S.C.I Mystery Series Volume 6 Chapter 16

The Card Murderer 16 – Both Sides of the Tunnel

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Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang returned to the police station, only to find the entire building brightly lit.

They had initially planned to grab some sleep in the break room, but the space had been taken over by the forensics and the medical examination teams. The entire room was covered in plastic sheets as they conducted blood spatter simulations. In an effort to identify the murder weapon, the forensic team had set up multiple mannequins and were in the middle of staging "murder and dismemberment" scenarios, an utterly gruesome sight.

Gongsun told them to go home and get some rest, advising them to return after lunch the next day when the forensic analysis and evidence examination would be completed. There was no point in them standing around now.

So, Bai Yutang and Zhan Zhao headed back first.

......

The next morning.

Bai Jintang had gone out early with the twins, seemingly for some business meeting.

Gongsun had yet to return, and Bai Chi had left at dawn to go on a morning run with Zhao Zhen. They had also planned to pick up some trendy cat paw bread from a newly opened viral bakery nearby.

Dressed in his pyjamas and yawning, Zhan Zhao made his way downstairs, dodging the various felines brushing against his legs.

By the time he reached the living room, Bai Yutang had just come out of the shower and asked him what he wanted for breakfast.

Zhan Zhao said he fancied some spaghetti, so Bai Yutang went into the kitchen to prepare it.

Zhan Zhao sat on the sofa, retrieving his tablet from under Lisbon's belly, and opened a news website.

As expected, reports about the camping site incident had surfaced.

The case at White Sand Campground, the one inside the RV, was actually the more gruesome of the two. However, since the area was deserted at night and the police were the first to discover the crime scene, there was barely any media coverage of it.

Instead, what dominated the headlines was the news of the one dead and one injured at Sparrow Campground.

Because the crime scene had first been discovered by campground staff... During the time waiting for the police to arrive, it seemed that some staff members had secretly taken photos of the scene. Those pictures had since spread, and although many news reports had blurred certain details, some shocking crime scene images were still circulating online.

Zhan Zhao frowned as he scanned the numerous headlines, all written in a similar style. "Why does it feel like they were all written by the same person?"

"How are they written?" Bai Yutang, who was in the middle of frying eggs, heard Zhan Zhao muttering and asked him to read a couple out loud.

Zhan Zhao read a few headlines for Bai Yutang...

"Viral Campground, Midnight Horror", "Bloodthirsty Campground, Grisly Murder Case", "One Dead, One Critically Injured at Popular Destination, Horror Camping Ground Devours Lives"...

As Bai Yutang drizzled honey over Zhan Zhao's omelette, he asked, "Why is the campground getting so much attention?"

"Exactly!" Zhan Zhao also found it odd. "There are photos, and the murder method is way more bizarre, yet no one is mentioning it."

"Won't this affect business for the campground?" Bai Yutang dropped the spaghetti into the boiling water while grinding coffee beans with a hand-crank mill.

"It won't just affect it, it'll probably boost business." Zhan Zhao shook his head as he scrolled through the comments under the news articles, noticing that many people were discussing plans to visit Sparrow Campground for an adventure.

This was not a good thing. If too many people gathered around the area, crucial environmental evidence could end up being destroyed.

"That's interesting..." Zhan Zhao came across yet another rumour about the Sparrow Tunnel. Apparently, the tunnel had been haunted in the past.

"How did this become a haunting?" Bai Yutang poured coffee using a filter pot. "But something did happen in that tunnel."

Zhan Zhao added sugar to the coffee Bai Yutang had handed him, one spoonful at a time, until Bai Yutang took the sugar jar away.

"Which highway hasn't had its share of accidents?" Zhan Zhao stirred his coffee, took a sip, and immediately stuck out his tongue.

"I used to go to that road to practice when I was learning to drive, and my instructor told me there was an urban legend about that tunnel."

"An urban legend?" Zhan Zhao found the honey bottle and squeezed some into his coffee while asking, "Is it that one about entering a parallel dimension through the tunnel?"

"You've heard of it too?" Bai Yutang asked.

"This legend seems pretty well-known, but tunnels are always hotspots for stories about time travel and parallel dimensions!" Zhan Zhao remarked. "I remember the story actually started because of a car accident, didn't it?"

Bai Yutang nodded, lifting the spaghetti out of the water and starting on the sauce. "That area wasn't always a campground, it used to be a plastic surgery hospital."

"A plastic surgery hospital?" That was news to Zhan Zhao. He stirred his coffee a little more, and when he found it sweet enough, he drank it with satisfaction.

"There were a lot of post-surgery patients recovering there, all wrapped up in bandages." As Bai Yutang prepared the sauce, he recounted the story his driving instructor had told him for Zhan Zhao. "Then one day, there was a medical accident. A nurse mistakenly administered the wrong dose of painkillers to a patient, which caused her to hallucinate. She went completely hysterical and bolted from her hospital room. She ran down the same mountain path Liu Jing used to escape that night... rushed out of the woods onto the road, and was hit by a car just as it was coming out of the tunnel." Bai Yutang added, "The driver of that car happened to be another patient on their way to the same hospital for surgery, someone whose body shape was eerily similar to the person they had just hit."

Zhan Zhao used his fork to spread wasabi over his omelette, then turned to watch Bai Yutang serve the spaghetti into bowls. He asked, "Could it be that the hospital made the female driver who hit someone look like the female patient who was killed?"

Bai Yutang nodded, carrying both portions of spaghetti to the sofa. He sat down next to Zhan Zhao, took a sip of coffee, and continued, "The hospital offered the female driver a hefty sum, and both parties reached an agreement to cover up the medical accident and the fatal car crash. They secretly buried the real victim's body in the deserted mountain behind the hospital. As for the driver who had run her over, she assumed the identity of the deceased woman. It just so happened that the two women were of similar age and build, and the driver had been going through a rough time due to a failed relationship, so she faked leaving the country, making it seem as if she had vanished for good. Meanwhile, the woman playing dead found life surprisingly smooth. Her family and friends already knew she had gone in for cosmetic surgery, so when she returned looking slightly different, no one thought much of it. But after spending time with her, people gradually began to notice certain changes in her behaviour."

Zhan Zhao slurped his spaghetti while watching Bai Yutang, finding the whole story reminiscent of a horror film Gongsun might have seen.

Bai Yutang put down his coffee cup and asked, "Take a guess, what do you think happened next?"

Zhan Zhao twirled his fork as he analysed it. "According to the usual direction of horror movies, this is where the dead woman would come back for revenge, right? Everyone involved in the cover-up would start dying one by one in mysterious, terrifying ways."

"The female driver did end up killing two of the doctors and nurses involved and even attempted suicide, but her boyfriend saved her," Bai Yutang quickly took the honey bottle away when he saw Zhan Zhao was going to add more to his coffee. "But the problem is that when she was arrested and led the police to the burial site behind the hospital, they didn't find the victim's body."

Zhan Zhao frowned slightly at this unexpected turn of events. He thought for a moment before asking, "What if, there was never a car accident to begin with?"

Bai Yutang chuckled and nodded. "When investigators later looked into the hospital, they confirmed that on that particular day, a female patient did suffer a medical accident due to an overdose of painkillers. She did run out into the woods, and a car did pass through the tunnel at the same time... But that section of the road, we noticed it when we drove through before, the road conditions were very poor, bumpy and all uphill."

Zhan Zhao nodded. "The car would have been moving very slowly."

"So the female driver did hit the patient, but she neither killed nor seriously injured her. And that driver wasn't even heading to the hospital for cosmetic surgery, she had just been passing by. She even left her contact details with the hospital. Later, when the police tracked her down, they found that she had never left the country, nor did she bear any resemblance to the supposed victim." Bai Yutang continued, "From start to finish, it was all a delusion created by that patient herself."

Zhan Zhao thought for a moment before asking, "Did this case really happen?"

Bai Yutang nodded. "It did, a long time ago. But the most fascinating part isn't even this..."

That made Zhan Zhao laugh. "There's something even more dramatic?"

"Further investigations revealed that several tragedies had occurred at that hospital due to incorrect doses of painkillers. The police later suspected that someone, either a doctor or a nurse, had been deliberately prescribing the wrong dosage or switching out medication, leading to a string of tragedies."

"What happened after that?" Zhan Zhao felt that the female patient was quite wronged. Although she killed someone due to hallucinations and delusions, it really wasn't her fault,  she was affected by the medication.

"Before the police could complete their investigation, the media got hold of the story and published it. That led to a flood of compensation claims, and the hospital went bankrupt," Bai Yutang shook his head. "The hospital's director was arrested... In the end, all the hospital's related assets were auctioned off to compensate the victims, but as for who had been tampering with the painkillers, that was never uncovered."

"What about the patient who killed people?" Zhan Zhao was particularly curious about her fate.

"Since she had been under the influence of medication, she wasn't convicted of any crime. Her boyfriend took her to get treatment, but no one knows what the result was."

Zhan Zhao was curious. "Then how does this tie into parallel dimensions?"

"After hearing the urban legend from the driving school instructor, I went to the police station's archive room to check the old case records and found the real details of this case. The part about the legend, however, was distorted."

Zhan Zhao urged him to explain in detail.

"According to the legend, the female driver's car sped out of the tunnel and did indeed hit a woman who had run down from the hillside. But when she got out to check, she found neither a body nor blood on the road, so she thought it might be her own hallucination and continued to drive up the hill. She really was heading to the hospital for cosmetic surgery, but only for a minor procedure. However, after the surgery, when she had fully recovered and looked in the mirror, she saw that her face had been changed. It was now the face of the woman she had hit."

Hearing Bai Yutang say this, Zhan Zhao stroked his chin and nodded. "Oh! This is exactly the kind of plot a horror movie should have."

"Then she discovered that even her name had changed. After leaving the hospital and driving back through the tunnel, everything seemed normal again, until she got home, and her own family didn't recognise her. She went back to the hospital to demand answers, but when she arrived, there was no record of her surgery, and everyone in the hospital looked at her as if they'd seen a ghost. That's when she realised, there were missing person posters plastered all over the hospital, and the face on them was hers."

Having finished his spaghetti, Zhan Zhao asked Bai Yutang curiously, "And then what?"

"Then she disappeared." Bai Yutang grabbed a napkin and wiped Zhan Zhao's mouth. "It's an open-ended urban legend."

"It's still a pretty complex version." Zhan Zhao found the connection between the real case and the urban legend interesting, even though the perspectives were completely different.

At that moment, Bai Chi and Zhao Zhen returned from their morning run.

"Brother, have you seen the news?" Bai Chi rushed to the sofa with a paper bag in hand and switched on the TV.

Zhao Zhen took a sip of water, walked to the sofa, sat down beside them, and stroked Lisbon's massive head. "Things really aren't peaceful these days."

Bai Chi turned on the TV, which was broadcasting the headline: "S City Publishing House's chief editor, Pei Tian, receives death threats".

"Pei Tian?" Bai Yutang turned to Zhan Zhao. "Pei Xiu's father?"

Zhan Zhao nodded while eyeing the cat paw bun Bai Chi had brought him, only to find that it looked more like a dog's paw.

Just then, Bao Sir called, asking Bai Yutang and Zhan Zhao to go to the publishing house.

Bai Yutang agreed, about to hang up when Bao Sir added, "Inside the threat letter Pei Tian received there was a playing card."

‿︵‿︵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: March 24, 2025 by Angel

Edited: May 19, 2025 by Soojin