Inside a gray, archaic room cluttered with weathered medical supplies, a youth sat rigidly before a whiteboard covered in a chaotic web of numbers, variables, and mathematical sheets.
He stared back and forth across the data, scribbling frantically with a marker until an alert suddenly chimed out into the quiet room.
TING~
"Has it been an hour already?"
Only then did Ron snap out of his deep trance. He rubbed his temples and cast his gaze back over his personal analysis. Indeed, the board was incredibly dense, packed with a terrifyingly massive wall of text. That was because he had systematically segmented the whiteboard into four completely distinct operational quadrants:
The psychology of the people present here.
The logical arguments regarding the train and the game.
The deductions surrounding Pegasus.
The structural breakdown of the available clues.
If his deductions were to be summarized, they would unfold as follows:
Premise One: Everyone is already dead? Or perhaps they do not exist in a physical form?
The justification?
Based on the photographic data he had gathered, the corpse located in car two had already reached stage three decomposition the exact moment the train pulled into the station. Furthermore, the train and its structural cars had been completely isolated from the outside world from the very beginning, given that Conductor Moroe's transmission arrived exceptionally late after the vehicle had already docked.
In addition, when inspecting the train cars, Ron noticed numerous deep pry marks on the doors where passengers had desperately tried to force them open, yet the primary locks remained completely undamaged—heavily reinforcing this line of evidence.
The dimensions of the train car were exactly 2.6 meters in height, 3 meters in width, and 20 meters in length. The total volume of air (V) within the empty space equaled 156 cubic meters. Subtracting the physical space occupied by the passenger seats and the overhead luggage compartments, and not yet factoring in human bodies, the net volume of breathing room was approximately V=125 to 130 m3.
Oxygen accounted for roughly 21% of the atmosphere—a baseline parameter he was entirely certain of. If oxygen levels drop below 7%, it results in immediate death; at 10% to 12%, an individual faints.
But the truly critical variable was Carbon Dioxide (CO2). The atmospheric threshold for losing consciousness due to carbon dioxide toxicity sits at 7% to 10%.
The corpse within the game had decomposed at an insanely accelerated rate, reaching stage three. In the real world, this specific phase of decay takes anywhere from 4 to 10 days to manifest. Ron was absolutely certain the body was discharging massive amounts of gas because he had personally witnessed the putrid, warning stench that triggered the initial alarm.
Assuming the individual perished right at the inception of the game, there were exactly 60 minutes remaining for the body to transition from stage one to stage three. This meant the rate of biological decay was accelerated by approximately 16,800 times.
Splitting this into two operational phases under a 16,800% accelerated decay index:
Phase 1: The corpse expels approximately 110 liters of gas per minute.
Phase 2: The corpse expels approximately 180 liters of gas per minute.
Due to the high-stakes, hazardous state of emergency—which demanded minimal physical strain from the passengers unless they were actively resisting the demon—and accounting for the presence of children, averaging 2 to 6 individuals per car, the rates of human CO2 emission were calculated as follows:
Adult emission rate (RNl): 0.7 liters of gas per minute per person.
Child emission rate (RNn): 0.4 liters of gas per minute per person.
There were zero elderly passengers present on this train during this late-night transit right before New Year's Eve. Ron was completely certain of this fact because he held the official registration roster detailing everyone's names and ages.
Setting the net car volume (V) to 130,000 liters:
The fatal threshold volume of CO2 (VCO2) is:
130,000×7%=9,100 liters
Number of adults (Nl) ≈ 25 people. Number of children (Nn) ≈ 4 children. Adult rate (RNl) = 0.7 liters/minute. Child rate (RNn) = 0.4 liters/minute. Corpse decomposition rate (Rx) = 180 liters/minute. Time variable = t
The mathematical formula for total CO2 accumulation within the car over time:
Total CO2=((Nl×RNl)+(Nn×RNn)+Rx)×t
Substituting the values:
9,100=((25×0.7)+(4×0.4)+180)×t9,100=(17.5+1.6+180)×t9,100=199.1×tt≈45.37 minutes
What if the death did not occur at the beginning of the game, but rather during the mid-game or late-game phases? It would simply mean the rate at which the corpse absorbed or expelled gas was equally, insanely accelerated to compensate. The underlying threat remained just as hazardous as the calculation above.
Consequently, Ron immediately envisioned an alternative possibility: this entire setup was a shared mental garden, or a cognitive mind-maze highly similar to the one he had previously navigated.
Because of this realization, a faint glimmer of hope regarding saving those who had already perished began to spark within him.
Premise Two: The 302 people per square kilometer metric.
This was the exact figure Janeus had measured for him. But the pressing question was: how did she know what a square meter or a square kilometer was?
Ron recalled the exact moment they walked toward the station. At that time, neither Ron nor Janeus seemed to exhibit any anomalies. In fact, Ron had deployed multiple layers of tactical deduction, much like when he encountered the fake Lunas.
Yet... that version of Janeus was either entirely real, or entirely fabricated.
To put it another way, mirroring the Benjamin Franklin effect, he had been thoroughly outwitted in an utterly embarrassing fashion, a realization that only crystallized long after the fact.
He found himself looking back and forth, scribbling frantically over the data until everything began to converge. All these separate vectors—the human psychology, the train mechanics, the Pegasus anomalies, and the physical clues—were systematically linking together. They intersected flawlessly under a singular, non-negotiable condition: Ron had to be entirely correct.
Ron approached the main desk. Resting upon it was a human heart, preserved carefully inside a glass enclosure and subjected to the intense scrutiny of focusing quartz crystals. This was a highly specialized piece of medical laboratory equipment—an asset only the director of a major hospital could afford to purchase, and Ron was currently utilizing it entirely for free.
His precise objective was to examine the hearts of the psychiatric patients—the mob of insane individuals roaming outside.
He knew with absolute certainty that the blood being discharged externally from their bodies was type O-, while the blood saturating the ground below Pegasus was type AB+. But the heart... the heart was a completely different story.
It could be argued that the heart is the organ least susceptible to cancer, primarily because human cardiac cells rarely replicate or undergo cellular division throughout a lifetime, whereas cancer fundamentally relies on aggressive cell proliferation.
In other words, Ron was relying on the biological structural integrity of these hearts to evaluate their exact level of freshness.
This action was either entirely meaningless or monumentally critical, depending entirely on the forthcoming data.
Ron still needed to wait several more hours for the final results to manifest. After all, the heart tissue he had harvested was far from pristine; he had taken it directly from a corpse and inadvertently contaminated it during extraction.