Gray Tower 1.3
The old church stands alone amidst the weeds on the outskirts of the city, its stained-glass windows broken and its cross askew.
Wen Lin kicked open the rusty iron door, and dust fell in a flurry. "Damn, this place is really eerie."
The team infiltrated in tactical formation. The church interior was dilapidated, pews overturned, and the altar covered in bird droppings. Situ Jin held an environmental monitoring device; the data on the screen suddenly jumped: "Trace amounts of gray powder particles are suspended in the air, consistent with previous evidence!"
“They’ve been here,” Li Weimian’s voice came through the earpiece. “Be careful, there may be residual devices.”
Yu Yan stood protectively in front of Fan Jinci, his gun barrel scanning every shadowy corner warily. Fan Jinci, however, headed straight for the basement entrance—the place the female writer had mentioned discovering the "inexplicable markings."
The basement was even more damp and dark than the upper floors, the beam of a flashlight sweeping across the mottled brick walls. Suddenly, Fan Jinci stopped in his tracks.
"here."
The walls were covered with distorted symbols, not any known script, but more like a mixture of waveforms of nerve impulses and mineral crystal structures. The marks were fresh, with sharp edges.
“It’s Ryan’s code,” Fan Jinci said, tracing the engraving with his fingertips. “He’s recording…some kind of frequency resonance parameter.”
Jiang Zhaoyan's voice switched to the channel: "I just compared the original architectural drawings of the church and found that there is an unmarked metal structure under the basement, which is quite large."
"Where is the entrance?" Yu Yan immediately asked.
The group split up to search. Suddenly, a stone slab that Situ Jin stepped on made a hollow echo. After clearing away the loose dirt, a rusty metal trapdoor appeared before them, the lock already broken.
Wen Lin and Yu Yan worked together to pry open the trapdoor, and a smell of mustiness mixed with chemical reagents hit them. Below was a steep metal staircase.
"I'll go first." Yu Yan went down first without question, followed closely by Wen Lin, with Fan Jinci and Situ Jin at the back.
At the end of the stairs was a secret space of less than ten square meters. There was no large equipment as one might expect, only a metal table with beakers, tubing, and an intricately designed silver metal box scattered on it.
The box was open, lined with black velvet, but empty. Only a few specks of gray powder remained on the velvet.
Fan Jinci put on gloves and carefully examined the table. On the edge of the beaker, he found a trace of dried, dark red blood—a bloodstain that initially matched the bloodstains of an unknown third party found in the safe at the crime scene of the female writer.
“This is a temporary processing point,” Fan Jinci concluded. “They used that gray powder here to ‘process’ the materials they stole from the female writer. Then they moved on with the ‘finished product’ or ‘data’.”
"The finished product?" Wen Lin asked, puzzled.
“That powder isn’t a simple destruction tool,” Situ Jin said, pointing to the still-moving data on the detector. “It may extract and preserve the encoded information within a specific carrier while it’s degrading it. It’s like… a biological scanner.”
This deduction sent chills down everyone's spine. The Gray Tower was not only erasing memories, but also "harvesting" them.
"Look at this." Yu Yan found a crumpled piece of sticky note, only half burned, on the leg of the table. On the fragment was a handwritten coordinate and a few blurred words:
"...Valley...starting...requires...a key..."
After Jiang Zhaoyan quickly checked the coordinates, they pointed directly to the Valley of Ashes.
“A key?” Li Weimian pondered on the other end of the channel. “Does it refer to a physical key to activate a certain device, or… like M-10, referring to a specific person?” Her gaze swept across Fan Jinci through the screen, seemingly casually.
Fan Jinci looked down at his palm, where the cold touch of the metal table from Ryan's laboratory still seemed to linger. Some sealed fragments of memory stirred, resonating dangerously with the engravings on the wall and the aura of ashes.
He raised his eyes, looked at Yu Yan, and spoke in a deep, clear voice:
"Go to Ash Valley."
"The answer is there. The trap is there too."
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