The air in the hospital room fell silent for a few seconds. Zhao Bailu casually set the completely unresponsive test strip on the bedside table and tapped her fingers twice on the desk.
"It seems my judgment was off." She withdrew her gaze, her tone carrying evident disappointment. "I thought you would react to this paper."
Lin Xiao glanced at the white paper following her gesture, her expression still calm. "This thing doesn't seem particularly special."
"The special part is its purpose." Zhao Bailu adjusted her sitting position, adopting the posture of a lecturer. "This is a specially made 'Energy Testing Paper' by the Bureau, designed specifically to identify the ability categories of Awakened ones. As college students, you must have read plenty of popular novels from Rose City, so the concept of 'superpowers' shouldn't be foreign to you, right?"
Lin Xiao nodded slightly. "I've heard of it, though I don't watch many movies."
"Superpowers do exist in reality, but due to management needs, not many ordinary people know about this." Zhao Bailu spoke with a serious expression. "Since you've personally experienced those inexplicable events, you should understand that phenomena science cannot explain are not uncommon in this world."
"I can certainly relate to that." Lin Xiao smiled politely, a hint of resignation in her tone. "After all, my worldview has been rebuilt several times because of this."
Zhao Bailu's lips twitched. She then explained, "I'm talking about real special powers, not magic tricks that bend spoons. The Bureau spent several years collecting information on relevant individuals, and eventually discovered that these abilities can be classified into a limited number of categories. To quickly identify the types of ability users, we developed this testing paper."
Lin Xiao contemplated this. "What are the usual categories?"
"You can try brainstorming based on how literary works usually handle these things." Zhao Bailu created suspense without giving a direct answer.
Since literary works had been mentioned, Lin Xiao guessed there would at least include healing and combat categories, with combat professions perhaps further divided into warriors and mages.
But what puzzled her was—if she had truly awakened some kind of ability, why hadn't this testing paper given any feedback?
"Would a situation like Nesda Campus also fit into these categories?" Lin Xiao pressed further.
"It would, but instances are more complicated." Zhao Bailu paused, her gaze lingering on Lin Xiao for a moment. "Actually, according to our assessment, someone with mental fortitude like you has great potential for future awakening."
"Thank you for the compliment." Lin Xiao replied without arrogance or humility. "I'd like to hear more details."
"Let's use Nesda Campus as an example." Zhao Bailu explained patiently. "When ordinary people stay inside an instance, they feel their thinking abilities gradually weaken, because the instance continuously erodes the sanity of participants. But if the entrant is an ability user, the instance will prioritize eroding their powers."
This explanation coincided with Lin Xiao's previous speculation.
After all, her acute awareness of the anomaly at the time was largely because the Eye of Insight and the Box of Destiny had taken on most of the mental damage from the instance.
Lin Xiao leaned back against the soft pillow and gave her assessment. "I'm not particularly fond of instances that can affect cognitive abilities."
Upon hearing this, Zhao Bailu felt that Lin Xiao was truly a young person full of compassion.
—Since most people's range of disliked instances was "all of them."
"If you don't want to keep encountering such things, you should try to stay in densely populated areas as much as possible in the future—it'll be relatively safer." Zhao Bailu offered kindly.
Lin Xiao raised an eyebrow. "I didn't think Xinda campus was that remote."
Recalling the three instances she had entered, besides the first time gaining a worldview-shattering opportunity at a suburban location, the other two times had all had enough passersby to help adjust her understanding of the world.
Zhao Bailu cleared her throat awkwardly. "...I was speaking of general situations."
Lin Xiao allowed herself a slight smile. "Thanks for the heads up, I'll keep it in mind." She asked again, "But I'd also like to know why densely populated areas are safer?"
Zhao Bailu gave an evasive answer. "You can think of it as the city authorities having taken some necessary measures."
—Ever since some skilled Awakened ones invented the Stabilizing Anchor, which could reduce the risk of instance appearance and suppress specific categories of abilities, such items had been widely applied across various cities. Unfortunately, items with supernatural powers required special materials to craft, and activation consumed enormous energy, so large-scale production was not yet possible.
After finishing her explanation, Zhao Bailu stood up and checked the time on her phone. There were still forty minutes until get-off work, and the Ninth People's Hospital was too far from Purple Magnolia Street. She couldn't be bothered to return to the Bureau, so she simply sat back down at the bedside and continued chatting with Lin Xiao.
After all, communicating with survivors was also an important part of the Bureau's work, so this didn't count as dereliction of duty.
Zhao Bailu twirled the recorder in her hand. The Bureau had many confidentiality clauses, and she didn't want to inadvertently disclose any key secrets during the conversation. She decided to firmly control the direction of the subsequent discussion. "Can you share your thoughts on this instance?"
In truth, the Bureau had specialized personnel for instance analysis, and survivors usually only needed to describe their own experiences.
When she asked this question, Zhao Bailu hadn't expected to get particularly constructive opinions from Lin Xiao.
However, Lin Xiao appeared to be the type of very serious and high-achieving student. Zhao Bailu became interested and decided to casually test the other party's logical abilities.
During Bureau meetings, it had been repeatedly emphasized that when researching instances, one must gather clues from different perspectives. Lin Xiao's composure intrigued Zhao Bailu—she wanted to know whether a student's perspective on instances might differ from that of Bureau staff.
Lin Xiao leaned quietly against the pillow, her gaze slightly unfocused, as if she were recalling something. After several seconds, she softly uttered two words: "Cuckoos."
Zhao Bailu froze, instinctively responding. "What?"
Lin Xiao: "I think some of the participants in the instance remind people of cuckoos."
Cuckoos were a very widespread bird species, surviving even after the catastrophe. They did not build their own nests but laid their eggs in the nests of other birds.
Cuckoo eggs also hatched quite quickly, usually breaking through the shell earlier than the host's eggs. After hatching, the cuckoo chick would push the host's eggs out of the nest.
"Slap."
An egg fell from high above, yolk and white mixing together, the fragile shell shattering across the ground.
Smeared flesh carpeted the cement surface, and the vivid green lawn was dyed red.
Lin Xiao: "...When first entering the instance, there wasn't much difference between the intern employees, but some of them were influenced, transforming from host birds into cuckoos."
By the time she heard half of this, Zhao Bailu had already turned her recorder back on.
Lin Xiao: "Just as different schools have different rules, cuckoos have their own rules and host birds have theirs. The difference is that students know which school they belong to before obeying the rules, but eggs don't."
Finishing this thought, she smiled again, her voice becoming gentle. "The intern employees entering the campus didn't even know they were cuckoo eggs."
Zhao Bailu gripped her pen and suddenly felt that her name was somewhat inappropriate for the psychological state of the student before her.
If she had known, the Bureau should have sent a teammate with "cat" in their name to ward off evil spirits.
Lin Xiao: "The campus had many forked paths, with signposts at each intersection. Some signposts had notes attached. I later noticed that the notes on signposts could contradict each other. For example, when first entering the campus, the light blue note told us not to enter the convenience store without lights, but the light red note told us we could enter the convenience store without lights."
Zhao Bailu reacted. "Following notes of different colors would turn you into different types of eggs."
Lin Xiao's voice was gentle. "That's what I thought." She continued, "The number of people who saw the red text should have been quite large. Those employees, influenced by the cuckoo, would try to make themselves hatch. I suspect that to successfully hatch and prove they had truly become cuckoo chicks, certain conditions needed to be met—like completely eliminating the other eggs in the nest."
Cuckoos had their own habits. Following the red-text rules would only place the intern employees in a state somewhere between cuckoos and host birds. When the sound of host eggs breaking rang out, new cuckoos would be born.
Zhao Bailu recalled Lin Xiao's description of her instance experience and confirmed with gravity: "You're saying that those people who fell were actually pushed out by their roommates?"
She didn't notice that she