Chapter Twenty-Two: Below Level Thirteen

The moment the words fell, Shen Mo had already turned and rushed back to his workbench.

The city’s pulse was still weakly trembling, but the venomous chill had indeed become more complex and chaotic due to the intervention of Zhang Yuan’s echo.

He put on his monitoring headphones, isolated the new distress signal recorded in Chapter 21, and imported it into the spectrum analyzer. On the screen, a ghostly blue waveform slowly unfolded. Compared to the vocal patterns of Li Zhizhong and the other two, the spectral characteristics of this fourth voice were drastically different. Its fundamental frequency was weak and irregular, while the high-frequency range was muddled with a persistent, prickly noise.

Shen Mo zoomed in on the details, his brows knitting together—this was irreversible damage caused by long-term exposure to high-concentration dust, much like a record worn down by sandpaper.

More importantly, there was the content of the sound. Amidst the desperate cries were fragmented, blurred but discernable words: "Load-bearing ratio... M8313... tolerance exceeded!" These were not the ramblings of someone near death, but the technical jargon of an engineer.

A forgotten worker who knew the trade.

Shen Mo immediately pulled the full employee roster of the Hongye Building Materials Company from that year. He went through every name, from permanent staff to contract workers, performing a fuzzy match against the vocal database. The computer whirred at high speed, scrolling through hundreds of names, only to finally pop up a cold, empty notification box: No such person found.

"Could it be that he wasn't on the roster at all?" Su Wangying’s voice rang out behind him, carrying a calm speculation. "Like a temporary worker, a student on a summer internship, or... perhaps not a worker at all."

Her line of thought gave Shen Mo a new direction. He set aside the vocal matching and turned to assist Su Wangying in searching for more peripheral data. Her target was the urban meteorological archives from the summer of 1983.

Soon, she made a startling discovery. On the day of the accident, Jiang City was shrouded in a rare, massive rainstorm; twelve hours of continuous precipitation had brought the humidity to saturation.

"On a rainy day, the moisture content of wood would soar, far exceeding safety standards," Su Wangying pointed to the weather report, her tone grave. "According to construction codes, accepting wood structural materials in such weather is strictly forbidden. This batch of M8313 stair railings should never have been inspected that day. Unless... someone was very insistent, perhaps even coercive, that the inspection be completed that day."

The clue pointed to a deliberately covered-up truth. The two exchanged a look and immediately drove back to the old teahouse where Old Xu resided.

This time, Old Xu’s condition was even worse. He was not sitting by his usual window, but curled up in the darkest corner of the teahouse, his eyes unfocused, his body trembling as if avoiding something invisible. Shen Mo and Su Wangying sat beside him and called out softly several times before the old man’s clouded eyes moved.

"That day... there weren't just three of them..." His lips trembled, his voice as thin as a thread. "There was a young man... surnamed Zhao. He was... he was the son of the general engineer, here for a summer internship from university..."

The floodgates of memory seemed to have been pried open, and Old Xu’s words began to flow coherently. "That kid was sharp; he saw the problem with the wood at a glance and wanted to report it on the spot, to expose it... As a result, he was... the project manager took men and locked him in the site warehouse, kept him locked up all night... When he was released the next day, he had gone mad, shouting at everyone he saw that 'it’s going to collapse' and 'the data is fake'... Later, I heard he couldn't take it and jumped into the river."

"What was his name? What was his employee ID?" Shen Mo pressed urgently.

Old Xu shook his head vigorously, his eyes filled with deep fear and self-reproach. "I don't know his full name... Everyone... everyone just called him 'Engineer Zhao'... We didn't dare to ask, and we didn't dare to talk..."

Just then, Su Wangying took a yellowed, parchment-wrapped manuscript of *The Chronicles of Urban Architecture* from her bag. She flipped through the pages quickly, finally stopping at one. Tucked in the gutter of the page was a piece of dried wood shaving. In the blank space next to it, a line of delicate yet forceful handwriting in pen read: "Zhao Mingyuan, 1983 quality inspection intern, resigned due to 'mental illness,' not entered into permanent files."

Zhao Mingyuan. This name was like a key, unlocking a door of darkness sealed for forty years.

Shen Mo did not hesitate for a moment. Relying on his status as a special consultant, he rushed to the basement vault of the municipal archives overnight. He needed to review all the original design blueprints and quality inspection reports for the M8313 batch of stairs.

The archivist led him to a dusty corner and pointed to several large crates of discarded blueprints scheduled for destruction. "They should be here. Many are moldy, be careful."

He searched through the pile of musty old papers for nearly two hours. Finally, on the back of a design verification form heavily altered with ink, he found a line of small, pencil-written text. The handwriting was somewhat shaky from the force of the writer's grip, but every stroke conveyed an unquestionable determination: "Data falsified, wood moisture content 37%, load-bearing capacity less than 60% of the standard—Zhao."

The signature was only a surname, but Shen Mo knew this was Zhao Mingyuan’s final word. He took a portable UV light from his pocket and shone it on the corner of the verification form. Under the purple light, several inconspicuous light brown spots on the edge of the paper instantly phosphoresced—they were trace amounts of long-dried blood.

The sample was too small and too old for effective DNA comparison, but Shen Mo carefully sealed it in an evidence bag. This was not just a piece of paper; it was the final cry of a young life and an "information carrier" capable of shaking the echoes.

Meanwhile, Su Wangying contacted an elderly scholar in the Folklore Society who specialized in the phenomenon of "the unavenged." Over the phone, the scholar told her that there had been folk legends since ancient times of "mute souls"—people who understood the truth while alive but died unjustly, unable to speak out for various reasons. Their obsession was a hundred times stronger than that of ordinary spirits, because their pain included not only anger toward their tormentors but also a profound sense of self-reproach for their own helplessness.

"I understand." Su Wangying hung up and immediately called Shen Mo. "Zhao Mingyuan’s echo might not be repeating a 'fall,' but rather being 'trapped.' His consciousness is forever stuck in that warehouse where he was locked, witnessing the truth slip through his fingers over and over again, unable to make a sound, unheard by anyone."

This deduction instantly cleared everything up for Shen Mo. That night, he adjusted the placement of his sensors based on the location of the warehouse where Zhao Mingyuan had been imprisoned. On the west wall—where, according to Old Xu, Zhao Mingyuan had once desperately pounded—he installed an additional high-precision EEG simulation capture device.

At midnight, the instrument reacted. A highly rhythmic alpha wave oscillation was clearly recorded, its frequency characteristics highly consistent with the waveforms produced in the modern human brain when recalling a traumatic event while in a conscious state.

The truth had come to light. Shen Mo and Su Wangying decided to immediately restart the burial ceremony to clear the name of this fourth victim. However, a new, eerie event occurred. When they hired a stonemason to carve the name "Zhao Mingyuan" onto the back of the previously nameless tombstone, the moment the stonemason struck his first blow, before the first stroke of the character "Ming" was even finished, the tip of his chisel shattered.

He switched to a new chisel and struck again, but on the surface of the hard bluestone, several dark red, blood-like lines slowly emerged. The stonemason retreated in terror, refusing to continue under any circumstances.

Su Wangying took a deep breath, took cinnabar from her bag, and mixed it into the ink used for the inscription. She walked to the tombstone, stopped forcing the mason, and instead dipped her finger into the cinnabar ink, reciting the contents of the verification form in a low, clear voice.

"Data falsified, wood moisture content 37%..."

Her voice echoed in the silent cemetery, carrying a strange, soothing power. When she reached the final line, "load-bearing capacity less than 60% of the standard," a soft "click" sounded. Where the blood-colored lines on the stone converged, a tiny crack split open, and a drop of viscous, pale-red liquid slowly seeped out, like a tear of blood shed by the stone.

Shen Mo stepped forward, gently placed the evidence bag containing the bloody verification form into the hole reserved in the tombstone's base, and covered it with fresh soil. He stared at the tombstone and whispered in a voice only he and the earth could hear: "You weren't crazy... you were the only one who was clear-headed."

As the words faded, the crack on the tombstone stopped spreading, and that eerie red hue gradually vanished. The tombstone stood still, showing no further abnormalities.

The next morning, a miracle occurred. In all the old buildings across Jiang City that used the M8313 batch of stairs, the bloodstains on the railings that had plagued residents for days vanished without a trace overnight.

A grievance that had lasted for forty years seemed to have finally come to an end.

However, just as Shen Mo returned to his studio, preparing to archive and seal all the data, his phone screen lit up. A text message from an unknown number contained only a short sentence:

"They have stopped... but we haven't finished the journey yet."