Chapter Five - Rain Falling in a Room Without Clouds

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The conference room at the forensic center was so heavy with tension it felt as if moisture could drip from the air. Dr. Huang, a highly respected authority in the field of anatomy, sat with his arms crossed, leaning back in his chair. His eyes behind the glasses were filled with disdain and arrogance.

He had just spent nearly twenty minutes delivering his definitive conclusion on Lin Wanqing’s cause of death—“psychogenic dissociative disorder,” a term that sounded deeply professional.

“In simple terms, it’s ‘psychological drowning,’” he adjusted his glasses, his voice piercing the quiet room. “Under extreme grief and guilt, Lin Wanqing’s cerebral cortex malfunctioned, triggering erroneous neural signals that simulated the physiological sensation of drowning and suffocation. This caused a total collapse of her autonomic nervous system, resulting in sudden cardiac arrest. Though extremely rare, there have been clinical cases documented, and this explanation is fully supported by current science.”

He paused, glancing at Shen Mo seated across from him, a mocking smile curling his lips. “As for Consultant Shen’s so-called ‘virtual water domain’ and ‘echoes of obsession’... forgive me for being blunt, but that sounds more like a carefully packaged modern ghost story than a rigorous forensic report.”

A suppressed murmur rippled through the room.

Dr. Huang’s theory was airtight, attributing all unexplained phenomena solely to the victim’s brain—scientific and safe.

Faced with such blatant ridicule, Shen Mo’s face remained devoid of any superfluous emotion.

He neither showed anger nor rushed to defend himself. Instead, he calmly picked up the remote and pressed the play button on the projector.

“Dr. Huang,” he said softly, yet his voice instantly silenced all background noise, “let us watch a video.”

The screen lit up, displaying a monochrome infrared thermal image.

The camera focused on a specially sealed evidence box containing fragments of a stone tablet.

The box was placed in a fully dry, temperature-controlled isolation environment, with various physical parameters steadily displayed in a corner of the screen.

Time passed second by second. Suddenly, everyone held their breath.

Under the infrared lens, the cold metal surface of the sealed box began to show subtle temperature changes out of nowhere.

Bit by bit, tiny bright spots quickly connected into lines and then merged into flows.

It was as if countless invisible droplets of water were condensing on its surface, eventually forming a delicate curtain of water that slowly slid down from top to bottom.

The entire process was vivid, eerie, and undeniable.

This watery veil lasted for a full seventeen seconds before disappearing as suddenly and mysteriously as it appeared, leaving no trace behind.

Shen Mo switched off the projector; the room fell into a deathly silence.

He slowly stood, meeting Dr. Huang’s stunned, almost frozen gaze, and spoke deliberately: “Hallucinations cannot alter physical states. This water has a source.”

For the next seventy-two hours, Shen Mo and Su Wanying practically made the laboratory their home.

They meticulously reanalyzed all data related to the stone tablet fragments, attempting to decipher the code that “activated” it.

A torrent of data streamed across the screen until three critical thresholds were identified.

“The humidity must be above ninety-seven percent, nearly saturated,” Su Wanying pointed to an environmental data comparison chart, her eyes sparkling with excitement. “Furthermore, the ambient sound level needs to reach at least sixty-five decibels, with the audio spectrum concentrated around a low frequency of about one hundred hertz—this aligns closely with the sound of a thunderstorm.”

“And the timing,” Shen Mo added, his finger resting on a calendar. “The phenomenon always occurs near the anniversary of Lin Wanqing’s drowning death. Emotion, environment, timing... it requires a perfect resonance chamber.”

Based on this model, they accurately predicted the next high-risk window: late at night, three days later, from 11:15 PM to 11:32 PM.

A brief seventeen minutes.

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“Whether the ‘echo’ has diffusion properties is the key,” Shen Mo’s gaze became sharp as a blade. “We need to verify it.”

He immediately submitted an application to transfer the dangerous stone tablet fragment to an abandoned biochemical laboratory on the outskirts of the city.

There, independent isolation chambers and monitoring systems made it an ideal site for high-risk experiments.

The police established a tight perimeter, ensuring absolute safety.

At Shen Mo’s special request, three sets of specialized equipment were installed inside the isolation chamber: a high-frequency sonic jammer capable of instantly emitting strong interference waves, an industrial-grade powerful dehumidifier, and most importantly—a specially coated floor layered with military-grade fluorescent developer.

This coating was extremely sensitive to liquids; even a single drop of water would trigger a visible fluorescent glow.

What he aimed to capture was the invisible “virtual water trace.”

On the eve before the countdown to the experiment, Shen Mo’s phone suddenly rang.

The caller ID showed Zhao Wan.

“Consultant Shen...” The voice on the other end trembled beyond recognition, choked with sobs and intense fear, “I... I dreamed of her... dreamed of Wanqing...”

Shen Mo’s heart sank sharply.

“She was standing at my bedside, soaked through, water dripping down, her lips purple... She did nothing but stare at me and said only one sentence... ‘It’s your turn now.’” Zhao Wan’s voice was hoarse with terror. “After I woke up, I found... the condensate pipe of my air conditioner was inexplicably blocked, the corner of the wall covered in mold, and the humidity meter in my home... the reading kept rising, unstoppable!”

“Stay where you are. Don’t move. I’m coming right now!”

Shen Mo dashed out of the lab almost instantly.

Upon arriving at Zhao Wan’s home, a chill of damp cold air greeted him.

He went straight into the bedroom, and at the corner Zhao Wan had described, he immediately noticed a photo frame placed on the bedside table.

The picture showed Zhao Wan and Lin Wanqing smiling closely together.

Shen Mo picked up the frame, and the moment his fingers touched its back, he sensed a faint, unfamiliar roughness beneath the wooden surface.

Carefully prying open the backboard, he found a small, fingernail-sized fragment of grayish-black stone embedded within the wood layers.

Its composition perfectly matched that of the commemorative stone tablet.

A terrifying deduction took shape in Shen Mo’s mind: at some point prior, Zhao Wan must have inadvertently come into contact with that stone fragment used as evidence.

Now, the “echo” was using her as a new node, silently spreading again through intense emotional connection.

At 11:00 PM that night, Shen Mo and Su Wanying sat in the monitoring room of the abandoned lab, dozens of screens capturing every detail inside and outside the isolation chamber.

At 11:13 PM, the anomaly erupted.

The temperature and humidity readings inside the chamber began rising in tandem, the needles jumping upward at a rate defying physical laws.

Simultaneously, a faint “rustling” sound emerged from the speakers connected to highly sensitive microphones, as if water were gathering within pipes.

At 11:18 PM, the chamber’s dark floor suddenly glowed with an eerie green fluorescence!

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A complete human-shaped water footprint appeared out of thin air on the floor.

Then a second, a third...

Those glowing footprints stepped clearly and resolutely toward the sealed box in the center of the room holding the stone fragments.

At the same moment, Shen Mo’s backup phone vibrated—it was an urgent message from the officer monitoring Zhao Wan’s residence: the residential complex had experienced an unexplained brief power fluctuation, and on the bathroom mirror of Zhao Wan’s home, a line of water vapor words had formed.

“This time, it’s your turn to sink.”

“Activate interference!” Shen Mo’s eyes flashed coldly as he gave the decisive order.

A piercing high-frequency sound instantly filled the isolation chamber.

On the screen, the fluorescent footprints appeared to be grasped by an invisible hand, violently twisting and deforming.

By the nineteenth second, they completely disintegrated into scattered spots of light, quickly fading away.

The temperature and humidity inside the chamber plummeted accordingly, returning to normal.

Shen Mo immediately instructed a replay of the footage at the slowest speed.

He stared intently at the screen, a detail causing his pupils to constrict—at the moment before dissolution, the water mark representing the “foot” was suspended midair; it never truly took the final step.

It was as if the ritual of obsession had been interrupted at the crucial moment—it failed to touch its target, yet did not vanish. In that instant of interruption, it still desperately sought the next foothold.

Afterwards, Shen Mo compiled all data and observations, formally proposing his “Emotional Medium Environment” three-factor theoretical model.

“Obsession, or intense emotion, is the fuse,” he said, gazing at the clear night sky washing away the gloom outside, his voice low and resolute. “A durable object capable of carrying this energy is the medium. And a specific physical environment is the trigger.”

He turned to look at Su Wanying. “It is attempting to complete a ritual we do not yet understand... and we have just successfully interrupted it once. But that also means it has learned how to counteract our interference.”

Su Wanying did not immediately respond. She was absorbed in a pile of local chronicles and ancient manuscripts borrowed from the library, her fingers rapidly flipping through them.

Suddenly, she seemed to realize something, lifting her head abruptly, her eyes carrying a chilling new hypothesis.

“Shen Mo,” her voice was somewhat dry, “have you ever considered... the possibility that some ‘echoes,’ or things like this, might have failed countless times and evolved repeatedly before discovering the set of rules we currently know?”

Shen Mo’s gaze froze.

Su Wanying’s words were a key unlocking a door in his mind never before opened.

Evolution... if a non-living entity could evolve, then the carrier it depended on—the seemingly ordinary stone—could not simply be a mundane rock.

A sufficiently complex system must be supported by equally complex hardware.

They had been focused on analyzing the “rules” behind the phenomenon, possibly overlooking the very foundation on which those rules rested.

His eyes slowly shifted to the latest compositional analysis report of the stone tablet fragments on the table.

The dense elemental symbols and data seemed to come alive in that moment.

Perhaps the answer had been there all along, hidden in the most fundamental physical makeup, yet ignored by all of them.

He must reexamine it—down to the atomic level.