“……”

Merka had no time for Oedipus, who had fallen into chaos right where he stood. He poured all his strength into opening his magical vision and began rummaging through Prometheus’s office, searching wildly for anything useful.

Reference books, cross-disciplinary materials, journals from advanced fields—and folders. Folders, folders, and countless folders piled into little mountains.

Stepping over the obstacles scattered across the floor, Merka quickly ran his fingers over the books lying everywhere, but he found nothing useful.

They were nothing more than academic papers and research materials. Merka couldn’t make head or tail of them.

More interestingly, the collection even contained quite a few philosophy books discussing life and human nature.

All in all, Prometheus might actually have been someone with quite a bit of leisure and refinement.

Before long, Merka had searched through most of the things around him.

His gaze shifted to the huge regular pentagonal-prism desk occupying the center of the room. At this point, it was the only desk in the entire room he hadn’t checked.

Facing the black desk that looked as though it had secrets hidden inside, Merka walked over and placed a hand on its surface. While carefully exploring every corner, he also scanned the desk with his magical vision.

At last, apart from the daily necessities, paper, and pens inside the desk that were already close to rotting, Merka found a concealed compartment hidden within it.

Inside the compartment lay a flashy electronic pistol and stacks upon stacks of banknotes.

Picking up the pistol hidden among the banknotes, Merka immediately saw that the technological craftsmanship and patterns covering it clearly weren’t something the foreign technology of his time could produce.

Merka gripped the pistol firmly, leveled it with both hands, switched off the safety, and fired at the wall some distance away.

In an instant, thick red smoke billowed from the pistol.

A laser shot straight forward and vanished beyond the wall. Using his magical vision, Merka saw that the beam seemed to have pierced more than a dozen walls in succession with a single shot.

The sudden power left Merka’s hand tingling with shock. He blew on the barrel, which was still giving off red smoke, then brought the grip up before his eyes and examined it carefully.

“Made In Deutschland……?”

Although he didn’t know German, Merka could still easily recognize from the English pronunciation that this was a gun made in Germany.

“Has foreign technology already advanced this far……?”

“Could they be hiding their true capabilities from Acadia?”

Merka felt a little uneasy. He carefully pushed the safety on the back of the gun back into place, then temporarily slipped the pistol into the pocket at his chest.

His eyes returned to the compartment. Merka used both hands, trying to pull out all the banknotes inside, but it still took him quite a while to clear most of the money from the compartment.

By Merka’s conservative estimate, the box contained at least five million marks.

It was hard to imagine how a foreign professor hired by Acadia—one who was supposedly penniless—could have kept so much German currency.

“Wait, there seems to be something under all this money……”

Merka wiped away the cold sweat running down his forehead, then thrust both hands straight into the bottom of the compartment and pulled out the papers hidden there.

When Merka pulled them out, he discovered that they weren’t documents or manuscript pages at all, but a stack of envelopes that had already begun to yellow.

As his fingers rubbed over the clumsy, scrawled Acadian writing on the envelopes, Merka’s pupils suddenly contracted.

“To……Turing?”

Merka’s body shuddered, and he even began to convulse.

The shock delivered by those few large words was no less than learning that Einstein had actually left Chaplin a blessing in his final moments.

Two people who should never have had anything to do with each other had somehow become connected in this inexplicable place.

Unable to wait any longer, Merka opened the first envelope and began reading at once.