For Jason, he could barely take one look at the moving shadows that were moving in the bedroom and the conversations they had. Large flow of information was flowing through his mind and right before his eyes, and he felt as if he was trying to find an exact scene from video that was several days long, and “clicking” at a certain point on the “progress bar”, fast forwarding or fast backwarding took a lot of his Xuanli and power of mind and will to do. He had to maintain his silver pen on the symbol he drew, and tried his hardest to tune the replay of information to the point in time right before the young couple living in this apartment was murdered.

It was pretty clear to Jason that the young couple might have been murdered while they were unconscious, either while they were asleep, or while they were under the influence of drugs, because the “footage” that was flowing before his eyes were just fast blurs, and he was relying on the sudden spike of strong negative emotions like dread, fear and horror to locate the time at which the murder happened. But there were no such spikes of emotions, there were only the occasional states of fuzziness, some moments of hunger, lust and purposelessness. So he had to try by the presence of their life force, which, due to their constant malnourished and drugged up state, was not as obvious as he would like.

“Gah!” Jason gasped and backed off from the symbol after an extremely long couple of minutes, and he had to drink up half his flask to recover: “Okay, keep your eyes open and focused now, we should see shadows of their death replays soon. If there was any grudge collection taking place after they were dead, it should reflect on the replays.”

“Is this - is this a spell to read the memories of the surrounding environment?” Aimee looked at the shadows in the room with surprise: “Holy - you really did work hard while you were at the academy huh?”

“Yeah, but I am really, really taxing myself here. ” Jason let out a long exhale and took a few more gulps from his flask.

Two human-shaped silver shadows stabilized in the room and started acting like actual humans. Neither of these two shadows showed any distinctive features on their bodies or faces, but it did not matter to anyone of the three, as they were not here to identify which victim was which shadow.

The two shadows hugged one another and rolled on the bed for a few seconds, then they lied on the bed. After around ten to twenty seconds, one of the shadows extended their arm at the nightstand and took something out from the drawer. The other shadow extended their hand at their partner and got something from the drawer as well. Then both of the shadows put the things from the drawer in their mouths, and laid back into their positions in bed.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Aimee, Detective Lee and Jason came closer to the bed and started looking around, the two victims in this case were found lying on the bed, and this scene they were witnessing now looked just like the scene described.

They waited for another five minutes for something to happen, and just when Aimee was about to ask if Jason could “speed up” the replay of memory, they saw that a group of two silver shadows came into the room.

If the two shadows were other young couples, they would have probably reacted to the intrusion of these two people. But they were unresponsive at this time, and the two silver shadows that came in came to both sides of their beds, and both had their hands on the two lying shadows’ heads.

The next moment, this replay of memory started flickering and distorting, as if it was a display of poorly rendered footage streamed over a limited internet connection. And when the flickering was over, the two silver shadows were still lying on the bed, while the other two that came in earlier were already gone.

“Something extracted the memory of torment from the memories of this place. I think ‘grudge collection did happen here.’” as the two silver shadows started dissipating, Jason said: “Though I don’t think they got a lot - if the victims were murdered while they were unaware, there would be no strong emotions, and therefore hardly any grudge.”

“Is there a way to tell when the grudge collection happened? And when the two… shadows came in?” Aimee asked.

“I can’t tell what time the grudge collection happened.” Jason sighed and said: “Their action did not leave that much of a mark for me to locate - I can try to do that again, but I don’t think I can do it today. But I think I just got an exact time of death for the two victims, they died around twenty eight days ago, plus or minus a few hours. From the lighting condition of the memory replay, I’d say it’s daytime.”

“Hey, what is this?” Detective Lee knelt down by the nightstand from which the two silvers took the drugs which helped bring about their demise: “This looks like it’s - some kind of symbol?”

Aimee came over while Jason sat down on the ground still trying to catch his breath.

“Fuck.” Aimee took a look at Detective Lee and asked: “Lee, please tell me you guys logged this in your evidence when you were looking at the scene.”

“No, I am pretty sure we did not.” Detective Lee shook his head with a serious look on his face: “This looks like … what’s called?”

“Bleeding Daggers.” Aimee sighed: “This is the cult I mentioned in our notes about the Drainer case - Thomas and I had this theory that they were involved, it did not pan out.”

“So they came to the scene after the two victims were murdered? Could it be that they were the ones collecting the grudge?”

“Then why leave this mark at all? Why not just come and go?” Jason asked on the side.

“I don’t remember seeing this mark in the previous victim’s place. ” Aimee said with a frown on her face: “So I am not sure that was the case as well.”

“If they intentionally left a mark here, then it must be for a reason.” Detective Lee said: “We should check this with other detectives and see if anyone else found this symbol in other crime scenes.”

“I’ll leave a mark here myself.” Jason scratched his jaw, then wrote a traditional Chinese word on his palm with his silver pen. He then placed his left palm onto the wall that was on the opposite side of the night stand: “This mark will remain here for about two weeks, if anyone comes in here, I will sense them.”