The rusted steel door of the inspection tunnel collapsed to the ground with a loud bang under the intense pressure of the hydraulic tongs, and the damp, musty odor wrapped in the salty sea air hit her face as if she had opened the gates of hell. Erin quickly snapped her respirator over her face as the headlamp beam pierced the darkness, swarms of rusty beetles were scattering through the cracks in the steel girders as if the world was coming to an end.
"God." Leo's voice produced eerie echoes in the confined space, as if surrounded by countless ghosts. The radiation detector in his hand suddenly exploded into a sharp beeping sound, and the value spiked wildly, pointing to the curved beam fifty meters above his head -- where dark red symbols were densely engraved, like some kind of ancient sacrificial inscription, emitting a mysterious and evil aura.
Erin's carabiner had just been hooked up to her safety harness when the technician screamed over the intercom, "Don't touch the numbers! North tower monitoring shows the engravings are moving..." The current murmur momentarily engulfed the second half of the sentence, and when she looked up again, the nearest Roman numeral, "XIII," was oozing a pitchy liquid as if it were demonic blood.
"It's a magnetic iron oxide solution." Leo dipped a cotton swab into the dripping liquid, and a strong fluorescent reaction immediately appeared under the violet light, "There are miniature electromagnetic coils embedded in these indentations, and the murderer was able to remotely control the flow of the liquid to change the arrangement of the numbers." All of this suggests that the killer had superior intelligence and sophisticated planning.
Erin's ice axe chiseled into the joints of the steel girders, sparking and revealing half a cable in the burst. As she climbed over the access netting, following the line's path, her calf was suddenly cut by a sharp object and bleeding -- a Bulgari necklace wrapped around a rusty wire rope, the back of the pendant engraved with the initials of the gallery owner who'd disappeared the previous week, as if the killer had left it as a provocation.
"Laser modeling complete." The technician's voice came from below with a hint of nervousness. Leo's mapper projected a holographic map into the air, and what had been a jumble of Roman numerals was now forming a precise topographical map of the Bay Area, with each victim's address corresponding to a numerical node, and the latest appearance of "XLII" pointing to a blue Victorian building on Telegraph Hill. Erin learns through her research that the building was once the former site of a bridge engineering research facility, where many of the key decisions on bridge projects were made, and that the connection to the case is no longer a simple coincidence.
Erin's hiking gloves rubbed harshly against the steel girders as if she were fighting a demon. It was the apartment where she had lived in high school, with the bedroom window facing Alcatraz, as if by a curse of fate. Even more eerie, the center point of the map was marked with a coordinate with a gear icon at the exact location of the Bay Area Bridge's Pier 122, where her father had disappeared, as if it were the heart of the mystery. After in-depth investigation, she found that this abutment had serious quality problems during its construction back in the day, and her father, as a bridge expert, had participated in the discussion of the restoration plan many times, which made this location closely linked to the case.
"Detective!" Maintenance man Parker's voice came from the bottom of the shaft with a hint of alarm, "We found it in the drain..." A violent cough interrupted him. By the time Erin landed on the lower platform, she saw the burly man sitting paralyzed in standing water, his flashlight illuminating the wall -- where an equilateral triangle had been painted in blood, with slices of human fingernails with fingerprints pinned to each corner, as if it were a sign of some evil ritual.
Leo suddenly grabbed Erin's shoulder, looking nervous, "Remember the broken steel cable accident three years ago? It was none other than Thomas who was in charge of overhauling it at that time, and in his last report, he mentioned..." A sudden alarm engulfed the second half of the sentence. The entire bridge tower began to tremble violently, and the horrible whine of steel cables straining above their heads seemed like a prelude to the end of the world.
In the flickering red light of the emergency lights, Erin noticed that the blood drawings on the walls were melting, as if the demon's magic was failing. That blood was mixed with some sort of enzymatic agent that gradually revealed the hidden binary code. As she deciphers "Souvenir in the anchor chain compartment" with a pen, an eerie song of children humming "London Bridge is Falling Down" suddenly comes from the ventilation ducts, as if it were a nursery rhyme from hell.
"This is no joke." Leo's hand was shaking as he held up his sidearm, having just discovered something even more terrifying in the control room -- the bridge stress monitoring system was showing twenty tons of unidentified weight hanging from the south main cables at this very moment, and all the surveillance cameras were fixed on the scene at 3:07 a.m., as if time had been frozen at that moment.
As Irene ventured up the west side of the cable, where the vibrations were the most intense, her headlamp illuminated a sight that made her blood curdle: twelve clear resin coffins embedded in steel cables, each with a right hand wearing a wedding ring floating inside. The lids at the far end were inscribed with passages from the New Testament Book of Revelation, dated the day her father disappeared, as if as a warning to her.
The emergency strobe lights suddenly all went out and the whole world was plunged into absolute darkness. In the darkness, Erin heard the sound of rusty gears beginning to turn and Thomas's vocoder-treated whisper echoing between the steel beams, "You think you're hunting a killer, but you're actually walking into a display of my memorabilia..." It was as if the devil was murmuring in her ear.