My organs are too abstract.

Chapter 83: The Beginning of the Story!

Yu Hanqiu stood frozen in place, the evening breeze carrying the coolness of the sycamore leaves, making her flamboyant red hair fly wildly.

She clutched her sunglasses between her fingers, her pale red eyes reflecting the dim, hazy light of the streetlights, filled with confusion and bewilderment.

"What's wrong with this person?"

She slowly withdrew her gaze, took a deep breath of the cool night air, and raised her hand to put her sunglasses back on her nose, concealing the turbulent emotions in her eyes.

She sought Xu Yuan's help because he seemed very familiar. But this familiarity wasn't a superficial connection from their three chance encounters; rather, it was an inexplicable pull rooted in her subconscious.

When she first arrived in Wutong District, she was sitting in the SUV when she caught a glimpse of Xu Yuan riding an electric scooter on the street. She subconsciously stared at him for a few more moments, and a strange sense of déjà vu rose in her heart.

At the time, she dismissed it as a misperception and didn't investigate further. But when she bumped into him a second time near Ren'ai Hospital, the sense of familiarity suddenly became clear and intense. And now, on their third encounter, this inexplicable flutter has become so profound that it can no longer be ignored.

Even more strangely, as she delved deeper into the investigation of this area, she felt that the entire Wutong District was completely familiar, yet she was certain that she had never set foot here before.

"Did I see him before—but why can't I remember?"

As she frowned in thought, she suddenly heard hurried footsteps behind her.

"Captain Yu." Gu Ya walked over quickly, her tone tinged with doubt, "What are you doing standing here?"

"Just thinking about something, nothing much." Yu Hanqiu's voice returned to its usual cool tone. "How's the investigation going?"

"The basic situation has been sorted out." Gu Ya's expression hardened, and she nodded. "A few days ago, an unknown level of calamity briefly appeared in the territory of Wutong District. It only cast a glance, but it corrupted seventeen people. Without exception, all of them went insane and eventually hanged themselves."

Although Yu Hanqiu already knew this outcome, she still remained silent for a moment upon hearing this.

"Just one glance, and seventeen people were corrupted—humans are truly fragile." She sighed softly.

Qi asked, "Did you find any clues on the deceased?"

"We didn't find anything, only some scattered footage of them before their deaths." Gu Ya shook her head, then changed the subject, "However, we've made a new discovery."

"What was discovered?"

Gu Ya paused, lowered her voice, and said in an increasingly serious tone, "It was recently confirmed that not seventeen people were affected by the calamity's gaze, but eighteen."

Yu Hanqiu suddenly looked at her, her brows furrowing slightly: "Eighteen?"

"That's right." Gu Ya nodded.

Yu Hanqiu's heart skipped a beat, and she immediately realized the key point: "This eighteenth person is very special?"

If he were like everyone else, Gu Ya wouldn't have brought it up specifically.

"Very unusual." Gu Ya's expression was serious. "He had been missing for a long time and was not found until recently when his whereabouts were traced. I have already used my retrospective ability to check his residence and saw a very unusual scene."

"Unusual?"

Yu Hanqiu was slightly surprised. She knew that Gu Ya's ability was to read fragments of the past from the residual aura and traces in the space. However, the longer the time, the stronger the interference, and the greater the difficulty of reading.

As a senior member of the Sickness Control Bureau, what could be the "unusual" thing that Gu Ya would describe?

Gu Ya didn't explain further. She took out a small silver device from her bag and handed it to her: "I don't know how to explain it, Captain Yu. You should see for yourself."

Yu Hanqiu took the instrument, looked down at the screen, which contained the image that Gu Ya had copied using her abilities.

The scene is dimly lit, an ordinary bedroom. Outside the window, the night rain is drizzling, the rain curtain is hazy. A man wearing a gray-blue plaid pajama stands by the window, holding a mobile phone and talking in a low voice. His tone is anxious and flustered, as if he is desperately explaining something to the person on the other end of the phone. But not long after, the call is rudely hung up.

The man slumped down on the edge of the bed, looking utterly lost. After a few seconds of stunned silence, he suddenly broke down and burst into loud sobs.

"Is this the residence of the eighteenth infected person?" Yu Hanqiu asked.

"Yes, this is footage from a period before his death," Gu Ya replied.

Yu Hanqiu looked at the man on the screen, who was crying uncontrollably: "What's wrong with him? Did something happen at home?"

"No." Gu Ya paused for two seconds before speaking in a complicated tone, "He failed as a simp."

Yu Hanqiu: "—"

"He scrimped and saved to give the other party a gift worth several thousand yuan, but the other party thought it was too cheap and refused to accept it," Gu Ya added.

Yu Hanqiu found it difficult to comment, and after a moment asked, "So his disappearance was reported to the police by the person he was pursuing?"

""

"No, it's the landlord." Gu Ya shook her head gently. "He had been behind on rent for a long time, and then he disappeared without a trace. The landlord couldn't contact him, so he called the police."

"He's behind on rent?" Yu Hanqiu was even more puzzled. "Isn't he a simp—a...you know, a gigolo? He even gave me such expensive gifts, how could he not pay rent?"

Gu Ya shrugged helplessly: "Who knows?"

Yu Hanqiu understood, said nothing more, and turned her gaze back to the screen.

In the scene, the window behind the man is open, and the night outside is dark and shrouded in rain and mist. Suddenly, something moves in the depths of the mist, not like the wind, but some kind of conscious, extremely slow wriggling.

A strange sense of familiarity suddenly rose in Yu Hanqiu's heart. Her eyes narrowed slightly, and her fingers unconsciously tightened: "This is—"

"This is it." Gu Ya paused the video and pointed to a blurry outline in the fog outside the window. "I've slowed it down, so look carefully."

The video continued playing, and the thick rain and fog slowly dissipated, gradually revealing an enormous, indescribable form. It was a half-open giant eye, staring at the man inside the room through the window, its pupil blinking slightly.

Yu Hanqiu stared at the eye, her pupils under her sunglasses suddenly contracting as she caught a strange detail: its eyelids did not open and close like a human's, but rather closed from both sides toward the middle, like two stone doors slowly closing, with a faint crimson light flashing across the edges with each movement.

The most terrifying thing is the pupil—a narrow vertical slit surrounded by irregular concentric circles that slowly rotate like a vortex. The circles break, shift, and heal from time to time, as if they are breathing.

"It really is it—" Yu Hanqiu murmured, her voice carrying a hint of seriousness that she herself did not realize.

This eye, like the one in the video she had seen before, suspended high in the air overlooking Wutong District, was named by the Disease Control Bureau as […].

The calamities associated with "vertical pupils" are exactly the same.

The moment the gaze fell upon the scene outside the window, the man inside, who had been collapsing and weeping, suddenly fell silent. All his emotions were drained away in an instant, leaving only a deathly numbness on his face.

He mechanically stood up, took a thin rope from the drawer, walked expressionlessly toward the ceiling fan, moved a chair over, stood under the fan, tied the rope loop, and without hesitation put it around his neck, then kicked the chair over.

In a short while, the man's body was hanging from the ceiling fan, his neck twisted and his head drooping limply. The old ceiling fan blades were pulled slightly down by the rope, but they did not break. This was completely illogical; the weight-bearing limit of this kind of old-fashioned ceiling fan was only thirty or forty pounds, which was not enough to support the weight of an adult man.

Soon, he was hanging from the ceiling fan, his neck twisted, his head drooping, and the fan blades were pulled down slightly by the rope.

Gu Ya couldn't help but ask, "Captain Yu, how could a ceiling fan possibly support his weight?"

Yu Hanqiu, however, noticed something amiss: "Because he is no longer human at this point, the weight of his physical body has lost its meaning for him."

Outside the window, that enormous eye blinked a second time.

In the scene, the hanging corpse suddenly trembled slightly, as if something invisible was churning wildly inside his body.

Then, a third blink.

The hanging corpse suddenly convulsed violently, and the next second, it slowly opened its eyes. A lifeless smile slowly crept onto its previously numb and deathly face.

At the same time, the ordinary hemp rope also quietly underwent a transformation, turning into a deep, abyss-like darkness that seemed capable of swallowing light.

"This is no ordinary death—" Yu Hanqiu murmured softly, his heart trembling violently.

"It's not over yet." Gu Ya continued to swipe the screen.

The corpse, suspended in mid-air, suddenly pulled a phone from his pajama pocket. The cold screen light reflected on his pale, stiff face. His fingertips mechanically swiped, as if he were exchanging messages with someone.

He didn't know what he saw, but the eerie smile on his face suddenly froze, then turned into complete bewilderment.

The next moment, the figure in the picture suddenly left a blurry afterimage, its body flashing at a speed that defied the laws of physics, instantly appearing outside the house and hanging on a tree trunk in the yard, its speed so fast that no one could catch its trajectory.

Then, his body flickered and sped away in a certain direction.

"This person—has been transformed into a calamity."

Yu Hanqiu maintained a calm demeanor on the surface, but her heart was already churning with turmoil.

With just three glances, an ordinary person was completely transformed into a calamity. Just what level is this being?!

"Since this eye created a calamity, it means it has an extremely strong desire for reality. But if that's the case, why doesn't it appear in person?" Gu Ya asked, puzzled. "And how come the calamity it created was so fast? It's completely illogical."

"Perhaps—it's testing us." Yu Hanqiu suddenly remembered something, his eyes flickering slightly. "This calamity was deliberately created," which is why it was given sufficient speed. Its mission wasn't to kill, but to test a certain being on behalf of the calamity behind it.

Gu Ya's heart skipped a beat, and she quickly asked, "Why do you say that?"

"Do you remember that video from before?" Yu Hanqiu's gaze fell on the slowly closing eye that was frozen in the last frame of the video. "In the video, this eye also appeared high in the sky. At that time, it seemed to be spying on something. The emotion revealed in its eyes was fear. It was afraid of something, so it dared not descend in person and could only create such a calamity to scout the way for it."

"Such a thing exists?" Gu Ya was startled. "Aren't calamities supposed to act on instinct? Are there really calamities with such high intelligence?"

Yu Hanqiu's eyes flickered slightly as she recalled some long-forgotten news. After a moment of silence, she slowly shook her head: "In this world, some calamities are far more terrifying and bizarre than you can comprehend."

Gu Ya nodded as if she understood, but not quite. The Bureau of Emergency Management always kept information about high-level disasters strictly confidential, and given her limited rank, she didn't know much.

However, she had a question in her mind: the bureau had divided the calamities into several levels, but some of these levels had never appeared in reality. Since there had never been any instances, what was the basis for the initial classification of the levels?

Yu Hanqiu, unaware of her thoughts, looked at the interrupted video and asked in a deep voice, "Is that all the video content is?"

"Yes, the traces of space disappear completely here, and it's impossible to read any more," Gu Ya nodded in response.

"Is it possible to find out who he last messaged?"

"I can't find it. The information traces were completely erased by a special calamity power and cannot be restored at all." Gu Ya paused, pointed in a direction, "However, I tracked the departure trajectory of that man-made calamity, and the last direction it disappeared was this way."

Yu Hanqiu didn't ask any more questions. Following the direction she pointed, her eyes flickered slightly. The young man named Xu Yuan seemed to have come from that direction.

"Xu Yuan————"

She hesitated for a moment, then suddenly spoke: "Help me investigate someone."

Gu Ya was taken aback and subconsciously asked, "Who?"

"Xu Yuan".

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