The mouse clicks sounded especially clear in the silent room. Each nested folder they opened felt like peeling back another layer of deliberately concealed onion skin.
Starting with the seemingly ordinary master folder labeled "Study Materials," Chu Zihang's fingers moved steadily, clicking through folders within folders, subdirectories linked to subdirectories—layer after layer—
Lu Mingfei grew more and more curious. Hidden this deeply—there had to be some huge secret!
Finally, after opening the fourth subfolder, they no longer saw more folder icons. The screen displayed documents, webpage screenshots, images, and text files.
They were named after places, abbreviated events, or mythological figures. They seemed somewhat disorganized, yet there was a faint underlying order to them.
Chu Zihang opened several documents. Their contents were copied and pasted from various folk forums, local gazetteer websites, and even obscure blogs, with the source URLs and dates collected clearly noted beside them.
The contents covered everything: an ancient legend from a mountain village about "Mountain Ghost Moving Stones"; an urban legend about "Midnight Ghost Fire" at an abandoned factory on the outskirts of a city; a brief record in a local county gazetteer of the strange phenomenon known as "Earth Dragon Turning Over"; firsthand accounts shared on Tieba about "Sleepwalking into the Vanishing Alley"—
Then Chu Zihang exited the folder and opened several others. Without exception, they contained similar material—carefully categorized by time and location.
Some incidents were even marked in different colors, seemingly representing credibility, danger level, or some kind of connection.
Viewed separately, these might have been nothing more than curiosity-seeking material or fiction. But when gathered together so systematically and in such great volume, a clear pattern emerged—
Like scattered puzzle pieces collected and compared one by one by someone determined, gradually forming a faintly visible map of the "anomalies" hidden beneath