Chapter 8: The Mysterious Embedded Pillar

  The uncle smiled and quickly found two cups. I poured the wine: "I'm not very good at drinking, Uncle, you have more. Anyway, there's nothing to do on a big night like this."

  The uncle was looking for a disposable chopstick at this time, saw me pouring wine and waving my hand to stop him, but he didn't even walk over, let alone grab the bottle. When I filled up a cup, he chuckled twice, handed me the chopsticks, and pulled me down to sit. After clinking cups, he took a big sip. I symbolically sipped it, then picked up my chopsticks to pick up some food.

  I was busy eating, and the old man had already downed half a bottle of wine. Suddenly he swayed, pulled me over and said two sentences of nonsense, then fell asleep on the table.

  I took out a pair of gloves from my backpack and put them on, then used a wet wipe to clean the wine bottle. I hadn't touched anything else in this room. Next, I poured the remaining wine into the drain outside the door, found a thermos by the wall, filled it with hot water, swirled it around, and then poured it down the drain as well. You can probably guess that I had added some sedatives to the wine; if not handled properly, evidence of my presence would be exposed if discovered.

  After finishing all that, I left the wine bottle on the table. I put on my mask and hastily exited the door house, walking into the dark warehouse cluster.

  No. 85 Nanle Road is a warehouse cluster. The warehouses and land belong to the owner, who has been renting them out for a long time to companies that need storage space. The surroundings are all high walls with high-voltage wires on top, but there are no surveillance cameras at the entrance, nor inside the guard room. Every night at 7:30, the guards change shifts, and the nighttime guard likes to drink alcohol. All of this was discovered by me when I came here to scout out the location beforehand. On May 29th, I found the address written in Wang Yongshun's diary, but it took three days to scout out the location and prepare tools. By the way, people who are often intoxicated with alcohol have a distinctive gait due to their cerebellum being affected by long-term exposure to alcohol.

  I felt the warehouse's back door marked with "A", and encountered a large iron lock. However, this lock was much more complicated than the one on the mortuary's iron gate. Fortunately, this lock wasn't a password fingerprint lock. I thought to myself, and pulled out the tin foil unlocking tool from my backpack. This tool didn't become popular until 2009, but it had already appeared in 2007, used to deal with single-letter locks, cross-shaped locks, and AB locks, all very conveniently. A true expert could use it to open any ordinary lock in just a few seconds. I found a seller online and spent a lot of money to get this thing, and they even offered a set meal deal, buying tin foil came with a steel bar, which was also worth it. The principle and usage were very simple, putting the specially-made tin foil into the steel bar's groove, inserting it into the lock hole, and the longer pins were all pushed into the lock cylinder by the tin foil. Then, as long as you quickly shook the steel bar, letting the pins press the concave tin foil under the spring's force, the tin foil gradually filled the core, allowing you to turn the steel bar and open the lock.

  After more than a minute of effort, the lock was opened. I carefully gathered up all my tools, slowly pulled open a gap wide enough for me to squeeze through, and slipped inside sideways, closing the door behind me.

  Actually, I had already smelled a strong fishy smell before entering the warehouse. The warehouse was even more pungent and choking. This is because it's a specialized transit warehouse for storing seafood. Seafood transported from the supplier will be stored here first, then transported to the next level of distribution warehouses, and finally transported to each market.

  The address written on Wang Yongshun's diary, if it has anything to do with the word "corpse", this smelly seafood warehouse is absolutely an ideal place to hide a body - not only does it have a huge freezer to provide refrigeration conditions, but the smell of seafood is also enough to cover up the stench of the corpse.

  There must be another paradise in here.

  I turned on my flashlight and walked in slowly. It was very cold inside. I pulled down the sleeves of my jacket, took out a hand warmer from my backpack, stuck it to the outside of my undershirt at my abdomen, and tucked it into my waistband. Since I knew this warehouse was a seafood cold storage, I had to take anti-cold measures. Actually, as long as my stomach didn't get chilly, there wouldn't be a big problem. If my stomach got frozen, and suddenly I had the urge to have diarrhea, that would be a complete tragedy.

  This is a very ordinary warehouse, with the lower level filled with all sorts of boxes and small cold storage rooms. The boxes have the type and weight of seafood written on them, stacked up high. The higher-up boxes can only be retrieved using a forklift. Those cold storage rooms are always refrigerated, mostly containing more valuable seafood, or... corpses?

  I carefully searched the warehouse from top to bottom, opening every freezer and walking along the walls, but apart from a red alarm button that made me particularly nervous, I didn't find anything unusual. However, I still carefully recorded the names of the aquatic companies marked on the boxes in a small notebook, so that I could check them one by one later to see if they had any unclear relationship with the lessee of this warehouse.

  Of course, the focus of this trip is still to find some direct evidence in the warehouse. However, apart from four walls, a big gate, a roof and a large pile of boxes, there was no mystery at all.

  Could it be that the real secret room is hidden among the stacks of boxes?

  It shouldn't be. According to my records just now, the aquatic products companies that transport goods here are quite diverse, and there are indeed goods in the boxes. This suggests that this warehouse is a real seafood warehouse, rather than a fake one set up to cover up some secret or to create an illusion by piling up empty boxes. If the hidden room were to be concealed among the piles of boxes, not only would it be easy for unsuspecting people to accidentally expose the trick, but also the person hiding the secret would find it extremely inconvenient to enter the hidden room themselves.

  Is it underground?

  But this kind of warehouse, when it was built, often didn't have a clear idea of what to store, and no space was reserved underground when the foundation was laid. If you want to knock down the ground floor and rebuild a small warehouse that can hold several corpses, the workload is too big, right? I shook my head lightly, negating this idea.

  I slowly felt my way back to the entrance in the darkness. Could it be that there was nothing unusual about this warehouse? Just as I was about to give up, I suddenly felt something strange. So I stood still at the middle door seam of the gate and started walking towards the right with almost the same pace.

  One step, two steps... walked to the right edge of the wall, a total of twenty-one steps.

  Come back again, towards the left, with the same pace. Only seventeen steps.

  The left side is four steps shorter than the right side. There can only be one possibility - there is a space of about 3.5 meters wide between the left wall inside the warehouse and the outer wall.

  He hurried over and knocked on this wall. That's right, the wall on the side of the gate basically made no sound when knocked, it was made of bricks. And this wall on the left, when knocked, made a much louder sound.

  I suddenly became excited. In this place where seafood is piled up, if a small room was separated out and some files, inventory records, account books, etc. were placed inside, it would still be understandable. But what kind of mystery could be hidden behind such an expensive top-to-bottom wall?

  Hehe, it wasn't a waste of all these days' effort. Most likely, the secret is related to Wang Yongshun or Chen Ziqi.

  The question then arises: where is the entrance?

  I made my way in, and when I finally reached the bottom, I suddenly discovered a very strange thing:

  In the deepest part of this warehouse, there is a pillar standing in the corner on both sides. It's that kind of rough door pillar often seen in ancient Chinese architecture. The pillar at the other end can't be seen clearly, but the one next to me has a part embedded in this problematic wall.

  Maybe you're saying this warehouse spans a great distance, and repairing pillars to support it is strange?

  But if this warehouse really needs to be supported by pillars, shouldn't they be built in the middle? Why are they built against the wall at the very back? Is that wall made of tofu dregs or something? And what's with these thick, ancient-style pillars that completely clash with the simple style of this warehouse?!

  The abnormal is the strange. I believe this pillar must be weird. Search around this pillar on the left.

  A brick on the side of a pillar, slightly higher than the ground. I stepped on it and found that it could be stepped down. So I didn't hesitate anymore and stepped on it with all my might. But there was no movement at all. I lifted up the brick and found an X-shaped spring and a button underneath. If you want to describe it, it's not easy, but if you take off a keycap from a computer keyboard and look inside, it's similar: when you press down on it, it will sink, and when you let go, it will automatically return to its original position.

  But why didn't it work when I stepped on it?