Chapter 24: Embers in the Ashes

At six in the morning, the Provincial Forensics Center was quiet. Dong Lan’s lab coat bore a faint stain of last night’s coffee at the cuff, unnoticed by her as she bent over the microscope. The blue glow of the laser scanner drifted across the surface of a bronze badge, like a fish of light probing unknown depths.

“Chen Ke, set the magnification to 2000 times.” Her voice was a low murmur, as if afraid to shatter the delicate traces under the lens.

As her assistant adjusted the parameters, Dong Lan suddenly held her breath—a razor-thin scratch flickered coldly in the verdigris crack beneath the serial number “0723”.

“Stop,” she tapped the console lightly. “Etched with acid reagents—still not fully corroded after twenty years.” As the laser restoration program initiated, her throat tightened. Last night’s message from Song Zhao echoed in her mind: “That badge may be hiding a secret from twenty years ago.” Now, the numbers flickering on the screen proved his intuition right—“041723”—six digits, like a rusty key clattering into an old lock.

“Pull up the orphan registration records from Jiangcheng Civil Affairs Bureau, 1998 to 2003,” she said, peeling off her rubber gloves. Her knuckles, pale from hours of gripping tools, trembled slightly. “Focus on girls born April 17th.”

The printer spat out a page. Dong Lan’s pupils narrowed to pinpoints. Three words—Su Wanqiu—stabbed at her eyes. The guardian’s signature, Lin Haoyu, swept boldly across the page, while the note—“Relative foster care, regular visits”—still carried the faint scent of ink from those years.

Dong Lan drew out her phone. Her thumb hovered for three seconds before she pressed send: “Su Wan is very likely one of the three children who went missing that year.”

At nine o’clock, the old police station’s archive room was filled with the creak of a ceiling fan.

Song Zhao’s knuckles whitened against the edge of the desk as he stared at the computer’s comparison progress bar—78%, 81%, 83.6%.

He could hear the motion of his own throat, like pebbles dropping into a dry well.

In the photos, the girl with braided pigtails overlapped perfectly with Su Wan’s ID photo—even the faint brown mole behind her right ear matched exactly.

He remembered three days ago in the library, the way Su Wan’s hair brushed past her ear as she bent over a book to restore it.

Back then, he only found the years gentle; now, he felt the blade hidden within that gentleness cut deep.

His phone vibrated, startling him so much he almost knocked over the lamp. “Dong Lan?” His voice was hoarse.

“The badge’s serial points to ‘Su Wanqiu’, with Lin Haoyu as registered guardian.” Dong Lan’s breath was audible over the line. “Her foster mother, Zhou Yufen, used to be the orphanage’s accountant.”

Song Zhao’s nails pressed into his palm.

He recalled how Su Wan always said her foster mother loved jasmine, a retired librarian whose white porcelain pots on the windowsill always filled the air with fragrance.

So that pot of jasmine concealed the orphanage’s old accounts beneath its roots. “Does she know?” He asked slowly, as if dismantling a live bomb.

“There’s no evidence she’s aware,” Dong Lan’s tone softened. “But Song Zhao, you’d better be ready—some truths are filthier than we imagine.”

—

At two in the afternoon, the white glare of the projection lit the disciplinary committee’s hearing hall.

Lu Yuan stood at the presentation stand, his shirt unbuttoned at the collar, revealing a faded pink scar across his collarbone—a wound from university days, shielding him from a broken bottle.

Now, his finger pointed to the screen displaying the “Qingyuan Project” file, his voice cold as tempered steel: “Asset No. 07 was transferred to the Northwest branch. Combined with Lin Haoyu’s education centers in Xinjiang and Gansu, these are waypoints for human trafficking.”

The supervisors’ pens scraped busily across their notebooks.

Lu Yuan caught the flicker of his phone at the table’s edge—a message from Su Wan: “Found the ‘Yongan Orphanage Annual Report (2001)’ in the underground archive. A page was torn out, the binding still clamped a photo.”

His lashes trembled. He continued, “Recommend immediate freezing of Lin Haoyu’s charity funds and launching a cross-provincial investigation.”

By the end of the meeting, the sycamore leaves outside were spinning in the wind.

Lu Yuan smoked at the corridor’s end, embers flaring and fading as he texted Su Wan back: “Protect the evidence. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

By five in the evening, the scent of sandalwood and paste mingled in the library’s ancient restoration room.

Su Wan wore a deep blue smock, holding half a photo peeled from the back of a ruined volume. Her wrists, slender as jade hairpins, steadied the yellowed paper—Lin Haoyu, in a white coat, stood in a shabby clinic, a syringe glinting coldly under the light. On the bed, a child lay with closed eyes, lashes casting fan-shaped shadows on her cheeks.

“This came from the adhesive layer in the binding,” her voice was rough. “There are pencil marks on the back, blurred by paste, but I could make out ‘Immunization Enhancement Experiment—Round 3’.”

Song Zhao’s temples throbbed.

He remembered the line in his father’s case file: “Leads point to Lin Haoyu.” He remembered that stormy night twenty years ago, when Song Jianguo was found collapsed in an alley, still clutching half a pamphlet from the orphanage.

Now, staring at Lin Haoyu’s white coat in the photo, he realized—it was no philanthropist’s robe, but a bloodstained lab coat.

“You’re not Su Wanqiu.” He clasped Su Wan’s hand, warmth seeping into her cold fingertips. “You’re an experiment subject. A survivor.”

Su Wan’s fingers trembled in his palm. “I don’t remember…” She looked up, eyes shimmering, “but I always dream of iron doors, children crying, someone pressing a metal tag against my arm with forceps—it hurt so much I kept crying.” She paused abruptly, glancing down at the inside of her left forearm, where a faint white scar bloomed like a wilted flower.

Song Zhao swallowed hard.

He recalled the morning’s photo comparison—her ID listed her birth as April 17, 1998—matching the “041723” on the badge.

So “Su Wan” was only the truncated end of “Su Wanqiu”—a new code given to an experiment subject.

At eleven that night, the desk lamp in Song Zhao’s rented flat cast deep shadows across his face.

—

He scanned Su Wan’s photo and uploaded it to a secure node, blue light painting his eyes red. His father’s case file lay open on the desk, “Reported, pending follow-up” circled in red, a fresh annotation beside it still smelling of ink: “The informant died two days later.”

He suddenly remembered the newspapers from twenty years ago—Song Jianguo’s cause of death listed as “accidental death in a demolition dispute.”

But who would bludgeon an old police officer’s skull repeatedly with a blunt weapon over tens of thousands in compensation?

Now, at last, he understood. His father hadn’t died in a street fight, but for knowing about the live experiments and child trafficking behind the orphanage, for trying to tear the mask from Lin Haoyu’s charitable persona.

His phone vibrated. Lu Yuan’s voice, rough with midnight fatigue: “Lin Haoyu did apply for clinical trials of psychiatric drugs in 2000. The approval sat with the Provincial Health Department for three months before it went through.”

“They’re not afraid of me solving the case,” Song Zhao said, gazing at the lightning outside, which illuminated the old photo of No. 72, Yongan Lane on his wall—the outline of half a bronze badge faint in a crack. “They’re afraid I’ll wake up.”

The rain stopped at three in the morning.

Su Wan sat on the swivel chair in the restoration room, moonlight filtering through the blinds onto the tattered remains of the “Yongan Orphanage Annual Report.”

She still wore her indigo smock, fingertips gently tracing the ragged edge left by the torn page.

Suddenly, her gaze caught on a faint indentation in the corner of the last page—a mark pressed repeatedly by a hard object.

She leaned in, pulled a soft brush from her toolkit, and swept away the paper dust.

A slender scratch gradually emerged, like a sleeping serpent.

Su Wan’s breathing grew heavier.

She put on the dust-free gloves from the restoration table, the coolness of the rubber reminding her of Song Zhao’s words that night: “Some truths need to be awakened.”

Outside, the moon slipped behind the clouds. The clock in the restoration room struck five in the morning.