Chapter 10: That Voice Was Breathing for Him |
The whisper of his own words echoed in his mind. The chill didn't come from the outside, but from the abyss named "truth," climbing up his spine inch by inch.
Zhao Wan was placed in the psychological observation room on the fourth floor of the city bureau. It was less a room and more a sophisticated biological data collector.
One-way glass shielded her from outside prying eyes, while inside, from ECG patches to EEG sensors, she was wrapped without a blind spot.
Shen Mo sat at the monitoring console, the stream of data flickering on the screen his only tangible clue at the moment.
2:17 AM.
A piercing alarm shattered the silence of the monitoring room.
Shen Mo jolted awake from a brief, light sleep, his eyes nailed to the main display.
Zhao Wan's vital signs were plummeting—her body temperature had dropped from 36.8 degrees Celsius to 31, her respiratory rate had slowed from 16 breaths per minute to 4. These were signs of impending death.
However, the most bizarre thing was the steady, undulating curve on the right side of the screen.
Her heart was still beating at a regular rhythm, as if mocking all the other collapsing life systems.
How could a person's bodily functions completely shut down, yet their heart continue to work like an independent perpetual motion machine?
This defied all medical knowledge he possessed.
"Open the door!" Shen Mo yelled into the intercom, but immediately realized the authorization process was too slow.
He grabbed the fire axe from the corner and charged towards the observation room's heavy metal door.
With a loud crash, the lock shattered.
The moment he burst in, a wave of icy air hit him.
The air conditioning wasn't on. This chill was pure and physical, as if radiating from Zhao Wan's body.
She lay flat on the bed, her eyes wide open, pupils dilated and unfocused, like an exquisite but lifeless wax figure.
Just as Shen Mo was about to perform first aid, he caught a very faint, unusual movement.
Zhao Wan's lips were moving slightly, a barely audible sound spilling from her throat.
It wasn't a moan, nor was it sleep-talking. It was a tuneless hum.
The pitch was low and unfamiliar, but it made Shen Mo's scalp tingle instantly—the frequency spectrum of this sound had a startling overlap with the background sound waves recorded when the stone tablet in Chapter 4 was activated.
"The contamination is deepening..." He immediately realized the gravity of the situation.
He didn't touch Zhao Wan. Instead, he rushed to the wall and slammed down the emergency brake for the room's main ventilation system.
He had to stop this unknown sound wave from spreading through the air ducts.
After doing this, he took a portable high-precision decibel meter from his investigation kit and brought it close to Zhao Wan's throat.
The number on the screen made him suck in a cold breath: 6 decibels.
This sound pressure was far below the minimum threshold of 20 decibels that humans can hear.
He could "hear" it because his brain, after the stone tablet incident, had become abnormally sensitive to this specific frequency.
But to an ordinary person, this sound simply didn't exist.
It wasn't even being sung by Zhao Wan using her breath.
The decibel meter's sensor clearly showed that the sound source was the extremely subtle, high-frequency vibration of her vocal cords, with almost no airflow involved.
How could a dying person, whose breathing was so weak it was negligible, drive their vocal cords to produce such a continuous vibration?
A cold conclusion flashed through Shen Mo's mind: it wasn't Zhao Wan singing... it was "it," borrowing her vocal cords, turning her into a biological speaker.
He quickly handed over Zhao Wan's physical condition to the arriving medical team and picked up her phone, which was sealed in an evidence bag.
He had a strong premonition that the answer might be hidden inside.
After unlocking it with her fingerprint, he almost immediately discovered an anomaly—the phone's recording app had been running automatically in the background for a full three hours, without either he or Zhao Wan ever operating it.
At the top of the file list, a file named "Untitled 07" lay quietly.
The seventh one.
Shen Mo's heart sank.
He imported the audio file into a professional spectrum analysis software on his laptop.
The original audio track was full of electrical noise and ambient white noise, but after he stripped away these interferences layer by layer, a waveform hidden at the very bottom finally appeared.
It was a clear, 18-second-long hum in the infrasound range.
The software accurately captured its main frequency: 18.7 Hz.
This number made Shen Mo's pupils contract sharply.
18.7 Hz. This was precisely one of the ranges where the human brain's alpha waves are most likely to resonate.
Alpha waves are directly related to a person's state of calm, relaxation, and even subconsciousness.
This infrasound wave was like a key that could directly pry open the door to the human subconscious.
What was even stranger came next.
Hidden within the seemingly smooth waveform was a series of highly regular pulse fluctuations.
This was by no means naturally formed.
Shen Mo immediately activated the Fourier transform decoding module.
A few seconds later, a sequence of dots and dashes was translated into text and projected onto the screen.
It was Morse code.
The content was just three short sentences: "Help me... I'm below... phone not cut..."
Shen Mo suddenly remembered the concept Su Wanying had mentioned during Zhou Zhenguo's autopsy: "speaking for the dead."
He had thought it was just a metaphor. Now, it seemed, it was a literal fact.
This wasn't Zhao Wan's sleep-talking at all. It was an unanswered distress signal, an obsession frozen in time, now being continuously broadcast to an unresponsive world through a contaminated host, over and over again.
He rushed back to his office overnight and pulled up all the missing person case files from the city bureau's unsolved case database for the past three years.
He set two keywords for filtering: "phone disconnected" and "lost contact in basement."
Dozens of cases popped up. He checked them one by one.
Finally, one of them firmly caught his attention.
Three months ago, a woman named Li Li called 110 late at night, claiming she was trapped on the B2 level of an abandoned commercial and residential building in the old city. Her voice on the phone was filled with terror, but the signal was extremely poor and was soon lost.
The subsequent large-scale search and rescue lasted for a week, digging almost three feet deep, but found no trace. The case was eventually shelved as a cold case.
What made Shen Mo's heart pound was an attachment to the case file: a noise-reduced recording of the 110 call.
In the background of Li Li's intermittent cries for help, there was a faint humming sound, which the technician at the time had determined to be "line interference."
Shen Mo immediately imported this audio for analysis and magnified it to the extreme—the subtle pattern of the hum's trailing note and pitch change was identical to the sound wave emitted from Zhao Wan's throat and the infrasound wave recorded on her phone!
He quickly flipped to the list of dispatchers in the case file. When he saw the name, a chill shot from his tailbone to the top of his head.
One of the dispatchers on duty that night: Zhou Zhenguo.
Shen Mo stared at the screen, cold sweat silently trickling down his temple.
The obsession was not only continuing, it was also connecting.
Different "echoes," different victims, were responding to each other through a common "unfinished event," like an ever-expanding spider web.
He immediately called the technical support department of the telecommunications bureau, requesting their assistance in tracing the original call path of that emergency call from three months ago.
However, the response he received made the situation even more difficult.
He was told that due to the comprehensive municipal pipeline renovation in the old city, the old communication lines in that area had been physically cut two weeks ago.
All the original call data was stored in the form of magnetic tapes in the servers of a long-abandoned communication hub in the west of the city.
"Captain Shen, no one has been in that place for almost ten years. To retrieve the data, we need special approval from both the city bureau and our main bureau, and..." the person on the other end hesitated, "the servers there are old-style tape drives, very unstable. The data is likely already damaged."
"Apply for emergency retrieval access for me," Shen Mo's tone left no room for argument.
After hanging up, Su Wanying was standing behind him at some point, holding a freshly printed blood report for Zhao Wan.
"Her cell activity is dropping abnormally, but there are no signs of any known viruses or toxins," she placed the report on the table, her gaze falling on the case file on his computer screen. "You're going to that communication hub?"
Shen Mo nodded.
"I'll go with you," Su Wanying's tone was calm. "Sound is the engraving of time. The ancients used chime bells to record history and horns to transmit military intelligence... If an obsession can really attach itself to sound waves, then every playback, every echo, is essentially a 'soul summoning'."
Shen Mo was silent for a moment. He turned off the computer, picked up his coat, his voice low and firm. "So we can't just find the source—we have to find a way to stop this damn sound from ever getting out again."
An hour later, the two arrived at the overgrown, abandoned communication hub in the west of the city.
The huge iron door of the underground server room was covered in rust, like a silent iron beast.
Shen Mo didn't bother trying to pick the lock; he directly cut the bolt with the hydraulic cutters he had brought.
A cold, damp smell, a mixture of rust, mold, and ozone, rushed out.
The beam of a flashlight cut through the darkness, illuminating rows of old tape cabinets standing silent like a forest of steles.
The air was so cold and damp it felt like you could wring water from it. There was also a shallow layer of water on the floor, its source unknown.
Shen Mo, following the layout map provided by the telecommunications bureau, quickly found cabinet number "N7" in a corner.
He pulled open the cabinet door. A tape box labeled "Psychological Hotline & 110 Emergency Line Backup - 2023Q3" lay quietly in its slot, appearing undamaged on the surface.
But Shen Mo noticed that the entire inner wall of the metal cabinet was covered with an abnormally thick layer of water droplets, as if this was the coldest place in the entire server room.
He reached out his hand, his fingertips about to touch the tape box.
As long as he took it back and sealed it in a signal-shielding box, he could at least cut off one known transmission medium.
Just then, Su Wanying suddenly reached out and grabbed his wrist.
Her touch was light, but her palm was ice-cold.
"Wait..." her voice was extremely low, tinged with a disbelieving suspicion, "Listen."
Shen Mo froze. He held his breath, heightening his sense of hearing to the extreme.
From the depths of the server room, from the thicker darkness that even the flashlight beam could not fully penetrate, came an intermittent hum, almost blending in with the ambient noise.
The sound had the exact same frequency as the one coming from Zhao Wan's throat.
It was as if someone, in another corner of the server room, was also playing this deadly recording on another device.
Shen Mo slowly looked up, staring at the end of the dark corridor—where there should have been no one.
(End of Chapter)