Thump.
That sound was very muffled.
It didn't sound like knocking on a door; it was more like sothing trapped in a cramped space, desperately striking the barrier that confined it with its head or soft, limp fists.
Each impact carried a viscous, lingering echo.
Lin Jie's hand had already left the wall by now.
He stood there, his spine ramrod straight.
[Serene Heart] was gripped in his hand, but he didn't raise the muzzle, because he didn't know where to aim.
In his reverberation perception, this deep red wall before him was the end of the world.
There was only a blank, unparseable void.
.bg-ssp-11164{margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;display:flex;justify-content:center;}But that sound was undeniably real.
It not only existed.
It was also getting closer.
"Lin..."
Evelyn's voice was trembling.
She was holding the heavy brass instrunt, her fingers gripping its edges so tightly her knuckles were white.
"Look at this."
She turned the oscilloscope's screen toward Lin Jie.
The chaotically jumping green waveform on it had undergone a horrifying change.
The waveform was converging.
Those spikes representing high-frequency noise had vanished.
In their place was an extrely regular, massively-amplified black circle.
That circle slowly rotated at the center of the screen, like a whirlpool, or like an opening eye.
"What does this an?" Lin Jie stared at the pattern.
"No echo."
Evelyn swallowed hard, her voice terribly dry.
"The detection sound waves from my [Echo Goggles]... they've all disappeared."
This defied the laws of physics.
Sound waves must reflect when they encounter a solid obstacle.
Even with foam or acoustic absorption material, there would be faint feedback.
But this wall, or rather, the "thing" inside the wall, was greedily consuming all sound.
It was like an acoustic black hole.
"Open the door..."
That hoarse male voice sounded again.
This ti.
No instrunt was needed, no headphones.
That voice was so clear it was as if it was spoken right next to Lin Jie's cheek.
It even carried a damp, cold chill.
"It's so cold here... My hands... they're frozen..."
The man's teeth were chattering.
Clicking audibly.
"The ice is lting... Water... The water is rising..."
Then ca a violent fit of choking coughs.
It was the sound of liquid flooding into a windpipe.
Lin Jie's brow furrowed even tighter.
His brain was operating at high speed.
He was analyzing.
First, this didn't seem like ntal interference.
Evelyn's instrunt was purely chanical in construction; it had no soul, it couldn't produce hallucinations.
Since the instrunt initially recorded sound wave vibrations, it ant this was a physical phenonon.
Sothing was vibrating the air.
Since it was a physical phenonon, there must be a source.
"Step back."
Lin Jie commanded in a low voice.
Evelyn hugged the instrunt and obediently retreated to the other side of the room, hiding behind a heavy oak armchair.
Lin Jie didn't fire imdiately.
Bullets might be effective against spirits, but if there really was only empty space behind this wall, firing would only invite unnecessary trouble.
Like the hotel owner or the police.
He needed to confirm.
He needed to use a more direct, more irrefutable thod to confirm what exactly was hidden behind this wall.
Lin Jie put away [Serene Heart].
With a flick of his right wrist, a black folding knife slid into his palm.
[Silencer].
This scalpel forged by Dr. Iron possessed sharpness sufficient to cut through steel.
Lin Jie walked to the wall. He didn't touch the core location from which the sound originated.
He chose the side instead, lightly running the blade across.
The thick wallpaper printed with Damascus patterns curled and peeled away like skin being flayed.
It revealed the gray-white plaster layer beneath.
"Thump!"
That knocking sound beca more urgent.
As if the person inside the wall had detected movent outside.
"Is soone there?"
That voice beca filled with hope.
"Help... Help ... That madman... He's coming back..."
Lin Jie's hand was steady.
"If it's a physical phenonon, then solve it with physical ans."
"Whether you're a ghost or a monster. As long as I dismantle your house, you'll have nowhere to hide."
The tip of [Silencer] pierced the plaster layer.
Plaster dust fell in a shower.
The wall structure of this old-style building was usually quite simple.
Plasterboard, wooden studs, then the load-bearing red bricks.
Lin Jie cut out a large piece of plasterboard; black mold stains covered the wooden strips on the inner side.
A stale, musty sll wafted out, but there was no scent of blood, nor the stench of a corpse.
"Hurry! Hurry!"
The man inside the wall was screaming.
"The water's up to my neck! I'm going to drown!"
That gurgling bubble sound beca deafening.
Lin Jie even had an illusion.
As if in the next second, icy sewage would gush out from that cut, flooding the entire room.
But all he saw were dry red bricks.
Rough, hard, completely normal.
Lin Jie didn't stop.
He reversed his grip on the handle and used the back of the blade to strike hard at the mortar seam of a red brick.
The old cent mortar had long since weathered; that red brick loosened.
Lin Jie hooked his fingers onto the brick's edge and pulled hard.
"Clatter."
The first brick was pulled out. No water flowed out, only a gust of cold wind.
An extrely cold, rain-scented night wind blew in through that brick hole.
Lin Jie was montarily stunned.
He narrowed his eyes and leaned close to the hole.
Through that rectangular gap, he saw the outside world.
But he didn't see any secret room, nor any ice-encased corpse.
He saw the night sky of Manhattan.
Under the pitch-black night curtain, countless strands of rain shimred silver under the streetlights.
In the distance were rooftops and chimneys of varying heights, and further away were the faint navigation lights on the Hudson River.
This was just an ordinary exterior wall, less than forty centiters thick.
Beyond these forty centiters was the empty street.
Was the void over a dozen ters above the ground.
"There's no room."
Lin Jie's voice was very soft.
He turned his head to look at Evelyn, who was hiding behind the chair.
Evelyn was staring blankly at that hole.
She also saw the wind and rain leaking in.
"But..."
She pointed at the instrunt in her hand.
The needle on that gauge was still stubbornly pinned at the red limit zone.
That sound hadn't disappeared.
Even because the wall had been breached, the sound beca clearer, more unobstructed.
"Cough... Thank you... Thank you..."
That man's voice carried a weak, relieved tone of soone who had narrowly escaped death.
The source of the sound was right at the location of the brick hole, right at that gap where cold wind was pouring in.
As if that man was lying at that hole, taking big, gulping breaths of fresh air.
Lin Jie felt a chill run down his spine.
This feeling was worse than facing a UMA.
When facing a monster, you knew it was a monster, you knew bullets could hurt it, you knew it would die if you shattered its heart.
But now, he was facing a paradox.
Reason told him there was nothing there, only air.
But his senses told him there was a person.
Lin Jie gritted his teeth.
He decided to make this hole bigger, no matter what was at work.
Only by completely exposing it to the light of day could fear be dispelled.
He began accelerating the wall demolition.
One red brick after another was pried loose by him and thrown onto the carpet.
Ten minutes later, a hole large enough for a person to pass through appeared on the wall.
Icy rain poured in unchecked, soaking the curtains and carpet.
Lin Jie stood at the edge of the large hole.
Just one more step forward, and he would fall, crashing onto the hard cobblestone road below.
He leaned half his body out, looking left and right.
The exterior wall surface was bare, with no climbing holds, no hanging cages.
Not even a pigeon resting on a windowsill.
Utterly empty.
But the sound continued.
"So cold... It's still so cold here..."
That voice echoed right beside Lin Jie's ear.
Less than ten centiters away.
As if that man was suspended in mid-air, suspended in the rainy night outside the window, speaking directly into Lin Jie's face.
Lin Jie could feel the airflow from that speech.
But when he reached out to touch, he only felt the moist air.
"Evelyn."
Lin Jie didn't turn his head. "Give the pen on your desk."
Evelyn tremblingly handed over a fountain pen.
Lin Jie took the pen. He aid it at the source of the sound.
Which was the "face" of that non-existent man.
He released his hand. The pen fell straight down, passing through the location where the sound originated.
A few seconds later.
A very faint cracking sound ca from the street below; the pen had shattered on the sidewalk.
The laws of physics still functioned in this world.
Gravity still existed, matter still existed.
Only this sound existed outside of all this.
It was like a piece of voice-over mistakenly edited into this reel of film.
"This is impossible..."
Evelyn finally couldn't help but walk over. Gathering her courage, she stood behind Lin Jie.
She was wearing those goggles.
In her field of vision, a blue vortex of sound waves floated in the void outside the hole.
That vortex was right there, spinning, defying all acoustic principles.
"Is this a recording?" she asked.
"Who would install recording equipnt in a place like this?" Lin Jie countered. "And your instrunt can distinguish between chanical sound production and natural sound production, can't it?"
Evelyn fell silent.
Yes.
The instrunt indicated this was a real human voice, a sound produced by vocal cords vibrating air.
But there was no air vibration source there; that sound originated from nothingness.
Just as the two of them stood bewildered before this vast, absurd void.
The sound suddenly changed.
That man's panting began to quicken, then turned into a scream.
"No... Don't co any closer!"
"I didn't say anything! I really didn't say anything!"
"Don't... Don't cut my hands!"
That at-chopping sound rang out again.
This ti, right in front of Lin Jie.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Accompanied by that man's agonized screams, Lin Jie instinctively took a step back.
Even though he knew full well there was nothing there, the illusion of blood splattering on his face still made him feel a physical nausea.
"He's being dismbered."
Lin Jie said in a low voice.
This was a murder in progress.
Or... a murder that had once occurred, now being reenacted?
No.
If it was a residual reverberation, [Reverberation Touch] should have been able to sense it.
But during the earlier contact, Lin Jie had felt nothing.
This was more like...
Two different spaces overlapping at so erroneous node.
They were looking at this side's rainy night.
While that man in that dinsional room was experiencing hell.
The screams lasted for about five minutes.
That sound was heart-rending, so real it made one want to cover their ears.
Then the sound began to distort, like a scratched record, or a tangled tape.
"Hel... help... uij... ouij..."
That man's voice began to beco slurred.
The pitch began to stretch, to twist.
Finally, it turned into a series of incomprehensible, aningless syllables.
Those syllables sounded like reversed mutterings, or like the low calls of so deep-sea creature.
The gauge on Evelyn's instrunt began to swing wildly; the needle in that instant directly bottod out, and then...
"Snap."
That needle broke.
At the sa mont, the sound abruptly ceased.
The world returned to silence.
Only the patter of rain outside the window and the occasional clip-clop of horse hooves from downstairs remained.
That non-existent room, that dismbered man, that at-chopping murderer.
All had vanished.
Vanished cleanly.
Evelyn took off her headphones. She gasped for breath in big gulps, her face as pale as paper.
"Is it over?" she asked.
"It's over." Lin Jie looked at that empty, gaping hole.
The wind blew in, ruffling the hem of his shirt; he felt a bone-deep chill.
This wasn't because of the cold, but because of the unknown.
He had seen many monsters, killed many monsters.
But he had never felt so powerless as he did now. You couldn't kill sothing that didn't exist.
You also couldn't solve a mystery with no clues.
That night.
Neither Lin Jie nor Evelyn slept.
They found a piece of discarded wooden board and temporarily sealed the large hole.
Then the two of them sat at the other end of the room, keeping watch by that gas lamp until dawn.
Early the next morning.
The first thing Lin Jie did was take Evelyn to the archives room of New York City Hall.
He employed so less-than-honorable thods to look up all the historical records for the plot of land where the "Chelsea Gate Hotel" stood.
For the entire morning, they pored over hundreds of docunts.
From when this plot was still a farm owned by Dutch colonists, to later a textile factory, to the current hotel.
No icehouse, no slaughterhouse. Not even a cold storage warehouse.
This had always been ordinary residential or light industrial land.
Then they went to the police station.
Lin Jie impersonated a private detective and inquired about all police dispatch records for this building over the past fifty years.
There were theft cases, brawls, accidents where a john died in a prostitute's bed.
But.
No murder cases.
No records whatsoever about "dismbernt," "disappearance," or "corpse hidden in ice."
Not even similar rumors.
That man, and that brutal murder, left no trace of existence in New York's history.
In the afternoon, Lin Jie checked out.
Before leaving that room, Lin Jie took one last look at that wall that had been patched up again.
The worker's craftsmanship was rough; the newly pasted wallpaper had a slight color difference from the surroundings.
That wall still stood there.
Silent, thick.
"Let's go."
Lin Jie picked up the suitcase.
They stood on the bustling streets of Manhattan, under bright sunshine.
Carriages flowed like a river, newsboys hawked the latest newspapers on street corners.
Everything seed so real, so normal.
But Lin Jie knew that just beneath this seemingly solid surface of reality, in certain corners of this world.
So things were in those cracks we also couldn't see, desperately knocking on walls.
Thump.
"Lin."
Evelyn stood by the carriage, her complexion still sowhat poor.
"That sound... what exactly was it?"
She looked at Lin Jie, a thread of hope in her eyes.
She hoped this seemingly omnipotent hunter could give her an answer, even a far-fetched explanation.
Like a grudge, like an earthbound spirit, like so yet undiscovered sound wave residual phenonon.
Any explanation would do, as long as it could make this event "reasonable."
But Lin Jie remained silent for a long ti.
He shook his head.
"I don't know."
He answered honestly.
This was an answer that made a hunter feel ashad, yet had to be admitted.
This world was too vast.
So vast that even those hunters who had glimpsed a corner of the inner world were rely children picking up shells on the beach.
Regarding that deep, vast, black ocean filled with chaos and disorder, they still knew nothing.
"So things, perhaps not even science or magic can explain."
Lin Jie opened the carriage door, letting Evelyn get in first.
"So," he turned his head, glancing at the signboard nad "Chelsea Gate," "we need stronger power."
"Not just to deal with those visible UMA."
"But also so that when facing this kind of... 'unknown,' we at least have the qualification to turn and leave."
Evelyn nodded with partial understanding, but that chill had already been deeply imprinted in her heart.
"Where to?" the coachman turned and asked.
Lin Jie withdrew his gaze; his eyes beca firm and sharp once more.
Since the puzzle couldn't be solved, then go solve those problems that could be solved.
This was the only thing a hunter could do when facing fear.
"To Brooklyn."
Lin Jie said.
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