The air in the lab seemed to have frozen, with only the faint hum of the ion probe echoing.
Shen Mo's gaze was locked on the energy spectrum graph in the holographic projection. The peak curve representing the "Technetium-99" element showed a small but clear drift compared to the data file from three days ago.
This was not an instrument error, but a directional, unbelievable migration.
These radioactive residues were slowly and stubbornly seeping from the inside of the stone tablet fragment to the surface at a speed imperceptible to the naked eye.
This scene did not resemble the physical change of an inorganic substance, but rather some imprisoned life struggling to breathe, trying to break through the seal at a microscopic level.
A word suddenly leaped out from the depths of his memory—growth.
In the Zhou Zhenguo case, on the cufflink that caused all the anomalies, there were hastily carved words.
At the time, he thought it was some kind of declaration or mark. Now, it seemed more like an instruction.
These contaminated media were never passive storage devices.
Every time they were activated by an abnormal energy field, their internal structure would undergo a reorganization, an "evolution."
They were learning, adapting. Each awakening made them easier to trigger and harder to completely block.
"Old Wu, I'll have to trouble you," Shen Mo called the resident hydrological observer for the Old Town River section.
Half an hour later, he had changed into a diving suit and was standing by the slightly restless riverbank before the flood season.
The murky river water, carrying mud and sand, lapped against the moss-covered embankment.
Under Old Wu's guidance, Shen Mo avoided the undercurrents and dived into the shallow area where the stone tablet was originally found.
The visibility underwater was extremely poor. He could only rely on a metal detector and his memory, searching the riverbed inch by inch.
Finally, his fingers touched a hard, flat edge.
The thing was buried half a meter deep in the silt. It took him a great deal of effort to dig it out.
It was the other half of the broken tablet.
When he dragged it ashore and washed away the mud with clean water, a line of smaller, more resentful characters was revealed: "If we cannot return together, we are willing to drown together in memory."
When Su Wanying arrived, she saw Shen Mo staring blankly at the words.
"If we cannot return to reality together, we are willing to drown together in memory," she read softly, her face turning pale. "This doesn't sound like a farewell from lovers committing suicide... This is a curse. It's not just recording a tragedy; it's demanding that everyone who sees, hears, and feels this story become a participant in the next tragedy. The 'witness' must become a 'co-deceased'."
Shen Mo's gaze suddenly turned cold.
He immediately had Su Wanying pull up the drowning records for the Old Town River for the past twenty years.
A horrifying pattern emerged: almost every year during the plum rain season or autumn, whenever there was a night with a sharp change in humidity, this specific section of the river would have one or two "accidental falling into water" incidents.
The victims had different identities. The only commonality was that they were either residents who lived nearby and often passed by, or visitors who had shown a strong interest in local legends.
"It's screening for hosts," Shen Mo said, word by word, his voice devoid of any warmth.
He needed to verify a crazy conjecture.
Back in the lab, Shen Mo designed an experiment he called "reverse contamination."
He extracted a small piece of clothing fiber from the deceased Lin Wanqing's belongings, had a stone tablet fragment of highly simulated material and density artificially synthesized, and then implanted this "blank" fragment into the fiber. They were placed together in a sealed environment where temperature and humidity could be precisely simulated.
He adjusted the humidity parameter to the peak value on the nights those drowning cases occurred.
A miracle, or rather, a horror, happened three hours later.
On the surface of the originally smooth artificial fragment, a fluorescent pattern of water ripples, identical to the one on the original tablet, appeared on its own.
The radiation detector issued a faint but clear alarm.
The "echo" could not only be replicated, it could even be "fed," infecting new carriers in a suitable environment.
"If it can be fed, then perhaps it can also be deceived," Shen Mo proposed an even bolder hypothesis: if they could create a false signal that the "ritual is complete," they might be able to induce this obsession into a dormant state, thereby stopping its spread.
The experimental plan quickly took shape.
In a special lead-lined sealed chamber, they used a high-concentration freshwater algae extract spray to simulate the river water environment. Then, through a precise temperature control array, they created two tightly embracing human-shaped heat source outlines in the center of the chamber. They programmed the temperature of these two heat sources to drop sharply in a short period of time, simulating the entire thermodynamic process of "two people embracing and sinking."
The original stone tablet fragment was placed in the center of the "human shapes."
The moment the experiment started, the clear air in the sealed chamber suddenly condensed into a thick white fog, reducing visibility to zero.
High-precision sensors captured countless tiny water droplets gathering and moving on the metal plate at the bottom of the chamber. In just a few seconds, they formed two tightly overlapping human-shaped water stains.
This bizarre pattern remained clear for twelve seconds. Then, the radiation activity reading of the stone tablet fragment, which was the core, plummeted, dropping by seventy percent.
Success?
Shen Mo stared at the data, but felt no joy.
He replayed the high-speed surveillance footage from inside the chamber, frame by frame.
In the last 0.1 second before the two human-shaped water stains were about to disintegrate, deep within the thick, impenetrable fog, it was as if a pair of eyes that could not be explained by the laws of physics suddenly opened and then instantly disappeared.
Shen Mo slammed the stop button, fine beads of cold sweat forming on his forehead.
He muttered to himself, "We tricked it... but who did we trick? 'It'? Or 'them'?"
"Shen Mo, come look at this," Su Wanying's voice held a barely perceptible tremor.
She had been gently stroking the cooled stone tablet fragment and was now pointing at its surface.
Under the deep carvings of the surnames "Lin" and "Chen," with angled light, one could vaguely see the outlines of older, more blurred strokes. They had long been worn smooth by time and water, leaving only ghostly imprints.
This stone tablet was far more than just the story of one pair of lovers.
That night, Shen Mo buried himself in the old papers of the city archives, frantically digging up all historical records about the Old Town River.
Yellowed files, newspapers from the Republic of China era, local county gazetteers... clues were like spider silk, pulled out from the dust of time.
In the past hundred years, there were a total of seven named and recorded pairs of lovers who had committed suicide in the same area of this river.
The earliest case could even be traced back to the warlord era of the Republic of China.
He marked the names of these seven pairs of lovers and the approximate locations of their suicides on the electronic map of the old city.
When the last point was marked, he leaned back heavily in his chair, his breath catching.
The seven red markers on the screen formed a standard, hidden seven-pointed star pattern.
And the very center of this seven-pointed star pointed directly to the now-abandoned prison, built on the site of the old-era nuclear physics research institute.
Just then, his phone buzzed.
On the screen was a photo sent by Su Wanying, taken in the artifact storage of the city museum.
The main subject of the photo was a Qing Dynasty finger-branding clamp used for torture, cold and brutal.
And on the artifact conservation record card next to it, besides a series of routine conservation notes, at the very bottom, there was a newly added note in pencil. The handwriting was elegant, but the content was chilling—"Seven items of the same type, scattered among the populace."
Shen Mo stared intently at the photo, then slowly raised his head to look at the huge, death-constructed seven-pointed star on his own screen.
The finger-branding clamp, the suicide locations, the number seven appearing repeatedly, like an inescapable curse.
This was no longer an isolated supernatural case, nor a cursed tragic legend.
This was a setup.
A massive system, spanning a century, constructed from countless deaths and resentments, now awakening from its slumber.
He closed the photo, his fingertip hovering over the seven points of light on the map. A chill rose from the base of his spine and quickly spread to his limbs.
These names, these locations, there had to be some kind of intrinsic connection between them that transcended geographical location.
He had to find it.
(End of Chapter)