Meanwhile, in the Library of Nowhere...

Alright, what the heck in a handbasket, Pathos commented while looking over a data sheet she had just finished putting together. Numbers aren't even my main thing and this looks weird even to me.

=Right?!=

At this moment in time, while Alicia and her group were handling a strange material, while Bellona and her group were running into Smoking Mirror and his growing army, and while their Kaijin Lord was in a bidding war against a certain Grafted weirdo, Logos and Pathos were busy collecting all of this information and putting it together into a singular docket for them to process.

However, putting all of this information together had...well, pushed the curators to their mental limit.

Because, as they looked over everything that was happening all at once, it was just one statistical improbability after another.

Running into Smoking Mirror was an inevitable probability.

There was a very high probability that the fragment of a war god would stay local due to either some divinely placed constraint or due to sheer laziness of not wanting to establish a brand new base of power elsewhere.

That stated, the curators assumed that they wouldn't run into the fragment until much later.

Speaking of run-ins, running into multiple past enemies at the same auction house was a one-in-a-million chance meeting by the curators' calculation.

One again, running into Smoking Mirror and his mortal subordinates was a one-in-ten chance occurrence that was inevitable, due to the high likelihood of the bastards still being present on the Dozing Salamander Continent.

Running into Madam Venus, or any members of the Shadow Garden was a one in fifty chance occurrence, considering that they were a global organization and that they had sent a trio of spies who were now working on Zhen Liu's dime.

Lastly, running into Alain or anyone remotely related to Buzza and the Fallen was so low on the probability chart that Zhen Liu had a better chance of pulling ten consecutive SSR characters in a mobile gacha game using nothing but R-guranteed tickets.

In other words, nearly impossible.

However, all that was more likely than the encounter at the Cyan Stone Auction house.

And we're certain that this guy is cultivating that formula?

=As sure as zero means nothing.=

Oh boy...

The merchant at the material auction house was a cultivator of the [Divine Ink Mantra], a weird formula that basically made someone's relationship with reality fuzzy even by [Chaos] standards.

Masters of this formula were able to turn themselves into living paintings that could go through the two-dimensional plane and the three-dimensional plane as easily as one could breathe air.

However, the number of people in the entire world that were compatible with this formula was fewer than the number of fingers on the average person's hands.

Running into someone who cultivated this formula was about…as rare as running into a Bloodliner with a link to a Time-Space Elder Cat.

Huh...

=Pathos? What's up?=

Give me a second...

After making a surprising realization, Pathos began to gather data from elsewhere in the Library's archives and began to combine them into one data sheet.

This sheet, however, dated back to when they first met Zhen Liu and when only one of them had the strength to pretend to be a [System].

The Schrodinger Bloodliner, the [Fate] Cultivator, the [Time] Cultivator, the Otherlanders, the fact that his childhood lover is technically a time jumped princess from one of our previous wards, the fact that he had to fight an imposter who made a literal hole in reality and now…this guy, Pathos mumbled to themselves as they continued to write up a list of all the nearly impossible encounters that Zhen Liu has had over the past few months.

Having any of these encounters as a normal mortal was the equivalent of winning the lottery or flipping a coin and having it land on its edge perfectly.

So the fact that their current Lord was dealing with all of these encounters one after the other was...absurd.

Logos and Pathos had served a myriad of Kaijin Lords over the centuries, but this was the first time they had ever served anyone with such...unusual fortunes.

Alright, that settles it, Pathos concluded after they had written everything down and looked over everything twice. He's either cursed or blessed beyond our understanding to the point of improbable fortune...or...

=Or what?=

We have finally found someone so compatible with [Chaos] that they literally draw in the most chaotic elements possible in the universe like a magnet in a bucket of iron sand.

=But the only way someone like that could exist is if...=

...Meanwhile, a little after Zhen Xing and Zhen Tai reunited with Axer, Alicia, and Harriet...

"So the guy who sold us this weird meteorite isn't related to the Library or [Chaos] in the slightest?"

[No, Miss Goldshire,] Sprocket answered. [Other than the Chaos he picked up from handling the Entropy Ore, I couldn't pick up a lick of anything else.]

"Yeah, as far as we could sense, that guy just had a weird aether formula that neither of us could identify," Zhen Xing confirmed. "Still can't his image out of my head, though."

"Yeah, it was like he was drawn into reality as opposed to being a part of it," Zhen Tai added.

"Hmmm."

A part of Alicia was mildly disappointed that the strange merchant associated with the equally strange ore wasn't a rogue Kaijin or any other enemy of theirs that she could practice her techniques on.

On the other, she was just relieved that their pile of problems hadn't decided to collapse on them quite yet.

Now that they had their answer, though, it was time to move on to other things.

Namely, assisting Axer finishing his other commissions so that he could get on to Alice's commission.

"Alright, since the merchant is probably just a curiosity to be explore later, and because we have other issues breathing down our necks, let's go and return to Axer's workshop so we can get a move on wrapping his commissions."

"Finally!"

"Wait, seriously? You don't want to at least try and tail that guy to see where he goes or if he got more of this stuff" Zhen Tai asked as he gestured towards the [Entropy] ore.

"We don't need to, since there's a very high possibility that dar—Zhen Liu probably already has someone taking the man as we speak," Alicia pointed out.

"That's...fair," Zhen Xing admitted as he recalled the myriad of times Zhen Liu seemed to uncannily know when something was about to go down, and recalling the fact that the Kaijin all had the ability to communicate with one another. "Actually, wait, if he could do that stuff himself, why did we sneak around too?"

"Non-zero chance that Zhen Liu may have recalled the kaijin to deal with some other issue," Alicia answered. "That and because, to paraphrase him, we must be able to do things independently in case things ever goes sideways with him or his powers again."

"I...huh."

Once Alicia made that comment, it had placed a lot of Zhen Liu's past actions into perspective.

Even before being revealed to be a Kaijin Lord, Zhen Liu always made sure to donate a whole lot of goodies he had acquired to the clan as a whole as opposed to hoarding it all and empowering himself with it.

They had assumed that he had done so due to either being incompatible with the stuff he had gifted the clan, or because he knew he could get himself even better goods and that these things were merely the scraps and hand-me-downs he didn't need anymore.

Putting into the perspective though of not wanting to worry about their well-being if something was to happen to him though was...a touch odd.

The man had once been pariah and had no future to speak of.

Now, he here was, worrying about the future of others instead of his own.

It was an equally heart warming and annoying observation to make.

"Wait, if we're going to be reconvening with the others now, shouldn't we at least figure out if they need help first?" Harriet pointed out once the plan had been fully processed by her mind.

"Good point," Alicia capitulated as she directed her attention towards Sprocket.

"Bellona should be with the others and I think you have a line connecting the library to Zhen Liu. Are any of them in any danger we should know about?"

The majin of gears was silent for a moment as they do a quick check of the situations elsewhere.

[Let's see...I think we'll be fine with meeting up back at the forge,] Sprocket eventually answered. [Bellona and company are busy putting on a farce in the face of Smoking Mirror, while the Main Inventory is stifling the desire to choke out a Grafted bastard with a pretty face and no boundaries.]

"...what the fuck did you just say?"