22: Chapter 22 First Batch of Candidates

When Lin Zhao received the grey message, he had just returned from his night patrol.

He stood in the narrow locker room of the security company, his old uniform still on, as the pale grey scar on his left arm began to throb faintly again.

It was left behind last month at Old Goods Street.

At the time, crying suddenly broke out from a shop selling old clocks, and customers rushed out like madmen. A child was pushed to the ground and was nearly crushed by a falling shelf. Lin Zhao rushed in to drag the person out, scraping his arm against a piece of black copper.

Later, the wound didn't bleed; it just left a grey mark under his skin.

He went to the hospital for a check-up, but they found nothing.

Until tonight, when that grey envelope fell from the gap in his locker.

Lin Zhao opened the letter and finished reading the line of text; his first reaction was not surprise, but silence. He checked the letter over and over—no cameras, no chips, and no traceable marks whatsoever.

As a veteran, he didn't believe in free lunches.

But he remembered that day at Old Goods Street, when the crying started from deep within the shop and everyone else was fleeing, only he had heard another sound.

It was like someone speaking from very far away: "Do not look back."

He did as it said, and so he survived.

Lin Zhao folded the letter and tucked it into his inner pocket.

"Third floor of the Qinghe Road Old Commercial Building." He whispered it to himself, "Old things again."

That same night, in the emergency department duty room at City Second Hospital, Xu Minglan stared at the grey message beside her medical chart, motionless for a long time.

She had been on duty for over a dozen hours straight; there were faint dark circles under her eyes, and the cuffs of her white coat still smelled of unwashed disinfectant.

The patient from last week still made her uneasy.

The person had clearly only been injured from sleepwalking, yet when they were brought in, their soles were covered in wet mud containing tiny black debris. After the wound was stitched up, the patient kept saying there was someone in the mirror mimicking their speech.

Xu Minglan followed protocol and made a record, but she didn't just toss the black debris into the medical waste bin; she put it into a sample tube and sealed it separately in a metal cabinet.

The next day, a ring of condensation appeared on the inside of the sample tube.

The third day, an eye reflected in the condensation.

Xu Minglan locked the cabinet tight and didn't tell any of her colleagues. She instinctively felt that this was not an ordinary pathological sample, nor should it be exposed to more people.

Now, the grey message told her that she had seen the darkness but had not passed it on to anyone else.

Xu Minglan pressed her fingertips against the edge of the letter; the paper felt cool.

She didn't like mysterious things.

But she disliked even more knowing danger existed and pretending nothing had happened.

"If this is a prank," she whispered, "then you had better be prepared to explain."

In a quiet study in the east of the city, Tang Zhiwei was sitting in front of a floor-to-ceiling window, reviewing several storage contracts. The coffee on the table had already gone cold.

She had a foundation, an investment company, and several private warehouses under her name. To outsiders, she was just a beautiful, shrewd, and skilled negotiator from a wealthy family.

No one knew that half a month ago, she had attended a private preview of old items.

On the display stand was a cracked copper bowl, said to have been dug up from some abandoned ancestral hall. The host packaged it as an "ancient object to guard the house," and many people on the scene placed bids.

Tang Zhiwei had originally only been there to keep a friend company, but the moment the copper bowl was struck, she saw the shadows of everyone around it bow toward the bowl.

She stopped the transaction on the spot, bought the batch of old items at a high price, and then found an excuse to have all the guests leave.

That copper bowl was later sealed by her in an underground vault; the security footage of the vault showed three seconds of static every night.

Tang Zhiwei never opened the vault a second time.

She knew she couldn't handle it.

When the grey message appeared on the contract, she didn't panic; she just finished reading the letter and let out a soft laugh.

"Finally, someone is willing to tell me what these things actually are?"

She put the letter into her handbag and wrote a line in her memo: Tomorrow night, Qinghe Road. Enter the third floor without bodyguards.

The last person to receive a grey message was Zhou Yan.

In the old building of the City Archives, the fluorescent lights were flickering due to a loose connection. Zhou Yan sat amidst a pile of local chronicles and folklore records, with a decades-old accident file spread out before him.

The file recorded that the Qinghe Road Old Commercial Building once housed a children's clothing store. After the owner's daughter went missing, a pair of red shoes would appear in the shop every few years. Children who saw the red shoes would walk to the third floor at night.

Zhou Yan used to treat this kind of information as mere folklore.

Until the three old-item incidents he had investigated all left similar records in reality.

He wasn't bold; he just couldn't stand those clues being tossed into the trash heap as superstition.

When the grey message landed on the file page, the two characters for "red shoes" on the paper simultaneously seeped a bit of dark color.

Zhou Yan's breath hitched.

He didn't touch the letter immediately; instead, he put on gloves and picked up the paper with tweezers.

After reading the content, he looked out the window.

The Qinghe Road Old Commercial Building was exactly the location of that children's clothing store from the file.

The same batch of grey messages wasn't just sent to the four of them. An old-goods peddler in the north of the city also received a letter, but his first reaction after opening it was to take a photo and sell it to a paranormal forum; a self-media blogger in the west of the city received the letter and immediately asked in a group chat, "Can this thing be used for a viral livestream?"; and a wealthy second-generation heir had his assistant look up the sender, saying right away that as long as they could buy a "supernatural ticket," price was no object.

These people's envelopes burned themselves out after they made their choices. The flames didn't hurt anyone, but they erased the specific directions to the Qinghe Road Old Commercial Building. The Xinhuo Council was not a charity, and certainly not a wish-granting machine to satisfy curiosity and greed. The only ones who truly remained were those willing to approach danger and also willing to restrain themselves.

The next night, the four of them arrived at Qinghe Road almost at the same time.

The old commercial building had long since ceased operations; its outer walls were mottled, and only half of the signboard remained. The rolling shutter door downstairs was gently swayed by the wind, making a hollow sound.

Lin Zhao arrived first. He was dressed in casual clothes and carried a simple tactical bag.

Xu Minglan arrived second, carrying a first-aid kit.

Tang Zhiwei stepped out of an understated black sedan, bringing no bodyguards, only a handbag and a small flashlight.

Zhou Yan appeared last, clutching a file folder, with old paper dust still on his sleeves.

The four people sized each other up, no one in a rush to speak.

Lin Zhao first checked the escape route, Xu Minglan glanced at the building structure and whether there were any injured people around, Tang Zhiwei noted the location of nearby cameras and conveniently parked her car where it wouldn't block the fire escape. Zhou Yan was the slowest; he lowered his head to check the file, confirming that the layout of the third floor of this building had no obvious discrepancies with the old records.

They didn't know that these details were also being recorded by the Grey Net. What was truly being observed about the Candidates was never just courage.

Until a soft laugh echoed in the stairwell.

Like a child wearing hard-soled shoes, running back and forth in the empty third-floor corridor.

Lin Zhao looked up, Xu Minglan gripped the handle of her first-aid kit, Tang Zhiwei put away her smile, and Zhou Yan slowly opened the file.

At the end of the dilapidated stairs, a tiny red shoe was placed at the entrance to the third floor.

The toe was pointing inward.

As if waiting for them to enter.