If there's an anomaly in this environment, I don't think we'll be able to beat it."