Chapter 27: We Are the New Layer

Shen Mo turned the volume of his headphones to the maximum. Amidst the seemingly unremarkable recording, a rhythmic static, like a ghostly whisper, seeped through the cracks of the background noise and into his eardrums.

It was not the hum of electricity, nor the sound of wind, but a faint, dry scraping.

It was the sound of a pen nib scratching across paper.

His heart sank violently. He immediately imported the video into analysis software and began to search frame by frame.

In the dim light of B4, the footage was blurred, showing little more than swaying shadows and mottled walls. He stared intently at the edges of the frame, especially the corners where they had paused briefly.

Finally, in a relatively stable segment, he saw it.

It was a crack that had almost merged with the wall. After extreme magnification and sharpening, a few characters carved by a hard object appeared faintly in the shadows of the fissure.

"Shen Mo, Su Wangying, supplemental appointment as B4 attendants, tenure permanent."

The characters were jagged and crooked, as if carved with every last ounce of strength.

A chill raced from the base of Shen Mo’s spine to the top of his skull. Driven by a frantic impulse, he rushed to the filing cabinet and pulled out the original copy of the duty roster he had brought back from B4.

He remembered clearly that on the last page, he had used his own pen to write in the blank space: "We did not finish walking."

And now, beneath that line, two new lines of text had appeared.

"B4-14: Su Wangying."

The handwriting, the pressure, the slight rightward tilt—it was identical to the "We did not finish walking" he had written himself. It was a perfect match.

He suddenly recalled a detail he had overlooked: in the oppressive space of B4, to confirm each other's locations, he and Su Wangying had called out each other's names more than once.

That sound had echoed in the sealed room, crystal clear, just as... just as it had when they read the list of the dead before the thirteenth step, solemn and distinct.

It wasn't a call; it was a ritual they hadn't realized they were performing.

Meanwhile, in the restoration room of the city museum, Su Wangying sat before a microscope, her brows furrowed. She was processing the wood fragments brought back from B4.

The shards seemed ordinary, but under high magnification, she discovered that countless tiny carbon particles were embedded deep within the wood fibers. These particles were not distributed randomly; they were arranged with impossible precision into microscopic text.

She adjusted the focus, identifying the words one by one, her breathing growing rapid.

It was a document title: "Xinhua Department Store B4 Level Duty Regulations (Revised Edition)."

The content was more detailed and cruel than what they had seen on the control panel. One provision stung her eyes like a poisoned needle: "Any person who participates in information completion or the recitation of the roster in any form shall have their identity automatically entered into the duty sequence until a successor is found."

Information completion... recitation... Su Wangying’s mind flashed to the sentence Shen Mo had written on the roster, and the way they had called out to each other in the sealed room.

She stumbled back, gripping the table, and opened a yellowed Republican-era book she had at hand: *Records of Industrial Casualties*.

This book recorded various bizarre accidents and rumors from the era of early industrialization. She quickly found the entry for "Extended Labor," which referred to certain construction sites where, if a craftsman died accidentally, a specific ritual was required to allow his "soul" to continue the work.

Beside the entry was a marginal note written in delicate, tiny script: "If the successor does not escape, they become the new nightmare."

Becoming a new nightmare.

She grabbed the phone, her voice raspy with terror, and whispered to Shen Mo on the other end: "Shen Mo, we were wrong... We aren't ending that reverberation... We are using our own names and actions to sustain its life."

The silence on the other end of the line was colder than any scream.

After a long while, Shen Mo spoke, but his voice was interrupted by another incoming call notification. It was an unknown number. He hesitated before answering.

A trembling, elderly voice came through: "Is... is this Comrade Shen Mo? I am Zheng Kaiyuan... Engineer Zheng."

Engineer Zheng. One of the executors of the Xinhua Department Store sealing operation thirty years ago.

Shen Mo’s heart skipped a beat. "Engineer Zheng, how could you..."

"I must tell you," Engineer Zheng’s voice was filled with uncontrollable fear, "for the past month, I have had the same dream every night. In the dream, I am patrolling that damned B3 level with a roll of caution tape in my hand, but those counters, those doors—I can never finish taping them. I can never finish..."

His voice choked up: "But that isn't the worst part. The worst part is that last night, I woke up and found a set of old work clothes at my bedside. They were blue, with two red characters embroidered on the chest—'B4 Supervisor'."

Shen Mo’s blood seemed to freeze instantly.

"There was something inside the clothes," Zheng’s voice shook even more violently. "A handwritten note that said... it said: 'You ran for thirty years, now it is your turn to take the shift.' That handwriting... I will never forget it as long as I live. It is exactly the same as the duty roster we saw on the B4 control panel back then!"

After hanging up, Shen Mo sat in his chair, his entire body cold.

The reverberation was not just "sustaining life"; it was "hunting fugitives." It was pulling the forgotten past back onto the chessboard, one by one.

If he and Su Wangying were "supplemental appointments," then Engineer Zheng had been "recalled." This system was far more intelligent—and aggressive—than they had imagined.

He had to test the possibility of a "handover."

A crazy idea took shape in Shen Mo’s mind. He would take the initiative and try to transfer this "misfortune" elsewhere. He spent an entire day compiling all the data on the B4 incident—including photos, recordings, analysis reports, and Engineer Zheng’s testimony—into a folder, giving it a formal, final-sounding title: "The Xinhua Department Store Reverberation Incident Final Report."

Subsequently, he used internal channels to officially submit the report to the public system of the City Archives, requesting it be archived. He wanted to see what would happen once this "information" was received by a vast, official system.

That night, the surveillance camera in his living room activated silently at midnight.

In the footage, Shen Mo himself, wearing pajamas, walked out of the study with a blank expression. He held a copy of the report, walked straight to the entryway closet, and took out a brand-new leather file box.

He placed the copy of the report into the box with great solemnity, then used a marker to write two characters on the outside: "B5."

After doing this, "he" in the footage leaned down and whispered to the file box, a sound barely captured by the recording:

"Next stop, it’s their turn to see."

And Shen Mo, lying in his bedroom, had no memory of any of this.

The next morning, a call came from the archives. The staff member’s tone was filled with confusion and apology. They told Shen Mo that the original "Final Report" he had submitted yesterday had disappeared.

The archivist swore he had locked the report into the safe for pending files himself, but it had vanished by morning.

Even more bizarrely, the system logs showed that the report had been successfully archived at 3:00 AM, but the location was a category they had never seen before: "Unnamed Underground Archive."

Everything was spiraling out of control.

As the sun set, Shen Mo and Su Wangying stood side by side on the roof of the Xinhua Department Store, which was slated for demolition.

The evening breeze tugged at their clothes. Below them, the city lights flickered on, a vast expanse of prosperity that seemed capable of swallowing all sins and secrets.

"We burned the notices, recited the names, and sealed the entrance, but the reverberation is still there..." Su Wangying’s voice held a hollow exhaustion. "It has even learned to use our rules, use official procedures, and grow using our own methods."

Shen Mo’s gaze drifted past the ruins toward the city skyline. The towering skyscrapers looked like cold tombstones in the twilight.

He spoke suddenly, his voice terrifyingly calm: "Perhaps... we were wrong from the start. Perhaps the true 'reverberation' isn't the obsessions of the dead, but us—the living. It is we who keep digging, keep verifying, and keep re-enacting the truth, injecting it with new energy time and time again."

Before he finished speaking, his phone, Su Wangying’s phone, and the alarms of countless security centers across the city erupted in a piercing wail at the same instant.

In three other old-fashioned commercial buildings in the city, built in the same era as Xinhua, the elevator surveillance systems simultaneously triggered the highest level of emergency alerts.

On three different screens, an identical, bone-chilling image appeared: the elevator doors were slowly opening at a non-operational floor, and outside the doors was the B4 sealed room they knew all too well, covered in water stains and mold.

And standing silently in front of every open elevator door were two figures.

One tall, one slightly more slender.

They were the silhouettes of the two of them.

The reverberation was no longer limited to one building. It had spread.

Just as Shen Mo and Su Wangying were completely stunned by this surreal scene, an unlisted number flashed across Shen Mo’s phone screen with an insistent, refusal-defying urgency, its sharp ringtone tearing through the deathly silence of the rooftop.