Chapter Six: The Next Sacrifice

The air in the laboratory seemed to freeze, with only the faint hum of the ion probe breaking the silence. Shen Mo’s gaze was fixed unwaveringly on the energy spectrum displayed in the holographic projection. The peak curve representing the element “Technetium-99” showed a slight but unmistakable shift compared to the data recorded three days earlier.

This was no instrument error but a directed, incredible migration.

These radioactive remnants were seeping slowly and stubbornly from within the fragments of the stele toward the surface at a speed imperceptible to the naked eye.

This phenomenon resembled not the physical change of inorganic matter but rather a trapped life struggling to breathe, trying to break through a microscopic seal.

A word suddenly leapt from the depths of his memory—growth.

In the Zhou Zhenguo case, the cufflink that triggered all the anomalies bore a crudely scratched inscription made with a sharp object.

At the time, he thought it was some kind of declaration or mark, but now it seemed more like an explanation.

These contaminated media had never been passive storage devices.

Every time they were activated by an abnormal energy field, their internal structure underwent a reorganization, an “evolution.”

They were learning, adapting; each awakening made them easier to trigger and harder to completely suppress.

“Old Wu, I need your help,” Shen Mo said as he called the resident hydrological observer of the Old City River section.

Half an hour later, clad in a diving suit, he stood by the riverbank, restless before the flood season.

The turbid river water churned with silt, lapping against moss-covered embankments.

Guided by Old Wu, Shen Mo avoided the undercurrents and dived into the shallow area where the stele had originally been found.

Visibility underwater was poor; he could only rely on a metal detector and memory, painstakingly probing the riverbed inch by inch.

Finally, his fingers touched a hard, smooth edge.

The object lay buried half a meter beneath the mud; it took all his strength to extract it.

It was the other half of the broken stele.

As he dragged it ashore and rinsed off the mud with clear water, a line of finer, more venomous small characters appeared beneath the previous inscription: “If we cannot return together, may we drown together in memory.”

By the time Su Wanying arrived, she saw Shen Mo staring blankly at the line.

“If we cannot return to reality together, then I am willing to drown together in memory,” she whispered, then paled. “This is not a lover’s farewell… it’s a curse. It does more than record a tragedy; it demands that everyone who sees, hears, or feels this story becomes part of the next tragedy. The ‘witnesses’ must become the ‘co-drowned.’”

Shen Mo’s eyes suddenly grew cold.

He immediately instructed Su Wanying to retrieve drowning records from the Old City River for nearly twenty years.

A chilling pattern emerged: almost every year, during the plum rain season or autumn, on nights with drastic humidity changes, one or two “accidental drownings” occurred within this specific river section.

The victims varied in identity, but shared one commonality: they were either residents living nearby who often passed through or visitors who showed intense interest in local legends.

“It’s selecting hosts,” Shen Mo said slowly, his voice devoid of warmth.

He needed to test a wild hypothesis.

Back in the lab, Shen Mo devised an experiment he called “reverse contamination.”

He extracted a small piece of clothing fiber from the belongings of one drowning victim, Lin Wanqing, and artificially synthesized a shard of stele with highly mimicked material and density.

He then implanted this “blank” fragment into the fiber and placed both into a sealed environment capable of precisely simulating temperature and humidity.

He adjusted the humidity settings to match the peak values on the nights the drownings occurred.

A miracle—or horror—occurred three hours later.

The once smooth surface of the artificial fragment spontaneously displayed fluorescent wave patterns identical to those on the original stele.

The radiation detector emitted a faint but definite alarm.

The “afterglow” was not only replicable but could be “fed” and infect new carriers in a suitable environment.

“If it can be fed, perhaps it can also be deceived,” Shen Mo proposed a bolder hypothesis: if a false signal of “ritual completion” could be fabricated, it might lure this obsession into a dormant state, thereby halting its spread.

The experimental plan rapidly took shape.

Inside a specially made lead-lined sealed chamber, using a spray of highly concentrated freshwater algae extract to simulate the river environment, they employed a precise temperature control array to create two tightly embracing humanoid heat contours in the chamber’s center.

A program was set to sharply lower the temperatures of these two heat sources within a short time, simulating the entire thermodynamic process of “two people embracing as they sink.”

The original stele fragment was placed at the center of the “human shapes.”

At the moment the experiment began, the clear air inside the sealed chamber suddenly condensed into thick white fog, reducing visibility to zero.

High-precision sensors detected countless tiny water droplets gathering and moving across the metal plate at the chamber’s bottom.

Within seconds, these droplets formed two closely overlapping human-shaped water stains.

This eerie pattern remained clearly visible for twelve seconds before the core stele fragment’s radiation activity plummeted abruptly by seventy percent.

Success?

Shen Mo stared at the data but felt no joy.

He retrieved high-speed surveillance footage from inside the chamber, replaying it frame by frame.

Just as the two human-shaped water stains were about to dissolve in the last 0.1 seconds, deep within the impenetrable fog, a pair of eyes—impossible to explain by physical laws—suddenly opened, then vanished instantaneously.

Shen Mo slammed the stop button, cold sweat beading on his forehead.

He murmured, “We fooled it… but whom did we really fool? ‘It,’ or ‘them’?”

“Shen Mo, come look at this,” Su Wanying’s voice trembled faintly.

She had been gently stroking the now-cooled stele fragment and was pointing at the surface.

Beneath the deeply carved surnames “Lin” and “Chen,” faint, ghostly outlines of older, more blurred strokes could be seen under angled light.

These had long since been worn smooth by the passage of time and water, leaving only spectral traces.

This stele held far more than the story of a single pair of lovers.

That night, Shen Mo buried himself in the dusty archives of the city records office, feverishly unearthing every historical record related to the Old City River.

Yellowed files, Republic-era newspapers, local county annals… clues emerged like threads pulled from the dust of time.

Over the past century, there were seven named pairs of lovers who had died by suicide in the same area of this river.

The earliest case dated back to the warlord era of the Republic of China.

He marked the names and approximate locations of these seven pairs on an electronic map of the Old City.

When the last point was placed, he leaned back in his chair, breath caught.

Those seven red markers on the screen formed a perfect, secret heptagram.

At its exact center was the now-abandoned prison built on the site of an old nuclear physics research institute.

Just then, his phone vibrated.

A photo from Su Wanying appeared on the screen, taken in the city museum’s artifact storage.

The image showed a Qing Dynasty torture instrument—a finger branding clamp—cold and sinister.

On the artifact restoration record card beside it, beneath routine repair notes, a newly added pencil annotation stood out.

Elegant handwriting, chilling content: “Seven similar items, scattered and lost among the people.”

Shen Mo stared intently at the photo, then slowly lifted his eyes to the giant heptagram of death on his screen.

The branding clamp, the suicides, the number seven recurring like an inescapable curse.

This was no longer an isolated supernatural case or a cursed tragic legend.

It was a trap.

A vast system spanning a century, constructed from countless deaths and grudges, now awakening from slumber.

He shut the photo, his fingertips hovering over the seven glowing points on the map.

A chill rose from the base of his spine, rapidly spreading through his limbs and bones.

These names, these places—they must be connected by some inner link beyond mere geography.

He had to find it.