S.C.I Mystery Series Volume 4 Chapter 114

The Murderer Who Returned From Hell 14 – Playground

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Zhan Zhao put on the sunglasses and couldn't help but let out a "huh", then took them off and compared it, "It's really different."

Bai Yutang also took them and put them on, then frowned, "How come these two dry corpses have words written all over them?"

"Words?!" Song Jiajia was shocked and took Ma Han's sunglasses to put them on. After taking a look at the corpses, she opened her mouth wide in a stupefied state.

The other SCI members also had sunglasses with them, but nothing changed when they put them on.

So, everyone looked at Ma Han.

In fact, Ma Han was also confused at this time. He took his own sunglasses, put them on and looked at them, then said, "Oh…"

"Oh?" Ma Xin put her arm around his shoulders and asked curiously, "Brother, what special function do your sunglasses have?"

"It's not that." Ma Han waved his hand, "These sunglasses have night vision."

"Night vision?!" Everyone was surprised.

"It's not like the night vision device that has a particularly strong function, it's similar to the kind of night vision glasses that drivers wear when driving." Ma Han said, "Sometimes I need to go out on sniper missions at night, these glasses can brighten the image as much as possible, making it easy for me to spot the target at night."

"Oh..." Everyone sighed, worthy of being a sniper's sunglasses! High-end and foreign styles are superior!

"Hmm." Gongsun got close to the dry body and sniffed it, then took the sunglasses and looked at it, and turned back to ask Song Jiajia, "Is there a UV light?"

"Yes." Song Jiajia brought two UV lamps and shone them at the two dry corpses.

Everyone couldn't help but frown. They saw that the two dry corpses were densely covered with circles and circles of incantations written on their bodies, as if they were bound by chain-like words.

"It looks like Sanskrit." Zhan Zhao moved closer to take a look, then reached out and fished out his phone, tilted his face slightly and began to think of a phone number.

Everyone looked at him in puzzlement.

Song Jiajia curiously asked Bai Chi, "What's he doing?"

"Oh, Brother is probably looking for a phone number." Bai Chi replied.

"How is he doing that?" Song Jiajia couldn't understand.

"He memorised the entire phone book." Zhao Hu on the side helpfully explained, and the corners of Song Jiajia's mouth twitched – God damn high IQ! Human computers are so scary.

Not long after, Zhan Zhao "found" the number he wanted and dialled it.

The phone seemed to ring for a while, then they heard Zhan Zhao say, "Hello, Professor Cao, I'm sorry for waking you up. "

Everyone was unsure of who this Professor Cao was.

Song Jiajia knew, "Oh! Professor Cao, the authority on ancient scripts! He's over eighty years old."

The crowd subconsciously looked at their watches. It was past twelve o'clock, waking up an old man in his eighties at this time would be too inhumane.

"It's like this." Zhan Zhao said, "I may have found the text of the Ye Helan curse... er, I'm at the new research institute, there will be a special police officer to bring you in when you arrive. Okay."

Zhan Zhao hung up the phone and smiled faintly at the crowd, "The old man's breathing is accelerated and his adrenaline is obviously spiking, so if he doesn't have a heart attack, he'll probably arrive within ten minutes."

Everyone was worried about that old professor.

"Ye Helan curse?!"

Gongsun and Song Jiajia were concerned, but not about that Professor Cao, instead it was what Zhan Zhao said.

"What Ye Helan curse?" Bai Yutang was puzzled.

Everyone also expressed that they had never heard of it, what kind of side knowledge was it?

"The Ye Helan curse is one of the most mysterious witchcrafts in the ancient legends of Eastern Europe." Song Jiajia said, "Of course, it only exists in legends. It is the longest curse in the world, with a text that has close to ten-thousand words, and can be written as a spell lock. After 'locking' a corpse with this curse, the corpse can be controlled and used by the person who cast the curse!"

Everyone's mouths were wide open, it was so evil that it was beyond belief!

Bai Yutang held his forehead, "You guys are not moving towards the normal rhythm of solving cases... it's getting more and more outrageous!"

The others also looked at each other in dismay – Is this going to be a complete haunting or something?

"Hmm..." Zhan Zhao stroked his chin, and asked Ma Xin and Song Jiajia to hold the ultraviolet light to illuminate the two corpses, showing the dense curse "chains". Then he took out his cell phone and circled around the corpses. After circling the corpse, he took a panoramic photo of the scene and sent a colourful picture to a number.

Bai Yutang asked, "Asking Zhao Jue?"

Zhan Zhao's eyes narrowed, his words hardened, "It's to share with that guy."

Not long after, Zhan Zhao's cell phone meowed.

When Zhan Zhao opened it, he saw a screen full of emoticons.

Zhan Zhao felt that his eyes were going blind from looking at it, "What is this?!"

Ma Xin glanced at it and laughed, "It's a person rolling around, rolling from the third floor to the second floor and back to the ground floor..."

Zhan Zhao patiently scrolled down, at the very end, there were indeed a few words – I really want to go over there and play!

Zhan Zhao looked at the sky.

"What does it mean?" Bai Yutang asked.

"It means that it's not within the scope of Zhao Jue's research." Zhan Zhao also looked helpless, "It's completely unrelated to what we're looking into."

Bai Yutang couldn't help but frown. To be honest, other than that weird organisation, he really couldn't think of anyone else who was doing such weird research... Who exactly was the murderer this time? What was the purpose of pretending to be a ghost?

......

Before ten minutes had passed, footsteps could be heard.

SWAT brought an old man with a head full of white hair up. The old man was out of breath, holding a pair of glasses in his hand and wearing a pair on his nose, panting heavily, "There... there it is!"

Bai Yutang noticed that the old man was holding a pair of glasses with brownish-yellow lenses. Although they were not as handsome as Ma Han's pair, they seemed to have similar lenses.

At the doorway, Zhao Hu asked, "Old man, how did you know to bring lenses to see it?"

The crowd looked at the old man suspiciously, with some kind of police intuition.

The old man put the glasses on and was speechless, "I say, why are you police officers all sceptics? I've been studying the Ye Helan curse for decades. The Ye Helan curse is a concealed curse, it must be integrated into the corpse, and cannot be seen by the outside world! It's written in the sap of a certain plant. Once it comes into contact with the air, it disappears into thin air and requires night vision goggles or an ultraviolet light to see."

Everyone understood, and at the same time glanced at Zhao Hu and Ma Han, the standard blind cat bumped into a dead mouse ah!

Professor Cao put on the glasses, got close to the surface of the body to see, opened his mouth wide, and then began to circle around and around. Everyone was worried for him, he wouldn't get dizzy, fall down and directly suffer a stroke, right?

Bai Chi couldn't help but go forward and accompany the old man as he circled.

Professor Cao looked at it for about ten minutes, then stood dumbfounded and didn't say anything. His eyes stared straight at those inscriptions, and his face was very difficult to describe, though the reddened face and the heaving chest were enough to prove that his heart was pounding at this time.

"Can you determine the authenticity?" Zhan Zhao asked.

Professor Cao took off his glasses, wiped the sweat on his face, and said, "The text of the Ye Helan curse is ten thousand characters. I've studied it for decades, and so far I've only identified about five thousand characters, there's still five thousand that I can't even begin to examine, but... the first five thousand characters of this curse are not a word different from the real curse, and the last five thousand characters I've never seen at all. If it's authentic, then this is definitely a discovery that will shock the world."

Bai Yutang understood the scholars' pursuit of such things, but they were just police officers who only wanted to find out the truth, so he asked, "That is to say, you're not sure if this curse is authentic or not?"

Professor Cao nodded, muttering to himself as he did so, "Shameful ah... I'm an authority that doesn't live up to my name at all, if it's authentic, then this person is many times better than me!"

"Then, do you have any impression of anyone who is capable of doing this?" Zhan Zhao asked.

Professor Cao shook his head vigorously, thought carefully for a long time, then shook his head again, "There aren't many people who have studied the Ye Helan curse."

"Speaking of which," Gongsun asked Professor Cao, "the purpose of this Ye Helan spell is to control the undead?"

"No no." Professor Cao gently waved his hand, "The Ye Helan curse comes from an ancient witchcraft civilisation, its origin should be in Tibet, and it was introduced to Eastern Europe by travelling monks. The Ye Helan curse itself is not an evil incantation, it is used to bind dead souls that have too much resentment and are acting up. Some evil spirits were too resentful to be put to rest, so the incantation was used to lock them away, so that at least innocent people could be protected from them. But then the incantation was changed by an evil monk. The original shackles became strings that manipulated puppets, and the evil souls became controlled puppets, at the mercy of the spellcaster."

"Is there really such a curse?" Ma Han found it unbelievable.

"That's right, it's too superstitious." Zhao Hu said as he looked at the little girl's dried corpse and frowned – He had just seen her running away in a flash and then disappear. Apart from simply not being human, what little girl could do that? But it was too difficult for him to believe that there really were ghosts haunting the world, and he found it too difficult to just turn his whole outlook on life upside down.

"Actually, I don't believe it either." Professor Cao shook his head, "Just like many curses in ancient civilisations, the Ye Helan curse might just be a kind of eulogy."

"Eulogy?" Zhan Zhao stroked his chin.

"Mhmm." Professor Cao nodded, "In fact, many times the living are afraid of the dead because they have done something wrong to the dead and are afraid of retaliation. It's like when Europeans were afraid that corpses would be vampirised, so they staked their hearts with peach wood before they were buried. In ancient China, they stuffed the mouth of the corpse with corpse fixing beads... Writing incantations on the corpse is something that has appeared in many ancient civilised funeral cultures, similar to eulogies exhorting the dead to rest in peace as well as to give up hatred and the like. Later on, the more it spread, the more outrageous it became, and such words and texts were demonised."

Everyone nodded.

"Hmm." Gongsun also agreed, "I always deal with corpses. Dead is dead, and I haven't seen any that have come to life."

Professor Cao looked at the sculpture again and said, "I need to study it for a while before I can give you more information."

The crowd did not comment, in fact, what could be done if it was proven true or false? Apart from a breakthrough in academic research, there would be little progress on the case.

Ma Xin squatted down and carefully looked at the connection between the dry corpse's foot and the base support. There was no gap, and it was sealed with clay. Then he looked at the dry corpse's fingers.

"It seems like I can get one or two fingerprints." Ma Xin took out a tool to take fingerprints.

Zhao Hu walked around and squatted behind the statue, looking at the little girl's back – It felt very similar to the one he had just seen, but it seemed to be a bit different, what was so different about it?

The crowd was studying it when Bai Yutang's phone rang.

After Bai Yutang picked it up and listened to it, he frowned and said to Zhan Zhao, "Shen Bo is going to die."

Zhan Zhao was shocked, "What?!"

"That knife hit his internal organs, and he lost too much blood, the old man's body was already in bad shape." Bai Yutang said, "Yang Fan said that if we rush over within half an hour, we should still be able to see him one last time, and said that the old man seems to have something to say to us."

Zhan Zhao immediately left with Bai Yutang, leaving the others to take the SWAT team to check out the entire institute to see if there were any other clues.

Song Jiajia followed Bai Yutang and Zhan Zhao and they went to the hospital. Shen Bo used to be her teacher, and the teacher-disciple relationship was still good. In the car, Song Jiajia had already started to cry.

Bai Yutang sped to the hospital.

There were many people at the entrance of Shen Bo's ward, Bai Yutang looked at Zhan Zhao with some confusion.

Zhan Zhao whispered, "They're all students, probably."

Bai Yutang nodded.

Yang Fan, wearing a mask, opened the door to the ward and beckoned to the two.

Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang walked in.

Hao Nan and that assistant of Shen Bo's were standing just outside the window of the ward, hanging their heads. Song Jiajia also walked to the window, and through the window, they saw Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang walking to Shen Bo's side.

The old man was wearing a respirator and his face looked similar to grey paper.

Yang Fan whispered a few words in his ear.

The old man's eyes gently moved for a long time before opening a slit, and at the same time, his fingers seemed to be beckoning to Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang.

The two bent down, and Yang Fan gently removed the old man's respirator.

Shen Bo opened his mouth, seemingly struggling to say something, but all that came out of his mouth was a hoarse gasp.

Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang tried their best to hold their breaths and listen, and it was obvious that Shen Bo was making a last ditch attempt to get the words out.

After adjusting for a while, he finally uttered a relatively clear sentence – Tell F that, I'm sorry.

Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang glanced at each other and listened again. The gasping sound was gone, and the di~di~ sound from the heart rate monitor that was regularly ringing just now was also replaced by a long and calm du~ sound.

Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang subconsciously looked at the straight line on the screen to the side.

Yang Fan looked at the wall clock, and after talking to the nurse about the time, he closed Shen Bo's eyes that were still slightly open, pulled up the snow-white sheet over his face, and announced death.

At the door, Shen Bo's students were all crying.

Bai Yutang and Zhan Zhao frowned slightly – F again? Shen Bo's last words before he died were actually an apology to F.

In the research institute.

Bai Chi received a phone call and told the crowd that Shen Bo had died.

The SCI crowd looked at each other in disbelief. Shen Bo was killed under their noses by a four or five year old girl, no matter whether the other party was a human or a ghost, it was equally unacceptable.

Outside the door, Ma Han stood by the wall, tilting his face up to look at the dark shadow at the corner of the sixth floor – Why did the dry corpse climb here and disappear?

Inside the door, Zhao Hu stood at the top of the stairs, looking at the metal steps – Why did the little girl disappear in an instant after she ran down the stairs?

......

At the hospital.

As Shen Bo's family and students opened the afterlife, Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang left the ward and walked down the long corridor.

Zhan Zhao's eyes were staring straight ahead, seemingly in some kind of contemplation.

As Bai Yutang walked, he looked at the night outside the corridor, when... a silhouette on a tall building in the distance caught his attention.

It was a tall building far, far away.

Bai Yutang's excellent eyesight allowed him to clearly see a person standing on the top of the building. Because the night was too deep and the light was too dim, he couldn't see the person's appearance and clothing at all, only a rough outline, it should be a man...

For some reason, Bai Yutang felt that that person was looking in the direction of the hospital, and from that angle, he could precisely see the area of Shen Bo's ward.

Bai Yutang frowned slightly as he stared at that silhouette.

After that figure was seen looking for a while, he turned around and left.

With a ding, the elevator doors opened.

Zhan Zhao tugged Bai Yutang into the elevator, and the two of them left in silence.

That night, everyone returned to the SCI's office.

Bao Zheng was also present at the time and knew that the crowd was now frustrated and upset, but some things truly happened so suddenly that no one could have predicted it.

He walked into the office and wanted to comfort the crowd, but they were already busy continuing their work.

Bao Zheng nodded with satisfaction and looked round again, asking Bai Chi with some confusion, "Where are your captain and Zhan Zhao?"

"Oh, Brother just called, saying that they're going somewhere." Bai Chi replied.

"Where?" Bao Zheng was puzzled.

"He said it was a playground."

Bao Zheng was confused, "What playground?"

......

At this moment, Bai Yutang's car was parked at the entrance of a large factory on the outskirts of S City.

He and Zhan Zhao were currently standing at the entrance of a factory building in a factory district that covered an area as big as a stadium.

Bai Yutang took out a key with a "Z" keychain, opened the lock on the huge iron door, and with a clatter, pushed the door aside.

Zhan Zhao walked in, reached out and pressed the switch on the wall, and in an instant... the generator began to work. Hundreds of high-powered incandescent lamps lit up together, and the entire factory was as bright as day.

In the factory building, there were rows and rows of giant bookshelves, which could not all be seen with one glance.

Bai Yutang closed the door, and leaned against the iron door to wait.

Zhan Zhao walked alone along the letters on the rows and rows of bookshelves... After walking to row F, he turned into the aisle and sat down cross-legged.

Tilting his face up, before him were dozens of huge wall-like bookshelves, containing all of the literature, information, newspapers, biographies, news records, and so on that could be found in this world... As long as it was textual information related to F, it was all here.

About half a year ago, Zhao Jue suddenly gave Zhan Zhao a key and told him the address of this factory.

Zhan Zhao looked at the key in disbelief.

Zhao Jue smiled and told him, "I'll share it with you, it's my playground."

Zhan Zhao had been here once before and felt that this place was simply terrifying. It was an ocean of information, and no matter how high an IQ or strong a memory, you would probably be drowned here.

However, at this moment, Zhan Zhao sat in front of that wall of Fs, filtering all the data with his eyes. No matter who this F was, as long as he had existed on this earth, he would surely have left behind a record of even a few words, no one could go round this world without leaving a trace.

‿︵‿︵ʚ˚̣̣̣͙ɞ・❉・ ʚ˚̣̣̣͙ɞ‿︵‿︵

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Translator Notes

Please feel free to comment any mistakes I made so I can improve and do better as I go through the book.

Translated: November 29, 2023 by Angel

Edited: November 30, 2023 by Angel