Ding ding ding! Welcome, young successor, to this detective game that pulls back the curtain on Astropolis's darkest secrets. Much like Tousled Detective's classic spin-off novel series Tousled Adventure Crew, I split the clues I've gathered into two parts. Only those who complete both trials will earn the right to inherit my work. Of course, this is also an opportunity, a last chance to turn back before you learn the truth and find yourself with no way out.
During the recent Irontomb incident, a frontier fortification vessel known as the Tartarion was destroyed, and a massive number of casualties were transferred to Astropolis. Even with medical support provided by the Technology Department, nearly a hundred individuals ultimately succumbed to their injuries. What makes this all the more unsettling is the ghost conversion rate among the deceased: a staggering 100%.
As the investigation deepened, more and more things began to surface:
1. Beginning five years ago, imagenae, creatures that should have been exclusive to Planarcadia, started appearing in Astropolis. This breakthrough is said to have originated from an experiment conducted by the Technology Department. Around the same time, ghosts began to appear in Astropolis.
Based on data gathered from Planarcadia, ghosts are born through a mechanism that sets them apart from other imagenated life, and a highly unusual one at that. In the absence of human intervention, the only plausible conclusion is that somewhere within Astropolis, there exists a device capable of simulating a Phantasmoon from Planarcadia, one that radiates outward, driving the excitation and anchoring of Wishpower. Furthermore, this experiment remains ongoing.
2. After ghosts began appearing in Astropolis on a significant scale, the Talent Motivation Department established the "Postmortem Employment Center." Over the following five years, the conversion probability of employees who died in Astropolis turning into ghosts increased by 12 times.
Ghosts have become the cheapest labor resource in Astropolis, exactly the kind of "talent" the Talent Motivation Department is looking for.
3. Tartarion, the most heavily damaged fortification vessel in the battle against Irontomb, received a substantial sum of funding from an unknown source prior to its deployment. Subsequently, each crew member was also compensated with a payout far exceeding standard decommissioning benefits.
Speculation One or more departments, driven by vested interests, have been artificially inflating the ghost conversion rate to make ghosts serve the IPC's purposes. But since ghost creation necessarily involves death, this mechanism is extremely difficult to quantify, at least not openly. So, if the ghost experiment requires a large number of samples, could there be a possibility of deliberately manufacturing massive numbers of casualties?
P.S. The food at that new Xianzhou place upstairs is pretty good.