Dude, something's really wrong with your abilities.

Chapter 59 The Dust-Sealed Old Files

Two days have passed, and nothing has changed in the forest, nor has the case made any progress.

Meng Xin stayed by her husband's bedside all day, her silence frightening. The child was quiet and well-behaved, so sensible it was heartbreaking. Except for occasionally watching TV, he spent most of his time curled up in a chair with his parents.

Su Xiaohe has been trying to calm the family members these past two days, but she feels a heavy weight in her heart. A perfectly good family has been inexplicably destroyed, and the perpetrator didn't even leave a trace. The intense sense of powerlessness and sympathy makes her extremely frustrated. But faced with this unsolvable situation, she doesn't know what to do.

Rather than staying in the hospital as a caregiver, Su Xiaohe wanted to do her part to solve the case and bring the person back to safety as soon as possible.

So she took the initiative to find Sun Tiemei: "Team leader, we're completely clueless about this case right now. I want to go back to the bureau and check the files, just in case there are similar cases, that would give us more leads." Her tone was firm, "No matter what, I want to do my part, this family is so pitiful."

Sun Tiemei thought for a moment and then agreed. Since the Fifth Group was just trying their luck at the hospital, they might as well try other routes.

"Sure," Sun Tiemei instructed. "If your access is restricted, you can let me know anytime."

After receiving permission, Su Xiaohe immediately returned to the bureau and plunged into the archives room. She originally came from the archives department and was extremely familiar with the filing order and storage rules there.

To save time, she didn't touch the regular cases of supernatural abilities, focusing only on the unsolved cases. She tried more than a dozen keyword searches, including terms like "consciousness stagnation," "unexplained coma," "undetectable supernatural ability," and "abnormal light and shadow," but none of them were recorded.

She then searched for the manual case files that were not entered into the system. Most of these cases were isolated incidents that occurred more than ten years ago, and some even took place in other cities. However, after two whole days, she still found nothing.

She knew the filing process all too well, and that's precisely why she felt disheartened. The files she could find contained absolutely no record of any supernatural ability corresponding to this case. Whether the relevant case hadn't occurred or hadn't been entered into the database, Su Xiaohe didn't know, but regardless, the result was the same.

But she didn't give up. She just stayed up late working on papers day and night, her eyes were bloodshot, and several fingers on her right hand were sore from rubbing against the paper for so long. She was also dirty and unkempt.

Old Yang, who manages the archives, watched this girl, who was about the same age as his daughter, diligently searching through the files all day long. Although he didn't know what she was looking for, he couldn't bear to see a young woman like her doing this. So today, when he finished locking the cabinet and was about to leave work, he unintentionally said something.

"Xiao Su, all of these documents you checked have already been archived. Go check the warehouse at the very end of the fifth-floor corridor tomorrow; there are probably still some files piled up inside."

"Huh?" Su Xiaohe was clearly not in a good mood. After Lao Yang repeated it, she asked in confusion, "Uncle Yang, isn't that a storage room? I've been there several times before. There are only some old tables and chairs and broken appliances in there. There are no files."

"It is indeed a storage warehouse, but the row of old metal cabinets in the corner has never been moved," Lao Yang explained. "Old files from decades ago and drafts of field notes are all stuffed in there. Back when the bureau started using an electronic system, these documents were too illegible because the handwriting was too messy. The workers found it troublesome and simply abandoned them, locked them in the cabinets, and didn't enter them into the system. They've been lying around ever since."

These words seemed to give Su Xiaohe a last glimmer of hope. She immediately wanted to go up and check, but Old Yang raised his hand to stop her, shaking his head with a smile: "Don't rush, it's very late now. Go back and get some rest. Come back first thing tomorrow morning, and I'll open the door for you."

Su Xiaohe had no choice but to leave for the time being.

The next morning, she waited early at the entrance of the fifth-floor warehouse, and Old Yang quickly came over to open the door for her. However, these metal cabinets, which had been sealed for decades, were classified as confidential legacy materials, and without temporary approval, no one could open them without authorization.

Su Xiaohe didn't dare to make a decision on her own, so she immediately contacted Sun Tiemei and reported the situation truthfully. Without saying a word, Sun Tiemei directly contacted Director Zhao of the Archives. A few days ago, Group Five had just lent Fatty out to help the Archives move supplies, and Director Zhao still owed him a favor. In addition, this batch of files were discarded and there was no risk of confidentiality, so Director Zhao readily agreed to grant access.

Decades had passed, and the cabinet key was long gone. Finally, Old Yang, with his experience, found a crowbar and carefully pried open the rusted lock. The moment the cabinet door opened, a thick layer of dust rushed out, causing both men to wince and pull away.

The documents inside the cabinet were piled up haphazardly, with various papers haphazardly combined without any categorization. Moreover, due to the passage of time, the papers had become damp and soft, the handwriting had become more blurred, and many pages were even stuck together, looking as if they might be damaged at the slightest carelessness.

Su Xiaohe put on the prepared protective gloves, squatted on the ground, and patiently and carefully peeled and flipped through the pages one by one. This task was far more tedious than searching electronic files. She looked at the cabinet full of documents, but most of them were daily field reports or casual notes. However, she still stared at the illegible handwritten small characters and tried to decipher them one by one, not daring to skip any page, for fear of missing the only clue. She endured the painstaking, carpet-like search.

It took her two whole hours, until her legs ached from squatting, to sift through most of the cabinet of waste paper. Her patience and composure were almost completely exhausted. Just as she was about to get up and rest, a stack of flattened, moldy, and brittle pages at the very bottom of the cabinet caught her attention.

This is a thin personal notebook, without an archive number or reporting record. It is a rough draft made by a field worker in the early years and does not even qualify for formal archiving. It is a complete and utterly discarded piece of waste.

Su Xiaohe turned the pages with a last glimmer of hope, but the more she turned, the brighter her eyes became. All the setbacks of the past two days vanished at this moment, and a strong sense of joy welled up in her heart.

This notebook was excessively rudimentary, just a few pages of rough drafts scribbled down during early fieldwork. The content was pieced together haphazardly, much like Chen Shi's style of writing reports—it looked very unprofessional. Most of the limited content was illegible, with only a few lines legible: "Today we discovered a strange thing; someone inexplicably lost their mind. Physical examinations showed no problems, but they just couldn't be woken up. No one had contacted them before the incident."

The rest of the content was a jumble of corrections, repeatedly marked with "uncertain" and "cannot be checked," and consisted entirely of the supervisor's complaints. It was hardly a valid case file. At the end of the notes was a summary, which was also the core reason why it was completely abandoned back then: the phenomenon was bizarre, there was no follow-up, it could not be classified and archived, it was suspected to be an observation error or misjudgment, and it was recommended to discard and seal it.

But Su Xiaohe knew that this was not a misjudgment by the recorder, because what happened in Lin Nei had actually happened right before her eyes.