200: Chapter 200 Midnight Wind-Up Sound

In Jiangzhou's early winter, the night wind always carried a damp and bone-chilling cold.

Fatty Wang and Bai Yu had gone to several deep mountain forests in the neighboring province over the past few days to procure century-old lightning-struck wood.

Without the chatter of these two troublemakers, the nights on Taiping Old Street appeared exceptionally quiet.

Yet tonight's quietness was quiet in a rather weird way.

Two-thirty in the morning.

In the west of Jiangzhou city, at a high-end single-person apartment complex named "Jinxiu Huating".

Twenty-four-year-old night shift security guard Xiao Zhang was sitting in the lobby's guard room, listlessly scrolling through short videos.

Ever since Great Xia's official authorities issued the red notice for "Supernatural Revival", even the bravest night owls dared not wander around the streets once it got dark.

"Zhi la... Zhi la..."

The fluorescent light tube overhead suddenly emitted a faint buzzing current sound, and the originally bright light began to flicker uncontrollably.

Xiao Zhang shuddered, instinctively reaching for the "blessed peach wood stick" at his waist that he had bought online for a high price.

"Whoosh!"

A piercingly cold wind squeezed in through the crack of the door.

The street outside was shrouded in a layer of grayish-white mist.

Right at this moment, a bizarre piece of music broke the dead silence of the late night.

"Ding-dong... Ding-dong-dong..."

It was the sound produced by an old-fashioned wind-up music box.

The melody was mechanical and monotonous, just like the accompaniment when a clown enters the stage in a circus.

Xiao Zhang swallowed a mouthful of saliva, staring fixedly at the tightly closed glass door of the guard room.

The sound of the music box drew closer and closer, and finally, it stopped on the other side of the glass door!

"Tap, tap, tap."

Three moderate knocks sounded.

Xiao Zhang's heart skipped a beat. The official defense handbook clearly stated that one must absolutely never open the door when encountering knocking in the middle of the night.

He held his breath, quietly creeping up to the peephole of the glass door to take a look outside.

The hallway was empty, with only grayish-white mist rolling about.

There was simply no human figure at all!

But the knocking still continued.

"Tap, tap, tap."

Accompanied by the music box's eerie and cheerful melody, a seductive voice directly sounded deep within Xiao Zhang's mind:

"Sir, your delivery has arrived. Please open the door and sign for your happiness..."

That voice carried a certain irresistible magic, instantly stripping away Xiao Zhang's rationality.

His eyes instantly became vacant and lifeless, and his body, like a marionette, stiffly reached out and grasped the doorknob.

"Click."

The door opened.

A gust of gray wind swept in.

There was still nothing outside the door, only a rust-covered music box dropped on the ground.

The lid popped open, and a clown spring doll inside, painted with an exaggerated smile, was nodding frantically at him.

Xiao Zhang's pupils suddenly dilated.

He wanted to scream, but found that he could not emit any sound from his throat.

Xiao Zhang lowered his head in terror.

He saw that his originally rough skin was turning pale, smooth, and rigid at a speed visible to the naked eye, finally transforming into lifeless, cold, hard porcelain!

"Click, click, click..."

His joints emitted the mechanical meshing sound of gears.

At that instant, his internal organs felt as though they had been completely hollowed out.

The dense sound of clockwork springs rotating came from inside his stomach!

"Tick, tick, tick."

In a mere five seconds.

A living youth suddenly turned into a life-sized ceramic wind-up doll.

An eerie smile was forcefully fixed on his face.

The music box's music stopped abruptly.

The grayish-white mist melted back into the night, leaving only that ceramic doll with ticking sounds constantly coming from its belly.

...

Early the next morning.

Taiping Old Street, Lins Funeral Shop.

Lin Ye wore a loose gray casual hoodie, lazily leaning against the sofa, holding a cup of Mingqian Longjing tea freshly brewed by Ayugu in his hand.

"These foreigners really are restless."

He looked at the few high-definition crime scene photos scattered on the coffee table, raising his eyebrows slightly as a glint of interest flashed in the depths of his eyes.

The photos had been hurriedly delivered by Deputy Captain Chu Hongyan ten minutes ago.

In the pictures was precisely security guard Xiao Zhang who had turned into a ceramic doll at the Jinxiu Huating apartment last night, along with three other ordinary citizens who had died in the exact same manner.

Their bodies had been completely porcelainized. Autopsies revealed that there were no flesh-and-blood organs inside their bodies, which were instead stuffed with rusted metal gears and springs.

Deputy Captain Chu Hongyan sat opposite Lin Ye, her heroic-looking face full of exhaustion and anxiety.

"In the latter half of last night, a total of seven identical murder cases occurred in Jiangzhou, with no traces of struggle and no residual yin energy."

She picked up her water cup and took a large gulp, her voice tinged with a deep sense of helplessness.

"Our special agents and forensic doctors from The Ninth Bureau rushed to the scene immediately. As a result, we found that our cinnabar armor-piercing bullets and Taoist talismans had zero reaction to this kind of death!"

"When dissecting the corpses, a forensic doctor was also almost infected by the curse attached to those gears. This is simply not some evil ghost!"

"Of course it's not a ghost."

Lin Ye put down his teacup.

He leaned against the back of the chair, his fingers toying with a strand of silver hair cascading down from Leng Yue beside him.

"Ghosts in Great Xia emphasize karmic retribution and obsessions giving rise to baleful qi."

"Yet the method of death in these photos is clean, crisp, and untainted by karma, almost as if it was forcibly formatted by some fixed 'program'."

Lin Ye turned his head to look at Helena standing behind him kneading his shoulders.

"Helena, you've stayed in the Western Holy See for a long time. Does this malicious taste of turning living people into wind-up toys look familiar to you?"

Helena leaned forward and took a look at the photos.

A trace of panic flashed instantly in her ice-blue eyes, and she instinctively stepped back half a step.

"Boss... This is S.H.I.E.L.D.'s stuff from Eagle Country!"

Helena took a deep breath, forcibly suppressing the palpitations in her heart, and explained in a lowered voice:

"The West doesn't have as many native demons and monsters as the East. A large part of Eagle Country's supernatural system is built upon [Containment Items]."

"They search the world for bizarre items that defy physical principles, and then use genetic technology or some kind of price to forcibly control them."

She pointed at the rusted music box remains in the corner of the photo.

"This should be [Containment Item - 042: The Smiling Clown's Music Box] from S.H.I.E.L.D.'s top-secret archives."

"This thing doesn't have a physical entity, nor does it belong to magic or yin qi; it is a kind of [Rule-type Cognitive Hazard]."

"Its killing rule is very simple: as long as one hears its music in the midnight thick fog, and opens the door after it knocks three times, the marked person's life form will be forcibly rewritten and completely transformed into a soulless wind-up doll."

"The Western Holy See once tried to purify it with the top-tier holy light, resulting in even the priest presiding over the ceremony turning into a ground of shattered porcelain pieces."

After listening to Helena's popular science explanation, the air in the hall instantly became somewhat heavy.

"Rule-type killing?"

Ayugu squatted on a chair, holding a half-eaten youtiao in her hand, and sucked in a breath of cold air.

"These foreign ghosts don't talk about martial ethics when fighting! Instead of hacking people face-to-face, they directly toss over a rule-based cheat? How are we supposed to defend against this?"

"If this fully spreads across Jiangzhou, wouldn't people all over the city become toy store inventory?"

Deputy Captain Chu Hongyan's face turned pale. Clearly, she also realized the seriousness of the situation, because rule-type anomalies were the hardest to deal with. Previously, The Ninth Bureau always won a pyrrhic victory when facing rule-type ghost domains.

"Those scumbags from Eagle Country, seeing that they can't win in a frontal fight, are starting to play dirty!"

Deputy Captain Chu Hongyan slammed her palm on the table in anger.

"What's the rush?"

Lin Ye chuckled softly.

"What Western containment items, what rule-type elimination. They sound quite intimidating, but at the end of the day, it's nothing more than loopholes in the Dao laws over on their side, giving birth to some junk things that exploit bugs."

Lin Ye stood up.

"Playing rules with me on Great Xia's turf?"

"What I cultivate is the Dao, the source of all laws in this world! Yin-Yang and the Five Elements, the cardinal principles of heaven and earth—which one of these isn't bigger than the rules of his lousy music box?"

Lin Ye walked up to Deputy Captain Chu Hongyan and reached out to flick her tense forehead.

"Alright, Captain Chu, put your heart back in your stomach. Since Eagle Country dropped this thing into Jiangzhou, its target is definitely not those ordinary folks, but rather coming straight for my Funeral Shop."

"Call your people from The Ninth Bureau back a bit. I'd like to see if this foreign toy that traveled across the ocean can take a beating."