Chapter 13: Don't Look at It |
The breathing sound from the phone receiver, heavy and sticky, lasted for a full seventeen seconds in the dead silence.
Then, as if cut by an invisible pair of scissors, the sound abruptly stopped.
Without a moment's hesitation, Shen Mo yanked the power plugs of all communication devices in his office, his movements as swift as if he had practiced them countless times.
He grabbed the black marker on his desk and wrote three lines on the smooth surface, his handwriting steady, the force penetrating the tabletop.
I heard.
I am not a dispatcher.
I have no unfinished responsibilities.
This was his "breakwater," the final psychological anchor to resist the invasion of his mind by those intangible things called "echoes."
After doing all this, he finally raised his head, his gaze directed at the sea of city stars formed by countless lights outside the window.
Soon, a clear outline emerged.
The six phone booths with their red indicator lights on were not randomly distributed. They followed the course of the Old Town River, precisely forming an irregular hexagon around a central point.
And that center was the long-ruined old site of Qiwu Li.
Shen Mo's fingertips gently tapped on that central point on the screen, his expression growing grave.
This was not an unconscious spread; this was "drawing a boundary." A massive ritual, with obsession as the pen and the city as the paper, was quietly beginning.
At three in the morning, on the other side of the city, a piercing alarm shattered the tranquility.
In the Jinxiu Yuan residential complex in the west of the city, a male resident was found collapsed in front of the dressing mirror in his bedroom, with no signs of life. The cause of death was unknown.
The city bureau received the report. The experienced old officer, Wang Jianguo, volunteered to lead the team to the scene.
The on-site surveillance footage was chilling. The deceased in the video stared motionlessly at the mirror for a full half hour, as if his soul had been captured, his behavior extremely bizarre.
Wang Jianguo didn't believe in such things. He thought it was just a hallucination caused by some new type of drug or psychoactive substance.
To dispel the superstition and to calm the residents of the complex, he decided to personally stand guard at the scene overnight.
However, six hours later, his replacement colleague found Wang Jianguo collapsed in front of the mirror in almost the exact same posture as the first victim.
After being rushed to the hospital, he was diagnosed with a sudden massive cerebral hemorrhage and died after rescue efforts failed.
The forensic autopsy report cast an even more supernatural shadow over the case: the micro-vessels inside Officer Wang's eyeballs showed a strange radial rupture, as if they had suffered an unimaginable extreme visual impact in a very short period of time.
In his duty logbook, they found the handwriting on the last page, sloppy and twisted, filled with endless fear: "The person in the mirror... moved half a second before I did."
When Shen Mo arrived at the crime scene in Jinxiu Yuan, the air was still filled with the cold smell of police tape and disinfectant.
He bypassed the officers who were still busy collecting evidence and, at first glance, locked onto the antique mirror that had caused the incident.
An oval frame, with peeling gilt edges. The main wooden frame was a deep brown, its surface covered with fine, scorched black marks, as if licked by flames.
It stood there quietly, like a silent observer who had seen all the joys and sorrows of life.
Shen Mo took out a pair of special polarizing lenses from his investigation kit, put them on, and slowly approached.
He didn't look at the strangely smooth mirror surface. Instead, he took out a UV investigation lamp from his pocket and carefully scanned the seam between the frame and the mirror.
Under the light of a specific wavelength, some faint carbonized marks appeared in the seemingly ordinary wood grain.
The shape of the marks was very special, not like natural scorching, but more like the small handprint of a child pressed on with all their might.
He quickly took a photo, encrypted it, and sent it to his partner at the forensic center, Su Wanying.
In less than ten minutes, Su Wanying's call came through, her voice tinged with suppressed surprise. "Shen Mo, you were right. I compared it with the data in the local gazetteer archives. The source of this carbonized wood points to one place—the 'Yuying Orphanage,' which was completely destroyed in a fire in the 1960s."
On the other end of the line, Su Wanying paused, as if flipping through something, then continued, "And more importantly, in the appendix of a Republican-era 'Yiji Hall Funerary Records,' I found a very vague record related to this mirror. It says: 'A teacher self-immolated in front of a mirror, lamenting: The world sees me as a villain, but does not see that I pushed the door thirty-seven times when the fire started.'"
Shen Mo's pupils contracted sharply.
He understood.
This was not a simple case of a vengeful ghost's revenge. This was the backlash of an obsession that had spanned more than half a century, after an identity was erased by history and a good deed was covered up by rumors.
That teacher was perhaps not the arsonist, but a hero who saved people.
But no one believed him.
His thoughts raced. He immediately pulled up all the surveillance footage from the first victim's home.
In an inconspicuous corridor surveillance video, he found that the deceased had hired someone to do a small repair on this antique mirror before his death.
In the video, the repairman handed the deceased a repair order, and the deceased signed it.
Shen Mo froze the frame, zoomed in, and zoomed in again, until the handwriting of the signature on the repair order became clearly visible.
With just one glance, the blood in Shen Mo's veins seemed to freeze.
That signature, whether it was the force of the pen, the habit of turning, or the small hook at the end of the stroke, was highly similar to the signature of Zhou Zhenguo that he had just seen on the psychological hotline duty record.
A terrifying thought exploded in his mind.
These "echoes" were not isolated individuals!
They were connecting with each other through some unknown media, through those "unanswered obsessions," forming a "network of resentment" that was quietly spreading across time and space.
Zhou Zhenguo was a node. This mirror was another new node!
"Seal it immediately!" Shen Mo's voice was devoid of any emotion.
He directed the on-site personnel to carefully place the mirror in a special double-layered anti-reflection sealed box.
Just a second before the lid of the box was closed, he glanced at the smooth metal inner wall of the box out of the corner of his eye.
In that less than half a second, he clearly saw the reflection of a person in the box wall—the reflection of himself in a white coat—the corners of its mouth slightly raised in a strange smile.
That movement was a few tenths of a second faster than any of his own expressions.
Back at the forensic center, the sky was already beginning to lighten.
Shen Mo immediately designed a delayed observation experiment.
He took the mirror out again and set it up in a fully enclosed observation room. A high-speed camera capable of capturing 120 frames per second was aimed at the mirror surface. At the same time, the real-time footage and the footage delayed by a precision instrument by 0.1 seconds were displayed side-by-side on a screen outside the observation room.
He and Su Wanying waited quietly in front of the screen. Time passed, minute by minute.
Three hours later, a massive data analysis report was generated.
The results sent a chill down their spines—all the subtle movements of the reflection in the mirror appeared, on average, 0.3 seconds earlier than the real-time camera lens.
And when it came to facial muscle expression changes, the lead time was even more obvious.
Shen Mo stared intently at the two images on the screen, which were almost indistinguishable to the naked eye. His voice was low and hoarse, as if he were talking to Su Wanying, and also to himself, "It's not reflecting... it's rehearsing. Whoever looks at it for a long time, it 'becomes' them in advance."
Su Wanying's fingertips were ice-cold. She flipped through the yellowed "Yiji Hall Funerary Records" she had borrowed from the city archives and finally, in the crevice of a page, found a line of almost faded small characters written with a brush, a warning left by the person who had collected this mirror back then: "Do not gaze at this mirror for long. Seven minutes is the limit."
Seven minutes.
The two looked at each other, and they could both see the chill in the other's eyes.
Officer Wang had stood in front of the mirror for a full six hours.
Shen Mo's gaze moved from the cold experimental data to the enlarged and printed repair order brought back from the crime scene.
The signature, identical to Zhou Zhenguo's, now seemed like a burning brand in his eyes.
The network of resentment had been spread, and the person who repaired this mirror was the key node who had personally woven and transmitted this great net.
He picked up the repair order, his fingertips gently stroking the signature.
Now, he needed to find this person.
(End of Chapter)