Bai Yulao: The Night Watcher's Debt to the King of Hell

After leaving the archives, Su Wantang did not go out for a nice meal as Lin Shoumo had hoped. Instead, she stepped on the gas and headed straight for the Nandu City Museum.

"Officer Su, what time is it? The museum has been closed for a long time! And what's so interesting about those old antiques?"

"It's all just stones and broken tiles, you can't eat it or sell it for money!" Lin Shoumo slumped in the passenger seat, looking utterly hopeless.

"You have to come in even if the archives are closed! I have an urgent case investigation request!" Su Wantang said without looking away. "The records in the archives are too abstract. I want to see the real things!"

Since Qingxi County sank, even if no gold or silver treasures were left behind, there should at least be some traces of life! If that poem is true, then there must be evidence that 'people' lived there!

Lin Shoumo pursed his lips and muttered under his breath, "No living people were left; those who were left are mostly dead..."

Nandu City Museum, underground artifact storage.

The air was thick with the strange smell of stale paper mixed with the pungent odor of mothballs. This was a historical junkyard, piled high with countless broken objects whose authenticity was questionable and had no value for exhibition.

"Officer Su, over here!"

The curator, who was over seventy years old, was in charge of managing the warehouse. He had gray hair, wore thick reading glasses, and walked with a slight tremor. He pointed to a huge object covered by a dust cloth in the corner.

"This is what you're looking for. It was stored here before I became the curator. It's said to be very strange back then. No matter how hard you tried to break it, you couldn't break it. They even tried to bulldoze it, but the bulldozer inexplicably overturned, and the driver died on the spot..."

The old curator shook his head. These were old stories from many years ago, and among the few strange things he had heard in his career: "Later, I had it brought back to the museum, and it's been sitting here ever since, untouched!"

Su Wantang and Lin Shoumo exchanged a glance and stepped forward.

Lin Shoumo reached out and ripped off the dusty cloth.

call--

As dust rose, a huge, incomplete bluestone tablet was exposed in the dim light.

This stone tablet is over two meters tall. It is not made of ordinary bluestone. Its surface has an eerie grayish-white color, like bone or the product of some kind of weathered metal.

What's most chilling is that the surface of the stone tablet is covered with a dense array of scratches.

The scratches varied in depth, some even penetrating an inch into the stone, as if countless hands had frantically tried to... pull out, or pull in, from this rock...

In the very center of the stone tablet, two lines of text are clearly engraved.

Although many of the characters had become blurred and illegible due to the erosion of time and human damage, and only their outlines could be barely discerned, Su Wantang still recognized the place name on the sheepskin fragment at a glance—

Qingxi County

However, below those two words, there was an even more shocking line of poetry.

Su Wantang turned on her flashlight, and the bright light swept across the surface of the stone tablet. The grooves were faintly tinged with a dark red, like blood that had dried up for centuries.

She took out her notebook and painstakingly wrote down the information while identifying it:

"Red flowers, red flowers, from their first bloom they are already at the ends of the earth!"

"An eight-year-old village boy uses his fist as an umbrella, his life as fragile as sand in the cold rain at dawn."

"...Cold stares are like thorns...your heart...is as warm as a scab!"

The handwriting becomes blurry and illegible here, with a large section missing in the middle. At the very bottom line, the handwriting becomes chaotic and messy, as if it were carved out with fingernails.

"...waiting until youth fades, waiting until death, waiting for the blood to flow like a sunset beneath the wheels!"

Su Wantang's finger stopped on the words "under the wheel".

Under the wheel?

A scene flashed through her mind: a woman in a red floral dress, being thrown through the rain like a kite with a broken string...

"Is this a... narrative poem?" Su Wantang murmured to herself, a chill creeping up her spine.

She turned to the old curator: "Curator, where did this stone tablet come from? Can we still find the demolition address?"

The old curator pushed up his glasses, a hint of confusion flashing in his cloudy eyes:

"The exact address... the archives don't seem to have a record of it! It's been many years, things were very chaotic back then, all I know is that it's an old alley in the south of the city, but..."

He pointed to the base of the stone tablet: "When this thing was brought here, there was some mud and... burnt cloth stuck to the bottom of the base."

I glanced at it then, and the pattern on the fabric looked like the one you were just reading about... a small red floral print.

"Since we can't contact the construction team, the exact demolition address is unknown... this..."

Su Wantang was somewhat disappointed; the clues seemed to have gone cold.

But at that moment, Lin Shoumo, who had been silent all along, suddenly shivered.

He stared intently at the inscription on the stone tablet, "An eight-year-old village boy uses his fists as an umbrella," and his face instantly turned deathly pale, even more so than when he was injured at the logistics park.

"Officer Su..." Lin Shoumo's voice trembled slightly. He took a step back, pointing at the stone tablet, "You... did you understand this story?"

Su Wantang paused for a moment: "It's probably about a woman's tragic life? She was bullied when she was eight, someone protected her, and she waited for that person until... she died under the wheels of a car?"

"No! No!"

Lin Shoumo shook his head violently, cold sweat beading on his forehead. He stretched out his hand, tracing the claw marks on the stone tablet in the air, his voice extremely low, filled with an undisguised fear:

"Officer Su, you're oversimplifying things. Think about it, 'an eight-year-old village boy used his fist as an umbrella' means that when she was eight years old, a little boy used his fist to shield her from the rain and blows. How old were they then? Eight!"

"'Life is as worthless as sand in the cold rain at dawn,' the fifth watch being around three or four in the morning! It means this woman's life is miserable, as insignificant as sand!"

"The key is here—'Waiting until youth fades and death arrives!'"

Lin Shoumo grabbed Su Wantang's arm, gripping it so tightly it hurt her.

"What does this mean? It means this woman spent her entire life waiting for that man! Waiting from childhood to adulthood, from black hair to white hair! And... 'waiting for the blood to flow like a sunset'..."

He swallowed hard, his eyes filled with terror.

"If this poem were engraved on a tombstone, it would be a 'eulogy.' But the eulogy only describes how she suffered, how she waited, and how she died, but it doesn't mention where that man went!"

"A man saved her when she was eight years old, and she remembered it for her whole life, waiting for him her whole life! But when this woman died, there wasn't even anyone to claim her body, so she could only carve her resentment into stone..."

Lin Shoumo took a deep breath, pointed to the dense scratch marks on the stone tablet, and said in a trembling voice:

"Look! These scratches... weren't done outside."

He placed his hand on the scratches, but in the opposite direction.

"This was pulled out from inside! Someone was sealed inside this stone, or rather... something was sealed inside this monument! She can't get out!"

"It's haunted... Officer Su, this time it's really haunted!" Lin Shoumo plopped down on the ground, his face ashen. "If I'm not mistaken, this isn't some kind of artifact at all; it's a sealing post used for a human sacrifice! The poem we just recited should be her unlocking incantation!"

Just then, a very faint sound suddenly came from the deathly silent warehouse.

Click!

That was the sound of stone cracking.

Su Wantang turned around abruptly and saw that the huge stone tablet had developed a thin crack on its surface without any external force.

A dark red liquid slowly flowed down the crack and dripped onto the ground!

Tick ​​tock!

In that deathly still air, Su Wantang distinctly heard a faint sigh, as if it were pressed against the back of her neck:

"...Did you see that...?"