Chapter 23: He Is Not a Ghost

The bloodshot veins in Shen Mo’s eyes were denser than the code on his monitor.

He synthesized all the data—site surveys, autopsy reports, material analyses, and humidity fluctuations—into a massive logical model. Between nodes that appeared chaotic to the average person, a cold, clear thread was beginning to emerge.

He typed the final character, and a document titled "Analysis Report on the Non-Physical Lethal Mechanism of the M8313 Staircase Incident" materialized on the screen.

At the heart of the report was his daring "Three Elements of Reverberation" theory.

First, the Medium. Certain materials, such as the damp wood used in the M8313 staircase, could record intense emotions or events like a magnetic tape, becoming a vessel for memory.

Second, the Obsession. A strong, unacknowledged, and forcibly interrupted will—such as an incomplete death—could solidify into an existence akin to a physical law.

Third, the Trigger. When the environment met specific conditions, such as the high humidity of the M8313 staircase and the ritualistic act of stepping on the thirteenth stair, the obsession embedded in the medium would be activated, reenacting the moment of interruption.

He sent this painstakingly crafted report anonymously to the public email addresses of the Municipal Emergency Management Bureau and the Construction Safety Association, appending a calm and restrained postscript: "This is not a supernatural phenomenon, but a natural one that has yet to be named."

The response was sparse.

Most recipients consigned the email to their spam folders, dismissing it as the delusional ramblings or a prank of some madman.

However, three days later, an encrypted reply quietly arrived.

The sender was a senior inspector from the Construction Safety Association. The content was brief but chilling: "We cannot verify your theory, but we have recently received seven similar complaints. It is not just staircases... there are elevators, pedestrian bridges, and even the balcony railings of old residential buildings."

At the same time, Su Wangying was in the storage room of the municipal museum, organizing a recent batch of donated artifacts.

Her fingertips brushed over a dusty box and eventually came to rest on a yellowed plastic hard hat.

Printed on the side of the hat was the faded logo of "Hongyuan Construction Company," with a production date clearly marked 1983.

Out of professional habit, she donned latex gloves and carefully pried open the inner lining of the helmet.

A piece of paper, soaked in sweat and dried by time, slipped out. It was half of a torn acceptance form. The handwriting was vigorous and bold, identical to the signature of Zhao Mingyuan, the project director of Hongyuan Company, whom she had seen in the archives.

The moment her gloved fingertips touched the half-form, an intense wave of vertigo seized her.

Everything before her eyes lost its color, replaced by absolute darkness.

The sound of a torrential downpour filled her ears, and cold rainwater seemed to be trickling down her neck.

The crying of a young man echoed in the empty warehouse, desperate and shrill.

She felt as though she were kneeling on cold concrete, her vision limited to a tightly shut warehouse door. Beneath the crack of the door, three pairs of mud-caked work boots flashed by and vanished into the darkness.

The scene vanished abruptly. Su Wangying gasped for air, her back drenched in cold sweat.

Suppressing her nausea, she sealed the hard hat and the half-form in a sterile bag and immediately drove to Shen Mo’s private laboratory.

When Shen Mo saw the hard hat, a near-fanatical light ignited in his eyes.

He did not ask about Su Wangying’s experience, instead immediately placing a fiber sample from the helmet’s lining into a high-precision mass spectrometer.

The analysis results appeared on the screen, the data curves hauntingly bizarre.

The lining fibers contained an abnormal protein deposit, its chemical composition highly similar to an unknown protein found in the cerebrospinal fluid of the M8313 staircase victim.

Crucially, this protein was not produced by normal biological secretion; its structure resembled a physical precipitate crystallized from psychic energy under extreme emotional stress.

Shen Mo muttered to himself, "Emotional condensate... the traces left by an obsession are actually physical."

To verify a bolder hypothesis—whether the "reverberation" could be transferred—Shen Mo designed a rigorous control experiment.

He obtained two wood samples of the same batch and material as the M8313 stairs. He labeled one 'A' and placed it next to the memory-laden hard hat for forty-eight hours.

The other, labeled 'B', was strictly isolated in a temperature-controlled, signal-shielded chamber.

Forty-eight hours later, the experiment began.

Shen Mo set up high-pressure misting devices over both wood samples to simulate a high-humidity environment.

The results were shocking.

Upon reaching critical humidity, sample B exhibited only slight physical deformation.

As for sample A, the moment the mist filled the air, it seemed to be pressed down by an invisible hand. The center of the wood sank at a speed visible to the naked eye, reaching a staggering depth of eighteen centimeters!

More terrifyingly, the infrared thermal imager in the laboratory captured a blurry, distorted human silhouette on the surface of sample A, emitting a temperature lower than the surrounding environment.

Shen Mo turned off the equipment and wrote the conclusion in his lab notebook, his hand trembling with excitement: "Reverberations can 'infect' new, suitable media through close contact. The intensity increases with the density of the original information—this is a silent epidemic."

With both theory and physical evidence in hand, how could it be resolved?

This question weighed on them like a boulder.

Su Wangying buried herself in piles of old documents, attempting to find an answer in the dust of history.

Finally, in a Republican-era record of architectural oddities titled *Records of Occupational Tragedies*, she found a similar account: "When craftsmen die unjustly, their resentment clings to wood and stone, eventually manifesting as a curse known as a 'Work-Ghost'. There are three ways to break it: first, expose the bones; second, restore the name; third, finish the work."

"'Expose the bones' means finding the remains to let them rest. 'Restore the name' means clearing the victim's reputation and having their death acknowledged," Su Wangying explained to Shen Mo, pointing to the last two words. "And 'finish the work,' in the context of these ancient texts, means completing what the deceased left unfinished."

Shen Mo’s gaze lingered on the words "finish the work" for a long time as countless threads connected in his mind.

Unfinished business... unacknowledged death... the endless staircase... He suddenly looked up, a staggering hypothesis forming in his mind: "The 'endless staircase' doesn't just trap people in a physical fall; it traps them in an 'incomplete acceptance' process! They repeat it over and over because their inspection was never legally completed. To end this cycle, we must 'complete' it for them."

Night was as dark as ink.

Shen Mo and Su Wangying snuck into another residential building that used the same M8313 staircase model.

Residents here had also reported that the stairs felt "spongy" underfoot.

Shen Mo changed into 1980s-style blue work clothes, holding a "Hongyuan Construction Company Quality Inspection Certificate" he had forged based on the scrap of paper, stamped with a 1983 date.

Su Wangying kept watch at the stairwell entrance as Shen Mo took a deep breath and stepped onto the stairs.

One step, two steps... He walked extremely slowly, as if treading on the pulse of history.

The air was damp and cold, carrying the smell of rotting wood.

When his foot landed on the thirteenth step, a familiar chill rose from the soles of his feet.

He did not retreat. Instead, he turned on his flashlight, the beam illuminating the forged certificate, and read aloud the original acceptance criteria in an emotionless, bureaucratic tone, enunciating every word.

Finally, he took out a pen and, in the conclusion column of the record sheet, wrote clearly and decisively: "Unqualified. Forbidden for use."

The moment the pen tip finished the last stroke, the anomaly erupted.

The voice-activated lights in the entire building flickered on simultaneously, then extinguished in the same second, flashing crazily several times.

Following that, the entire staircase beneath their feet emitted a long, agonizing moan from top to bottom. It sounded as if decades of compressed wood fibers were snapping all at once, or perhaps like a long-imprisoned soul finally gaining release.

The moan lasted for ten full seconds, after which everything returned to a deathly silence.

The next day, the residents of the building were astonished to find that the weird feeling of the stairs "feeling like stepping on cotton" had vanished, and that "walking felt solid."

Shen Mo and Su Wangying quietly retrieved the record sheet that night.

The mission appeared to be a success.

Shen Mo folded the paper in half, preparing to put it in his pocket, when his fingertips brushed against a strange protrusion.

Puzzled, he flipped the paper over, and his pupils contracted sharply.

On the back of the previously blank paper, a new line of text had appeared.

The handwriting looked as though it had been written in ice water, bleeding through the paper with a chilling, ghostly intent.

"Next, it is your turn to walk."