The story opened upon a dim, misty sea…
No one knew how long they had been drifting on the ocean. The perimeter was permanently choked with a thick, heavy fog. They occupied a small sampan, and the vessel simply bore them forward, relentlessly forward… yet there was absolutely nothing ahead. No matter how long they drifted, there was only fog; whichever way they looked, the view remained unchanged. Even the surface of the water was completely cloaked in mist.
They could not see the sky above, nor could they discern the ocean below. Front, back, left, and right—every direction was identical in its absolute opacity.
The passengers were already starved and exhausted, looking for all the world as though they were destined to perish within this anonymous mist, trapped upon the narrow boards of the sampan. Right at this juncture of lingering between life and death, the current suddenly delivered a satchel.
Every single gaze converged upon the satchel in perfect unison, their eyes flashing with the eerie, predatory green light characteristic of dying men.
The satchel was hauled aboard. The captain, spearheading the group, impatiently unfastened the latch.
The outer satchel fell open to reveal a black cylinder bag hidden inside.
When the black cylinder bag was unzipped, it was found to be wrapped in several protective layers of brilliantly colored silk fabric.
After repeating this process three times, the object that had been so meticulously preserved was finally unveiled before their eyes.
It was a bamboo tube—but by no means an ordinary one. The green rind of the bamboo was adorned with gold leaf paintings and intricate openwork carvings, displaying an exquisite level of craftsmanship. At that exact moment, the bamboo tube abruptly split open on its own, dividing into three distinct panels. The central panel housed a sacred statue of the Holy Mother, flanked on either side by her subordinate generals. The generals possessed fierce, terrifying countenances, looking thoroughly menacing and martial, while the Holy Mother appeared ethereal, her divine robes fluttering as she exuded a boundless grace.
The crowd stared intently at the icon. Amidst the dense fog blanketing the sky and sea, this statue of the Holy Mother completely arrested their senses. It seemed to emit the faint, echoing strains of celestial music, a subtle golden luminescence, and a delicate, exotic fragrance.
“It is Holy Mother Mazu! The Mother is divinely virtuous and merciful, possessing eternal youth!”
Strangely enough, even though not everyone on board was familiar with Mazu, it felt as though an external force had seized control of their vocal cords at that exact moment. They chanted the praise in absolute, ringing unison.
“Heaven has provided a path of survival!” Beside the captain, the chief mate was overcome with a mixture of shock and joy. “If we can successfully invite the Holy Mother to manifest, we will be saved!”
“But…… how do we invite the Holy Mother to manifest?” A timid voice surfaced from the crowd as a sailor manifested a look of profound anxiety.
“Since antiquity, invoking the gods has always required a sacrificial offering,” the business manager spoke up from among the group. “If we execute a formal ritual, the Mother will witness our absolute sincerity and surely descend to aid us.”
Yet, trapped upon this tiny sampan, everyone was entirely empty-handed. Where were they supposed to harvest sacrificial offerings?
Just as they found themselves at a complete impasse, the ocean surface—previously as stagnant as dead water—suddenly began to churn violently like a boiling cauldron. The captain remarked in sheer astonishment: “A massive school of fish is gathering beneath us. They are bearing something on their backs!”
The objects began to breach the surface. First came the torsos, followed by limbs, and finally, the faces of deceased individuals.
The features of that pale, lifeless face were intimately familiar to every single person on board—it was the exact face of the captain!
What was happening?
The captain was clearly alive and well, standing right there on the deck of the sampan. Why had he transformed into a corpse floating in the ocean? Was the person dead in the water the real captain? Or was the individual standing alive on the sampan the real captain?
The captain stared in utter bewilderment at his own corpse, just as the surrounding crew stared blankly back and forth between him and the body. Before anyone could process the anomaly, the business manager suddenly clapped his hands and laughed: “I comprehend it now!”
“What do you comprehend?” the captain pressed immediately.
“A sacrificial ritual places absolute premium on sincerity. What greater demonstration of sincerity could there be than offering ourselves to the Mother?” the manager declared.
These words resonated like the striking of a massive bronze bell, instantly illuminating their confusion. Enlightenment washed over the crowd.
“I understand,” the captain said. “I ought to sacrifice myself to the Mother.”
He executed the thought without a shred of hesitation, reaching down to haul his own corpse out of the water. He turned the body left and right, examining it thoroughly for a long moment. Suddenly, he reached out and forced the corpse’s jaws apart, violently dragging the tongue out from within the mouth.
The tongue was bright red and entirely limp. The captain strained and gasped for breath until he finally extracted the organ in its entirety. With a swift slash, he severed the tongue and reverently laid it before the Holy Mother.
The moment the captain completed his offering, the churning waves vomited two more corpses—this time, they belonged to the chief mate and the navigator.
Witnessing this sequence of events, the crew’s belief in the manager’s words hardened into absolute certainty. The chief mate and the navigator scrambled to drag their respective corpses onto the deck.
As they hauled the bodies aboard, a daggerfish happened to wash onto the deck—a perfectly functional tool. Utilizing the sharp profile of the fish as a makeshift blade, they split their corpses’ abdomens wide open, gouged out their own kidneys, and promptly laid them down as offerings.
Immediately afterward, another corpse surfaced. It belonged to the sailor who had spoken up earlier. Possessing immense physical strength and driven by a desire to distinguish himself, he severed his corpse’s head. He struck the skull violently until a clean fissure cracked open, thoroughly hollowed out the interior contents, and rinsed it repeatedly in the seawater. Having fashioned the cranium into a ceremonial bowl, he presented it with profound reverence before the Mother.
Next came the business manager. His corpse drifted to the surface, and he quickly recovered it.
He looked left and right, swaying his head as he sliced open the flesh to drain every drop of blood from the vessel. He splashed a measure of seawater into the pool, mixing the fluids thoroughly. Dipping his finger into the crimson mixture, he began to trace characters in the empty air, chanting an incantation to summon the deity:
“The heavens turn azure, the earth grows desolate, an isolated vessel on a lonely trajectory trembles in profound terror.”
The sky darkened rapidly as thunder detonated overhead, and silver dragons of lightning danced across the firmament. The gale intensified, whip-sawing the ocean into towering waves and triggering violent whirlpools across the perimeter.
“Let the spiritual wind encircle us, tracking the forward trajectory to banish all malignant entities.”
A fresh current of air kicked up—yet it was no violent gale. It was a localized, crystalline breeze originating from an unknown source, instantly overriding the fury of the storm.
“Let the divine radiance blaze, illuminating the gathering phantoms until their souls disintegrate.”
A fissure cracked open across the horizon, looking exactly as though a colossal, invisible hand had gently pushed aside the heavy curtains of fog. Celestial light cascaded down through the breach.
“Let Holy Mother Mazu swiftly manifest her divine interventions!”
With this final exclamation, the business manager pitched his voice to an extreme, piercing register, sounding remarkably like the crowing of a rooster.
Yet, despite these profound manifestations of divine intervention, the Holy Mother did not unveil her actual physical form. The crew intuitively understood that the quality of the sacrifices remained insufficient. The ocean was still holding onto corpses, and they were rising significantly faster than before, breaching the surface in rapid succession.
The remaining crew members threw themselves into the task with feverish intensity. They hacked away large, choice cuts of healthy flesh from their respective corpses, skewered the smaller fragments onto splinters of wood, and minced the remainder into a fine paste, presenting the collective harvest as a grand offering.
Finally, the fog dissolved entirely, leaving a pristine sky illuminated by a brilliant golden radiance. Right at the geometric center of the firmament, the elegant, statuesque silhouette of a celestial being materialized—it was Holy Mother Mazu!
The Mother sat serenely amidst the clouds: “What is it that you seek?”
The crowd prostrated themselves in worship: “We beg the Mother to preserve our lives!”
The Mother responded: “Human agency can override the dictates of heaven. There is no requirement for you to plead with me; you already possess the means to save yourselves. A vessel requires a sail to navigate; if you flay the skin from the flesh to construct a sail, will you not break free from your impasse?”
The crowd was overcome with joy, yet as they looked down at the fragmented, mutilated state of their own corpses, they encountered a fresh technical hurdle.
Right at that moment, the Mother extended her finger, pointing toward the stern. The waves surged once more, and nine perfectly intact corpses drifted slowly from behind the perimeter of the sampan. The crowd was ecstatic. They hauled the pristine bodies to the edge of the vessel and immediately set to work flaying the skin.
Flaying skin was by no means an elementary craft. Individuals like the captain and the manager executed the cuts with remarkable speed and precision, but there were others who struggled to separate the dermis. Those with superior technique promptly stepped in to assist.
Once the task was finalized, the harvested sheets of skin were gathered together. They fused automatically, transforming into a massive, patchwork sail constructed entirely of flesh.
Having executed this extensive sequence of tasks, the crew—already structurally depleted by starvation and exhaustion—had thoroughly burned through the final reserves of physical energy within their bodies. They collapsed onto the deck of the sampan, utterly paralyzed. Right at this moment, a faint, delicate aroma of cooked food drifted into their nostrils.
They tracked the fragrance to its source, and their eyes landed upon the discarded fragments of their own corpses. The aroma was explicitly emanating from those remains. Yet, how could human corpses emit the scent of a prepared banquet?
At an initial, cursory glance, the remains looked exactly like corpses. But when they locked their focus onto the flesh, they realized they were looking at something entirely different—these were the carcasses of pigs and sheep.
One by one, the plump specimens resolved into slaughtered pigs, their features frozen in憨态可掬 smiles; the leaner specimens resolved into slaughtered sheep, their eyelids drooping serenely.
“This is a full pig and sheep banquet—it is entirely edible!” the business manager shouted urgently.
The crew required no further prompting from the manager; their baseline impulses had already overridden all restraint. The captain was the first to lower his head, tearing a massive bite out of a pig’s head.
The pig gave a faint grunt, its limbs twitching slightly even in death.
“Magnificent! Truly magnificent!” The captain was unstinting in his praise, his mouth glistening with grease.
The rest of the crew could no longer contain themselves. They deferred to the captain first, followed by the chief mate, before allowing the business manager to handle the formal distribution of the rations. Those allocated pig gorged on pig, while those allocated sheep consumed sheep. They executed a savage, rapid feast, clearing the boards like a whirlwind sweeping away scattered clouds. Once the entire company was thoroughly sated, an anomaly occurred—the fragmented pieces of the consumed pigs and sheep automatically reassembled themselves into whole animals. They slipped off the deck into the ocean, positioning themselves at the bow to pull the sampan forward. Meanwhile, the nine flayed corpses gradually dissolved into the sea. Within moments, a colossal lotus flower manifested beneath the surface, cradling the hull of the sampan from below.
Supported by the pulling force from the front and the lifting force from below, the small sampan—which had been groaning in the storm as though it might disintegrate at any second—suddenly cut through the waves with absolute stability, riding the currents as steady as a mountain. The persistent mist that they had been unable to shake vanished into nothingness. The outline of the coastline was visible in the distance!
The crew cast their eyes back up toward the firmament. The Mother offered them a distant, serene smile from the heavens.
That smile was so exquisitely beautiful, so undeniably authentic, that it filled a person with an overwhelming desire to instantly drop to their knees, rip out their own heart and liver as a tribute, and offer her their absolute, unconditional worship!
The moment this lengthy narrative concluded on the blank interface of the Word document, Zhao Wu’s gaze as he looked at Lan Lan was saturated with profound skepticism. Ji Xun calculated that if this young woman hadn’t literally sustained a lacerated throat, Zhao Wu might very well have classified her as a deceitful, uncooperative hostile element attempting to derail the investigation.
Ultimately, Zhao Wu granted Lan Lan a measure of professional leniency, choosing not to explicitly challenge the empirical validity of the narrative. Instead, he focused on a targeted query: “When Hu Kun recounted this story to you, did he provide any additional contextual commentary? Or, throughout the duration of your domestic life with him, did you witness any specific events that covertly mirrored the details of this narrative?”
[ No. ] Lan Lan huddled deeper into the hospital pillow, looking drained. The pillow was merely standard proportions, yet her physical profile appeared remarkably small against it. [ What I know…… ]
Human beings can achieve physical intimacy, but how does one achieve true psychological alignment?
A look of profound bewilderment surfaced in Lan Lan’s eyes.
[ Is limited…… ]
Zhao Wu scrutinized her for a moment before offering a final query: “Do you have any further statements to enter into the record?”
Lan Lan shook her head in silence, typing across the page: [ Regarding the active homicide file, your unit already possesses the complete data matrix. ]
“What about Old Hu?” Ji Xun suddenly interjected. “Regarding Old Hu himself, do you have anything left to say?”
Lan Lan lifted her eyes.
This marked the very first instance since they had entered the perimeter that the woman on the bed manifested a trace of genuine emotional resonance.
Yet, that emotion resembled a dying candle flame; it flickered faintly a few times before dissolving into stasis.
Lan Lan lowered her head once more, her gaze anchoring to the laptop terminal. The screen sat directly before her, and the keyboard rested beneath her fingertips. The cursor continued its steady, mechanical blinking. She seemed to initiate the finger movements to formulate sentences multiple times, but the inputs failed to resolve into coherent text…… In the end, she disclosed absolutely nothing.
Upon exiting the medical ward, the group moved down the corridor together. Ji Xun was the first to speak: “What is your analytical assessment of this narrative?”
“It does not bear the structural characteristics of an ad-hoc fabrication,” Huo Ranyin noted.
The vice captain rubbed his head, his patience clearly exhausted by these abstract anomalies: “Are you two seriously analyzing a ghost story? I made it halfway through before deciding the supernatural elements were entirely tedious. I was literally standing there with my eyes open, taking a mental nap.”
“This narrative contains significant underlying intelligence,” Zhao Wu countered. Inside the ward, he had maintained a mask of total skepticism, but the moment he crossed the threshold, he displayed his characteristic precision and cunning. It was a structural law of law enforcement units: whenever a captain possessed an excess of intellectual calculation, the vice captain invariably lacked it. “Hu Kun didn’t secure his livelihood as a fiction novelist. Why would he waste cognitive currency authoring a ghost story for amusement? Could he monetize it? Furthermore, this individual’s profile is highly complex. If we extrapolate this data on a larger scale, it’s entirely possible he was documenting an actual historical case matrix……”
It was fortunate that the vice captain wasn’t currently consuming water; otherwise, a spray of fluids would have landed directly on Zhao Wu’s face.
“Take a look at the casualty count within that narrative! A casual calculation yields over a dozen fatalities, each featuring highly distinct, brutal methods of termination. What kind of case profile is that? A massive, catastrophic conspiracy that would trigger a direct inquiry from the central ministries! Are you genuinely trying to initiate an investigation that reaches all the way to the capital authorities?”
Zhao Wu calmly wiped the imaginary spray from his face, choosing not to engage the vice captain’s outburst. Instead, he turned his focus to Ji Xun and Huo Ranyin: “You two interacted with Hu Kun prior to his termination. What is your assessment?”
“Old Hu manifested a strong behavioral pattern of utilizing narrative storytelling,” Ji Xun provided an objective breakdown. “Beneath the cliffs of Daye Temple, he explicitly treated us to a grim, disturbing tale regarding a corpse hidden inside a Buddha icon. However, compared to the document we just processed, that initial story immediately pales into insignificance, appearing entirely pedestrian. While this current narrative incorporates structural elements of traditional Mazu mythology, the specific methodologies detailing the disposal and manipulation of human remains feature an excessive density of technical details. We can state with high confidence that this was not written without a specific target framework.”
Since it wasn’t a random fabrication, it possessed a specific real-world anchor.
“To verify whether these two narratives track with empirical reality…… we can no longer interrogate Old Hu. Our only viable operational vector is to determine if we can locate the human remains hidden within the temple structures. If we manage to recover a physical body there……”
Then the narrative regarding the corpse hidden inside the Buddha icon transitions into verified fact—and by extension, this current narrative potentially transitions into a roadmap for an active investigation.
The group continued their exchange as they navigated the exit, stepping out of the facility into the direct sunlight. The moment the warm light hit them, the dark, phantom-choked atmosphere of the narrative seemed to dissolve into a wisp of black smoke, vanishing without a trace.
Zhao Wu and the vice captain peeled off toward the parking structure to retrieve their vehicle. Ji Xun lingered in the sunlight for a moment before tilting his head back to survey the towering facade of the inpatient wing.
Rows of windows stretched across the building, some thrown wide open, others tightly sealed. One specific pane among them marked the boundary of Lan Lan’s perimeter.
“Did Lan Lan love Old Hu?” Ji Xun murmured.
The query felt as though it were directed at Huo Ranyin, yet it simultaneously sounded like a question he was posing to himself.
Could a young woman genuinely harbor romantic love for a man old enough to be her biological grandfather?
If love existed, why did she refrain from seeking systemic vengeance or mobilizing the police apparatus the moment her lover was terminated?
If love was absent, why—when driven into an absolute dead end—did she completely ignore the lifeline of survival Old Hu had meticulously secured for her, choosing instead to anchor herself to the final, fading echo of a dead man’s affection?
Perhaps even Lan Lan herself lacked the vocabulary to formulate the answer.
