Like an automated robot, he opened his eyes at exactly 6:45 in the morning, sat right up, and landed lightly on the floor without a single delay. He ambled towards the still sleeping Hinoko and gave her a soft scratch on her head. She needs time to transition herself from her slumber to a fully awakened state. During that time, Rey would perform his daily morning routine.

He doesn’t need to spend time thinking what he should wear for the day like Eli; he had a timetable for it. He took his clothes into the washroom and place it on top of the toilet’s lid. He swiftly brushed his teeth before taking off his current clothes, threw it into a miniature ‘washing machine’ beside the sink, and changed into a new one. After five seconds, the machine spat out his nicely folded and clean sleeping clothes as he was now fully prepared to face a new day.

He placed the clean clothing into his receptacle after walking back to the room. He took a peek at his roommate; he was still sleeping soundly. Hinoko, with her own magic spell, had clean up her body and leaped onto Rey’s shoulder. Together, they exited the room and made way towards the cafeteria.

He sat on the same table he has been sitting for the past month or so, beside the large glass panel and near the corner of the entire cafeteria floor. Perhaps the only reason as for why he chose to wake up this early every day was because he wanted to avoid the large, annoying crowd of people eating breakfast. The noise caused by groups of students really grates his nerves.

After shoving down that large bowl of noodles into his throat with lightning speed, he sauntered out the building and boarded the train heading to the Academy. He realizes his eating speed is not ideal for his stomach’s health, so, every time while he waited for the train to reach its destination, he would use his Ingenium to ‘power up’ his digestive organ and allows it to ‘work’ harder without inflicting any long-term damage.

After arriving at the Academy, he would go straight towards the library. He would usually stay there until dusk, except for the times when he is required to sate his hunger or releases unwanted wastes in his body.

Of course, he also has a timetable to arrange when will he study a certain subject. And by study, it means he would find the most factually correct book, a physical or virtual one, by conducting a thorough research and comparison about the books which tackles a similar topic before imprinting all the contents found inside the winner into his mind.

There were short intervals of rests while he reads to loosen himself a bit for better focusing, and also to mitigate the voice in his head screaming ‘I’M BORED!’. He would often watch short videos or catch up with the latest chapters of the comics and mangas he is interested in.

Although it only happens once in awhile, he would seldom completely indulge himself into the massive amount of videos which came out within a day from all his subscription. All of them were mostly educational videos which talk about science, history, latest news, or entertainment videos like funny animation videos, gaming compilation videos or videos from unpopular (and underrated) music artists.

He was glad the past few weeks went by pretty fast. It was practically hell. He had to apply for so many permits/licenses and do a lot of other random things relating to his classes and The Analytical Mind. He hadn’t actually attended any classes or discussion groups, but he has been paying attention to any assignments which could give him points to add to his overall ‘grade’.

As much as he wanted some anticipated stimulation from Solver cases, he only managed to get one until now. He knew it wasn’t going to be easy to have a new case, after all, Solvers are responsible for miscellaneous cases which do not fit into what people would call ‘normal’ or ‘usual’. He thought maybe in the Academy, which is basically a simulation of the ‘real world’ out there, he would have more opportunity to show off his abilities. He was wrong.

However, this dull day wasn’t focused for no reason. After his lunch, he received a call from his mentor. It seems a case has finally arrived. He brought up the Travel app and pressed on a presetted coordinate. He instantly teleported to the front of the left door (among the three doors) of the organization he is currently working for. He pressed a few numbers on the pad and opened the door.

Upon entering the small but comfy room, he laid his eyes on the visitor’s back. The visitor was sitting on a chair in front of a technologically advanced table, a ‘smart' table. On the other side of the expensive furniture was Rey’s mentor.

“Ah, you're here,” He glanced at the boy for a second. His attention then went back to the client. “Mr.Rudas,” Said he as he directed his hand aiming at the couch in the middle of the room, “Would you mind?”

“No. None at all.” Both of the proceeded to stand up and walked towards the couches.

Rey caught his mentor’s eye signal as the Solver went for the couch on the right side while Rudas went to the other. Rey ambled to the same couch as his mentor was and all three of them sat down at the same time.

“Reynard, this is Mr.Rudas. Mr.Rudas, this is my apprentice, Reynard.”

“Nice to meet you, Reynard.” The scene of a fox standing on the boy’s shoulder was kinda weird, but it didn’t bother him.

“Nice to meet you too, Mr.Rudas.” The fox, in return, stared at him curiously. Apparently, she never saw a cyclops before, or she simply couldn’t remember..

“So, Mr.Rudas, what brings you to my office today?”

“Well...I would like to understand how this entire...Solver thing works first.” The dark-skinned cyclops was unsure if coming here was necessary. He was pretty nervous when he decided to come here. He heard about what Solvers do, but he didn't know how their system functions. Luckily, as soon as he stepped into the room with no decorations of any kind but the beach themed wall design, he began to relax. Then, when the good-looking higher-lizard-Demi started introducing himself as Mr.Kibo, he completely dropped down his guard. The man certainly knows how to make an excellent first impression and calming someone down. But, before he could state the reason for coming here, the Demi insisted the both of them should wait until his apprentice came before getting into business.

“I see. Reynard, would you do the honor?” From the way Kibo was looking at Reynard, the cyclops could effortlessly deduct that the older Solver was testing his apprentice.

“What would you like to know, Mr.Rudas?”

“I want to know what exactly does a Solver do. I heard that you guys accept odd requests from different people, but what kind of odd requests?”

“Primarily, we help our clients solve something they could not understand in the situation where they do not know what authority they should find help from. Most of the time, our clients truly needs our services to unravel certain mysteries that has been affecting their lives in either a good way or bad way. Seldom, there were clients who just came to us when they found some interesting and they wants us to find out the secrets behind it. Of course, that's not to say there aren't any cases that are in between those two scenarios.”

“Other than solving random mysteries, we also provide services which leap across multiple professions. Because Solvers are required to have an extensive amount of knowledge on many things, we could perform certain tricky requests which would either cost too much on normal circumstances or too troublesome. For example, a person was framed by his enemy for something he did not commit. Because hiring a lawyer and a detective would be too costly, he might search for a Solver which can find evidence of his innocence and prove that he was indeed framed in the court of law.”

“Oh, I see. Then, what about payment? I heard from a few people that you guys don’t always accept Credits as payment.”

“Yes, that is correct. Due to the unpredictable nature of our cases, sometimes seemingly easy ones have deep and dark secrets behind it. In this scenario, the client might not be able to pay the unexpectedly large amount of money. Under normal circumstances, we would inform our clients whenever we found something new related to their case and let them decide if they want us to continue or not. This way, we won’t have any complaints.”

“However, if it comes a time when our clients absolutely could not pay the bills, we would offer them several alternatives. There’s the simplest solution, the client pays in installment. If not, the client can give us something that has equal value to the money they owe us. And if both of these solutions doesn’t work out either, we would form a service contract with them.”

“In simple terms, when we need their specialty to solve difficult problems we would call them to aid us. It might be needlessly complex due to a foreseeable disagreement between what we want our clients to do and what they think they should to clear their debt. However, many would still prefer this method because they could take the chance of doing something relatively easy to them than paying money. Is my explanation suffice for you to make a decision, Mr.Rudas?”

“Um...I guess so,” There was a short pause, “Okay, I’ve made my decision. I’ll give you both a case, my case. I seriously hope both of you can solve it. I’ll start from the beginning.”

“A few days earlier, I receive a message in my inbox. It told me that I have won 500 Credits from a lottery for participating an event some time ago. It was sudden, but nothing was out of place. Then, when I went back to my room later that evening, there was a strange-looking device sitting in front of my door. Here, take a look at this.” He pulled out the machine from his pocket and handed it to Rey who already extended his hand. He knew what it was at first glance.

It was an outdated rectangular audio recorder. Its length was about the horizontal length of a palm of an adult while its width was about 3cm. It was black, but the ‘record’ button on one end of the recorder was red and the ‘play/stop’, ‘fast forward’, ‘rewind’ and ‘slow down’ buttons were blue. This crude, disposable recorder was made by people living in the underground to relay messages without the messenger getting noticed. It has biometric defences which would only allow the appointed user to operate the device and blow up the device if it detects stranger’s biological data. However, that function was obviously not activated, or else they would’ve been blown to bits.

“After I hit ‘play’, a strange piano melody came out. The music was very disorganized and terrible, but I think there might be some hidden message inside it. Until this point, what happened hasn’t been creepy until I remembered that I couldn’t have possibly get the 500 Credits from the lottery. I recalled that I need to fill in a complete basic information about myself at that event to participate the lottery. However, my thoughts were a bit blurry at the time and I clearly remembered that I didn’t fill in every bracket, which meant these Credits came from someone else.”

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the day I got free Credits from someone I don’t know is the same day I got that creepy audio recorder. I want the both of you to find out who is doing this and why. I’ll give you the 500 Credits to you if you manage to find the answer. Also, don’t tell me about ”

“I see. Alright, I accept your request, Mr.Rudar. Please follow me back to my desk to form a contract. My apprentice and I will begin the investigation as soon as you step out from this room.” Kibo gets onto his feet with his arm directing his client to his desk.

“Mr.Rudas, is that really the only reason you came to us?” Rey’s abrupt sentence halted his movement towards the desk, “If you need our help to solve your problem, you have to tell us everything you know about it.” The cyclops immediately turned his head towards Rey with a slightly horrified expression. It seems Rey’s ability to read auras wasn’t well received.

“Even though you had supposedly told us everything and placed your trust on us to solve this problem, your fist is still clenched up from the moment I saw you, indicating you might still have some worries in your heart. This could be translated to: you are withholding certain information that you are unsure if you want to disclose it or not.”

The cyclops let out a subtle breath of relief and the expression he previously had have faded; he thought he had his mind read, “Yes, you are right,” he then turned his body to align it with his head’s direction, “*Sigh I tried to throw the recorder yesterday. I thought it was a prank, so after I found it, I just tossed it on my table without giving it a thought. But, after I threw it away for the first time because it’s cluttering my desk, I heard a knock on the door 10 minutes later. When I opened the door, the recorder came back. I was freaked out; I didn’t know what to do. Then I threw it again. The knocking returned and the recorder was there, on the ground, once more.”

“I wanted to find someone to help me, but it was too late into the night, so I had to wait until morning. I went for the detectives first, but because there was no harm done and some of them seem to be busying themselves with a smuggling case, they refused to help me, although they did recommend me to come here. So here I am.”

Rey tipped his head slightly at the cyclops, “I apologize for my rudeness.” “No, it’s okay. I should’ve told you both about this.”

As the two older students form an official contract, Rey subtly used his Ingenium to scan the recorder to see if there were something else in the device. After that’s done, he let Hinoko sniff at it to make extra sure there weren’t any undesirable component inside.

“Mr.Rudas, I’ll start the investigation from the mysterious placement of the recorder. I will need you to take me to your room and tell me every detail you can recall during the time period where you find the device and when you tried to throw it. In the meantime, my apprentice will search for clues from the file inside the recorder.” He lifted his hand again. This time, it’s aimed at the door. Rudas nodded, and the both of them left.

The boy ambled to the chair in front of the desk and sat on it. He placed the recorder on the table to be analysed. This way, after he played the recorder, the programs installed in the table can capture easily missable details in the file.

The moment he pressed ‘Play’, a large and sudden sound burst out. A split second later, the sounds transformed into individual, incompatible, soft sounds. Then, another burst of large sound came and went before returning to the soft sounds. The cycle repeats inconsistently for about a minute before stopping.

A hologram popped up as soon as the examination of the file was complete. He then went through a few standard test for the file. There were hints that the file was indeed carrying a hidden message, but he couldn’t figure out the complete picture.

He listened to it a couple times to figure out what other methods he should use. Running it through the music database on the web would just waste his time. Suddenly, he remembered something. He quickly downloaded a specific music synthesising program and changed the format of the audio file before opening with that very program. A few clicks later, the message was revealed.

All the notes in the file were arranged to spell out a few letters and numbers: R4 S5 R15-37. It’s a coordinate. He didn’t think to call his mentor and went straight to that coordinate.

He arrived in front a normal looking door. He didn’t bother to check what kind of room is he going to step in. He entered the numbers into the keypad and went in. It was dark and there wasn’t anyone inside. He switched on the lights and it was revealed to him that this is a small-scale conference room. The elongated table and chairs in the middle were in poor condition, indicating there hasn’t been anyone here for a long time.

Since there were nothing suspicious here, he scanned the room with different spectrums of light. When that didn’t work, he played the audio inside the room. Nothing. Revealing spell? Nothing. Ingenium? Nope.

After seeing her master starting to get frustrated, she jumped off his shoulder and onto the table.

He decided to suspend his attempts to find clues in this room and called his mentor. Perhaps he found new leads.

“Reynard, did you found anything in the audio file?”

“Yes. A coordinate was hidden inside the file. Ring 4, Section 5, Room 15-37.”

“I assume you already went ahead and ran a few tests already?”

“Yes. But I can’t seem to locate anything remotely suspicious.”

“I think I have a solution, though it’s still incomplete yet. I finished my part of the investigation here. I’ll meet you in ten minutes.”

Of course, while waiting for his mentor, he tried using a newly learned spell to see if there was a shadow dimension built in the room. He didn’t dare to cast it initially because it drains a lot of Mana, but as the persistent person that he is, he stubbornly cast it anyway. The result was fruitless. There was no shadow dimension. So now, he sat against the dusty wall catching his breath. A few minutes after, his mentor arrived.

“You okay?” He inquired. Rey slowly stood up and waved his hand once. He had recovered half of the Mana he lost.

“What did you found?” “I managed to uncover the source of the money. Someone hacked into an inactive account and made it looked like it was the organiser of the event that sent the money. The only reason I managed to find it was because the hacker purposely left a trail for me to follow. I traced it back to a bot, but there was nothing to follow beyond that. The bot was encoded with a message. I had to spend some time translating it to elvish.”

“I didn’t find anything about the where the recorder came from though. There was no evidence denoting someone brought the recorder to Mr.Rudas’s front door. Maybe a drone was used, or an undetected teleportation spell that did the trick. Anything on the recorder itself?” Rey shook his head.

“Hm. Should’ve expected. Let’s head out. I want to try something.” The fox leaped back to her favourite spot on the apprentice as he followed his mentor out of the room. Standing in front of the keypad, Kibo activated his Circulum. He pressed a few stuff on the screen before rotating it with his finger. As the holographic screen and the keypad met face to face, he pressed an icon at the back of the screen and a series of visual codes ran from the top to the bottom. After three seconds, the codes stopped while the screen on the keypad ran crazy for another few seconds before it went back to normal and opened the door itself.

“Bingo.” He grinned, “I’ll explain it to you once we get inside. Don’t want to cause any unnecessary leak.” He then pushed the door open and stepped into the room. Rey ensured no one was watching them before he did it too. The door shut itself at the same time the apprentice had a good glance at the room.

It was pitch black inside. The both of them turned on the ‘Torch’ app and discovered that there was absolutely nothing inside. It was a cubical room of 5 meters at each side. Only the floor was grey in colour while the other five were white. It was strangely hot in there, and Hinoko was definitely getting uncomfortable.

“The bot I encountered had a pack of foreign codes and an instruction injected into it. The instructions only say: ‘Use this in front of the keypad.’ I have to admit, I had no idea what to do with it, until you called me.” Rey listened as he approached the right wall and touched it. He felt a weird sensation. The wall...was warm. He could felt the heat radiating from the wall, but some part of it was not.

“Kibo, turn off the light.” He did as his apprentice asked. The boy also turned off his light but he immediately activated another app. The heat signature app swiftly scanned the entire room and used that data to create a picture. He had to walk around a few blind spots to complete the image. He stared at the image formed and…he couldn’t understand anything. There was indeed a large picture drawn on the walls with heat, somehow. However, there were patches of emptiness preventing the image to be understood.

“We’ve come here too late. It seems like the patches of nothingness were also once have ‘heat patterns’ on them, but it cooled down.” The older Solver didn’t reply verbally and ambled to one of the patches before brushing it with his hand. As soon as he did that, he felt something odd about the wall. This time, he gently feels the surface of the wall, and he noticed there were obscure bumps on it. He took a look at the image formed by the heat signature app again and located the cold spots(not the patches) among the heat image. The spots were there to create contrast.

He compared the sensation of touching the patches and the spots and came to a conclusion. Something was there, on the patches. He informed Rey his discovery and they started examining the bumps. They let their Circulums to inspect this mysterious material. The Circulums showed them a bunch of chemical compounds which Rey doesn’t recognize while Kibo, on the other hand, had a vague impression that he saw this before. He managed to recall bits of information regarding those compounds: it can be found inside a plant.

As he lets the Circulum find a match in the database, Rey wanted so badly to take off his shirt and threw it on the ground. It was so hot in there. He had to forcefully refrain himself not to use his Ingenium to cool his body down. He couldn’t believe how Kibo was able to stay silent whilst wearing that relatively thick suit. In the end, he used a wind spell to cool himself down. He didn’t want to do it initially because he was worried it would affect something on the walls, but he couldn’t take it anymore, and so does his familiar.

“Found it. It’s the sap of the Water Writer. The sap will turn opaque once the right amount of H2O is sprinkled on top of it.” So this is the reason why there was a faint odor. Kibo thought it came from him, or the fox.

Rey knew about that one, “Which strain? How old was it?” “Forest Mist Strain. Six years old. Did you know a mist spell?” “Yes.” “Good. Send me the picture captured by the heat signature app. We’ll be doing some puzzle soon.”

Rey sent the image and cast the spell. The mist slowly came into existence around his body and spread out towards the entire room. The both of them quickly activated their Torch app again alongside the Camera app whilst Hinoko climbed up to Rey’s head and create some sort of fire bubble to prevent herself getting wet.

It was going to be a pain. The mist had to be so thick that they can barely see anything in front of them at the same time they need to see clearly to take photos of the patches. Rey really hopes this would work. The heat spots would dissipate once the mist was up and there will be no way to bring them back to see if there were more secrets hidden in the spots.

After they’re done, Rey retracted his spell and the room was apparent again. After that, they fit the picture of the patches into the empty spaces of the previous image and the complete image was finally presented before them. They then ran the image through a program to ‘clean it up’ so it could be seen more clearly.

The image was a silhouette picture. There was a person, probably a male, with an obvious white dot on his arm, sitting on a chair as he ate the food on his plate. At the background, large glass panels can be seen; below the glass panels were pots of twister-like plants. Although it’s quite hard to notice, shadows cast by objects were also included.

“This is the dormitory’s cafeteria in the Zivot Section.” Kibo recognize those plants in the background. They were hard to forget.

“Assuming we are supposed to find the person in the image, there are no clues indicating when will the person be there, in that position.”

“That is if that person will be there at all. We’ll have to make a lot of assumptions. Hopefully, none of them will be wrong. Ideas?” He had a few, but considering how well their first case did, he wanted to see what Rey would come up with first.

“I would have to assume that this person will be there at that table, every day, during a fixed time period for this image to be a viable clue for the next one. I presume you have the knowledge to locate the spot where this image was showing?” He shifted his attention to the corner of his eye at Kibo for his confirmation. The Demi nodded slightly and his attention went back to the image.

“No Sun in the image...could you zoom in and see if there were shadows in the image?” Rey used both of his hands to zoom in at places he thought might have shadows.

“Hmm...Stop. There, did you see it?” The apprentice only detected the faint shadows on the ‘ground’ when his mentor pointed his finger at it.

“The shadows were closer to the glass panels, so the time the image was portraying is probably around 5 or 6 in the evening. We still have a few hours to go.”

“We better don’t waste it then.” Kibo swirled towards the direction of the door and proceeded to exit the room. When the both of them were in the hallway, the older Solver’s Circulum let out an emergency beeping sound. Once the screen was up, a notification tells him that the code he extracted from the bot was corrupted, which meant they could never return to that room.

“Looks like my Circulum needs some checking. Hopefully, the hacker’s code won’t give me any trouble.” He mumbled to himself as they teleported to the Eintracht gate. The board the train and arrived at their destination shortly after. Although they did not communicate with each other, they automatically knew they should act like they were searching for someone in the cafeteria that would sometimes be late and sometimes won’t. It’s to prevent potential suspicion that would be cast upon them.

They subsequently put an end to their search after an hour and began finding the perfect spot to not only able to observe the mysterious person perfectly and stayed out of his sight, but could also reach him fast enough if he tries to escape. After all that was done, they began to wait. Kibo sat beside a table which was somewhere between the elevator and the location seen in the image. Rey, on the other hand, was sitting very close, only two tables behind their target.

He semi-regretted coming here so early. There were still a few hours until the estimated time. Nevertheless, he ordered some food for him and Hinoko to eat while he continued watching his philosophy video.

During that period of time, he overheard a conversation about a manga series. He kinda wondered why he felt he heard these kinds of conversation so often.

“Hey, listen. I recently read a shoujo manga that was about a girl meeting a boy with a cat head, but only she saw the cat head, nobody else did.”

“That’s weird.”

“Maybe, but it’s also super interesting. Because the girl was an airhead and very innocent, she would sometimes create very intriguing moments. The best thing about this one is that when the plot was getting cliche, like her classmate getting jealous at her for hogging the cat boy, the issue was resolved in a very non-traditional way and nobody had hard feelings for each other afterward. Heck, they even became friends!”

“Hmm. Did the girl managed to see the boy’s real face in the end?”

“Well, that’s a spoiler. Why don’t you check it out yourself?”

The hours passed quickly. Both of the Solvers immediately halted their personal activities and commenced their observation.

To Be Continued.