Chapter Ten – The Voice That Breathed for Him

His mind echoed with his own whispered words from moments before; the chill he felt did not come from the outside world, but crawled inch by inch up his spine from the abyss called "truth."

Zhao Wan was placed in the psychological observation room on the fourth floor of the municipal bureau. This was less a room and more a sophisticated biometric data collection device.

A one-way mirror shielded her from outside observation, while inside, from heart electrodes to brainwave sensors, she was enveloped without a single blind spot.

Shen Mo sat before the monitoring console, the streaming data on the screen his only thread to hold onto at that moment.

It was 2:17 a.m.

A piercing alarm shattered the silence of the monitoring room.

Shen Mo jolted awake from a brief light sleep, his gaze fixed unblinkingly on the main display.

Zhao Wan’s vital signs were plummeting precipitously—her body temperature dropping from 36.8°C to 31°C, respiratory rate slowing from sixteen breaths per minute to four—a clear sign of impending death.

Yet, the most bizarre anomaly lay in the steady waveform on the right side of the screen.

The ECG was normal.

Her heart continued to beat with rhythmic precision, as if mocking all the other failing bodily systems.

How could a person’s entire physiological function shut down, yet the heart persist like an independent perpetual motion machine?

This defied all medical knowledge he possessed.

“Open the door!” Shen Mo shouted into the intercom, but immediately realized the authorization process would be too slow.

He grabbed a fire axe from the corner and charged towards the heavy metal door of the observation room.

With a loud crash, the lock gave way.

As he burst in, a wave of cold air hit him.

The room’s air conditioning was off; the chill was pure and physical, as if emanating directly from Zhao Wan herself.

She lay supine on the bed, eyes wide open, pupils dilated and unfocused, resembling a delicate yet lifeless wax figure.

Just as Shen Mo prepared to administer emergency aid, he caught the faintest sign of movement.

Zhao Wan’s lips were barely moving, and a faint, indistinct sound escaped her throat.

It was neither a groan nor sleep talk, but a fragmented hum.

The tone was low and unfamiliar, causing Shen Mo’s scalp to tingle instantly—the spectral profile of this sound matched astonishingly with the ambient background noise recorded when the stone tablet in Chapter Four had been activated!

“Pollution is deepening…” he immediately grasped the gravity of the problem.

He refrained from touching Zhao Wan, instead rushing to the wall and slamming down the emergency shut-off valve for the room’s ventilation system.

He had to stop this unknown sound wave from spreading through the air ducts.

Having done so, he retrieved a portable high-precision decibel meter from his field kit and brought it close to Zhao Wan’s throat.

The numbers on the screen made him gasp: 6 decibels.

This sound pressure was far below the human audible threshold of 20 decibels.

He could “hear” it only because his brain had become extraordinarily sensitive to such frequencies after the stone tablet incident.

For ordinary people, this sound simply did not exist.

It was not produced by her breath.

The sensor on the decibel meter clearly showed that the source was a subtle, high-frequency vibration of her vocal cords, with almost no airflow involved.

How could a dying person, breathing so faintly as to be negligible, drive their vocal cords to produce this continuous vibration?

A chilling conclusion flashed through Shen Mo’s mind: it was not Zhao Wan singing—it was “it” using her vocal cords, turning her into a biological loudspeaker.

***

He quickly handed Zhao Wan’s condition over to the arriving medical team and took up her phone, sealed in an evidence bag.

An intense premonition told him the answer might lie within.

After unlocking with her fingerprint, he immediately noticed something unusual—the phone’s recording app had run automatically in the background for a full three hours, without either of them having activated it.

At the top of the file list was a file named “Untitled07.”

The seventh.

Shen Mo’s heart sank.

He imported the audio file into specialized spectral analysis software on his laptop.

The raw audio track was filled with electrical interference and environmental white noise, but after peeling away these layers of distortion, a hidden waveform finally emerged.

It was an eighteen-second-long segment of clear infrasound humming.

The software accurately identified its fundamental frequency: 18.7 hertz.

This number caused Shen Mo’s pupils to contract sharply.

18.7 hertz was precisely one of the frequency bands where human brain alpha waves resonated most readily.

Alpha waves are directly linked to calmness, relaxation, and subconscious states.

This infrasound was like a key, capable of prying open the door to the human subconscious.

Even more uncanny was what lay beneath the seemingly smooth waveform: a series of highly regular pulse fluctuations.

This was no natural phenomenon.

Shen Mo immediately activated the Fourier transform decoding module.

Seconds later, a sequence of dots and dashes translated into text appeared on the screen.

It was Morse code.

The message contained only three brief lines: “Help me… I’m down below… phone didn’t disconnect…”

Suddenly, Shen Mo recalled the concept of “substitute speech” mentioned by Su Wanying during the autopsy of Zhou Zhenguo’s body.

He had thought it a metaphor, but now it seemed to be literal truth.

This was not Zhao Wan’s delirium—it was an unheeded distress signal, a fixation frozen in time, now endlessly broadcast through the infected host, reaching out to a world that offered no response.

That night, he rushed back to his office and accessed the municipal bureau’s unsolved cases database, searching through all missing person files from the past three years.

He filtered the records with two keywords: “phone disconnected” and “lost contact in basement.”

Scores of cases popped up, and he sifted through them one by one.

Finally, one case gripped his attention.

Three months ago, a woman named Li Li had called emergency services at midnight, reporting she was trapped on the B2 level of an abandoned commercial-residential building in the old city district.

Her voice on the call was terrified, but the signal was poor and soon went dead.

The subsequent large-scale rescue lasted a week and involved digging deep, but no trace was found; the case was eventually shelved as unsolved.

What made Shen Mo’s heart race was an attachment to the file: a denoised recording of the emergency call.

Amid Li Li’s intermittent cries for help, there was a faint humming sound, dismissed by the technician at the time as “line interference.”

Shen Mo immediately imported this clip for analysis and amplified it to the extreme—the tail tones and subtle pitch changes of the hum were identical to the sound emanating from Zhao Wan’s throat and to the infrasound recorded on her phone.

He quickly checked the list of dispatchers on that night.

When he saw the name, a chill ran from his tailbone to his crown.

One of the on-duty dispatchers that night: Zhou Zhenguo.

***

Staring at the screen, cold sweat silently traced down Shen Mo’s temple.

The obsession was not just continuing; it was linking together.

Different “resonances,” different victims, were responding to one another through a shared “unfinished event,” like a spiderweb endlessly expanding.

He immediately called the telecom bureau’s technical support, requesting assistance to trace the original call route of that emergency call from three months prior.

But the reply made the situation more complicated.

Due to a comprehensive municipal utility overhaul underway in the old city, the old communication lines in that area had been physically cut off two weeks earlier.

All original call data were archived on magnetic tapes stored in an abandoned communication hub in the western part of the city.

“Captain Shen, that place hasn’t been entered in nearly ten years. To retrieve data requires dual special permission from both the municipal bureau and our headquarters, and…” the technician hesitated, “the servers there are old magnetic tape drives, very unstable. The data may well be corrupted.”

“Apply for emergency access immediately,” Shen Mo’s voice left no room for argument.

After hanging up, Su Wanying appeared behind him, holding a freshly printed blood test report for Zhao Wan.

“Her cellular activity is falling abnormally, but no signs of any known virus or toxin,” she said, placing the report on the desk and looking at the case file on his computer.

“You’re going to that communication hub?”

Shen Mo nodded.

“I’m coming with you,” Su Wanying said calmly.

“Sound is the imprint of time. Ancient people used bronze chimes to record history, and horns to convey military information… If obsession can truly attach itself to sound waves, then every playback, every echo, is essentially a ‘summoning of souls.’”

Shen Mo was silent for a moment, then closed the computer, donned his coat, his voice low and resolute.

“So we can’t just find the source—we have to find a way to make this damned sound never broadcast again.”

***

An hour later, the two arrived at the overgrown, abandoned communication hub in the western city.

The massive iron door to the underground machine room was rusted like a silent steel beast.

Shen Mo made no effort to pick the lock; he directly used hydraulic cutters to sever the door bolt.

A damp, cold stench of rust, mold, and ozone hit them.

The beam from their flashlights cut through the darkness, illuminating rows of old magnetic tape cabinets, silent as a forest of stone tablets.

The air was so cold and damp it seemed water could be wrung from it; a thin layer of shallow water covered the floor, seeping in from somewhere unknown.

Using the telecom bureau’s layout map, Shen Mo quickly found cabinet number “N7” in a corner.

He opened the door to find a magnetic tape labeled “Psychological Hotline and 110 Emergency Line Backup—2023 Q3” resting undisturbed in its slot, its surface appearing intact.

But Shen Mo noticed a thick layer of water droplets had condensed on the metal cabinet’s interior walls, as if this was the coldest spot in the entire machine room.

He reached out, fingertips nearly touching the tape.

If only they could take it back and seal it in a signal-proof container, at least one known medium of transmission could be cut off.

At that moment, Su Wanying suddenly reached out and pressed her hand against his wrist.

Her touch was light, but her palm was ice cold.

“Wait…” she whispered, voice low and filled with disbelief, “listen.”

Shen Mo froze.

He held his breath and sharpened his hearing to the utmost.

From the depths of the machine room, beyond where their flashlight beams could reach, in a darkness thick enough to swallow light, came a faint, intermittent humming almost indistinguishable from the ambient noise.

That sound was exactly the same frequency as the one coming from Zhao Wan’s throat.

As if someone else in another corner of the machine room was playing that deadly recording on a different device.

Shen Mo slowly lifted his head, eyes fixed on the pitch-black corridor’s end—where there should have been no one at all.