Artifact Report

Chapter 255 Mai Ming River: Finding Jones

Could Jones be one of the six people present?

Didn’t anyone else notice?
Mai Minghe thought blankly for a while, strode around the conference table, grabbed the other two notebooks, and quickly flipped through them. In the second notebook, there was a line of heavy writing: "Action Plan". The tip of the pen almost pierced the back of the paper, and he drew several circles around it.

Jones: An adult, possibly a woman, or at least she thinks she is.

Approximately 5.5 feet (167 cm) tall

Is there a place that can hide a grown woman???
We should not disperse

Divide the third floor into areas, conduct inspections and actions together, and do not disperse
Think of a horror movie.

Pantry

Room 301 (including sample cabinet)

Room 302 (including conference room)

Manager's office

Men's Restroom
Women's Restroom
switch room

Is it a supernatural force? Is it a ghost? Then, isn't it possible that "Jones" takes on a form we can't understand?

Should all human-shaped objects in the company be inspected?
Haha, why not shout to every corner, I found you, and see if that ghost thing will come out

Crazy, crazy, I want to go home
Mai Minghe closed the notebook.

The person who recorded the last stroke tore the paper, and after "I want to go home", he didn't write another word.

...Those that are crossed out with a pen mean that they have been looked for but without any results, right?

She glanced through the glass door of the conference room into the cubicle-lined office. Silence reigned outside, the fluorescent lights seeming to be frozen in time, along with the computer desk, the coat draped over the chair, the trash can under the desk, and the water dispenser in the corner.

It seemed that no outsider had ever entered the third-floor office since the "Search for Jones" began, which undoubtedly proved one thing: in just one day, everyone disappeared, and not even a single survivor was left.

No one has found Jones. Does this mean that Jones is still hiding in a corner on the third floor?

So is the path to the outside world always disappearing?

It seems this is the interview stage the Kai family prepared for the hunters. It's precisely because there's no passage that the standard for successful clearance they set is to return to the first floor gate...

Hunters who are thrown to other floors will probably have different levels.

Although no one knows the meaning of the wooden door mirror around his neck, at least all the clues at present point to one thing: Mai Minghe will continue to "search for Jones."

...Among the six people attending the meeting, who is Jones?

Mai Minghe looked at the names on the whiteboard again.

Patricia
奥修

Leremon
eugene

clean
Laura

The first two notebooks did not record the owner's name, so the only person who could determine that it was not Jones was "Jie".

Osho, Leremon, and Eugene all appear to be male names, so the chances of it being "Jones" are slightly lower, but we can't assume it's definitely not...

In her confused thoughts, Mai Minghe opened the third notebook - she almost immediately realized that this notebook might be the greatest hope to solve the mystery of Jones.

The reason was simple. The owner of the notebook, Eugene, not only left his name on the notebook, but also recorded the entire situation in detail as best he could, just like writing a diary, until he disappeared.

5:15PM
(It’s time to get off work, but we can’t go home.)
(I vowed to write the whole thing down; if Jones could change our perceptions, pen and paper would be the only reliable source.)
Following Osho's suggestion, we searched the office several times, searching every cabinet door, under the desk, behind the sofa, and even the refrigerator.

Osho said that if it was haunted, we should check all the human-shaped objects - and if you think about it carefully, there are so many human-shaped objects in the toy company that it makes you feel uncomfortable.

Although Jie emphasized that the other person was in the form of an adult and could not hide in a toy, we still pinched and cut open each human-shaped toy.

Mai Minghe silently noted in his mind: It turns out that the second notebook belongs to Osho.

In this case, Jai, Eugene and Osho can all be ruled out, right?
Mai Minghe was in the office just now and did not look at the toy samples; but now it seems that if she had gone to look, she would probably find the traces of the toys being dissected left by the missing employees.

She turned the page.*
After checking out the action figures, we returned to the conference room.

Everyone was in despair... Osho was furious, kicking the wall and swearing at "Jones." After returning, Jai sat there in a daze.

Laura cried quietly for a long time, on and off. Patricia, who had tried to comfort her at first, was now pretending not to hear. To be honest, I found her crying very disturbing, too.

Leremon kept trying to analyze the situation, listing several possibilities, and finally said that he thought we were suffering from a collective hallucination—luckily he said "collective hallucination." If he thought we were all products of his hallucination, I don't know what he could do to us.

I've already vomited twice. When I'm stressed, I...

There's no Jones in the toilet either.

*
Mai Minghe frowned and counted the names of the people in these paragraphs.

Wait a minute, including Eugene who is writing, aren’t there six people now?

But it doesn’t seem strange…

"Jones" seems to be able to confuse people's cognition. When facing each other, no one knows that the other person is actually something they don't know at all, or even not a human being.

Then when Eugene recorded everyone's behavior, he would naturally treat the other party as a real colleague - if they could see something wrong just by looking at it, they would have found Jones long ago.

But in this case, can Mai Minghe still find any clues?
*
6: 02PM
To maintain their strength, everyone reluctantly ate what they had in the refrigerator. Judging by the time other colleagues disappeared, we had about two hours left—if we couldn't find Jones, would we meet the same fate and disappear as well?

I dare not think about it.

My stomach turns at the thought of it, and I don’t feel like rushing to the bathroom anymore.

Patricia made a frightening suggestion.

"Did the company originally have so many samples?" she asked.

She is a product designer and has the most experience, but she said that she suddenly found that many of the samples displayed in the company seemed to have never been seen before today.

Could it be that all the missing colleagues... ?
This idea was so absurd that no one said it out loud, but everyone must have thought the same thing. Laura kept praying quietly.

We quickly decided to find the company's product catalog and compare it with the existing samples.

Anyway, I don’t know where to find Jones, so I’m just sitting there anyway.

The samples were a mess from our earlier encounter, so we had to sort them out and compare them one by one with the product catalog. Patricia wrote down what she remembered of the older models that weren't in the catalog.

*
Mai Minghe turned his head and glanced outside the door.

The child's doll she had just thrown out was still in the same position it had been in when it landed, with its limbs scattered and piled on the ground; its head tilted from its shoulders, staring fixedly at the door of the conference room.

...It shouldn't have moved, right?

The faint, fragmented reflection on the glass door vaguely revealed a part of the carved wooden door; Mai Minghe's gaze passed from his own reflection and fell back on the notebook.

*
The result came out.

I don’t know how to understand this result... I was really overthinking it.

The dozen or so colleagues who disappeared didn't join the toy army. Everyone remembered that there were about a dozen or so samples in the office; after checking, there were exactly twenty samples, no more, no less.

With so many items, it was normal for Patricia not to remember or to have remembered them incorrectly. Even Patricia began to doubt herself.

When Osho found out that the sample quantity was correct, he was very unhappy and complained that Patricia was wasting her precious time.

(PS: He also said that my record-keeping was a waste of time. But I think he didn’t like me recording because he didn’t like the feeling of leaving a death message.)
But we soon discovered that out of the twenty samples, none of them were toys produced by the company.

　Sorry, my updates have been very short recently because my health has not been very good. I took iron supplements for two days and there was a slight improvement, but very little. I still have difficulty lifting my phone.

　　It's that feeling of raising your hands into the air for a very long time and then putting them down. Your fingertips are empty, as if there is no blood, let alone strength.

　　I've finished writing the update intermittently, but I don't dare to stop, and I'm afraid that my writing will not be good because of my physical condition...

　　Might have to go see the doctor on Monday.

　　
　
(End of this chapter)