Stone House Case File
Genre: The Grave Robbers' Chronicles-style, mystery adventure, southern Fujian folk customs
Wen Li returns to her family's old home on the southern Fujian coast to deal with a dilapidated stone house left behind by her grandma. The house sits beside the high-tide line. When the tide rises, seawater floods the courtyard; when it recedes, oyster shells and dead fish are left scattered everywhere.
In a hidden compartment behind the ancestral shrine, she finds a moisture-proof metal box containing a psychiatric hospital medical record from 1987.
Patient: Chen Wenjin, female.
Diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenia.
Chief complaint: Repeatedly claims, "There is a city beneath the sea, a gate in the city, and someone behind the gate calling my name."
Also tucked inside the file are a photograph of her grandma and Chen Wenjin when they were young, and half a nautical chart of Wujiao Island.
Wen Li follows the address on the medical record to investigate. The hospital says there was no such doctor; the archives have no record of this person, and that ward was long ago turned into a morgue.
In her final days, Grandma repeatedly murmured in the southern Fujian dialect, "When the sea gate opens, the living must not enter."
Wen Li had thought it was just the rambling of an old woman, until one night at an especially low tide, three short knocks followed by two long ones sounded from beneath the stone house.
She lifts the flagstone under the stove, revealing a hidden alley sealed with oyster shells. Carved into the cliff face are the words:
Chen Wenjin, 1987. Went to sea, never to return.
It turns out Chen Wenjin was the leader of an underwater maritime archaeology team studying the ancient Maritime Silk Road. At Wujiao Island, she discovered a submerged ship graveyard dating to the Song and Yuan dynasties. On the night before she could report her findings, a group of people with no official identification forcibly committed her to a psychiatric hospital.
That medical record was a gag order. They could not let the world know that a "sea gate" lay buried beneath the southern Fujian intertidal zone.
And Wen Li is the "key" Chen Wenjin left behind.
On the sixteenth day of every lunar month, during the spring tide, the stone gate beneath the sea opens once. The medication record on the back of the medical file is actually a tidal code written in southern Fujian dialect syllables.
Grandma's stone house is the first bolt securing the sea gate.
On the final page of the medical file, these words are written in dark red ink:
"Wen Li, don't open the last gate. Your grandma wasn't crazy, and neither was I."
Theme: Detective fiction
