Chapter 8: Who Speaks for the Dead |
The air in the museum was thick with the decaying scent of old paper and camphor, like a well sealed for a hundred years.
Su Wanying, wearing white gloves, ran her fingertips across rows of dust-covered wooden shelves.
Deep in the storeroom, the light was dim, with only the beam from her headlamp casting a lonely halo.
Finally, her gaze locked onto an inconspicuous corner. In a nearly collapsed wooden box, a booklet with a carbonized black cover lay askew.
She carefully lifted it out, blew away the surface dust, and three barely discernible characters written with a brush came into view—"Yiji Hall Funerary Records."
The booklet was so fragile it felt as if it would turn to dust at a touch.
Su Wanying turned the pages one by one, the history rustling beneath her fingertips.
Yiji Hall, a charity from the Republican era that handled the funeral affairs for lonely souls and wandering ghosts who had no one to bury them.
But its business went far beyond that.
These ceramic caskets were called "Proxy Speech Caskets."
Su Wanying's heart suddenly raced.
She immediately checked an old city map, comparing it with the former location of Yiji Hall.
When the two lines overlapped on the map, she felt a chill run up her spine—the backyard of Yiji Hall, after a century of changes, was precisely the eerie river bend in today's Qiwu Li old town.
She forced herself to calm down and continued to flip through the "Funerary Records," her eyes searching for any clue related to the seven pairs of lovers.
Soon, she found it.
The names of five of the seven pairs of lovers appeared in this ledger. Their relatives and friends had all come to the "Proxy Speech Studio" to leave a final "Proxy Speech Casket" for them.
Her fingertips stopped on a yellowed page. The ink there had bled slightly due to moisture, but it still carried a sense of unwilling force.
Trembling, she softly read the record aloud: "In the nineteenth year of the Republic, a female student surnamed Lin threw herself into the river for love. Her sister came to visit, weeping inconsolably, and spoke her last wish on her behalf: to be buried with her beloved Chen in the clear stream, seeking no monument, but only that a single word would not perish."
A single word would not perish. These four words were like ice-coated needles, stabbing into Su Wanying's nerves.
Meanwhile, the lights were blazing in the city bureau's technical center.
Shen Mo stood before a giant electronic whiteboard, on which the timeline of the seven death cases was outlined in red.
Every time the "echo" was activated and a new anomaly appeared on Zhou Zhenguo's body, a seemingly unrelated detail would emerge.
Within a one-kilometer radius of the crime scene, someone would always find an anonymous letter in their mailbox, under their door, or even under their car's windshield wiper.
The contents of the letters varied, all being fragmented farewells, such as "Wait for me to come back," "No regrets in this life," "Don't worry about me," and so on.
The handwriting also varied, sometimes elegant, sometimes sloppy, imitating the tones of different people.
The only commonality was the paper.
All the letters used a type of coarse, pale-yellow, ancient-style paper.
Shen Mo sent a sample to the forensics department. The report came back quickly: the paper was made from a mixture of bamboo fiber and bone glue, a cheap but durable type of letter paper from the Republican era.
More importantly, when the forensics colleagues performed a high-precision fluorescence reaction test on the paper according to Shen Mo's special request, a startling result appeared.
In the fibrous gaps of the paper, trace amounts of a mixed residue of copper ions and the radioactive element Technetium-99 were detected.
The combination of these two substances, like a devil's fingerprint, pointed precisely to the brass cufflink and the stone tablet containing the "echo."
"Team leader, could it be that someone is imitating the deceased and sending prank letters?" a young officer, Xiao Li, speculated.
Shen Mo's gaze, however, did not leave the whiteboard. His eyes were as cold as a scalpel.
"Imitating?" He slowly shook his head, his voice low and clear, echoing in the silent office. "If it were just imitation, it wouldn't explain the residue on it. This isn't someone sending letters..." He turned, his sharp gaze sweeping over everyone present. "It's 'them,' trying to piece together a broken language with the only things they can touch, trying to speak."
As soon as he finished speaking, there was a knock on the office door.
A weather-beaten Old Wu stood at the door, clutching a rusty iron box, his expression a mixture of nervousness and relief.
"Officer Shen," he began, his voice hoarse, "this thing was passed down from my father. He said the last calligrapher from the 'Proxy Speech Studio' gave it to him before he died, telling him not to open it no matter what. I... I used to just think of it as a memento, but after seeing the news, I just feel something isn't right."
Shen Mo took the iron box. It was heavy in his hands.
The lock was rusted shut. He pried it open with a tool, and a musty, sealed smell rushed out.
There was no gold or silver inside, only a neatly stacked pile of proxy speech drafts. The paper was identical in material to that of the anonymous letters.
The ink on the top page had mostly faded, but the line of words was still clear, carrying a kind of fateful prophecy: "If seven voices do not reach the heavens, then borrow the throats of the living to speak for the dead."
Shen Mo's heart sank.
He quickly flipped through the manuscripts. Each manuscript recorded a heart-wrenching last wish, and at the end of each wish, a peculiar symbol was drawn in vermilion.
When he saw the symbol at the end of the seventh manuscript, his pupils contracted sharply.
It was a variant pattern composed of seven fine, curved lines, twisted and struggling, full of unwilling tension.
This was the exact symbol the medical examiner had found carved by Zhou Zhenguo's own fingernails on the autopsy table!
At this moment, all the clues seemed to be connected by a bolt of lightning.
These symbols were not some code to be deciphered. They were signatures, the unique "proof of existence" carved into the real world by those obsessed souls who refused to rest in peace for over a century.
"Qiwu Li," Shen Mo put down the manuscript and immediately called Su Wanying. "We have to go back there."
When the two returned to the old site of Qiwu Li, it was already a ruin after demolition.
The huge tracks of bulldozers had crushed all signs of life.
They searched carefully in the area that was once the backyard of Yiji Hall, based on the old map and their memory.
Finally, under a pile of broken bricks and rubble, they found a dry well, buried by debris and trash.
The mouth of the well was not large. The well wall was built of blue bricks and covered with dense inscriptions, most of which had been weathered into obscurity by time.
Su Wanying found a bottle of water and a wet cloth from the car and carefully wiped the dirt off the well wall.
As the dirt was wiped away, some fragmented words gradually appeared: "buried together," "remembered together," "traceless," "forever follow"... each word was like a sigh.
Shen Mo was not distracted by these words. He used a sampling tool to pry off a well brick and dug some deep soil from the bottom of the well, bringing them back to the lab.
The test results came out in the early hours of the morning, and the conclusion plunged the entire technical center into a dead silence.
The fired clay of the well bricks was mixed with the calcium and phosphorus residue of human bones that had been incinerated at high temperatures.
And in the soil at the bottom of the well, a high concentration of Technetium-99, far exceeding the natural background level, was detected.
The evidence was conclusive.
Remains contaminated with radioactive material had been repeatedly buried here over a long period of time.
Those "Proxy Speech Caskets," those ceramic shards carrying last wishes, had been slumbering here, just like their owners.
Shen Mo looked at the analysis report and inferred in a low voice, as if talking to himself, or as if explaining to those departed souls, "This isn't a cemetery, nor is it a simple charity backyard... It's a 'memory furnace.' Countless similar, intense obsessions were thrown in here, superimposed, and purified. Catalyzed by radioactive material, they finally condensed into the core that we call the 'echo'."
That night, Shen Mo stayed alone in the lab, replaying the surveillance footage of the stone tablet's activation over and over again.
He magnified the image to the extreme, analyzing frame by frame the moment the "eyes" appeared in the black fog.
The image itself offered no more information. He turned his attention to the audio.
He pulled up the complete spectrogram. The screen was filled with chaotic background noise.
But he didn't give up. He threw all his computing resources into noise reduction and filtering.
Time passed, minute by minute. The computer's processor whined under the heavy load.
Finally, after layers of complex noise were stripped away, an almost imperceptible, extremely low-frequency sound wave appeared.
Shen Mo put on his headphones and converted the sound wave into audio.
After a faint hiss of electric current that seemed to come from the depths of the earth, an extremely vague, composite voice mixed with countless human voices, whispered eerily in his ear:
"...Can... you... hear... us...?"
Shen Mo violently tore off his headphones, his chest heaving.
He turned off the audio, stood up, and walked to the window.
Outside was the heavy curtain of night. The city lights in the distance wove into a silent sea of light.
For the first time, he felt that he was not solving a bizarre case, but responding to a desperate, collective cry for help that had spanned an entire century.
Just then, his phone on the desk vibrated crazily, breaking the silence of the night.
It was Xiao Li, his voice filled with suppressed panic and urgency.
"Team Leader Shen! It's bad! Medical Examiner Zhao... Zhao Wan, she's missing!"
Shen Mo's gaze instantly froze. He spun around and rushed back to the computer, his fingers flying across the keyboard, quickly pulling up all the surveillance footage from the entrance of the city bureau building and along the roads.
He stared intently at the screen, the timeline rapidly scrolling, and finally froze on a single frame—it was the last time Zhao Wan appeared on camera.
(End of Chapter)