Chapter 25: The Elevator Stopped on a Non-Existent Floor |
The surveillance footage looped silently on the screen.
The cold pixels faithfully recorded everything after two in the morning.
In the study, he himself, the "Shen Mo" who should have been fast asleep in the bedroom, walked to the desk as if sleepwalking, picked up a fountain pen, and then mechanically, over and over again, wrote the same sentence on a white piece of paper.
"We haven't finished walking."
Three times, no more, no less.
The handwriting, with a rigid, inhuman precision, Shen Mo didn't even need to perform a detailed image comparison. Just one glance sent a chill through his stomach.
This handwriting was identical to the echo's text formed from bloodstains and dust on the thirteenth step.
This was not imitation; it was reproduction.
Something was using his body to continue its unfinished "walk."
The data after the video was uploaded was calm, until last night.
Starting from 1:50 AM, a series of abnormal access requests flooded in.
Thirty-seven times. Each IP address was heavily disguised, but the final source, without exception, pointed to the internal surveillance systems of old, near-abandoned buildings in various corners of the city.
They were like an invisible spider web, quietly connecting, collectively spying on him.
What made his scalp tingle even more was the playback log.
At 2:13 AM, at the same time he was unconsciously writing those three lines, one visitor had watched the entire "M8313 Project Simulated Acceptance" clip he had uploaded.
The video progress bar paused at the end for a full thirteen minutes.
The thirteenth minute... Shen Mo's gaze shot towards the desk.
At that exact moment, in the surveillance footage, the fountain pen that "he" had put down rolled off the pen rest without any warning, drawing a long, slanted, and forceful line across the paper filled with words.
The shape was like a sloppy letter, or perhaps a room number.
B4.
Just then, the doorbell rang.
Su Wanying brought the latest emergency report from the museum. Her face was as pale as the document in her hand.
"The situation is not good," she said bluntly, her voice low. "The 'emotional condensate' in the safety helmet... has spread."
She spread several high-resolution photos on the table.
What was originally just a faint residue on the inner lining fibers had now spread across the inner wall of the sealed glass display case like a living thing, forming an intricate network of tiny cracks.
"We compared the topology of the crack network with the original design drawings of the M8313 staircase," Su Wanying pointed to another document, a colorful analysis diagram of wood stress distribution. "Look, the structure is strikingly similar. It's not spreading randomly. It's replicating... not just the deceased's memory, it's replicating the 'rules' of that space."
Shen Mo's heart sank.
A bold and terrifying guess formed in his mind.
If an echo could replicate rules, could it, like a virus, infect other similar "hosts"?
"Wanying, check the city construction committee's recent public notices."
A few minutes later, the answer appeared on the computer screen.
In the past week, there had been three similar police reports, all pointing to the same location—the old Xinhua Department Store building, which was about to be demolished.
The content of the reports sounded like an urban legend: when taking the freight elevator, an extra floor would appear.
"Xinhua Department Store..." Su Wanying murmured, quickly pulling up the information. "The design institute is the same. The architectural drawings for the M8313 batch of staircases and the Xinhua Department Store were done by the same chief designer."
The mystery was solved.
The echo was, with its own logic, finding and "infecting" buildings of the same origin.
It was expanding.
Shen Mo immediately applied to enter the Xinhua Department Store under the pretext of a "pre-demolition structural safety review."
The project manager, Engineer Zheng, a middle-aged man with an impatient face, showed strong resistance over the phone.
"Review what? The elevator system was shut down long ago. For safety, the power has been cut. You researchers, don't come and cause trouble." Engineer Zheng's voice was rough and firm. "And don't believe those boring police reports. This building only has two basement levels for storage. There's no B3, let alone a B4."
Zheng's denial only made Shen Mo more certain.
He didn't argue further. After hanging up, he drove directly to the scene.
Using the excuse of checking the fire escape, he easily bypassed the security guard and found the maintenance entrance to the elevator shaft.
A cold iron ladder extended into endless darkness.
Shen Mo turned on his headlamp and slowly descended along the shaft wall.
The air was filled with the old smell of machine oil and dust.
After descending about fifteen meters, his light beam caught something unusual.
On the smooth concrete shaft wall, there was an extremely regular outline of a doorway that had been sealed with new cement.
At the edge of the doorway, a few mottled fragments of red paint were faintly visible in the light—it was the uniform paint color of the "Night Market Golden Street" counters in the state-owned department stores of the 1980s.
There used to be a door here.
Shen Mo took out a can of fluorescent spray and evenly coated the wall around the sealed doorway.
Then, he turned off his headlamp and switched on his handheld UV light.
Under the eerie purple glow, a horrifying scene appeared.
From his position on the third level downwards, lines of previously invisible floor markers seeped out from deep within the cement, glowing like will-o'-the-wisps.
B3, B2, B1, G, 1...
These markers didn't seem to be covered, but rather "completed" by a reverse flow of time.
The space was growing from a non-existent "future" towards the known "past."
To verify the "doubt-trigger" mechanism he had been pondering for a long time, Shen Mo returned to the ground floor. Together with Su Wanying who was waiting there, they managed to connect the freight elevator's backup power.
Inside the elevator car, the atmosphere was heavy.
Shen Mo looked at Su Wanying and deliberately said in a loud, disdainful tone, "This building doesn't even have a B3. The so-called B4 is just nonsense."
As soon as his voice fell, the elevator jolted violently, then let out a teeth-grinding metallic screech and plummeted!
The emergency braking system didn't react at all.
However, the high-precision accelerometer in Shen Mo's pocket showed a bizarre data curve—it was not in free fall.
After falling about 6.8 meters, the entire elevator experienced a 0.7-second levitation pause, as if held up by an invisible hand.
In that instant of pause, the previously unlit floor display screen lit up with a "hiss," and two crimson characters appeared: B4.
The elevator doors slid open smoothly.
Outside the door was not a basement, but an airtight room.
The room was filled with all kinds of old-fashioned radios. Hundreds of speakers were simultaneously playing the same news recording. A hoarse male voice echoed in the small space:
"...The city's rectification work on the individual economy is progressing steadily. Illegal vendors who occupy the road and affect the city's appearance will be resolutely banned..."
Su Wanying's breath caught. "I've checked the records. This is the local news broadcast from the evening of April 17, 1983. That was the day the underground night market at Xinhua Department Store was permanently sealed off."
They didn't stay long, quickly retreating from the strange space.
Back in the car, Shen Mo immediately pulled up the last call recording of the missing maintenance worker, the last call he made to the dispatch center before he disappeared.
Shen Mo imported the audio into his computer, filtered out the electrical noise, and amplified the background sound to its limit.
Amidst the maintenance worker's panicked cries, an extremely faint and brief sound was captured.
A newborn's cry, lasting less than 0.3 seconds.
Shen Mo's whole body trembled. He suddenly remembered a long-forgotten local rumor about Xinhua Department Store that Su Wanying had mentioned before—when the underground night market was sealed off, a pregnant vendor who was about to give birth went into premature labor in the chaos, and both mother and child died.
The clues connected.
He immediately compared the fragmented original construction drawings of Xinhua Department Store with the scanned copies downloaded from the urban construction archives database.
The drawings had been modified many times, covered in red and blue pencil marks.
Finally, in the corner of a B3 level ventilation duct design drawing that had been altered beyond recognition, he found a line of small pencil writing that had been almost worn away.
"B3 Night Market, Stall 87, pregnant woman Chen XX, emergency medical record archive number: M19830417."
He had found the source.
The core of that echo was not a cold building, but the despair of a mother and her unborn child.
Shen Mo immediately picked up his phone and dialed the night duty number of the city archives, wanting to verify that number.
On the other end of the line, there was only a long, dead busy tone.
Just as he was about to hang up, his phone screen suddenly lit up, and a new text message popped up.
The sender's number was a string of garbled characters.
The content was only one sentence.
"The record you want to check... see you in the archives at three tonight."