S.C.I Mystery Series Volume 6 Chapter 130

Special Files – Collector 15 – House of Vines

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As a seasoned forensic pathologist, Gongsun has encountered all sorts of bizarre "ways to die."

Some of them had been so extraordinary that he remembered them vividly.

The screenwriter's death, which seemed almost like divine retribution, reminded Gongsun of a particular case he had come across before.

"Usually, in areas prone to hail, the meteorological department fires a type of anti-hail shell into the sky. But once, there was a dud shell. The shell didn't explode, fell back down, and killed a passerby. Coincidentally, the shell pierced through the victim's head and got stuck inside the chest cavity. It happened during a thunderstorm, with lightning flashing and thunder rumbling, so many onlookers believed the victim had been struck by lightning. The family didn't request an autopsy and accepted lightning as the cause of death. They cremated the body... and as soon as it went into the furnace, the high temperature caused the unexploded shell inside the body to detonate."

Everyone thought about it and felt that it seemed to perfectly match how the screenwriter had died.

"But to deliberately create such a death, that'd be quite difficult, wouldn't it?" Bai Yutang thought it was almost impossible to replicate this method, and besides, what was the point?

"The hardest part of the case wasn't just the shell falling and hitting someone precisely, it was the fact that the explosive shell had stayed inside the body undetected."

Gongsun pointed out that the key to that case had been the lack of an autopsy before cremation.

"That case should be quite old. Nowadays, meteorological shells are equipped with deceleration parachutes." Gongsun felt that if the screenwriter had really died in such a bizarre way, it would have been impossible for there to be no autopsy. Therefore, the likelihood of him being cremated with a shell inside his body was extremely low.

"If the perpetrator was skilled enough, it wouldn't be impossible to fake, but the cost would definitely be high." Bai Ye found the case rather interesting and analysed it briefly. "Using a drone and an implanted device, it might be possible to produce the same effect."

"All that effort, just to kill a screenwriter?" Zhao Jue looked thoroughly unimpressed.

Bai Ye agreed. "If it really was deliberate, there must have been a very specific reason behind it... Of course, it's not impossible that it was a coincidence."

"So... the TV drama and the mannequin, is that also a coincidence?" Zhan Zhao tugged at the cushion he was leaning against, feeling it was a bit too firm and not very comfortable to lean on.

Bai Yutang also felt uncomfortable after sitting for so long and stood up to stretch.

Looking at the time, it was already evening. Having eaten barbecue earlier, no one felt hungry, so they decided to go out for a walk.

When they stepped out of the cabin, they found the road surprisingly busy, and it was even livelier than it had been at noon.

After walking a few steps, they realised that although the mountain area had looked gloomy during the day, it was rather pleasant in the evening.

Especially with the setting sun tinting the whole sky rose-coloured, the winding mountain road was dotted with cyclists and joggers.

Bai Yutang tried to persuade Zhan Zhao to run down the mountain and back up again, but Zhan Zhao firmly refused.

The twins told Bai Yutang that there was a bicycle store in the shopping mall at the foot of the mountain, and there were many bicycles suitable for mountain biking.

In the end, Bai Yutang, Bai Ye, and a few others couldn't resist and ran down the mountain.

Zhan Zhao, Zhao Jue, Gongsun, and the others strolled leisurely, accompanying Lan Qi, who was pushing the stroller.

Zhan Zhao was absent-minded as they walked. His mind kept returning to those few clips and the television drama they had watched earlier. They are obviously the same style, so what is it trying to imply?

As he was walking in a daze, Gongsun suddenly reached out and pulled him aside.

Zhan Zhao looked up and saw a car approaching, driving past them...

Zhan Zhao suddenly turned his head, touched the back of his own head, and looked puzzled.

"What's wrong?" Gongsun noticed that Zhan Zhao had stopped walking and kept staring back.

Zhao Jue also stopped.

"I think I just saw..." Zhan Zhao said, "two plastic mannequins on the back seat of that car!"

Gongsun and Zhao Jue stared at him for a moment, suspecting he was hallucinating.

To be honest, Zhan Zhao wasn't entirely sure himself. His eyesight definitely wasn't as sharp as Bai Yutang's, and it had only flashed by for a second, perhaps he really had been mistaken...

Gongsun asked Bai Jintang whether he had seen it.

Big Brother Bai, who had been yawning lazily just a moment ago, shook his head, indicating he hadn't.

"But if those mannequins really were in that car... they should've been in the trunk, shouldn't they..."

Zhan Zhao thought about it and decided that it was true, he had probably been mistaken.

"Is it over there?"

As they were talking, Bai Chi ran to the side of the road and pointed at an open area down the mountain.

Zhan Zhao and the others walked over to have a look and saw that it was quite a large space filled with abandoned shipping containers, and there were lots of people.

Zhan Zhao looked rather put out. "Looks like it... but why are there so many people?"

"Seems like they're all influencers here to livestream." Bai Chi counted and found at least ten different groups filming.

Zhao Jue touched his chin. "Now I'm genuinely curious about the current mental state of young people..."

While they were still making sarcastic comments, a burst of laughter rang out from afar.

Everyone frowned slightly... This laughter, for some reason, sounded rather irritating...

"It sounds familiar..." Lan Qi, who was pushing the stroller, asked Zhan Zhao to hold it for a moment while he took out his phone and aimed it towards the area with the abandoned shipping containers.

Zooming in as much as possible, he could see a group of people filming on one side of the site.

One of the young men stood out, wearing a red hoodie and glasses, holding a selfie stick in one hand and gesturing animatedly towards the containers with the other, occasionally tilting his head back to let out a strange laugh.

"It's him!" Lan Qi seemed to have recognised the person.

"You know him?" Zhan Zhao thought that that man's lung capacity was impressive, they could hear his laugh from so far away.

Gongsun looked rather concerned. "Why's he laughing like that? Could he be short of oxygen?"

"That guy's called 'Laughing Bird',  he's an online influencer." Lan Qi pointed at his own teeth and said, "Ling Ling once treated him when she was working as a dentist. Every one of his teeth has the character 'ha' tattooed on it."

"Ha?!" Everyone was baffled and looked at Lan Qi. Even Zhao Jue turned towards him with a puzzled expression.

"In his videos, the number of ha's visible when he laughs indicates how funny something is. If you can only see four ha's, meaning four teeth, that's just mildly funny. If you can see twenty-eight ha's, then it's absolutely hilarious. So he always laughs in an exaggerated way. Ling Ling even ran into him once in the emergency room, he'd torn the corners of his mouth from laughing too hard and had to get stitches."

Gongsun looked even more disgusted. "This... does anyone actually watch it?"

Lan Qi nodded. "Apparently quite a lot. There was even a trend at one point, people rating things as 'three-ha funny' or 'ten-ha funny'."

Bai Jintang glanced down at the abandoned site below the mountain. "Wasn't that place the scene of a murder case before? What's so good about it that he's so interested in it?"

"You know how I like watching adventure and survival videos," Lan Qi continued. "I keep coming across his stuff. This kid is incredibly annoying, he has absolutely no sense of respect. He's got a series on haunted houses, where he visits murder houses and places tied to urban legends... Honestly, there are already tons of shows like that, so it's hard to come up with anything original."

Everyone nodded. Ever since short videos had become popular, every possible theme had been repeated endlessly. That cluster of containers below was the perfect example, with so many people filming there all at once.

"Probably just to stand out. That Laughing Bird mocks and ridicules everything wherever he goes, it's practically asking for trouble. He laughs at the dead, taunts murderers, and keeps letting out all those bizarre laughs..."

As he spoke, that strange laughter rang out again.

Zhao Jue asked, "Surely the people filming nearby will have picked up his laughter?"

Lan Qi nodded. "Exactly, he does that on purpose. The more people there are, the louder and weirder he laughs. That way, others have to reshoot or edit the sound to remove it. And if someone overlooks it and leaves his laugh in their video, he deliberately clips it out and claims they've infringed on his unique laugh, trying to ride on his popularity."

Gongsun couldn't help but laugh. "It's impressive he's managed to live this long."

Zhan Zhao felt that this man was practically a rare human specimen worth studying, so he took out his phone to search for the videos... Sure enough, there were plenty of videos of "Laughing Bird". The view counts were all quite high, too.

"Hmm... this is a bit interesting." Zhan Zhao scrolled through the videos and suddenly noticed a video titled The House of Vine.

Zhan Zhao frowned.

As the group continued walking down the mountain, Zhan Zhao watched the video while Bai Chi held onto his arm, afraid he might trip over the potholes on the road.

Zhao Jue glanced curiously at what Zhan Zhao was watching. From the phone's speaker came Laughing Bird's voice: "The haunted house of this episode is, the! House! Of! Vines!"

"The House of Vines?!"

Both Bai Chi and Gongsun leaned in when they heard that. "You mean that House of Vines?!"

Zhan Zhao nodded.

"What's the House of Vines?" Bai Jintang asked curiously.

Gongsun and Bai Chi both looked at him with a questioning expression – You've never heard of it? It's really famous!

Bai Jintang was puzzled, Am I really the only one who doesn't know? He glanced at Zhao Jue.

Zhao Jue didn't say anything, he was busy entertaining Jiajia in the stroller as they walked.

"If you haven't heard of the House of Vines, have you heard of the Wisteria Manor?" Zhan Zhao asked, looking up.

Big Brother Bai paused slightly, then let out an "Oh." "That cheap manor? I almost bought it when I first came back... Later, the twins looked into it and said they'd rather die than purchase it. Apparently it's haunted and has been abandoned for thirty years..."

Both Gongsun and Bai Chi nodded. "That house is considered the most infamous haunted house in S City, one of the most famous haunted houses in the world, actually."

"Is it really that cursed?" Bai Jintang didn't really believe it back then. He'd even gone to see the manor himself and had especially liked the enormous wisteria tree in the middle. At the time, he had thought that even if he demolished and rebuilt the whole house, just keeping that wisteria would be worth it. But the twins had strongly opposed it, and since the place was a bit out of the way, he eventually gave up on the idea...

Zhan Zhao watched the video, and after hearing that strange laugh, he shook his head, closed it, and looked up at Zhao Jue, who was admiring the scenery.

When Zhan Zhao was studying the case files Zhao Jue had given him earlier, he'd noticed a category labelled "unsolved cases", specifically marked by Zhao Jue himself. They were cases from his younger days that had never been concluded.

Among them, the "House of Vines" was one of the cases with two red circles drawn on the folder.

Two red circles indicated a potential serial killer.

Bai Jintang asked Gongsun for more details. "The twins only said it was a haunted house, and that it was extremely haunted... but what exactly happened there?"

As a forensic pathologist, Gongsun naturally didn't believe in haunted houses, but even he admitted that this manor was indeed very evil.

"This haunted house was built thirty years ago by a collector who'd returned from overseas. It was said he spent a huge amount of money on its construction. The place was lavishly designed both inside and out, particularly the courtyard, where there was an enormous wisteria vine that almost covered the entire manor. After the manor was completed, the collector moved in with his wife, children, bodyguards, and servants, eleven people in total. Not long after they settled in, one night, residents at the foot of the mountain heard gunfire coming from above... The next day, a delivery worker went up to the manor. He knocked for a long time but no one answered, so he left the goods and went away. The following morning, the newspaper deliveryman came and noticed that quite a few things were piled up by the door, the milk and produce delivered the previous day hadn't been brought inside. Suspecting something was wrong, he reported it to the police. When the police arrived and pried open the door... they were met with a scene of blood everywhere, and bodies were scattered all over the floor. Everyone except the master of the house had been shot in the head with a double-barrelled shotgun. The master himself was seated in his usual rocking chair, the shotgun still in his hands, and around his neck was a coil of wisteria vine... He had apparently turned the gun on himself." Gongsun explained that according to the records left behind, it seemed that the master had killed everyone in the house before shooting himself.

"What about the vine?" Big Brother Bai was puzzled. "Did he deliberately wind the wisteria around his neck?"

"That's what makes it unusual," Gongsun continued. "Since the entire family was dead, the inheritance went to his younger brother, who was living overseas. But the brother refused to inherit it, not because he believed in the haunted house rumours, but because he believed that his brother's collection had killed him. As a collector, the master had reportedly acquired quite a few dangerous or ominous artefacts. In the end, the younger brother entrusted the property to a real estate company to sell. Because it was in a remote location, and the house contained many valuable items, the company hired someone at a high salary to look after the place. Not long after that, a caretaker accepted the job..."

Bai Jintang listened, thinking the story was starting to sound more and more like The Shining...

"The caretaker brought a few of his friends to live with him. It was said they were a band, and since this place was remote, they could practise without disturbing anyone... But in reality, they weren't a band at all. They were a theft ring, and their real target was the priceless art collection inside." As Gongsun spoke, he winked at Bai Jintang.

Big Brother Bai caught his meaning. "Did those people die too?"

Gongsun nodded. "Exactly the same way. The ringleader shot all his accomplices, then killed himself, in precisely the same manner as the previous owner. And there was wisteria around his neck, too."

"At that point, the manor became infamous as a haunted house, and even harder to sell." Gongsun shook his head. "So the real estate company decided to take a rather absurd approach, they hired people to exorcise it... And the method was outrageous. They actually put a bounty notice in the newspaper. Taoist priests from Mount Mao, psychic mediums, and even priests waving crucifixes... a large group came flocking in. Eventually, the company selected seven of the most credible ones, dragged them up the mountain, and set them to catch ghosts..."

Bai Jintang thought that there was enough material for three films, so he asked, "And what happened in the end?"

"As a result, that very night, the villagers down the mountain heard gunfire again. The next day, when the real estate people went up to check, they found the same thing as before, everyone was dead. One of the professional ghost-hunters, a man named Zhang Dadan, was found sitting in that same rocking chair. He'd tried to shoot himself too, but luckily, the shot missed... Although the bullet went through his head, he somehow survived, but unfortunately, he'd gone insane... He has been confined in the T Zone ever since."

"He's still alive?" Bai Jintang asked in surprise.

"Mhmm, he should still be," Gongsun said, glancing towards Zhan Zhao.

Zhan Zhao, in turn, looked at Zhao Jue and asked, "Do you have any details to add?"

Everyone else looked at Zhao Jue as well.

With his hands still in his pockets, Zhao Jue kept walking, his gaze still fixed on the scenery beyond the mountain.

After a moment of silence, he suddenly said, "It wasn't just the neck, there were marks around the wrists and ankles too, as if they'd been bound by vines. And there were no fingerprints..."

"No fingerprints?" Everyone repeated. "Where?"

"On the shotgun trigger," Zhao Jue turned to face them and said, "There weren't any fingerprints on the trigger at all."

‿︵‿︵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 5, 2025 by Angel

Edited: November 26, 2025 by Angel