On the other end of the phone, Su Wanying's breath hitched for a moment, then turned into a sharp gasp.
Soul-Guiding Piles. The term was like an ice-coated key, instantly unlocking her entire knowledge base of folklore and ancient rituals.
Piles were markers that defined a field; soul-guiding was a medium for directional summoning.
Seven seemingly unrelated artifacts, given coordinates spanning a century, linked the deaths of seven pairs of lovers into a ritual chain pointing precisely to the future.
"If they really are Soul-Guiding Piles," Su Wanying's voice trembled slightly with shock, "then these artifacts are no longer simple 'Object Corrosion' samples. They are... living media. Qiwu Li is the eye of the formation, the Still Wet Blade is the opportune time, and these piles are the switches that activate the ritual."
"A super-long cycle ritual lasting over ninety years," Shen Mo's voice was as cold as a scalpel. "We only have forty-six days to dismantle a killing machine that has been operating for nearly a century."
Hanging up the phone, Shen Mo turned to face the mobile command vehicle temporarily set up downstairs from the apartment building.
Inside the vehicle, several technicians were whispering to each other, looking at the jumping data and thermal images on the screen, their faces a mixture of confusion and awe.
The moisture-absorbing gel plate embedded in the wall had been carefully removed and sealed in a constant temperature and humidity evidence box.
On the wall of the box, a photo of the blurry handprint that had lasted for eleven seconds was enlarged and projected onto the main screen—a slender, female five-fingered print, as if pressed silently from another dimension onto the glass separating the two worlds.
A technician reported, "Captain Shen, the energy peak analysis of the gel plate is out. It's highly consistent with the frequency we detected in Lin Wanqing's residual bio-electric signal. It... is her."
"Not just her," Shen Mo's gaze swept across the building's architectural diagram. The spiral-shaped condensation trail, marked by infrared thermal imaging, was like a dormant snake, precisely "biting" the bedroom ceiling of the elderly person living alone on the fifteenth floor, from Lin Wanqing's sixteenth floor.
"The echo is looking for a new host, or rather, a new 'resonator.' It's no longer content to passively attach itself to an object, but has begun to actively expand along the humidity gradient. This building is turning into a giant petri dish, and every 'virtual leak' repair call is it self-regulating to ensure the transmission path remains clear."
His words seemed to make the surrounding air heavier.
People could understand ghosts, they could understand curses, but an echo that knew how to use building physics and fluid dynamics for "vertical contamination" was beyond everyone's cognitive scope.
This was no longer a supernatural event, but a blurry-bordered, cross-dimensional ecological invasion.
Just then, Shen Mo's personal phone let out a sharp buzz.
The caller ID showed Zhao Wan, Lin Wanqing's best friend.
He answered the phone. What came from the receiver was not words, but a beast-like whimper, suppressed to the point of voicelessness by extreme fear.
"Officer... Officer Shen..." Zhao Wan's voice sounded as if someone was strangling her, each word a struggle. "I dreamed of her... I dreamed of Wanqing..."
"Don't be afraid, it's just a dream," Shen Mo tried to keep his voice steady.
"No!" Zhao Wan screamed. "It's not a dream! I was sleeping in the guest room, the one she used to love staying in! I dreamed she was standing on the wall... no, not on the wall, but from inside the wall... like peeling back a layer of soaked wallpaper, her face was right behind it, smiling at me... She said, it's so quiet and damp in here, and asked me to go in and keep her company..."
Shen Mo's heart sank.
He immediately ordered the technician next to him, "Pull up the surveillance footage of the sixteenth-floor corridor of Building C from two to three in the morning, now!"
A few seconds later, the surveillance footage was switched to the main screen.
At 2:03 AM, the empty corridor was dimly lit.
Everything was normal.
The technician was about to fast-forward, but Shen Mo stopped him with a hand gesture.
"Wait, rewind, slow motion."
The footage replayed at 0.5x speed.
At exactly 2:03:17, the entire wall opposite the guest room where Zhao Wan was staying, the flat, cream-colored latex-painted wall, suddenly rippled in an extremely bizarre way.
It wasn't a change in light and shadow, but a fluctuation of solid matter.
The ripples spread out from the center of the wall, slow and viscous, as if the wall was no longer solid brick and cement, but a taut, water-soaked membrane.
Something was slowly swimming on the other side of the membrane. Its outline was unclear, but the deformation caused by its movement was clearly projected onto this "membrane."
The entire command vehicle was silent, except for the low hum of the equipment.
Everyone stared intently at the scene on the screen, which lasted for about five seconds and defied all laws of physics. A chill originating from their bone marrow quietly crept up everyone's spine.
Shen Mo's pupils contracted to a pinpoint.
He remembered what Su Wanying had mentioned about the "Yiji Hall's" business—writing last wills and testaments on behalf of others.
Those desperate, unwilling, love-filled last words.
Those farewells that should have been delivered, but for various reasons, might have been left to sleep forever in old papers.
They hadn't dissipated. Instead, they were captured and concentrated by the massive formation eye of "Qiwu Li," becoming the best nourishment for this century-old ritual.
Every suicide of a lover was an injection of energy, and the seven artifacts were the "piles" that guided and solidified this energy.
Now, this massive energy, accumulated for nearly a century, was no longer content to wait passively. It had begun to actively "forage."
He grabbed the phone again and dialed Su Wanying directly, his voice filled with a decisive urgency.
"Qiwu Li is the formation eye, the Soul-Guiding Piles are the media, the Still Wet Blade is the opportune time, the tears of the bereaved and the unspoken last words are the nourishment... Su Wanying, a complete ritual cannot be without an 'instruction manual'."
The other end of the line was silent, clearly digesting the information he had thrown at her at high speed.
Shen Mo's speech grew faster, his thoughts connecting. "Yiji Hall wasn't a charity; it was a business. Taking in corpses, writing last wills, assisting with joint burials... every service corresponded to a tragedy, and every transaction should have a record. Price, name, date, reason... especially the reason! What kind of person would entrust their final words to a strange institution before death?"
He could almost imagine Su Wanying's furrowed brow on the other end.
"Go to the museum's old papers," Shen Mo stared at the now-calm wall on the screen and said, word by word, "and dig out its account books for me. Every single entry, I want to see it."
(End of Chapter)