Chapter 103: Light in the Low Places

The wind on the third day was even drier than the previous two, carrying the finest grit from the Gobi Desert and worming its way into every crevice of the Western Criminal Investigation Technical Support Center.

Song Zhao’s office was one such crevice.

The walls were a faded, yellowish green from the 1980s. A thin layer of dust coated an old centrifuge in the corner, its cooling fan emitting a rattling noise like the wheezing of an elderly man. This was the new station for the "expert" transferred from the provincial headquarters.

Sharing the office with him were two young local officers currently undergoing rotation. One was Batu, a sturdy man whose eyes revealed the straightforward, scrutinizing nature of a herdsman. The other was Li Xiang, who wore glasses and appeared more scholarly, yet consistently maintained a distance of at least three paces from Song Zhao.

They addressed this parachuted-in "expert" with a politeness that felt distant, as if they were examining an unfamiliar piece of precision equipment—unsure of its purpose, and even less certain of its temperament.

At the 9:00 AM case briefing, the atmosphere was as stifling as the sky outside. The beam from the projector looked murky in the smoke-filled room. A string of petty theft and brawl cases were breezed through until the very end, when the detachment captain, Zhou Liguo, cleared his throat and said in a voice devoid of warmth, "The last one: a death reported in the Kashak pastoral area. The deceased, Ahmat, a sixty-eight-year-old Uyghur herdsman. Found by a neighbor in his sheepfold the afternoon before last, already stiff. There were liquor bottles at the scene; preliminary judgment is death by asphyxiation due to airway obstruction while lying prone in a drunken stupor. The initial forensic examination found no obvious signs of trauma, and the family accepted this conclusion. It is being treated as an accidental death, and no case has been filed."

Just as he finished speaking and was about to announce the end of the meeting, a cool, clear voice broke the silence.

"I suggest a re-examination of the scene."

All eyes immediately converged on Song Zhao in the corner. He had been listening quietly, his fingertips tracing patterns on his notebook unconsciously.

Zhou Liguo furrowed his brows slightly, looking at the young man with an impressive resume but a reserved demeanor. "Comrade Song Zhao, do you have any new findings?"

"I wouldn't call them findings," Song Zhao said, standing up and sweeping his calm gaze across the faces in the room—some curious, some skeptical. "It is just a detail in the report. The forensic record notes that the deceased’s right index finger is in an unnatural, curled position, the joint rigid. This posture is not one a drunken person would adopt while naturally relaxed. It is more like... muscle rigidity formed after gripping a slender, metallic object with force before losing consciousness."

The conference room fell into a heavy silence, save for the hum of the fan.

An old detective couldn't help but mutter, "It’s perfectly normal for a herdsman to be holding a piece of wire or a nail. What does that prove?"

"Perhaps nothing," Song Zhao’s voice was soft, yet exceptionally clear. "But it could also explain everything. Evidence sometimes requires us to actively awaken it."

Zhou Liguo stared at him for a full ten seconds before finally nodding. "Very well. Batu, Li Xiang, you two go with Comrade Song Zhao. Stay safe."

That "stay safe" sounded more like a procedural formality.

The road to the pastoral area was bumpy enough to displace one’s internal organs. Inside the investigation vehicle, Batu focused on driving, while Li Xiang chatted intermittently about local customs, but Song Zhao could feel them deliberately avoiding the case itself.

It was a silent barrier. Song Zhao made no attempt to break it.

He opened his large toolbox, and under the guise of organizing, retrieved a palm-sized module wrapped tightly in black electrical tape. It was Lin Wan’s handiwork: a portable electrochemical analysis module. Utilizing salvaged medical probes and military-grade chips, she had managed to compress the functions of a small laboratory into this unassuming black box.

He calmly found the vehicle's spare power port and connected the module. A faint green light flickered on the screen as it began its self-test.

In his mind, a line from Lu Chen’s battered journal surfaced: "Evidence cannot be allowed to sleep; you must understand its language better than the killer does."

Lu Chen—his mentor, and also one of the lost souls of this land.

Song Zhao knew that this seemingly unremarkable case was the first stone he was casting into these deep waters. He wasn't looking for ripples; he wanted to see how the behemoths beneath the surface would react when disturbed. He was testing the response threshold of the local judicial system.

Ahmat’s sheepfold was filled with the pungent odor of mutton mixed with rotting hay. The deceased had already been claimed by his family; only the police cordon and a chalk outline remained on the ground.

Batu and Li Xiang followed the standard procedure of photographing and documenting, their actions proficient yet tinged with the perfunctory air of people just going through the motions.

Song Zhao did not disturb them. He walked slowly around the sheepfold like a lone wolf hunting for prey, his gaze scanning the ground inch by inch.

Eventually, his eyes settled on the southeast corner of the sheepfold, a spot that was highly discordant with its surroundings. There was a small patch of fresh soil, noticeably softer than the compacted earth around it, with a few blurred footprints—as if someone had disposed of something there.

He knelt down, retrieved a small strip of pH test paper from his kit, moistened it with mineral water, and pressed it gently against the fresh soil.

A few seconds later, the paper turned light blue.

"Weakly alkaline," he whispered to himself.

Li Xiang leaned over upon hearing this, asking, "Teacher Song, is there a problem here?"

"The soil here is generally acidic due to years of fermentation from livestock manure," Song Zhao pointed to the normal ground nearby. "This patch of soil is foreign."

With that, he took a folding shovel from his kit and began to dig with great care. Batu and Li Xiang exchanged glances; though they didn't understand, they stepped forward to assist.

Less than half a meter down, the tip of the shovel struck something with a crisp clink.

Song Zhao reached in and brushed away the soil, revealing the remains of a broken syringe. The needle had snapped, but the inner wall of the glass tube was coated with a layer of dried, nearly black, gelatinous substance.

Batu’s expression shifted. "This... could it be drugs?"

"Unlikely." Song Zhao placed the remains into an evidence bag, his expression grave. "Drug dealers wouldn't use a syringe of this volume."

On the way back to the support center, the atmosphere in the vehicle changed completely. Batu and Li Xiang stopped talking, only glancing at Song Zhao in the back seat through the rearview mirror from time to time.

The "expert from the province" now carried an air of mysterious, unfathomable complexity in their eyes.

Song Zhao ignored their gaze. He scraped a trace sample of the gelatinous substance from the evidence bag and placed it into a handheld micro-spectrometer. The device connected to his encrypted phone, and complex spectral curves began to pulse, analyze, and compare on the screen.

Minutes later, the results were generated. His pupils contracted sharply.

Mixed components: sheep blood protein, sodium citrate anticoagulant... and trace fragments of human HLA antigens.

This was not drugs; it was something far darker. An illegal blood reserve—a mobile blood bank existing to satisfy some specific demand.

Old man Ahmat likely did not die from alcohol, but from complications following forced blood extraction. The bottle of liquor was merely a prop used by the killer to conceal the truth.

Song Zhao immediately contacted Tang Yurou, who was far away in Beijing, using an encrypted communicator, his voice kept extremely low. "Yurou, it's me. Initiate the 'Echo Project' database. Help me compare a set of biochemical markers; I’m sending them to you now. Focus on samples related to organ transport chains."

After hanging up, he accessed the internal police network without skipping a beat, beginning to pull records of all missing persons in the Kashgar region over the last six months.

Soon, a chilling pattern emerged: every quarter, exactly twelve migrant workers without local residency were reported as "natural deaths." The causes of death were varied, but they all shared one commonality: their funeral arrangements were handled uniformly by a funeral service company under the "Wei’s Charity Foundation," using the same hearse.

Twelve—a perfect number. Not enough to trigger alarm, yet sufficient to maintain the stable operation of a black-market industry.

As night fell, Song Zhao was the only one left in the office. He had just finished organizing the day's survey data when an encrypted message from Shen Yan popped up, brief and lethal: "The 'Path of Light' medical aid project under the Wei’s Foundation donated three 'portable biological sample refrigeration units,' model D-780, to the Kashgar region this month. The recipient is a health station on the border."

D-780!

Song Zhao’s heart skipped a beat. This model was identical to the cooling unit in the mysterious transit station mentioned in Lu Chen’s journal!

He quickly pulled up the death locations of the missing persons, the transport routes of the foundation’s donated supplies, and the location of the border health station on an electronic map. When he overlaid these three elements with a heat map analysis, a clear, closed "death triangle" appeared on the screen.

The disappearance point was the source; the transport line was the conduit; the health station—or rather, the transit station—was the destination.

He did not submit this report to Zhou Liguo. The time was not right.

He packed and encrypted all the data, labeling the file "R08 Continuation"—the last case number Lu Chen had investigated before he disappeared. Then, he uploaded the file to a shared cloud that only he, Lin Wan, and Shen Yan could access.

By the time he finished, it was deep into the night. Song Zhao rubbed his sore eyes and began calibrating a microscopic comparison instrument on his desk, the core piece of equipment he would need for his work tomorrow.

Just as he adjusted the focus knob, his fingertips detected an extremely faint resonance.

*Hum... hum...*

The sound was too familiar. The frequency and amplitude were almost identical to the vibrations of an aging compressor on a D7 cabin that he remembered from his past!

His movements froze, and his breathing slowed. His eyes scanned the seemingly ordinary instrument like a blade. He turned off the office lights, leaving only a desk lamp on, and took out a set of precision disassembly tools from his kit.

He unscrewed the base and peeled back a layer of camouflage sound-dampening foam. His heart sank.

Tucked between the instrument's motherboard and the casing was an embedded signal transmitter, smaller than a fingernail, emitting a faint, ghostly blue light. It was cleverly wired into the instrument’s power supply; as long as the machine was powered on, it would periodically pack all usage logs and comparison data and send them to an overseas IP address.

They were not just watching this office; they were watching him—the man trying to lift the lid.

Song Zhao’s face remained expressionless. He did not destroy it; that would only alert the enemy.

From a hidden compartment in his wallet, he retrieved a chip as thin as a cicada’s wing—a "talisman" Lin Wan had slipped him before he departed: a military-grade signal interference chip. He carefully cut the transmitter’s power module and spliced in the interference chip.

Then, he performed a reverse operation, using the transmitter’s port to plant a fabricated set of operation data he had prepared regarding hair comparisons from a routine theft case.

He reassembled the casing and tightened the final screw. Everything returned to its original state, as if nothing had happened. He turned the instrument on, let it idle for a while, and then shut it down.

In the darkness, he spoke to the cold machine in a voice only he could hear: "Now, it's your turn to hear the wrong signal."

Outside the window, dust began to rise, and the wind howled like a ghostly whisper. A streak of pale moonlight pierced the dust, shining obliquely across the corner of the table, illuminating the brass ID tag his father had left behind.

In the dim light, the copper reflected a long, cold shadow, sharp as a blade.

Song Zhao looked at his own hands—the hands that had just completed a silent counter-attack. He knew that from this night on, he was no longer a pawn on the chessboard passively searching for its place.

He had become one of the players.

And the real storm was only just beginning to brew.

Next, he needed a report of sufficient weight—a report that no one could ignore, one capable of prying open this deadlocked game.

As for how to write the first word of that report, he already had the answer in his heart.