Original Mystery Novel: 《ℬ𝓁𝒾𝓏𝓏𝒶𝓇𝒹 ℳ𝒶𝓃𝑜𝓇》 EP56

But the lamp was right there on the corner of the table, its dim light illuminating the entire wall. He walked to the table. The open page of the notebook was filled with writing. He recognized it as Old Zhou's handwriting—exactly the same as in the diary in the garage, but more mature, more suppressed. "I spent sixteen years trying to make all this disappear. But some things, the clearer you try to be, the clearer they become. Fog Valley never disappeared. It just found another way to live—in everyone who left. Lin Jing's case, Fang Guodong's crackdown, Shen Yuehua's foundation, Xu Ziqian's land... all fragments of Fog Valley. I cleared them, but they grow back on their own. I finally understood today. The only way to close that door isn't to hide it. It's to let the person who is supposed to go in, walk in themselves." Chen Mo turned to the next page. A drawing was on it—Chen Mo had seen a similar diagram, the one Lin Jing drew, but this one was more complete. In the center was a banyan tree, and beneath it, a door. Six people stood around the door, each holding a rope, the ends of which converged in the center of the door. "A ritual," Chen Mo murmured. He picked up the framed photograph from the table. In the photo, a young Zhang Zhenyu, a strange woman, and that little boy stood under the banyan tree. Chen Mo looked closely at the woman's face—thin, her eyes gentle but shadowed—he had seen her somewhere before. Not in a photo, not in a memory, but something more recent. He flipped the photo over. On the back, written in blue ink with the same handwriting as the invitation, was a single line: (To be continued)