Eric Turner's first reaction was to dash toward the door. He grabbed the handle, but the door was clearly shut tight. In fact, when he came home yesterday, he had made sure to close it firmly behind him. That wasn’t all—an ingrained sense of caution and insecurity, present since birth, had given him a lifelong habit: every time he opened or closed the door, he would slip a tiny piece of paper, no bigger than half a fingernail, into the crack. Who would ever notice such a thing? What’s more, he would lightly scratch the spot with his fingernail, leaving a faint white mark, thinner than a strand of hair. Even if someone else stuffed a piece of paper into the crack, they would never notice that white mark.

When Eric Turner opened the door, sure enough, the paper fell from the spot with the white mark. This basically confirmed that after he fell asleep last night, no one had entered the room... unless someone was so bold and meticulous that they could spot even the tiniest piece of paper and the faintest white mark in the dark. But could such a person even be called human?

(In other words, it’s impossible that someone swapped out the scrap of newspaper while I was asleep. So why did its contents change? If it changed without any outside interference... could the problem lie with the newspaper itself?)

Eric Turner once again took out the newspaper and examined it carefully. Aside from the change in content, the date on the paper had also changed to today. What’s more, after the date, there was now a string of numbers that definitely hadn’t been there yesterday, but had suddenly appeared today. In front of the numbers were three characters: Causality Points.

“Causality Points? There are over twelve thousand seven hundred causality points in total—what does that mean?”

Eric Turner felt even more bewildered by the origin of this scrap of newspaper and its various contents. Just then, as he was thinking about finding Ethan Brooks and Grace Miller to tell them about the newspaper, the original text on the paper began to fade. Then, the current locations of Ethan Brooks and Grace Miller, as well as what they were doing, appeared on the paper. At the same time, the number of causality points changed, dropping from over twelve thousand seven hundred to over twelve thousand five hundred—a decrease of two hundred points.

“So this is... causality points?”

Chapter Three: Past Lives, Present Life, and Causality Points? (Part Two)

Eric Turner sat motionless on the bed, dazed. After a long while, he finally picked up the scrap of newspaper with trembling hands, but the shudder in his heart was impossible to suppress. This was just too unbelievable, too indescribable!

After all, this was the real world. Everything Eric Turner had ever encountered since childhood, everything he’d learned from proper books and information sources, basically denied the existence of so-called ghosts, gods, aliens, supernatural powers, or any other paranormal phenomena. These things simply couldn’t exist. Even if there were a few phenomena that science couldn’t explain, it was only because science hadn’t yet advanced enough to do so.

Nineteen years of understanding were shattered in an instant, because what lay before Eric Turner was something truly supernatural—a scrap of newspaper that could reveal the future. The significance of this was self-evident. Eric Turner was no fool; on the contrary, he was quite clever. In his eyes, a newspaper that could predict the future was nothing less than the key to controlling the entire world. That’s no exaggeration, because information about the future contains so much—money, technology, human nature. If you could know what would happen even just one day in advance, within a year at most, you could overturn every stock exchange and rake in billions of dollars. And you wouldn’t have to worry about your safety, because with foreknowledge of the future, there would be no way to catch you... unless someone used weapons of mass destruction, otherwise, it would be nearly impossible to kill you!

To control the future is to control the world! And this scrap of newspaper is the key to that world!

At this thought, Eric Turner actually calmed down. He silently stared at the scrap of newspaper, his mind racing with all sorts of related thoughts.

(Calm down... Please, I have to calm down! First, I need to determine the origin of this scrap of newspaper... Who, or what power, gave it to me? Was it a god? An alien? Or some kind of higher power in the shadows?)

Eric Turner stared at the scrap of paper, deep in thought. Absentmindedly, he reached up to rub the bridge of his nose, only to find nothing there. He suddenly snapped out of it, surprised at his own unconscious gesture, but his thoughts kept churning.

(These three possibilities can actually be summed up as one: an untouchable force, something beyond human imagination. So for now, there’s no point in considering it. As for other possibilities, there just isn’t enough information to draw any conclusions. But that’s only to be expected—after all, this scrap of newspaper is already a supernatural object, so its origin can’t possibly be a product of natural science... or at least, not the natural science of this era.)