In the forensic center's conference room, the air was so heavy it felt like water could drip from it.
Dr. Huang, a renowned authority in the field of anatomy, sat with his arms crossed, leaning back in his chair. The gaze behind his glasses was filled with disdain and arrogance.
He had just spent nearly twenty minutes elaborating on his final conclusion regarding Lin Wanqing's cause of death—"Psychogenic Dissociative Disorder," a term that sounded incredibly professional.
"To put it simply, it's 'psychological drowning'," he pushed up his glasses, his voice particularly grating in the quiet room. "Under extreme grief and self-blame, Lin Wanqing's cerebral cortex malfunctioned, triggering erroneous nerve signals that simulated the physiological experience of drowning and asphyxiation. This led to a complete collapse of her autonomic nervous system, and ultimately, cardiac arrest. There have been extremely rare clinical cases of this, which can be fully explained by existing science."
He paused, his gaze sweeping over Shen Mo, who sat opposite him, a sarcastic curve playing on his lips. "As for the so-called 'virtual waters' and 'obsession echoes' proposed by Consultant Shen... forgive my bluntness, but that sounds more like a well-packaged modern ghost story than a rigorous forensic report."
A wave of suppressed whispers rippled through the conference room.
Dr. Huang's theory was unassailable. It attributed all unexplainable phenomena to the victim's own brain, making it both scientific and safe.
Faced with the blatant ridicule, Shen Mo's face showed no extra emotion.
He was neither angry nor eager to defend himself. He simply picked up the remote and pressed the play button on the projector.
"Dr. Huang," he began, his voice not loud, but it instantly silenced all other noise, "let's watch a video."
The screen lit up, displaying the monochrome tones of infrared thermal imaging.
The camera was aimed at the special sealed evidence box containing the stone tablet fragment.
The box was placed in a completely dry, constant-temperature isolation environment. Various physical parameters were stably displayed in a corner of the screen.
Time ticked by. Suddenly, everyone held their breath.
Under the capture of the infrared lens, the cold metal surface of the sealed box began to show subtle temperature changes out of thin air.
Little by little, piece by piece, tiny bright spots quickly connected into lines, then converged into a flow.
It was as if countless invisible water droplets were condensing on its surface, eventually forming a fine curtain of water that slowly slid down from top to bottom.
The entire process was clear, bizarre, and irrefutable.
This curtain of water lasted for a full seventeen seconds, then vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, without a trace.
Shen Mo turned off the projector. The conference room was dead silent.
He slowly stood up, his calm gaze meeting Dr. Huang's stunned and dazed eyes, and said, word by word, "A hallucination does not change the physical state. This water has a source."
For the next seventy-two hours, Shen Mo and Su Wanying practically lived in the lab.
They re-combed all the data related to the stone tablet fragment, trying to crack its "activation" code.
A massive stream of data scrolled across the screen. Finally, three key thresholds were confirmed.
"The humidity must be above ninety-seven percent, near saturation," Su Wanying pointed to an environmental data comparison chart, her eyes shining with excitement. "And the ambient sound intensity needs to reach over sixty-five decibels, with the audio spectrum concentrated in the low-frequency range of around one hundred hertz—this is highly consistent with the ambient sound of a thunderstorm."
"And the time," Shen Mo added, his finger landing on the calendar. "The time of the phenomenon's occurrence is infinitely close to the anniversary of Lin Wanqing's drowning. Emotion, environment, time... it needs a perfect resonance chamber."
Based on this model, they accurately calculated the next high-risk window: three days later, in the dead of night, between 23:15 and 23:32.
A short seventeen minutes.
"Whether the 'echo' is diffusive is the key," Shen Mo's gaze was as sharp as a knife. "We need to verify it."
He immediately submitted an application to transfer the dangerous stone tablet fragment to a decommissioned biochemical laboratory building in the suburbs.
It had independent isolation chambers and monitoring systems, making it the perfect place for high-risk experiments.
The police set up a tight cordon around the perimeter to ensure nothing went wrong.
At Shen Mo's special request, three sets of special equipment were installed in the isolation chamber: a high-frequency sound wave blocker capable of instantly releasing strong interference waves, an industrial-grade powerful dehumidification system, and most importantly—a special floor coating covered with military-grade fluorescent developer.
This coating was extremely sensitive to liquid. Even the weight of a single drop of water was enough to make it emit a visible fluorescence.
What he wanted to capture was the invisible "virtual water trail."
The night before the experiment was scheduled to begin, Shen Mo's phone suddenly rang.
The caller ID showed Zhao Wan.
"Con... Consultant Shen..." the voice on the other end was trembling uncontrollably, filled with sobs and extreme fear. "I... I dreamed of her... I dreamed of Wanqing..."
Shen Mo's heart sank.
"She was standing by my bed, soaking wet, dripping water, her lips were purple... She didn't do anything, just looked at me, and said only one thing... She said, 'It's your turn to go'." Zhao Wan's voice was hoarse with fear. "When I woke up, I found... I found the condensation pipe of my bedroom air conditioner was somehow clogged, the corner of the wall was covered in mildew, and the hygrometer in my house... the reading just keeps climbing, it won't stop!"
"Stay where you are, don't move, I'm on my way!"
Shen Mo practically bolted out of the lab.
When he arrived at Zhao Wan's house, a wave of cold, damp air hit him.
He rushed straight into the bedroom and, in the spot Zhao Wan had described as "the corner of the wall," he immediately saw a photo frame on the bedside table.
In the photo, Zhao Wan and Lin Wanqing were smiling, locked in a close embrace.
Shen Mo picked up the photo frame. The moment his fingers touched the back panel, he felt a very subtle, gritty texture that didn't belong to wood.
He carefully pried open the back panel. A fingernail-sized piece of grayish-black gravel was embedded in the interlayer of the wood.
Its composition was identical to that of the memorial stone tablet.
A terrifying inference formed in Shen Mo's mind: at some point in the past, Zhao Wan must have unintentionally touched the stone tablet fragment that was in evidence.
And now, the "echo" was using her as a new node, silently carrying out a secondary transmission through a strong emotional connection.
On the night of the experiment, at 23:00 sharp.
Shen Mo and Su Wanying sat in the monitoring room of the abandoned laboratory building. Dozens of screens provided a complete view of everything inside and outside the isolation chamber.
At 23:13, a sudden change occurred.
The temperature and humidity readings inside the isolation chamber began to climb in sync, the needles jumping upwards at a speed that defied the laws of physics.
At the same time, a faint "shushing" sound came from the speakers connected to the high-sensitivity microphones, as if water was gathering in pipes.
At 23:18, on the monitor screen, the pitch-black floor of the isolation chamber suddenly lit up with a patch of eerie green fluorescence!
A complete, human-shaped wet footprint appeared out of thin air on the floor.
Then came a second, a third... The glowing footprints, step by step, clear and firm, walked towards the sealed box containing the stone tablet fragment in the center of the room.
At the exact same moment, Shen Mo's backup phone vibrated. It was an urgent message from the officer monitoring Zhao Wan's residence: an unexplained, brief power fluctuation had occurred in the target's residential complex. On the surface of the bathroom mirror in Zhao Wan's home, a line of words had condensed in the steam.
"This time, it's your turn to sink."
"Activate interference!" A cold glint flashed in Shen Mo's eyes as he gave the decisive order.
A piercing high-frequency sound wave instantly filled the entire isolation chamber.
On the screen, the moment the sound wave started, the fluorescent footprints seemed to be violently squeezed by an invisible hand. They twisted and deformed sharply, and finally, at the nineteenth second, they completely disintegrated into a scattered patch of light spots, which then quickly dimmed.
The temperature and humidity in the chamber also dropped abruptly, returning to normal.
Shen Mo immediately ordered a replay of the recording, slowing it down to the lowest speed.
He stared intently at the screen. A detail made his pupils shrink—in the final moment before disintegration, the watermark representing the "foot" was suspended in mid-air. It had not actually taken that final step.
It was as if the ritual of obsession had been interrupted at the most critical moment. It had failed to reach its target, but it had not disappeared. At the moment of interruption, it was still unwillingly searching for the next foothold.
Afterward, Shen Mo integrated all the data and observation reports and formally proposed his "Emotional Medium Environment" three-element theoretical model.
"Obsession, or intense emotion, is the fuse," he said, looking out the window at the clear night sky, washed clean of the gloom, his voice low and powerful. "A durable object capable of carrying this energy is the medium carrier. And a specific physical environment is the trigger."
He turned to Su Wanying. "It's trying to complete some kind of ritual we don't yet understand... and we just successfully interrupted it once. But that also means it has memorized our method of interference."
Su Wanying didn't answer immediately. She was engrossed in a pile of local gazetteers and ancient texts borrowed from the library, her fingers flipping through the pages rapidly.
Suddenly, as if she had thought of something, she looked up sharply, her eyes holding a new, chilling conjecture.
"Shen Mo," her voice was a little dry, "have you ever thought... is it possible that some 'echoes,' or things like it, before finding the set of rules we now know, might have... failed countless times, and evolved countless times?"
Shen Mo's gaze froze.
Su Wanying's words were like a key, opening a door in his mind he had never touched before.
Evolution... if a non-living entity knew how to evolve, then the carrier it relied on, that seemingly ordinary stone, how could it possibly be just an ordinary rock?
A sufficiently complex system would inevitably require equally complex hardware to support it.
They had been focused on analyzing the "rules" of the phenomenon, but they might have overlooked the "foundation" on which the rules existed.
His gaze slowly moved to the latest composition analysis report of the stone tablet fragment on the table.
The dense symbols and data of the elements seemed to come alive at this moment.
Perhaps the answer had been hidden there from the very beginning, hidden in the most basic physical composition, just overlooked by all of them.
He had to re-examine it, from the level of every single atom.
(End of Chapter)