S.C.I Mystery Series Volume 6 Chapter 166

The Wisteria Murderer 10 – Behind the Scenes

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While the SCI team had managed to uncover a few clues in the wisteria case, the cost seemed a little too "heavy".

After receiving a phone call from Gongsun, Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang first took Bai Ye, Zhao Jue and Issel back home.

The house had quieted down by then. Bai Chi's fighting power was clearly no match for Mia's. After Zhao Zhen pulled him into his arms and noticed that he was still looking around, he took a blanket and covered him with it.

After being covered up, Chi Chi stopped "seeing ghosts". This made Big Brother Bai and the twins rather suspicious... So Bai Chi really had "seen" a ghost earlier, rather than it being some kind of psychological effect?

After Gongsun hung up the phone, he heard Zhan Zhao say that Mia had been experiencing the same symptoms. Curious, he asked Zhao Zhen, "They encountered ghosts while investigating a case... What's going on with Bai Chi? Did you guys also encounter ghosts when you went to the amusement park?"

Zhao Zhen looked utterly bewildered – No, we didn't even go into the haunted house when we went to the amusement park this time!

"Then what was he doing just now?" Gongsun asked, puzzled.

Bai Jintang thought for a moment. "He was looking at your tablet earlier. I think he said something about a new type of horror movie..."

"A horror movie?" Gongsun took out his tablet and asked Bai Jintang which video it was.

Bai Jintang tapped on the video of the dark, ruined building that Bai Chi had been watching earlier.

Gongsun and the twins crowded together and watched it once.

Afterwards, they looked at one another, none of them understanding what was supposed to be frightening about the video. There was nothing there at all!

Zhao Zhen reached out and took the tablet, watching it himself as well... After watching it, he frowned and thought for a moment before playing it again.

"Something's moving," Zhao Zhen muttered to himself.

At that moment, Bai Chi, still hiding beneath the blanket, nodded.

"What's moving?" The twins leaned in from either side, bringing their heads right up to the phone screen.

"There's a shadow!" Zhao Zhen turned on the television, cast the footage from the phone onto the TV screen, and then played it back at half speed.

Everyone in the room crowded in front of the television to watch the slow-motion footage...

When Bai Yutang and Zhan Zhao returned, this was the scene that greeted them: a group of people gathered around the television, with Zhao Zhen sitting on the sofa beside Bai Chi, who was wrapped in a blanket.

Seeing that everyone was back, Zhao Zhen picked up the tablet and gestured for Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang to come over.

The two took the tablet and, sure enough, the problem lay in that particular stretch of the wisteria ruins.

Issel took the tablet and played the video once, frowning slightly. "A shadow."

Zhao Zhen nodded.

"What shadow?" The twins had just watched the entire clip in slow motion on the big television, and were beginning to doubt their own eyesight. "There's no shadow."

"It doesn't look like a human shadow..." Bai Jintang had indeed noticed something odd in one frame earlier, it was as if something had flown past. Its shape hadn't looked human, but rather something the size of a bird or some kind of avian creature. A black shadow had zipped past, and even when the footage was frozen, it was impossible to make out exactly what it was.

After staring at the screen for too long, the twins felt as though their eyes were playing tricks on them, so they stood up and rubbed their eyes.

Zhao Jue told them not to rub their eyes and to check the glass windows, glass doors and other similar surfaces first to see whether they could spot any ghostly shadows.

The twins did as he said, but both shook their heads, indicating that they hadn't seen anything...

Issel observed Bai Chi's condition and told Zhao Zhen to accompany him back to his room to rest and cover up anything that could reflect light. Then he grabbed Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang and headed for the ruins overgrown with wisteria.

......

By nightfall, the abandoned area was far more unsettling than it had been during the day. The road was pitch-black, without a single streetlight.

Bai Yutang and Zhan Zhao led the way, carrying flashlights. Issel and Bai Ye followed behind them, observing their surroundings, while Zhao Jue and the twins, who'd tagged along for the excitement, brought up the rear.

The twins were carrying two emergency lights, which were so bright that they looked like a pair of searchlights, illuminating the entire street. However, both of them kept glancing behind them.

Perhaps it was because of the atmosphere, but they couldn't shake the feeling that they could hear footsteps, even though there was no one following them.

Bai Ye looked at Issel, who was frowning at a row of derelict prefabricated buildings nearby, and asked, "There really is someone in the vicinity, right?"

Issel nodded. "That's right."

"Where are they?" Zhan Zhao asked curiously. "We can't see a single shadow, yet the footsteps sound as though they're right behind us."

"This kind of sound travels through mediums such as metal pipes." Issel pointed to their surroundings. "Because of the U-shaped layout of the street, the vacant buildings on either side act as echo chambers, creating this effect where the footsteps are impossible to pinpoint."

"Was it deliberately designed this way?" Bai Yutang asked, somewhat puzzled.

"It feels intentional," Issel explained his assessment. "If this was a natural coincidence, the source of the sound should be our own footsteps... This sound has been carefully engineered, it's coming from an external source."

"Someone's watching this place?" The twins reckoned that if someone staged an ambush using this terrain, they'd probably all be wiped out.

"The question is, why are they monitoring this place?" Zhan Zhao and Zhao Jue asked almost in unison.

After speaking, they both glanced at each other.

"This is just a wasteland."

"Even before it was abandoned, it wasn't a particularly valuable area."

"Are they trying to create the illusion that the place is haunted?"

"But haunting a place wouldn't stop people from coming. If anything, it'd attract even more people."

Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang both recalled the "spectacular sight" of influencers everywhere that afternoon. Speaking of influencers...

Zhan Zhao looked at Bai Yutang – Those three who were rollerblading, did they go home after finishing their interviews at the police station?

Bai Yutang thought they probably had, so he sent Luo Tian a message to ask.

Luo Tian had just arrived home and was having dinner with Ma Xin and Yang Yang when he received Bai Yutang's message. He replied that the three of them had already gone home.

Since Hei Zhen had been in danger earlier, Tian Bian had accompanied him home to spend the night. It seemed that Hei Zhen lived with his parents, so there were quite a few people in the house. Xiao Wei had returned to her university dormitory, where she had two roommates. There were security guards at the entrances to the S University dormitories, so she should be fairly safe too.

Luo Tian had given all three of them his contact information and told them to call him if they noticed anything unusual.

Bai Yutang hung up and looked at Zhan Zhao – Cat, do you suspect that one of those three might develop the same symptoms as Mia?

Zhan Zhao wasn't sure either. "Mia and Chi Chi do have a few things in common. For example, they're both exceptionally intelligent, and they both have photographic memories..."

"Don't you have both of those traits too?" Bai Yutang pointed out. "So why haven't you seen any ghosts?"

Zhan Zhao was pondering that very question himself. "When I watched the video just now, I didn't even notice that moving shadow..."

After walking for a while, the group gradually grew accustomed to their surroundings and no longer found them so eerie.

They arrived at the former site of the abandoned Wisteria Hotel, where an enormous wisteria tree stood beneath the night sky...

"Wow..." the twins exclaimed. "It'd be great if they turned this place into a park. Such a magnificent tree..."

Before the twins could finish speaking, everyone present except Zhan Zhao suddenly turned their heads in unison...

Zhan Zhao had been admiring the tree when the group's sudden movement startled him. Puzzled, he turned to look in the same direction – What are you looking at?

The group collectively looked at the crumbling wall on the left. Zhan Zhao couldn't make sense of it. He looked at Bai Yutang and the others, then couldn't help laughing... The way everyone was behaving now reminded him of a group of fox mongooses standing guard... They'd all turned their heads in exactly the same direction, at exactly the same angle.

Zhan Zhao was puzzled. Was there something wrong with his eyesight? What on earth had they seen?

Issel took the emergency light from Xiao Ding and pointed it towards the wall.

In an instant, the entire wall was illuminated. Under the intense light, the abandoned brick wall, with its peeling and mottled surface, began to undergo a strange transformation...

"It's moving," Xiao Ding muttered.

Da Ding nodded.

Everyone else nodded too, with the sole exception of Zhan Zhao, who still looked utterly bewildered.

Not wanting to seem so out of place with the others, Zhan Zhao crossed his arms and examined the wall carefully – What exactly is moving?

Bai Yutang glanced at the cat's head that had popped up right beside him. He reckoned Zhan Zhao hadn't quite figured it out, so he took the lamp from Da Ding and slowly moved it across the wall, shining the light as he went...

"Ah!"

Zhan Zhao finally spotted it. "It's like one of those lenticular cards! There are two images!"

The group around him looked at Zhan Zhao with amusement – He's actually rather insensitive to this sort of thing... It just goes to show that even geniuses have their weaknesses.

"The brick wall is a mural! It isn't really a crumbling brick wall." Zhao Jue stepped closer and looked up at it. He even reached out to touch the surface. "Whoever painted this mural is pretty skilled!"

Bai Yutang and Issel raised the lights, found a suitable angle to illuminate the wall, then slowly walked forward.

As the light moved slowly across the surface, the picture hidden "underneath" was revealed. However, as the light shifted, the part that had been revealed quickly disappeared again.

Since the wall itself couldn't be turned to change the angle, it was like a fixed, immovable lenticular card. The only way to see the image was to adjust the angle from which the light hit it.

Working with the light, the group tried all sorts of angles along the wall, but they still couldn't get a complete view of the picture underneath...

Zhan Zhao used his phone to record the entire transformation. Thanks to their photographic memories, he and Zhao Jue had more or less pieced together the hidden picture in their minds. But it didn't matter that the others lacked photographic memories; they had AI... Zhan Zhao asked "Got You" to stitch the video together frame by frame. Before long, the picture concealed beneath the wall was revealed. Unexpectedly, it wasn't frightening at all.

It was simply a piece of extreme-sports graffiti, depicting a young man dressed entirely in black, wearing rollerblades as he leapt over a series of obstacles...

It was impossible to make out the young man's features. He wore a black hoodie, a black baseball cap pulled low over his face, and a mask... Not an ordinary mask, either, but an industrial dust mask of the kind with two air valves on either side of the black facepiece.

The young man appeared four times in the mural, each in a different pose as he glided over different obstacles. The sequence progressed from low to high: first, with his body upright; then, crouched forward as he accelerated; next, with his legs tucked up as he jumped onto a metal railing; and finally, leaping into the air and twisting his body...

"The painting's really well done, isn't it?" Zhan Zhao thought the artwork was superb, but wasn't entirely sure, so he asked Zhao Jue.

Zhao Jue nodded and added, "Not only are the figures well painted, but the backgrounds are excellent too."

The others didn't think much of Zhao Jue's comment about the backgrounds, but Bai Yutang and Zhan Zhao exchanged a subconscious glance... The four dynamic poses of the young man in black were paired with four different backgrounds: the wisteria tree at the beginning, the Wisteria Hotel, a brand-new high-rise building, and a floor of a building engulfed in flames.

The backgrounds also contained various snippets of streets and a number of figures. They were all drawn in simple strokes, but each had a different appearance...

"Would it be easier to see during the day?" the twins asked Zhao Jue.

Zhao Jue shook his head. "During the day, no matter how you shine the light or what angle you look from, you probably won't be able to see the second picture at all... I suspect this is why the place is haunted at night."

"It's all because of this painting?" Bai Yutang didn't quite understand. "Did Mia and Bai Chi see the second picture too? There's nothing frightening about it."

Zhan Zhao stroked his chin as he studied the mural assembled on the screen. He'd originally wanted to look for some kind of hidden message or suggestive imagery in the picture, but he really couldn't find anything. It was an entirely ordinary painting.

Moreover, Zhan Zhao still hadn't figured out why only Mia and Bai Chi had noticed something wrong while everyone else was fine. How had those two spotted it? Could it be that, in the instant the light flashed across the wall, their eyes had worked differently from an ordinary person's, allowing them to see something the others couldn't?

With no clues to go on, the group could only turn to Issel – Radar, have you found anything?

Issel stared at the wall with a frown. His expression suggested he'd seen something rather unpleasant.

Bai Ye and Zhao Jue exchanged a glance. Zhao Jue silently took out his phone and sent a message.

Just then, Bai Yutang's phone suddenly rang.

As he took out his phone, Bai Yutang looked at Zhao Jue, wondering whether the call might have something to do with the message Zhao Jue had just sent.

However, when Zhao Jue saw him looking at him, he simply shook his head.

Bai Yutang glanced down at the caller ID and seemed momentarily stunned as well. He showed it to Zhan Zhao.

The caller was Gui Jiali.

‿︵‿︵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: October 28, 2026 by Angel

Edited: October 29, 2026 by Angel