Chapter 22: Below the Thirteenth Step |
The moment his voice fell, Shen Mo had already turned and rushed back to the workbench.
The city's pulse was still faintly trembling, but the venomous chill had indeed become more complex and chaotic with the intervention of Zhang Yuan's echo.
He put on the monitoring headphones, extracted the newly added cry for help from the recording in Chapter 21, and imported it into the spectrum analyzer.
On the screen, a ghostly blue waveform slowly unfolded.
Compared to the voiceprints of Li Zhizhong and the other two, the spectral characteristics of this fourth voice were completely different.
Its fundamental frequency trembled weakly and irregularly, while the high-frequency part was mixed with a continuous, burr-like noise.
Shen Mo magnified the details, his brow furrowed—this was irreversible damage to the vocal cords that could only be formed by long-term exposure to a high-concentration dust environment, like a record scratched by sandpaper.
What was more crucial was the content of the voice.
Amidst the desperate cries, there were some blurry but clearly discernible fragmented words: "load-bearing ratio... M8313... error exceeds limit!" These were not the ramblings of a dying person, but the professional terminology of a technician.
Shen Mo immediately pulled up the entire employee roster of the Hongye Building Materials Company from that year, from official workers to contract workers, and conducted a fuzzy comparison with the voiceprint database one by one.
The computer ran at high speed, hundreds of names scrolling across the screen, but in the end, a cold prompt box popped up: No such person found.
"Could it be that he wasn't on the roster at all?" Su Wanying's voice sounded from behind him, with a hint of calm speculation. "For example, a temporary worker, or a student who came for a summer internship, or even... not a worker at all."
Her line of thought gave Shen Mo a new direction.
He temporarily put aside the voiceprint comparison and instead assisted Su Wanying in retrieving more marginal materials.
Su Wanying's target was the city's meteorological archives from the summer of 1983.
Soon, she made an astonishing discovery.
On the day of the accident, Jiangcheng was shrouded in a rare, exceptionally heavy rainstorm. Twelve consecutive hours of precipitation had brought the air humidity to saturation.
"On a rainy day, the moisture content of wood will soar, far exceeding safety standards," Su Wanying pointed to the meteorological report, her tone grave. "According to construction specifications, it is strictly forbidden to conduct acceptance inspections of wooden structural materials in this kind of weather. This batch of M8313 staircase handrails should not have been inspected that day at all. Unless... someone was very insistent, even forceful, that the acceptance must be completed on that day."
The clues pointed to a deliberately concealed truth.
The two exchanged a look and immediately drove back to the old teahouse where Old Xu was.
This time, Old Xu's condition was even worse than last time.
He was not sitting at his usual window seat, but was curled up in the darkest corner of the teahouse, his eyes vacant, his body trembling slightly, as if he were hiding from something invisible.
Shen Mo and Su Wanying sat down beside him and called his name softly several times before the old man's cloudy eyes turned slightly.
"That day... there were more than three..." his lips trembled, his voice as thin as a thread. "There was also a young man... surnamed Zhao, he was... the chief engineer's son, a university student who came for an internship during the holidays..."
The floodgates of memory seemed to have been pried open a crack. Old Xu's words began to flow more coherently. "That kid was amazing. He could tell at a glance that there was something wrong with the wood. He was going to report it on the spot, to expose it... but he was... taken by the project manager and locked in the construction site's warehouse for a whole night... When he was released the next day, he had gone mad, shouting 'it's going to collapse' and 'the data is fake' to everyone he saw... Later, I heard that he couldn't get over it and jumped into the river."
"What was his name? What was his work number?" Shen Mo asked eagerly.
Old Xu shook his head forcefully, his eyes filled with deep fear and self-blame. "I don't know his full name... everyone... everyone called him 'Engineer Zhao'... we didn't dare to ask, and we didn't dare to say..."
Just then, Su Wanying took out a yellowed, kraft paper-wrapped, handwritten copy of the "City Architectural Annals" from her cloth bag.
She flipped through the pages quickly and finally stopped at one.
In the seam of that page, a long-dried wood chip was tucked.
In the blank space next to the wood chip, there was a line of small characters written in pen, elegant yet forceful: "Zhao Mingyuan, 1983 quality inspection intern, resigned due to 'mental disorder,' not entered into official files."
Zhao Mingyuan. This name was like a key, opening a dark door that had been sealed for forty years.
Shen Mo did not delay for a moment. With his status as a special consultant, he rushed to the underground storage of the city archives overnight.
He wanted to review all the original design drawings and quality inspection reports for the M8313 batch of staircases from that year.
The archivist led him to a dusty corner and pointed to several large boxes of old drawings that were about to be destroyed according to regulations. "They should be in here. Many of them are moldy. Be careful."
He rummaged through the pile of musty old papers for nearly two hours. Finally, on the back of a design verification sheet that had been heavily altered with ink, he found a line of small characters written in pencil.
The handwriting trembled slightly due to the writer's force, but every stroke exuded an unquestionable determination: "Data falsified, wood moisture content 37%, load-bearing capacity less than 60% of standard—Zhao."
The signature was only a surname, but Shen Mo knew that this was Zhao Mingyuan's final testament.
He took out a portable UV lamp from his pocket and shone it on the corner of the verification sheet.
Under the purple light, a few inconspicuous light brown spots on the edge of the paper instantly showed a phosphorescent reaction—they were trace amounts of long-dried bloodstains.
The sample was too small, the time too long, and an effective DNA comparison was no longer possible, but Shen Mo still carefully sealed it in an evidence bag.
This was not just a piece of paper; it was the final cry of a young life, an "information carrier" capable of shaking the echo.
Meanwhile, Su Wanying contacted an old scholar in the folklore society who specialized in the phenomenon of "the unjustly unheard."
On the phone, the scholar told her that there had been a saying of "mute souls" in folklore since ancient times.
It referred to those who had insight into the truth during their lifetime but were unable to speak out for various reasons and died with grievances.
Their obsessions were a hundred times stronger than those of ordinary ghosts because their pain included not only anger towards the perpetrators but also deep self-blame for their own powerlessness.
"I understand," Su Wanying hung up the phone and immediately called Shen Mo. "Zhao Mingyuan's echo may not be repeating 'falling,' but repeating 'being trapped.' His consciousness is forever stuck in that warehouse where he was locked up, witnessing the truth slip through his fingers over and over again, but unable to make a sound, unheard by anyone."
This inference instantly enlightened Shen Mo.
That night, based on the location of the warehouse where Zhao Mingyuan was imprisoned, he readjusted the layout of the sensors and added a high-precision EEG simulation capture device to the west wall of the warehouse—the wall that Old Xu recalled Zhao Mingyuan had desperately slammed against.
At midnight, the instrument reacted.
A highly regular alpha wave oscillation was clearly recorded. Its frequency characteristics were highly consistent with the waveforms produced by the human brain when recalling traumatic events in a waking state in modern medicine.
The truth had come to light.
Shen Mo and Su Wanying decided to immediately restart the burial ceremony to clear the name of this fourth victim.
However, a new bizarre event occurred.
When they invited a stonemason to carve the name "Zhao Mingyuan" on the back of the previous nameless stele, the stonemason had just made the first chisel strike. Before the first stroke of the character "Ming" was finished, the tip of the chisel shattered with a crack.
He changed to a new one and chiseled again. On the surface of the hard bluestone stele, a few blood-like dark red patterns slowly appeared.
The stonemason was so frightened that he backed away repeatedly, refusing to touch it again no matter what.
Su Wanying took a deep breath, took out cinnabar from her bag, and mixed it with the ink used for the inscription.
She walked to the stele and did not force the stonemason anymore. Instead, she dipped her finger in the cinnabar ink and, in a low and clear voice, recited the content of that verification sheet.
"Data falsified, wood moisture content 37%..."
Her voice echoed in the silent cemetery, carrying a strange, soothing power.
When she read the last sentence, "load-bearing capacity less than 60% of standard," with a soft "crack," a fine crack appeared where the blood-colored patterns on the stele surface converged. A drop of viscous, light red liquid slowly seeped out from the crack, like a teardrop shed by the stele.
Shen Mo walked forward, placed the evidence bag containing the blood-stained verification sheet gently into the hole reserved at the base of the stele, and then covered it with new soil.
He stared at the stele and said in a voice that only he and this land could hear, "You weren't crazy... you were the only sane one."
As his voice fell, the crack on the stele's surface stopped spreading, and the eerie red color gradually faded.
The stele stood silently, with no further changes.
The next morning, a miracle happened.
In all the old buildings in Jiangcheng that used the M8313 batch of staircases, the bloodstains on the handrails that had troubled the residents for days disappeared overnight without a trace.
A forty-year-long injustice seemed to have finally come to an end.
However, just as Shen Mo returned to his studio, preparing to archive and seal all the data, his phone screen lit up.
A text message from an unknown number, with only a short sentence.
"They have stopped... but we haven't finished walking yet."
(End of Chapter)