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墨書 Inktalez
Chapter Sixty-Two Ghost Village
How did the serious crimes unit come to me for help with a tricky case? I was quite puzzled, as I knew nothing about it and could only exorcise ghosts and draw talismans. They, the police, relied on scientific evidence to solve cases, so I really couldn't be of any assistance.
Seeing my confused expression, the captain of the serious crimes unit sighed and said, "Let me put it this way: we received a paranormal case that is very bizarre. We have exhausted all investigative methods and found no clues, so we would like to ask for your help in thinking of a solution."
Now I understood; they had encountered Ghostly Affairs. It made sense—anything could happen in this vast world, and not everything could be explained by science. However, I was genuinely curious about the paranormal case he mentioned. What kind of bizarre case could compel these serious crimes officers to believe it was a supernatural event?
Thinking of this, I asked him if he could tell me about the case they were dealing with.
The captain readily nodded in agreement and then took me to an empty office where he began to explain the origins of the case. As I listened, my scalp tingled and my body felt cold because what he described was truly bizarre.
The situation was as follows: this captain's surname was Wang, and he was in charge of the city's serious crimes unit. About two months ago, one night around midnight, one of their colleagues on night duty received a strange phone call. At first, there were only sounds of heavy breathing on the line, followed by a voice that was neither male nor female claiming to have killed someone and wanting to turn themselves in. The voice was very strange—how strange? According to the colleague who answered the call, it sounded hollow and ethereal, making it feel unreal or more like a recording. However, that duty officer was certain it wasn't a recording because there was a lot of background noise on the line along with wind sounds.
At that time, the detective asked the person on the phone where they were. The caller said they were at an old house number seven in Liu Family Village. The detective felt the situation was serious and immediately reported it to the duty chief while also notifying the local police station. Thus, several detectives from the bureau who could be mobilized immediately set out.
However, just as the detectives from City Bureau left the police station, they received a call from the local police station informing them that Liu Family Village had long been uninhabited and it was impossible for anyone to be murdered there.
City Detective was surprised; how could a village be uninhabited? Even if no one lived there, it was possible that a perpetrator had kidnapped someone and committed murder in Liu Family Village since the person turning themselves in claimed to be at old house number seven.
What shocked City Detective even more was that the local police station informed them that Liu Family Village was also known as Ghost Village, as all its residents had died out thirty years ago. Not only would there be no one there at midnight, but even during the day, no one would go near that place. Moreover, local police officers mentioned that every year they received emergency calls from Liu Family Village; however, whenever they sent someone over, nothing could ever be found. Over time, they simply stopped paying attention to it.
City Detective was very surprised. How could such a thing still happen? At that moment, the person from the police station asked them if the voice of the person who reported the case sounded very ethereal, very hollow, and unreal.
After confirming with the detective on the line from the Criminal Investigation Team, they informed the police station that it was indeed so. The police station then said that it was a ghost reporting the case, and there was no need for them to come over.
The answer given by the local police station was simply too unbelievable. The members of the City Detective team stared at each other in shock. They had encountered many homicide cases before, but this was the first time they had come across something related to ghosts. Of course, despite their astonishment, they did not believe that this matter was caused by a ghost. Therefore, the City Detective team decided to continue on to Liu Family Village to see whether the person who reported the case was human or a ghost!
Liu Family Village is far from the city center, located deep within a mountain range. Because the case was already very strange from the beginning, the Major Crimes Unit led by Wang Team personally went to Liu Family Village.
Upon arriving at the local police station, the officers informed them that there were no vehicles going to Liu Family Village, so they had to go on foot. The path from the town to Liu Family Village is over ten miles long, winding through mountainous terrain. Due to no one having walked it for over twenty years, the road had long been destroyed, and what was once a narrow mountain path was now overgrown with weeds taller than a person.
At this point, Wang Team smiled wryly and said that if it weren't for the local police officer leading them, they would have never found their way or even recognized the route to Liu Family Village.
On their way to Liu Family Village, Wang Team asked the accompanying police officer about Liu Family Village. According to him, there used to be about twenty or thirty households and around a hundred people living in Liu Family Village, but over twenty years ago, everyone died. One day, a villager from a neighboring village went to Liu Family Village for some business and found that there wasn't a single person in sight upon entering. When he walked into one of the houses, he saw four or five corpses hanging from the beams inside. Among those four or five people were both old and young, men and women—clearly an entire family—but by the time that villager discovered them, they had already passed away.
That villager was terrified and wanted to call for help. However, when he ran to several other houses, he found that every household had its entire family hanging dead inside.
Scared out of his wits, he escaped and reported it. The case file from that year still remains in the archives; all over a hundred villagers committed suicide by hanging overnight.
It is said that investigations into that case lasted nearly a year but yielded no clues and remains unsolved to this day. Since then, outsiders have dared not enter Liu Family Village, as it is said to be haunted. Those brave enough to venture into the empty Liu Family Village claimed that during the day, various sounds could be heard—voices talking and laughing as well as cries and screams—but when one followed those sounds to investigate, they would find that there wasn't a single person in sight. However, at night, many figures could be seen throughout the village—ghostly apparitions of villagers who had already died. Living people entering the village would be called out by them and unable to leave; many people from neighboring villages have died for trespassing into Liu Family Village, while some who managed to escape ended up going mad.
In short, everyone in the area knows about the hauntings in Liu Family Village, which is referred to by locals as Ghost Village. Especially in those initial years when hauntings were particularly severe; nowadays, perhaps due to time passing and no one entering Liu Family Village, reports of hauntings have decreased significantly—some young people are even unaware that there is a place called Liu Family Village.
Since then, colleagues on night duty at the local police station receive one or two calls each year from Liu Family Village. Sometimes it's a woman reporting that her parents were killed by her brother; other times it's a man confessing that he has killed someone. Initially, officers would send someone out to investigate these calls from Liu Family Village, but after multiple trips without seeing anything and two officers returning mad, they eventually stopped responding to calls from Liu Family Village, believing them to be calls from ghosts!
Hearing Team Leader Wang say this, I couldn't help but ask, "So when you arrived at Liu Family Village that night, did you encounter anything strange?"
Team Leader Wang sighed, looking out the window with a somewhat frightened expression. He told me that that night, they had hiked over mountains with local police for more than an hour before finally reaching the so-called Ghost Village. They found the old house number seven mentioned by the person who reported the case.
When they entered the old house, they indeed saw a man in his twenties sitting on the ground in the living room, covered in blood, and there was a female corpse lying on the ground. Team Leader Wang and his team immediately subdued the man and asked if he was the one who reported the case. The man nodded and admitted it. So that night, they took both the man and the female corpse back to the City Bureau.
Upon hearing this, I felt confused and couldn't help but ask Team Leader Wang, "If that's the case, then it has nothing to do with the supernatural. The female corpse has been found, and the man who committed the crime has confessed. Isn't that quite smooth? Why do you still need me?"
Team Leader Wang sighed again and said, "Sir, please don't rush me; let me finish. To be honest, at that time I thought just like you—what Ghost Village or no Ghost Village; there are no ghosts in this world. But on the very night we brought back that man and the female corpse, something big happened. First, the man who was detained disappeared without a trace, and even more mysteriously, the female corpse stored in the morgue also vanished. To make matters worse, we had sent a forensic doctor over there, and that doctor ended up dead in the morgue where they stored the female corpse."
"Ah?" I couldn't help but be shocked; indeed, the development of events was far too unexpected.
Team Leader Wang smiled bitterly again and continued to tell me that upon such occurrences, they immediately realized how serious the situation was. You have to understand that if a criminal escapes from a detention room in the criminal investigation team, it would be a huge problem; it would be a laughingstock if word got out. This not only severely affected the future of leaders at City Bureau but also tarnished the reputation of criminal investigation officers.
At that moment, Team Leader Wang reported this matter to city leaders, who demanded mobilizing police forces throughout the city to seal off all intersections and conduct area searches to find the criminal. Of course, they also reviewed surveillance footage afterward; however, when they finished watching it, everyone broke into a cold sweat!
Because in the surveillance footage from last night after Team Leader Wang and his team returned from Liu Family Village, there were indeed two police officers who arrived at the detention room. However, they did not see that confessing man. This meant that when the criminal investigation officers detained that confessing man in the detention room, only officers were visible in the surveillance footage while that man was nowhere to be seen.
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