Chapter Eight: Who Speaks for the Dead

The air in the museum was thick with the musty scent of aged paper mingled with camphor, like a deep well sealed for a century. Su Wanying, wearing white gloves, let her fingertips glide over rows of dusty wooden shelves.

In the dim recesses of the storage room, the only light was the solitary halo cast by the spotlight above her head. Finally, her gaze fixed on an inconspicuous corner, where a nearly falling-apart wooden box lay askew, cradling a booklet with a charred, blackened cover.

She carefully lifted it out and blew away the dust. Three barely legible brush-stroked characters came into view: "Yi Ji Tang Funeral Records."

The booklet was so fragile it seemed it might crumble to dust with a single touch. Su Wanying turned the pages one by one, the rustling under her fingertips echoing the passage of history.

Yi Ji Tang was a charitable hall during the Republic era, dedicated to arranging funerals for the homeless and unclaimed souls. But its work extended far beyond that.

Within the records, it was noted that a special chamber called the "Substitute Language Study" was set up in the hall. There, a scholar skilled in calligraphy would listen to those coming to arrange funerals for their deceased loved ones, carefully transcribing the unfulfilled wishes and lingering regrets of the departed onto paper. These writings were sealed into specially made flat ceramic boxes and buried in the hall's backyard.

These ceramic boxes were known as "Substitute Language Boxes."

Su Wanying’s heart raced suddenly. She immediately consulted an old city map, cross-referencing the former location of Yi Ji Tang.

When two points overlapped on the map, a chill surged up her spine—the backyard of Yi Ji Tang, after a century of changes, was precisely the dark, eerie bend of the river in today’s Qiwu Li old town.

Forcing herself to remain calm, she continued to leaf through the "Funeral Records," her eyes searching for any clues related to the seven pairs of lovers.

Soon, she found what she was looking for.

Among the seven pairs of lovers, five names appeared in the ledger. Their families had all visited the "Substitute Language Study," leaving behind final "Substitute Language Boxes" for them.

Her fingertip paused on a yellowed page where the ink had blurred slightly from moisture but still carried a tone of stubborn defiance.

Trembling, she whispered the recorded passage: "In the nineteenth year of the Republic, the female student Ms. Lin drowned herself for love. Her sisters visited, weeping inconsolably, conveying her last wish: to be buried with Chen Lang in the clear stream; no epitaph sought, only that a single word never perish."

A single word never perish. Those four characters pierced through Su Wanying’s nerves like a needle dipped in ice.

Meanwhile, at the city bureau’s technical center, the lights blazed brightly.

Shen Mo stood before a massive electronic whiteboard, where seven death cases were outlined in a timeline traced with red lines.

Each time a "residual echo" was triggered and Zhou Zhenguo’s corpse exhibited new mutations, a seemingly unrelated detail would surface.

Within one kilometer of each crime scene, someone would find an anonymous letter slipped into mailboxes, door crevices, or even tucked under windshield wipers.

The letters varied in content, all fragmentary farewells like "Wait for my return," "No regrets in this life," or "Do not grieve."

The handwriting differed wildly—sometimes delicate and neat, other times messy—mimicking various voices.

The one constant was the paper.

All letters were written on a coarse, pale yellow, traditionally made paper.

Shen Mo sent the samples to the forensics department, and the report came back swiftly: the paper was made from a mixture of bamboo fibers and bone glue—an inexpensive but durable stationery from the Republic era.

More crucially, when Shen Mo’s colleagues conducted high-precision fluorescence tests on the paper as per his special request, a startling discovery emerged.

Trace amounts of copper ions and the radioactive element technetium-99 were detected within the paper fibers.

This combination was like the devil’s fingerprint, pointing precisely to the copper cufflink and the stele imbued with the "residual echo."

“Team leader, could someone be impersonating the deceased, playing a prank by sending these letters?” young officer Xiao Li speculated.

Shen Mo’s gaze never left the whiteboard, cold as a scalpel.

“Impersonation?” He shook his head slowly, his voice low and clear, resonating in the silent office. “If it were just mimicry, it wouldn’t explain the residual substances. This isn’t someone sending letters...” He turned sharply, his sharp eyes sweeping the room. “It’s ‘them,’ trying to piece together broken language with the only things they can touch. They’re trying to speak.”

At that moment, the office door was knocked upon.

Old Wu stood at the doorway, his weathered face tight with tension and relief, clutching a rusted iron box.

“Officer Shen,” he rasped, “this was passed down from my father. He said it was given by the last calligrapher of the Substitute Language Study before he died, and warned never to open it. I... I used to think it was just a keepsake, but after seeing the news, something feels off.”

Shen Mo took the iron box, its weight heavy in his hands.

The lock was rusted shut; with tools, he pried it open, releasing a musty, sealed scent.

Inside, there was no gold or silver, only a neat stack of substitute language manuscripts—made from the same material as those anonymous letters.

The ink on the top page had faded more than half, yet the words remained clear, bearing a fateful prophecy: “If the seven voices fail to reach heaven, the living shall lend their throats to speak for the dead.”

Shen Mo’s heart plummeted.

He flipped through the manuscripts rapidly; each recorded a heartrending final wish, each ending with a peculiar symbol painted in cinnabar.

When he reached the seventh manuscript and saw its symbol, his pupils contracted sharply.

It was a variant pattern made of seven fine arcs, twisted and struggling, full of unyielding tension.

This was exactly the symbol the forensic pathologist had found, carved with his own fingernails on Zhou Zhenguo’s autopsy table!

In that moment, all the clues connected like a bolt of lightning.

These symbols were not ciphers to be decoded; they were signatures—unique proofs of existence etched into the real world by restless obsessions spanning a century.

“Qiwu Li,” Shen Mo set down the manuscripts and immediately called Su Wanying. “We have to go back there.”

When the two returned to the site of old Qiwu Li, it was already a wasteland of demolition.

Bulldozer tracks crushed what little trace of life once remained.

Using the old maps and their memories, they carefully searched the area once the backyard of Yi Ji Tang.

At last, beneath piles of broken bricks and rubble, they uncovered a dried-up well, buried under stones and debris.

The well’s opening was small; its walls built of blue bricks, densely inscribed with characters now mostly blurred by time’s erosion.

Su Wanying fetched a bottle of water and a wet cloth from the car, cautiously wiping away the grime on the well wall.

As the dirt cleared, fragments of words emerged: “Buried together,” “Shared memories,” “No trace,” “Forever accompany”... Each word like a sigh.

Shen Mo was not fooled by the inscriptions; he pried off a brick for sampling and collected soil from the well’s bottom to bring back to the lab.

The test results came in the early hours, plunging the entire technical center into stunned silence.

The clay used to fire the well bricks contained remnants of calcium phosphate from human bones, incinerated at high temperatures.

And the soil from the well’s bottom showed technetium-99 concentrations far exceeding natural background levels.

The evidence was irrefutable.

This place had long been a repeated burial site for remains contaminated with radioactive material.

Those “Substitute Language Boxes,” those shards bearing final wishes, and their owners alike, all slumbered beneath this spot.

Staring at the analysis report, Shen Mo murmured, as if speaking to himself or explaining to the restless souls: “This is not a cemetery, nor simply the backyard of a charitable hall... It’s a ‘memory crucible.’ Countless similar, intense obsessions were cast, layered, and purified here. Under the catalyst of radioactive substances, they ultimately condensed into what we call the ‘residual echo.’”

That night, Shen Mo stayed alone in the lab, replaying the surveillance footage recorded when the stele was activated.

He zoomed in to the utmost, analyzing frame by frame the moment the “eyes” appeared in the black mist.

With no further visual clues, he turned his attention to the audio.

He pulled up the full spectrogram, the screen filled with chaotic background noise.

Refusing to give up, he dedicated all computational power to noise reduction and filtering.

Minute by minute passed, the processor humming under the strain.

Finally, beneath layers of noise, a barely perceptible, ultra-low frequency sound wave emerged.

Shen Mo put on headphones and converted the wave into audible sound.

After a faint crackling, like electric currents from the earth’s core, a profoundly blurred synthetic voice, a composite of countless voices, whispered softly in his ear:

“…Can… you… hear… us…?”

Shen Mo yanked off the headphones, his chest heaving violently.

He shut off the audio, stood, and walked to the window.

Outside, the heavy night spread, city lights forming a silent sea of illumination in the distance.

For the first time, he felt he was not unraveling a bizarre case but responding to a desperate collective call for help spanning an entire century.

At that moment, his phone on the desk vibrated wildly, shattering the night’s stillness.

It was Xiao Li, voice trembling with urgent panic.

“Team leader Shen! It’s bad! Forensic pathologist Zhao... Zhao Wan is missing!”

Shen Mo’s gaze froze instantly. He spun back to the computer, fingers flying over the keyboard to pull up surveillance footage from the city bureau’s entrance and surrounding areas.

He stared intently as the timeline rapidly scrolled, stopping finally on a frame—the last image of Zhao Wan caught on camera.