“What is it?” Bowler asked.
“You only need to ask, boss!” The Man said enthusiastically.
Jack took out the box filled up with papers that he had gotten from the infirmary and put it on the floor. The others came forward and looked at it.
“I am on a quest. I need to check out the data recorded on these papers. If you people can help me check them, it will shorten the time needed,” Jack informed them.
“No fighting?” The Man enthusiasm died down immediately. He was never good with this kind of administrative stuff.
“Those are a lot of papers,” Bowler commented with a similar lack of interest.
“There are still another six boxes…,” Jack said.
Everyone was silent as they looked at each other.
“Do we get an issue of system quest like when you handed us the expedition one?” John spoke out.
“I’m not sure,” Jack replied.
“How about you give it a try?” John said.
Jack did so. He explained to them the nature of his quest. About the disease and what he had learned. He then spoke to them formally with the intention of inviting them to his quest.
Nothing happened.
“Well, good luck on your quest then,” John said as he walked back and sat back on the lounge chair.
Unfaithful a**hole! Jack cursed in his mind.
In the end, the ones that were willing to help him were Bowler, Flame, The Man and his entire retinues albeit unwillingly, Jeanny, Viral Cora, and surprisingly Trinity Dawn. Trinity Dawn said she used to be a secretary who was also a file clerk in her real life, so she was used to dealing with such paperwork. The others continued to lounge around in the lobby.
Although Guss had said no outside help, Jack thought that should only be referring to NPCs. Also, the help he requested was only for sorting out information, he did not think the system would be so strict as to have him do everything by himself?
Jack took the willing ones to one of their rented rooms. There were sixteen of them, so one room was too cramped for all of them. They separated into three teams and took three rooms. Jack placed two boxes on the other two rooms, while his room handled three boxes.
Jack told them what to look for and to write down. The patients’ unit within the army, their gender, age, the time and location when they were confirmed to have suffered the disease, what exact job they were doing before then, what food they ate, prior illness. Basically, he was trying to find a common similarity between the incidents.
Jack gave them a ton of white paper to write down on, he had asked them from the friendly healer woman before he left the infirmary. Each paper to note down on the same subject, for example, their age. This way it would be easier for them to spot a similarity between each patient.
There was too much information in the patient’s data, lots of technical stuff as well. Jack told them to just skim the parts. They could not afford to check everything. The ones that had the most difficulty were Men of Solidarity. They were more fitted for grunt’s works. Though The Man was also having a problem, he had to help his boss, so his underlings were not permitted to opt-out as well.
They spent the entire afternoon and well into the night sifting through the papers for information. The Man and his underlings were exceptionally suffering. The Man had thought several times of asking for a time out or outright asking to just continue the next day, but every time he saw how serious Jack and the others were, he was dissuaded. Since he could not stop, he scolded his underlings who had frequently asked for a time out.
John had come and given them a visit. He had this gloating face when he looked at the others who were hard at work. Jack took out his magic staff and shot a mana bullet at him. He seemed to have expected that as he had dashed away before the spell hit.
Before midnight, everyone finally finished reviewing the papers and submitted the reports to Jack. Jack thanked them all for their hard work and promised to make it up with them. All of them said they should be the ones thanking him for had bringing them into this expedition, granting them a massive increase in levels and wealth.
The others went back to their rooms for a rest. Jack was sharing his room with Bowler. Bowler wanted to sleep already but he realized that the light was still on, then he saw Jack who was still sitting on the desk reading through the reports.
“Bro, are you seriously going to read through that tonight?” He asked.
“Not sleepy yet,” Jack said. “You don’t have a problem sleeping with the light on, do you?”
“With how tired my eyes are after reading through that? I can even sleep under a glaring noon sun.”
“Outstanding. Good night, then.”
Bowler stared at Jack’s back for a while more. He felt bad going to bed while the guy was still hard at work. He wanted to stand up and asked him if there was anything he could help with. Halfway through raising his body, he gave up and fell back down to his bed. Too tired, he thought.
The next morning when Bowler woke up, he saw that Jack was still behind the desk. He jolted up and exclaimed, “bro! Don’t tell me you stay up all night?”
Jack turned to him and said, “You think I am superman? I have gone to sleep around one or two hours after you slept. Before that, I’ve found some similar aspects about the patients from the data we separated last night, but couldn’t make a sense of it. I woke up just an hour before and thought of something, so I got up and checked the data again. I think I find a clue.”
“Really?” Bowler’s interest was piqued. He pulled himself up and walked towards Jack.
“What did you find?” He asked.
“I have looked through the data. They roughly had varied data on the subjects we have checked, except for the food, which actually made sense since they were in the military. Everyone ate the same meal provided by the mess hall. I don’t know why I asked that subject to be noted down, wasted time on that. But apart from that, there was another thing where the patients had seventy to eighty percentage of similar data.”
Jack took several sheets of paper that were noted with time and location when the patient found out they had been contracted by the disease. “The locations were varied, but the time periods were similar.”
Bowler took a look at those papers. “Bro, I saw many different time periods,” he said.
“Look closer. See I gave them some marks. I marked them with numbers one, two, and three. Basically, the periods by which they found out they were afflicted with the disease can largely be categorized into three time periods, around 8-9 AM, 2-3 PM, and 7-8 PM.”
Bowler studied the sheets in which they had jotted down the information yesterday. A few patients were outside the time periods Jack had mentioned, but for the rest, mostly they did fall into those three schedules.
“So what about it?” He asked. I don’t see anything special about these time periods.
“They are not, but what about if it was one or two hours before? And what does everyone do that are normally three times in a day?”
Bowler gave the matter some thoughts. He took his sweet time thinking that Jack started to feel annoyed and just said out the answer, “having meals.”
“Oh, now that you mentioned it. Yes, I see. So, it was because of their meals?” Bowler asked.
“If it is so, there will be more people that were infected. There must be another factor, but this meal clue is a good place to start. From what I talked with the soldiers yesterday, there were five mess halls in this town that catered to the soldiers’ meals. There was no information about which hall the soldiers were having their meals in the infirmary papers. We will have to go ask the soldiers ourselves.”
“We?” Bowler asked.
Jack turned to him. “You have other plans to do for today?” He asked.
“Uh, no…”
“Why did I sense reluctance?”
“You must have imagined it. I will be happy to aid you, bro!” Bowler said enthusiastically.
“Let’s go ask for The Man to join as well,” Jack said.
The two of them went to the room next door, which The Man was staying at. But Jack just realized from the radar that there was no one inside The Man’s room. He was just about to tell Bowler but the guy had already barged into the room without bothering to knock. “Rise and shine–” His hearty call stopped mid-sentence, as he saw the room was empty.
