"Thank you, Miss and Master, for your enthusiastic assistance and help regarding my psychological test. Please take your time with it. Once you are finished, I will come over to collect it. I also need to check on my friend. Farewell, Miss and Master."
Click~
Ron closed the door to the hospital room and returned to an empty room at the end of the corridor. It was none other than the director's office that he had previously entered.
Adjacent to it was a laboratory and a lecture room for students, containing a white board meant for teaching.
Ron locked the door, then pulled out his notebook along with the firearm components. He grabbed a marker and began writing on the board. Although he had already finished mapping out his thoughts, it was best to visually display them for a final summation.
First, the crucial points to note:
1: The scattered, disconnected firearm components.
2: The wooden bullet engraved with 2026.
3: The train car anomaly.
4: The ground of Pegasus.
5: The Demon Prey game.
6: His own mind and cognitive functions being altered or intervened with.
7: A bizarre entity observing everything, aiming to gather information and recombine it much like an AI.
8: The three categories of people: the colored, the insane, and the semi-insane individuals possessing a Gift, standing right between madness and sanity.
9: The city undergoing a constant transformation.
10: Two distinct types of occult anomalies completely isolated from each other—the train and Pegasus—for entirely unknown reasons.
He began to reason through the surface level information.
First, the firearm and the wooden bullet were explicitly meant for the current Ron, left behind by his past self.
His deduction followed this trajectory:
Initially, he had brought various gun components along with both hot and cold weapons from home solely to teach Quan. Fundamentally speaking, he would never choose to pull them out during the game inside the train car.
This restriction stemmed from two specific reasons. First, secrecy. Weapons like firearms remained monumentally valuable in a world ruled by magic, serving as an ultimate tool of self-defense for the common people. Therefore, even if it was a completely non-functional version, he could not risk letting that information leak out to the public.
Second, a firearm was an item unique to Earth. Quan and Ron were the only two individuals in this entire world who knew of its existence. No one else, not even the blacksmiths who forged the components in the smithy, knew exactly what they were making.
Thus, the mere notion that someone would dare to pull those pieces out on the train and assemble them was inherently absurd. Unless it was Ron or Quan—who might have known the assembly process in the past—it was impossible for anyone else to know how to piece a gun together. Furthermore, Ron had absolutely no reason to display it, nor would he ever speak of it. Consequently, no one, including Quan at that time, possessed any knowledge regarding firearms.
From his athletic duffel bag, Ron pulled out a paper bag containing dozens of different components. He looked closely at the defective firearm and compared the pieces with one another.
Indeed, they were a perfect, seamless match.
This effectively eliminated the possibilities of Ron abandoning his gear, being subjected to mind control, or any scenarios involving the consumption of items.
Thus, the remaining options narrowed down to two: magic or illusions.
Ron then posited the possibility that he himself was the one who had placed the gun beneath the seat. The primary justification was that he was the only one who knew his own seat number, though that line of thought felt incredibly forced.
The second justification was that if someone else had stolen the components from his bag, assembled them into a weapon, and tossed it under the seat, they would strictly require two things:
First, magic—at least a spell capable of duplication, replication, or cloning.
Second, they would need to know exactly who Ron was, or at least comprehend what needed to be accomplished by placing the firearm there.
However, according to the game rules recounted earlier, a player had to execute a kill within ten seconds if they utilized magic. If an entity used magic merely to store and manifest this weapon, it would be entirely irrational. Doing so would force them to commit a physical murder or face immediate death.
Yet simultaneously, another question inevitably surfaced: why go to the trouble of hiding it, and how did they gain knowledge of a firearm? The easily comprehensible answer split into two paths: either they knew Ron intimately and were actively tracking him, or they had acquired the data through an entirely separate source.
Furthermore, if they possessed the capability to deploy magic and execute the corresponding sacrifices within the time limit, that attributed two distinct traits to them: cold-bloodedness and high proficiency.
Those two traits typically belonged to individuals with unstable antisocial psychology, exceptionally low EQ, or twisted serial killers. Alternatively, they could belong to desensitized veterans or soldiers.
The current era was a period of active warfare among the city-states, meaning regular soldiers were not concentrated in Jinlus or Pegasus—which were relatively peaceful regions—but were instead deployed to combat zones or areas bordering active warfare. Consequently, if military personnel were involved, they were either deserters or possessed a rank high enough to exempt them from being tightly bound to their posts during these days.
Yet a massive paradox manifested. High-ranking figures typically did not travel by train, because they possessed more than enough personal resources to travel via private means utilizing magic, unless they suffered from a highly specific predicament. But if they were plagued by such an issue, the probability of them achieving a high rank in the first place was abysmally low.
As for lower-ranking soldiers, they were simply not adept at clean executions. At the very most, they could beat a target to a pulp before deploying magic, crushing them to death within the ten second threshold. That scenario was... feasible.
Therefore, combining those two lines of reasoning, he arrived at a profile:
Possessing a high, remarkably stable psychological fortitude.
Knowledge of Ron, or at least the mechanical structure of a gun.
Belonging to one of two groups: low-ranking military personnel/deserters, or professional murderers.
The reason Ron completely excluded groups like butchers or executioners was that they were fundamentally not strong enough. Butchers engaged in work that was messy and crude, and they were typically quite weak; if they possessed real strength, the vast majority would opt for occupations less drenched in the scent of blood, barring exceptional circumstances involving deep psychological trauma or family traditions.
As for executioners... they were merely death row convicts forced to execute other death row convicts under the direct command of the lord. Their status was slightly higher than prisoners of war but significantly lower than commoners. They could not even afford a train ticket.
Ron rifled through the master list of individuals who had purchased tickets—the document he had covertly obtained from Janeus. He quickly realized that among the passengers designated to car five, not a single one possessed a military background.
'Deserters? Murderers?'
Ron hypothesized, but unfortunately, there was nothing more to go on. Occupations were not printed on the document for him to deduce further.
Consequently, this path turned into another absolute dead end. He did not know their faces, nor did he know their true identities. There were only names and alphanumeric ID codes—data types he could not cross-reference within the standard magical archives.
But then, he remembered the nature of those IDs. To travel on this specific train, those individuals could not possibly use their real IDs, meaning they were using forged ones. But if they were operating under aliases, they logically should have chosen a much safer method of transportation, such as a covered horse carriage. Although far more expensive, it was undeniably more secure against official scrutiny.
Ron immediately erased this entire line of deduction, completely discarding the question of whether they knew him or the firearm.
With that, the mystery of the gun's origin was temporarily settled. The weapon belonged to the old Ron, passed down directly to the new Ron. The probability of this being the truth was exceptionally high.
As for the underlying reason why he had to pass a firearm to his future self, Ron formulated a new hypothesis: The pre-amnesiac Ron had deliberately orchestrated this exact situation.
Since this was a riddle left by himself, Ron would deduce its meaning through the lens of symbolism, logic, and intent.
A firearm was inherently bound to the concept of killing. Did this imply that Ron was fully capable of taking a life?
This sounded entirely reasonable on the surface. Whether in his past or within the present constructs of the old world, a gun was tied directly to the manifestation of death rather than being a normalized, mundane symbol.
The two classifications of individuals present in the train car game were:
Commoners (29 individuals)
The Demon (1 individual)
The demon was permitted to utilize magic, provided they slaughtered a person within a ten second window, followed by a designated period of rest within the rules.
Did that description not sound exactly like a single individual holding a loaded gun?
Next, he pursued a deeper analysis.
It was vital to comprehend that the components remained separate parts instead of a complete, functional weapon because they were defective rejects—waste material brought along specifically to teach Quan the mechanics.
The scattered components were each engraved with entirely different manufacturing numbers indicating completely different production dates, and the components did not even belong to the same model of firearm.
'Time? Or my very self?'
First, the dates stamped onto the components were thoroughly chaotic. This implied that the person who positioned them there did so with deliberate intent. The objective was to force Ron to recognize the continuous alteration or the piecemeal patching of time itself.
This was absolutely not a coincidence. A revolver's cylinder could never be integrated into a semi-automatic handgun. Yet the components that could technically be connected to function did not align logically; instead, they belonged to disrupted, fragmented periods of time.
Meaning, everything regarding time was currently in a state of absolute chaos, a phenomenon directly linked to the wooden bullet marked 2026.
Second, Ron might be experiencing a severe disruption of his own identity.
Recalling how effortlessly he had been outwitted previously, he was entirely certain that his mind was not operating at one hundred percent sanity. In other words, the current Ron was merely a collection of patched, mismatched cognitive fragments.
Both were highly plausible hypotheses. Perhaps both were entirely wrong, or perhaps both were simultaneously correct.
Ron temporarily cast aside the abstract symbolism and shifted his focus toward something else—the one element only he could truly decipher regarding what his past self was thinking.
It was not based on fleeting emotions or logical deductions, but on the immutable structure of memory.
Specifically, the Method of Loci. The Memory Palace.
He knew with absolute certainty that the old Ron would think exactly like the current Ron, which was precisely why this scenario had manifested. After all, they shared the exact same hardwired memory instincts.
Synchronized memories from the past and the future were packed entirely into a single, physical object.
"The theory of close and mid-range combat in moments of extreme peril."
Yet this specific firearm was a defective piece, assembled clumsily from discarded junk.
Did that signify the absolute abandonment of combat in times of peril?
The current Ron, or the Ron that had stepped onto the blood-drenched ground of Pegasus, was not currently trapped in extreme, inescapable peril. Though there were undeniable losses, they remained within acceptable parameters.
Meaning, was this a message recounting an event from the deep past? In a situation where he was designated as the demon, yet he chose not to launch an attack, deliberately turning his ultimate weapon into a useless piece of junk instead?