An 80s female translator was spoiled rotten by a rough and jealous man.

Chapter 280 Background Sounds (Part 2)
Huo Qingshan took off his headphones, met Meng Youyou's eager eyes, and calmly said, "The echo duration of the two recordings is significantly different. The first one is less than 0.2 seconds, which is almost inaudible if you don't listen carefully. The second one is about 0.7 seconds, and the echo is very prominent and has a strong presence."

"Anything else?" Meng Youyou asked.

The man lowered his head to think, recalling the details: "The voice quality is different too. You can tell it's the same person speaking, but..." Huo Qingshan paused, and when he looked up again, he met the pair of burning eyes opposite him once more. He cleared his throat before continuing, "But in the first recording, that person's voice sounded rather deep and resonant, while the second one sounded sharper, with a metallic vibrato."

Meng Youyou nodded emphatically in agreement, picked up the paper on the table and slammed it down in front of Huo Qingshan, "The environment in which this person was in the two communications was obviously different."

She leaned closer, her fingernails tracing rapid lines on the paper, her voice lowered: "The first tape is from three days ago. I've analyzed over a dozen recordings from this period, and their echo durations are highly average. Excluding human auditory error, it's almost certain that the correspondent's location remained unchanged during this time."

Judging solely from the sound quality, the first one sounds more like a large cave, but the maximum diameter of the activity space wouldn't exceed 30 meters.

Her fingertips slid to the other side of the page: "And the timeline of the other tape runs from the day before yesterday to yesterday. I found that their echo durations varied greatly, some were long and some were short, the longest was even close to one second, and the shortest was probably around 0.5 seconds. This gave me the feeling... like being in a narrow underground fortification connected by several long, almost straight tunnels of varying lengths."

Huo Qingshan followed her fingertips to the densely packed numbers, and after silently studying them for a long time, he suddenly looked up and made her unspoken words clear: "You suspect that they have a secret passage."

Meng Youyou turned her head, and their eyes met. "That's right."

As the words fell, the silence in the air suddenly became heavy, as if an invisible sharp knife was hanging above their heads.

However, no one noticed that Ayu's face turned deathly pale when he heard those words.

As if suddenly remembering something, Meng Youyou abruptly reached out and grabbed the man's arm, pulling him away from the chair and hurriedly sitting down herself.

"Give me a few minutes." Meng Youyou said without looking to the side, taking the cassette tape out of the tape recorder and inserting it into the spectrum analyzer.

While engrossed in drawing, Meng Youyou felt a stiffness in the left side of her neck. Her neck was now stiff and painful after hanging down for a while, which was unbearable. She took a moment to free one hand, made a fist and pounded it a few times, then quickly withdrew it and put her fingertips back on the graph paper.

Huo Qingshan looked down at her awkward posture, her neck slightly tilted to one side. After a brief hesitation, he calmly extended his right hand and placed it on Meng Youyou's left shoulder. His thumb pressed against the hollow of her cervical spine, and his slender knuckles rubbed back and forth along the joint, the pressure gradually increasing.

Meng Youyou's breath caught in her throat. For several moments afterward, all she could feel was a tingling sensation on the back of her neck, nothing else. She could hardly tell whether the stiff, painful feeling she had just experienced there had actually been there.

Meng Youyou's hand, holding the pen, continued to wander across the paper. After a moment, she slowly uttered, "The other side isn't comfortable either." Her tone was indifferent, revealing nothing about her feelings.

Xiong Ayou, who had witnessed the previous scene, was already petrified. Now, she was so shocked that her eyes almost popped out. When Platoon Leader Huo heard this, he did not show the slightest abnormality on his face. He simply moved to the back of Sister Meng and placed both of his hands on her.

There was something strange about the room; it seemed like he was all alone, but he couldn't quite put his finger on what was wrong.

A few minutes later, Meng Youyou shrugged, brushed aside the two hands on either side of her neck, turned to the side, presented the coordinate paper to the man, and said decisively, "It's not a doubt."

If before we couldn't completely rule out the possibility that they were in a natural cave passage, now I'm certain they are in a man-made passage.

Huo Qingshan reached out and took it, his gaze falling on the waveform distortion that was highlighted. The man's eyes suddenly sharpened—the corresponding horizontal axis below clearly showed 3400Hz.

Meng Youyou pointed out: "What does the 3400Hz resonance frequency correspond to? I don't need to remind Platoon Leader Huo, do I?" According to the "Y Army Equipment Voiceprint Atlas" collected and compiled by our army, the resonance peak frequency of ST-3 steel, which is most commonly used by the Y Army, is 3400±40Hz.

Huo Qingshan didn't respond immediately. After pondering for half a minute, he calmly made arrangements: "Immediately check the existing recording clips and screen for key information. Focus on clues that imply hidden locations, as well as auxiliary intelligence that can indirectly narrow down the coordinates of the 'old kitchen.' No detail can be overlooked."

As he was leaving, Huo Qingshan stretched out his long arm, put his arm around Ayou's shoulder, leaned down and whispered a few words in his ear. Before letting go, he patted Ayou's shoulder twice, and said, "Do a good job!" before quickly leaving the listening station.

After everyone had walked away, Ayou sat down next to her, and Meng Youyou casually asked, "What did he just say to you?"

The boy's face first showed a shy expression that resembled embarrassment, then his eyes seemed to ignite with a bright light of fighting spirit, and his hands unconsciously clenched into fists. "Platoon Leader Huo told me that it is meaningless to dwell on failure."

"To defeat the enemy, you must first defeat the coward in your own heart. If you want to become stronger, you can't let fear, panic, and self-doubt follow you. You must believe that you can do it, then face it bravely and get rid of that thing that's holding you back as soon as possible."

A real man fights forever!

……

"Sister Meng!" Ayou suddenly shouted.

Even through the headphones, his excitement startled Meng Youyou. She took off her headphones and looked over. "What's wrong?"

Boys this age can't hide their emotions; their thoughts are all written on their faces. Meng Youyou could guess seven or eight parts of his thoughts just by looking at his expression. She tapped her fingertips on the edge of the table: "Did you hear something useful?"

Ayou nodded vigorously, eagerly reaching for her earphones, but then quickly pulled her hand back, slapping the back of her hand in annoyance. She then turned to the side, unplugged the earphones from the recorder, and pushed it towards Meng Youyou, her voice brimming with barely suppressed happiness: "Sister Meng, listen to this!"

"...Waterproof canvas and quick-setting cement!" A somewhat impatient male voice, with a hint of northern western accent, was accompanied by the distinct sound of rain in the background, occasionally accompanied by the splashing of water, like the sound of shoes struggling to move in a ditch.

Meng Youyou mentally retraced the timeline; there had indeed been a torrential downpour three days ago, lasting all night.

Seeing that the other person was still haggling and talking about the official excuse that supplies were scarce and needed time to be allocated, the person's tone became increasingly impatient. "Hurry up and send it over! I'm going to the third vegetable plot to wait for the pickup. If it's any later, this place will be almost flooded. The old kitchen can't hold people for long. If the food is sent from here, it will all be ruined."

Vegetable patch number three? Meng Youyou pondered the code name in her mind, feeling that she had seen it somewhere before, but she couldn't quite place it.

She pulled out the secret code book and glanced at Ayu, who was staring at her expectantly. Ayu immediately understood and turned her back to her in a flash, even closing her eyes tightly.

Meng Youyou then lowered her head and began searching. She recognized the code name, but it was definitely not a frequently used term; otherwise, it wouldn't be so vague. Her fingertip slid directly to the second half of the manual, finally finding the small print on the second-to-last page—"Vegetable Plot No. 3," followed by a series of coordinates.

It wasn't until she saw this that Meng Youyou fully remembered where the code came from.
More than two weeks ago, our army captured half of an enemy map, which was then sent to the listening station to update the database. At that time, Meng Youyou checked the geographical location corresponding to this set of coordinates. It was neither a strategic high ground nor a key area where the enemy's firepower was stationed, and it seemed to have no special significance.

Moreover, according to the young soldier who delivered the documents at the time, that plot of land, two years earlier when the enemy held a favorable position, was considered their second-line rear area, used to grow some vegetables to reduce logistical pressure. As for now, only a large septic tank remains there, nothing else.

Moreover, this code name had never appeared in any previously monitored communications, so Meng Youyou naturally categorized it as minor information and casually jotted it down at the end of the manual.