Chapter 23: He's Not a Ghost |
The bloodshot veins in Shen Mo's eyes were denser than the code on the monitor.
He compiled all the data—on-site surveys, victim autopsies, material analysis, humidity changes—into a massive logical model. Between the nodes that seemed chaotic and disorderly to the average person, a cold clue was gradually becoming clear.
He typed the last word. A document titled "Analysis Report on the Non-Physical Lethal Mechanism of the M8313 Staircase Incident" was generated in the center of the screen.
At the core of the report was his bold "Three Elements of Echo" theory.
First, the medium.
Specific materials, such as the damp wood used in the M8313 staircases, could record strong emotions or events like a magnetic tape, becoming a carrier of memory.
Second, the obsession.
A strong will that was not acknowledged by the outside world and was forcibly interrupted, such as an uncompleted death, would solidify into an existence that was almost like a physical rule.
Third, the trigger condition.
He anonymously sent this report, into which he had poured his heart and soul, to the public mailboxes of the Municipal Emergency Management Bureau and the Construction Safety Association. At the end of the email, he attached a calm and restrained postscript: "This is not a supernatural phenomenon, but a natural phenomenon that has not yet been named."
The response was sparse.
Most recipients classified the email as spam, considering it the delusion or prank of some madman.
However, three days later, an encrypted reply quietly arrived.
The sender was a senior inspector from the Construction Safety Association. The content of the letter was brief but chilling: "We cannot confirm your theory, but we have recently received seven similar complaints, not just about stairs... but also elevators, footbridges, and even the balcony railings of old residential buildings."
Meanwhile, Su Wanying was sorting through a batch of newly donated old items in the warehouse of the city museum.
Her fingertips brushed across the dusty boxes and finally stopped on a yellowed plastic safety helmet.
The side of the helmet was printed with the mottled words "Hongyuan Construction Company," and the production date was clearly 1983.
Out of professional habit, she put on latex gloves and carefully turned over the inner lining of the helmet.
A piece of paper, soaked in sweat and then air-dried, slipped out. It was half of a torn acceptance form. The handwriting on it was firm and powerful, identical to the handwriting of Zhao Mingyuan, the project director of Hongyuan Company, that she had seen in the archives.
The moment her gloved fingertips touched the half of the acceptance form, a strong sense of dizziness suddenly seized her.
Everything before her eyes faded to black and white, replaced by a pitch-black darkness.
The sound of pouring rain was in her ears, and cold rainwater seemed to be flowing down her neck.
The cry of a young man echoed in the empty warehouse, desperate and shrill.
She felt as if she were kneeling on the cold concrete floor, her vision limited to a closed warehouse door. Under the crack of the door, three pairs of mud-stained work shoes flashed by and then disappeared into the darkness.
The scene suddenly vanished. Su Wanying gasped for air, her back soaked in a cold sweat.
She suppressed the churning discomfort, sealed the helmet and the half of the acceptance form in a sterile bag, and immediately drove to Shen Mo's private laboratory.
When Shen Mo saw the safety helmet, an almost fanatical light burst from his eyes.
He didn't ask Su Wanying how she felt. Instead, he directly placed the fiber sample from the helmet's inner lining into the high-precision mass spectrometer.
The analysis results soon appeared on the screen. The data curve was so bizarre it was startling.
An abnormal protein deposit was detected in the inner lining fibers. Some of its chemical components were highly similar to the unknown protein found in the cerebrospinal fluid of the M8313 staircase victims.
But the key was that this protein was not produced by the normal secretion of a living organism. Its structure was more like... a physical precipitate condensed from spiritual energy under extreme emotional stress.
Shen Mo murmured to himself, "Emotional condensate... the traces left by obsession are actually physical."
To verify an even bolder idea—whether the "echo" could be transferred—Shen Mo designed a set of rigorous control experiments.
He took two wood samples of the same batch and material as the M8313 staircases. He marked one as A and placed it next to the safety helmet carrying the memory, letting it sit for forty-eight hours.
The other, marked B, was strictly isolated in a signal-shielded constant temperature incubator.
Forty-eight hours later, the experiment began.
Shen Mo set up high-pressure spray devices above both pieces of wood simultaneously to simulate a high-humidity environment.
The results were shocking.
Sample B only underwent slight physical deformation after reaching the critical humidity.
But sample A, the moment the water mist filled the air, seemed to be pressed down heavily by an invisible hand. The center of the wood visibly sank, and the final sinking depth reached an astonishing eighteen centimeters!
What was even more terrifying was that the laboratory's infrared thermal imager captured a blurry and distorted human-shaped silhouette on the surface of sample A, emitting a temperature lower than the surrounding environment.
Shen Mo turned off the equipment and wrote down the conclusion in his experiment log, his handwriting trembling slightly with excitement: "The echo can 'infect' new qualified media through close contact. Its intensity increases with the increase of the original information density—this is a silent epidemic."
They had the theory and the physical evidence, but how to solve it?
This question weighed on both of them like a huge stone.
Su Wanying buried herself in old papers, trying to find an answer from the dust of history.
Finally, in a Republican-era book recording various strange stories in the construction industry called "The Record of Industrial Tragedies," she found a similar record: "When a craftsman dies unjustly, his resentment attaches to wood and stone, and over time becomes a haunting, called a 'work nightmare.' There are only three ways to resolve it: one is to expose the bones, the second is to clear the name, and the third is to continue the work."
"'Exposing the bones' means finding the deceased's remains and letting them rest in peace. 'Clearing the name' means restoring the deceased's reputation and having their death acknowledged," Su Wanying pointed to the last two words and explained to Shen Mo. "And 'continuing the work,' in ancient texts, means completing the deceased's unfinished business."
Shen Mo's gaze lingered on the words "continuing the work" for a long time. Countless clues connected rapidly in his mind.
Unfinished business... unacknowledged death... stairs that can't be finished... He suddenly looked up, a groundbreaking hypothesis forming in his mind: "The so-called 'unfinished stairs,' it traps people not just in a physical fall, but in the 'unfinished acceptance' process! They repeat it over and over again because their acceptance was never legally completed. To end this cycle, we must 're-walk' it for them once."
The night was as black as ink.
Shen Mo and Su Wanying sneaked into another M8313 model residential building that was still in use.
This building also had residents who had complained about the stairs "feeling hollow."
Shen Mo changed into a set of 1980s-style blue work clothes, holding a "Hongyuan Construction Company Quality Inspection Certificate" with a 1983 date that he had forged based on the half of the paper.
Su Wanying stood guard at the entrance of the corridor. Shen Mo took a deep breath and stepped onto the stairs.
One step, two steps... he walked extremely slowly, each step as if stepping on the pulse of history.
The air was damp and cold, with the smell of rotting wood.
When his foot stepped on the thirteenth step, a familiar, sinister coldness rose from the sole of his foot.
He did not retreat. Instead, he turned on his flashlight, the beam shining on the forged certificate. In a business-like tone, devoid of any emotion, he read out the original acceptance standard clauses, word by word.
Finally, he took out a pen and, in the conclusion column of the record sheet, clearly and decisively wrote: "Unqualified, use prohibited."
The moment the tip of the pen crossed the last part of the paper, a sudden change occurred.
All the voice-activated lights in the entire building instantly lit up, then went out in the same second, flashing crazily several times.
Then, the entire section of the staircase under their feet, from top to bottom, let out a long and painful groan. The sound was like the fibers of wood that had been compressed for decades breaking at the same time, and also like a long-imprisoned soul finally being freed.
The groan lasted for a full ten seconds, and then everything returned to a dead silence.
The next day, the residents of the building were surprised to find that the strange feeling of the stairs, "like stepping on cotton no matter how you stepped," had disappeared. "Walking felt solid."
Shen Mo and Su Wanying quietly retrieved the record sheet at night.
The mission seemed to be a success.
Shen Mo folded the paper, preparing to put it in his pocket, but his fingertips touched a strange bump.
Puzzled, he turned the paper over. His pupils contracted sharply.
On the back of the originally blank paper, a new line of words had appeared at some point.
The handwriting was as if written with ice water, seeping through the back of the paper, carrying a sinister chill.
"Next, it's your turn to walk."
(End of Chapter)