Fisherman Case 1.4

Chen Haisheng's knees were already bleeding, with dark brown scabs mixed with grit clinging to the old wounds. He lit three incense sticks with trembling hands, the tips of the incense flickering in the river breeze, casting a pale blue-red glow on his wrinkled face.

"Ah Xiu—"

His chanting, like a dull knife, seeped into the fog, cutting through the night.

In the reeds, Li Weimian's voice recorder was capturing audio fluctuations. She suddenly pressed her earpiece: "The water level is dropping."

Under the moonlight, the river water was receding at a visible speed, revealing a group of moss-covered reefs. The stones, which had been eroded by the water for twenty years, were covered with densely packed tally marks—the newest marks still tinged with dark red.

"Blood sacrifice count." Situ Jin's detector beeped, "Each count represents one live animal sacrifice... a total of 347 sacrifices."

1:40 AM, third basement level of the forensic center

The wedding dress was laid flat on the dissection table, and Fan Jinci's tweezers were pulling a section of the spine out of the neckline.

"The third to fifth segments are severely deformed." He rotated the skeleton, revealing spiral-shaped growths under the light, "similar to the neural spines of deep-sea fish, but..."

The scalpel suddenly slipped at a certain protrusion.

Inside the bone crevice pried open by the knife tip, a dozen pearly white eggs were curled up, their surface covered by a mucous membrane that was still pulsating slightly.

As soon as Situ Jin's test tube approached, the eggs suddenly burst open with a "pop," and the splattered mucus corroded honeycomb-like dents on the stainless steel countertop.

"They're larvae." Situ Jin's glasses reflected the wriggling debris. "They're digesting the calcium in their bones... preparing to hatch."

Suddenly, a dull thud came from the corridor as something heavy fell to the ground.

3:15 AM, Jiang's Biological Isolation Room

Jiang Zhaoyan observed the "specimen" through the bulletproof glass. The object was strapped to the medical bed, and its swollen skin was oozing a pale blue mucus.

"Can we talk?" He knocked on the glass.

The specimen's vertical pupils slowly focused, and a rifty smile appeared on its lips—

"Haisheng...brother...took...his...medicine..."

(Brother Haisheng, I want to buy a bag~ Brother Haisheng, I want to eat well~)

The voiceprint analyzer pulsed violently. Li Weimian abruptly pressed the call button: "It's mimicking Ah Xiu's brainwaves before she died! The real consciousness is—"

The monitor screen suddenly started displaying static, and when the image returned, the restraints were completely empty.

The ceiling ventilation duct cover was swaying slightly, and a string of webbed, sticky mucus marks were stuck to the duct wall.

Linjiang Village Ancestral Hall

Chen Haisheng was sewing a new wedding dress with fishing line, the stitches crooked and uneven all over the cuffs. The glass jar on the offering table had been opened at some point, and swollen eyeballs floated in the bloody water.

"What you injected Ah Xiu with back then wasn't medicine at all."

Wen Lin held up the syringe he'd found in the cellar; the chemical formula on the label was gleaming with phosphorescence. "This is the M-series embryo carrier from Ryan Labs, using living people as culture dishes."

Chen Haisheng's needle suddenly pierced his thumb, and a bead of blood seeped into the red silk: "Dr. Ya said... as long as she is fed regularly, Ah Xiu can maintain her human form..."

A creaking sound came from the beams of the ancestral hall.

Everyone looked up and saw a strand of wet hair hanging down from the ventilation duct. The water dripping from the hair fell right onto the wedding dress that Chen Haisheng was sewing, spreading out in a dark red pattern.

The thick fog pressed down on the river like a soaked quilt. Zhang Quan's old fishing boat swayed gently with the undercurrent, and the sound of the rope rubbing against the wooden stakes was like the panting of some dying animal.

Fan Jinci stood at the stern, his gloves stained with salt from the evaporated river water. The tip of his forensic tweezers picked up a small piece of blue-green substance from a crevice in the deck—not fish scales, but fragments of some kind of industrial coating that had peeled off.

"There are drag marks on the deck." He ran his fingers along several parallel grooves in the wood grain. "Not from a harpoon or a knife, it looks like..."

"Hydraulic shears." Yu Yan's voice suddenly came from the cabin, accompanied by the dull thud of a metal box being violently pried open. "Take a look at this."

Hidden in the hold was a rusty metal box, with "98.5.3" scrawled in red paint on the lid—the date the "Blue Fish" sank.

Situ Jin's ultrasonic cleaner was vibrating the bronze plaque retrieved from the deceased's stomach. As the rust peeled away, several lines of small characters gradually appeared on the plaque:

"Sample No. 7 - Neural Inhibition Experimental Group"

"Vaccination date: May 17, 1998"

"Responsible Person: Ya"

"These aren't crew identification tags," Situ Jin said, his glasses reflecting the blue light of the computer screen. "They're lab animal identification tags."

He suddenly pulled up a file, an appendix to the 1998 "Industrial Pollution Investigation Report in the Yangtze River Basin," which contained a deliberately blurred photo: more than twenty metal cans were neatly stacked in the refrigerated hold of a fishing boat.

"Back then, Ryan Biotech hired the 'Blue Fish' ship to transport experimental samples under the guise of researching the Yangtze River's ecology," Situ Jin said, pointing to a label on a tank. "But according to the ship's load records, they returned with 3.7 tons more weight than they set off."

Mold spread like veins across the wooden wall. Wen Lin kicked aside an empty wine bottle at his feet, and the beam of his flashlight swept across the fishing nets piled up in the corner—one of the nets was stained with dark brown dirt, and a faint smell of formaldehyde could be smelled when brought closer.

"Old Chen has bought enough industrial alcohol in the last three years to soak ten corpses," the village chief said, squatting on the doorstep, puffing on his pipe. "He always says he's 'maintaining old things.'"

Li Weimian was scanning the bed frame with a UV lamp when she suddenly noticed a fluorescent reaction near the pillow. Lifting the moldy quilt, she found a damp, soft notebook underneath; the latest page read:

"Number 7 has woken up, and it remembers the shipwreck. Dr. A was right; some sins must be washed away with blood."

A muffled thud came from outside the window, as if something heavy had been thrown into the river.

At the coordinates where the "Blue Fish" sank, the Jiang Group's detectors were emitting regular beeps.

"The sonar shows a neat, square notch on the starboard side of the hull." The engineer wiped away a cold sweat. "It looks like... it was violently dismantled by some kind of heavy machinery."

Jiang Zhaoyan stared at the blurry shadow on the screen, then suddenly chuckled: "Zoom in on the bottom left corner."

In the enhanced footage, half of a twisted metal cabinet is stuck in a crack in the shipwreck, and the words "Sample Refrigeration - Absolute Zero" are faintly visible on the cabinet door.

The diver's searchlight pierced the dark river water, the beam moving between the twisting hulls of the boat.

The broken metal cabinet was half-buried in the silt, and the water pressure had squeezed a gap in the cabinet door, through which one could vaguely see the neatly arranged glass ampoules inside.

"Watch out!" came the engineer's warning over the communicator. "Tetraethyl lead residue detected!"

Just as the diving pliers gripped the cabinet door handle, a stream of dark green viscous liquid suddenly gushed out from the gap, spreading in the water like some kind of living thing.

In the area illuminated by the searchlight, tens of thousands of silver particles tumbled in the slime, contracting and expanding like miniature jellyfish.

On the shore, in front of the monitoring screen, Jiang Zhaoyan suddenly grabbed the walkie-talkie: "Cut the sampling rope immediately! That's—"

Suddenly, the screen filled with a flurry of snowflakes, and the only sound at the end was the diver's heart-wrenching scream: "It's burrowing into my skin!!"

.

In the isolation ward, diver Xiaolin was strapped to the bed. Countless wriggling silver lines protruded from under the skin of his arm, like countless tiny parasites swimming in his blood vessels.

"Not a living organism." Under Fan Jinci's microscope, a drop of blood sample was strangely layered. "Nanometer-sized metal particles, coated with neurotransmitter receptors."

Situ Jin suddenly turned the tablet towards everyone—on the 1998 procurement list of Lane Labs, the following were prominently listed:

"Quantum dot-labeled neurotoxin carriers (experimental code: Q-7)"

"So the so-called 'mermaid'..." Li Weimian's fingertips traced across Xiaolin's twitching arm.

"These nanoparticles invade the visual cortex, causing people to see their deepest fears," Situ Jin explained, pulling up Xiao Lin's psychological assessment report. "He almost drowned as a child, and his greatest fear is water ghosts."

Chen Haisheng knelt before the ancestral tablets, holding a faded photo frame in his hands. In the photo, young Ah Xiu stood smiling by the fishing boat, with the brand-new "Qingyu" (Blue Fish) boat behind her.

"That day, after they poured the buckets of poison into the river, Dr. Ya suddenly said, 'The test subject escaped.'" He ran his rough fingertips along the glass of the picture frame. "Ah Xiu went to the stern to retrieve the net, and when she came back, the hem of her skirt was covered in a shiny, sticky substance..."

In the cellar of the ancestral hall, Wen Lin was scanning a pile of empty syringes with an ultraviolet light. Suddenly, the light illuminated a small glass vial hidden at the bottom of the box, labeled: "Q-7 Antagonist - Subcutaneous Injection Only".

"Old Chen," Wen Lin's voice was unusually serious, "what exactly did you inject Ah Xiu with?"

Chen Haisheng trembled as he unbuttoned his shirt, revealing a gruesome stitched scar on his abdomen: "I found this at the shipwreck site three years after she died."

The glass jar he pulled out contained a lump of meat wrapped in metal wire, its surface covered with pearl-like particles.

"Dr. Ya said this is the 'mother,' capable of absorbing toxins." He unscrewed the cap of the antagonist bottle, "Feeding it a drop of blood each month will get you a free injection of the antidote..."

The moment the syringe plunged into the abdomen, the river beneath the rocks suddenly churned. Countless silver specks rose from the depths, piecing together a blurry human face on the surface.