Cyber ​​Ghost Record

Chapter 118-117: The Rendezvous
Suger found the painting somewhat appealing, not because of its bizarre or outlandish nature, but for something else, though he couldn't quite put his finger on it.

Shen Ke glanced at them briefly as she climbed the escalator to review the old whistleblower records. The records of illicit drug processing, organ harvesting, and drug smuggling had been replaced with metaphorical imagery. She passed the stairwell adorned with plaster casts of gazing angels, their sculptures seemingly fixed on her.

She pushed open the stone door of an exhibition room. The room was dimly lit by firelight, and the ochre walls were decorated with white aquatic plant patterns and swimming fish designs. In the center of the space was a coffin, not made of stone or wood, but more like an industrial product with sheet metal and paint. The coffin was forced open, and the sealing board rolled up like a can lid. Its interior was full of water, and several pieces of rotting flesh were soaking inside, their color glistening with oil in the firelight.

"What kind of case is this report?" Soger asked. "It sounds a bit like tomb raiding."

“There’s no record of it.” Shen Ke shook his head and examined the coffin. “It’s probably just a work of art. I’ve never heard of tomb raiding these days.”

"I think this is a hibernation pod."

Now that you mention it, it does seem a bit like that.

Is there any hidden information here?

"No."

"Oh, right, that painting from earlier..."

"Which one? There are many paintings here."

"The one on the first floor, the one with people in the tree."

"what happened?"

"They're also a bit like hibernators."

Su Ge paused for a moment, and when he didn't get a response from Shen Ke, he continued, "Animals hibernate in tree trunks. He drew a person in a tree trunk, so isn't that a hibernator?"

"You're not wrong to think that way. In any case, the audience has the right to interpret the metaphor. As long as you can tell a story without logical errors, your interpretation is correct."

Shen Ke walked out of the tomb chamber and into a corridor, where the style shifted to surrealism, with various images pieced together in the space: a dead colt, pigeons, flowers, and a distorted clock.

"What do the other things in that painting represent to you?" she asked.

“I don’t know.” He paused. “They might be hibernating individuals used for organ cultivation.”

"Not bad, you're quite suited for this line of work."

"Don't you think that painting depicts a hibernating person?"

“Maybe it is, maybe it is something else,” she said. “You are a hibernator, so you tend to think in that direction.”

"He might actually be trying to convey a message."

Suger helped the Security Bureau find that mysterious informant, originally just to gain more access to information.

But the works in this art gallery gave him a vague feeling that the informant might know some inside information.

The inside story of the murders of those hibernators.

Yang Guan had been investigating this matter, but after losing his identity once, he gave up the investigation.

Sug traced Jiang Ning's whereabouts and saw a figure resembling Jiang Ning at the Spiritual Society's gathering. After that, all the clues went cold again.

Now, a clue has emerged again: the missing informant, the mysterious person who knows everything about Yingchuan's underworld, may have the information that Su Ge needs.

"Even hibernators are nothing special. Hibernators either have terminal illnesses or hope to achieve immortality in the 'future,' but they often end up dying even more tragically. Some are divided up by medical institutions, while others have their organs harvested by middlemen. This kind of theme is actually quite suitable for creative works. Only special cases like yours can live such a vibrant life."

"I've had it bad enough," Soge thought to himself.

"You seem to have developed an extra interest in him."

She walked through the corridor, and her view suddenly opened up. She leaned on the railing and looked up at the entire inverted bucket-shaped art gallery, with giant arches floating in the air.

"After the Security Bureau suspected something had happened to him, they checked several channels, but they haven't investigated this place yet. This is the dark web; investigators won't come to places like this unless the incident escalates. Didn't you tell the Security Bureau to find 'water ghosts' to gather information? To have them act as sandboxes?" "Okay."

“In fact, the investigators are like the sandboxes of Li Lou.” She gazed at the huge, coffered dome above, “just as the counters of sand are also the sandboxes of God.”

"Is this why you're giving up?"

She gazed at the metallic clouds floating in the air with the music.

"It doesn't matter now. You explore the dark web through me, so I'm your sandbox."

Su Ge paused for a moment, then said after a brief silence, "How about we finish this job and I take you to do a purification ritual?"

"A purification ritual?" She chuckled. "You're really something, bringing demons and monsters into a purification ritual."

"Didn't you go to the dark web before to find someone to coordinate your consciousness? That shady character helped you get rid of your split personality..."

Su Ge recalled Shen Ke's experience of coordinating consciousness on the dark web. He vaguely remembered that she had many personalities at that time, but he was hypnotized then, and his memory was now blurred.

"Pretty much, they're all essentially about coordinating consciousness. It's just that purification rituals are specifically for removing impurities and bad luck, that's a ritual specifically for exorcising evil spirits like us. You still know too little. If you had a brain-computer interface, this problem would be much easier to solve; those basic common sense facts could be directly fed into your database."

She stepped away from the railing and looked at the other artworks.

“Learn from this guy. He worked for the National Security Bureau for so many years, and then he just dumped them. The National Security Bureau can’t even find him.”

"Maybe something happened to him."

Suger expressed his speculation, or rather his concerns.

"The security bureau's judgment is definitely more accurate than your guess."

She walked up the stairs, and after about ten minutes, she suddenly stopped. In the exhibition hall next door, there was a semi-circular carved archway. The archway was placed on the floor as if it were just a decoration. Through the archway, she could see the gray wall opposite.

"There's a hidden dark web space there, and the information the security agency gave you doesn't include any access records to it."

"A clue?"

"Can't tell."

She said that and went inside.

The moment she stepped through the doorway, all the lights in the art gallery went out, plunging the surroundings into darkness. Su Ge discovered that Shen Ke had entered a tunnel, with only one incandescent light every few dozen meters on the tunnel ceiling. The dim light could only faintly illuminate the path beneath her feet.

"Where is this?"

"Quiet."

"Quiet……"

A voice rang in Su Ge's ear, but it didn't sound like Shen Ke's voice.

Water droplets dripped from the gaps between the concrete bricks from time to time, making a rhythmic ticking sound like the swinging of a second hand.

She looked ahead, where a blurry figure awaited at the end of the tunnel. She walked towards the figure, her footsteps echoing through the tunnel, surrounded by a low-frequency hum.

He was immersed in these rhythmic sounds, and it seemed like a long time had passed before the figure finally came into view.

I've never seen you before.

A voice, both real and illusory, came from the darkness.

Suger still couldn't make out the figure's face, but a strange, direct feeling told him that this was the informant.

(End of this chapter)