Chapter 52: Who Is Listening

5:49 a.m. The air in the Archive Restoration Room was saturated with the peculiar scent of old paper and mildew, like a tomb forgotten by time.

The scanner’s ghostly green beam swept again and again over the fragment of metal log retrieved from Warehouse B7, translating the uneven etchings into cold digital signals projected onto the screen before Su Wan’s eyes.

The marks were erratic, like a child’s scrawl—or the desperate clawings of a beast.

But Su Wan’s intuition told her this was no accident.

Chaos itself was a kind of order.

Her mind whirred like a precision machine, rapidly searching every piece of knowledge she possessed about cryptography.

Suddenly, a nearly forgotten term surfaced—sonic encoding.

A communication method popular in the military during the 1970s, short-range and covert, using the frequency and interval of taps on various objects to transmit information.

The etchings on the screen, with their distinct lengths and spacing, perfectly matched the physical characteristics of this code.

She adjusted the analysis software’s parameters, converting the length and depth of the marks into simulated sonic waveforms.

“Old Ma,” Su Wan’s voice was soft but sharp enough to ripple through the dead silence, “in the seventies, did the Yunjiang Port system use any special recording methods?”

Old Ma, hunched over a yellowed document with a magnifying glass, looked up, a flicker of fear in his cloudy eyes.

He set the magnifier aside, rubbing his hands repeatedly on his dust-stained work trousers as if trying to wipe away some invisible stain.

He didn’t answer directly. Instead, he shuffled over to a locked metal cabinet in the corner, opened it with a rusty key.

From the depths, he drew out a bundle of oilcloth-wrapped papers, hands trembling, and extracted a battered book whose title—“Yunjiang Port Record”—was barely legible.

“This is a leftover, missed during the purge,” he whispered, as if revealing a secret that could cost his life. “Some things couldn’t be written openly. We used this…to record ‘anomalous goods.’”

He flipped to a page with no words, only rows of hand-drawn symbols, reminiscent of hieroglyphs.

Su Wan leaned closer, feeling a chill crawl up her spine.

Old Ma pointed to one symbol. “This one, for example, means…living person.”

Su Wan’s gaze locked onto her computer screen.

The code translated through sonic analysis formed a sequence of “△,” “●,” and “△△.”

She cross-referenced with the symbol chart in Old Ma’s hand, deciphering them one by one.

When she finished the last group, her breath stopped.

That recurring sequence in the log—“△-●-△△”—meant: young girl, fourteen to sixteen years old, used for ‘relocation persuasion.’

“Relocation persuasion”—a term so gentle, so innocuous.

But here and now, it was more chilling than any word soaked in blood.

It was a velvet-wrapped dagger, silently slicing open the sealed, shadowy history of forced evictions and development in Yunjiang City.

11:12 a.m., the safehouse.

Curtains drawn, only a sliver of pale light.

Xiao He awoke, curled at the edge of the bed like a frightened cub.

Dong Lan sat nearby, her voice barely above a whisper, attempting to soothe her.

Song Zhao stood a little further back in the shadows, silent, yet his gaze never left the frail figure.

“They…didn’t hit me,” Xiao He’s voice cracked and dry from long thirst, “they gave me food, clean clothes, a room.” She paused, as if recalling some horror. “Every day, they made me wear headphones and listen to recordings. All of them…were crying. All kinds of crying: scared, sad, hopeless…”

Her body began to tremble uncontrollably. “There was a female instructor. She said we had to learn how to cry, how to cry like a real victim. She said, the more convincing you are, the more they’ll believe you. When they open the door, you light what you’re holding…and throw it out.”

Song Zhao’s fists clenched silently at his side.

Using a child’s innocence and fragility as a weapon to ignite another blaze of evil.

The mastermind behind all this was appallingly malicious.

“I saw a man,” Xiao He suddenly lifted her head, her hollow eyes focusing for the first time. “He was different from the others. Very clean, wore gold-rimmed glasses, looked refined.” She raised a thin finger, mimicking a gesture in the air. “When he visited us, he’d pat my head and say…‘This batch is good quality.’”

Song Zhao’s heart plummeted, gripped by an invisible hand.

That gesture, those glasses, the demon lurking beneath a gentle façade—Lin Acheng.

He’d seen countless references to that gesture in the files about his sister.

So, the girls in Warehouse B7, like his sister Song Xi, were once appraised as “quality” by this man.

3:18 p.m., the technical center.

White noise filled the room, guarding against eavesdropping.

Song Zhao sat before the instruments, his fingers touching the pearl earring sealed in the evidence bag.

He needed more—he had to know more.

He closed his eyes, surrendered to the cold, despairing echo that engulfed him.

This time, the pain was sharper than ever.

He felt as though he were trapped in a blazing inferno, seared by heat, choking on thick smoke.

Voices screamed in his ears, mingled with the crackling of burning wood.

Amid the chaos, he caught a fragment of clear conversation.

Two men’s voices—one steady, one urgent.

“We can’t keep B7 anymore, it must be wiped clean!” the urgent voice demanded.

“I know. But that ledger must be burned in front of the higher-ups, so they think all evidence is gone,” the steady voice replied, with a hint of hidden cruelty.

“But what’s burned is the fake account. The real one…”

The conversation was abruptly cut off, as if by an explosion or collapse.

Song Zhao’s eyes flew open, gasping for breath, sweat cold on his brow.

Fake accounts!

That critical evidence—the ledger recording all transactions and personnel, officially reported as “accidentally destroyed” in the city-shaking arson during the forced eviction—was a prop, a forgery meant to placate superiors and the public!

So where was the real one?

Lightning flashed through Song Zhao’s mind.

Warehouse B7, the massive cold storage… Where fire couldn’t reach was the most fireproof place.

They had used the low temperatures to hide the original, damning ledger, intact, within a crevice of the refrigeration system.

It lay there, waiting to be discovered—or forever forgotten.

6:05 p.m., the city disciplinary committee’s emergency hearing.

Tension thickened the air, faces grim.

The head of the inspection team tapped the table, “Captain Dong, what we need is irrefutable evidence—not speculations or an encrypted log from an unknown source.”

Dong Lan stood at the podium, calm-faced. “This decrypted result matches the victim statements we’ve found exactly.”

“A mentally unstable minor’s testimony—how much legal weight does that carry?” sneered a well-dressed man, Lin Acheng’s most trusted confidant and the project’s chief legal advisor.

Just as the deadlock threatened to freeze the room, the door opened.

Xiao He, supported by a female officer, entered.

Still thin, but her eyes were no longer empty.

She scanned the room, finally resting her gaze on the man who had just spoken.

More precisely, on his gleaming bespoke shoes.

Everyone followed her gaze.

Those expensive shoes were spotless, except for one faint, irregular scratch near the toe.

“You were at Warehouse B7 last Wednesday,” Xiao He’s voice was quiet but rang crystal clear through the chamber.

She stated a fact, calmly, “Your shoe got stuck in the bars of our cage. I saw you bend down and pull it out, hard.”

The man's face turned ashen; instinctively, he tried to tuck his feet under the table—but it was too late.

The room erupted.

Such a concrete, irrefutable detail struck harder than any lengthy accusation.

It was a surgeon’s scalpel, slicing away the disguise in an instant, exposing the bloody truth.

8:47 p.m., the hearing long over.

Participants departed in shock and suspicion, leaving behind a wrecked hall.

Song Zhao remained, standing alone before the vast windows, gazing at the city’s emerging lights.

He retrieved the evidence bag from his pocket. In the moonlight, the pearl earring glimmered coldly.

His palm brushed its icy surface.

The echo came, as always.

But this time, Song Zhao sought neither clues nor resistance.

He let himself sink into the bottomless despair, feeling the last breath his sister left in the world.

In endless darkness and silence, he “saw” a pair of lips silently moving. No sound—but he understood the mute cry.

A name—“Acheng.”

Song Zhao opened his eyes slowly, sorrow replaced by a nearly savage calm.

He turned to Su Wan, who had waited quietly outside, and said, “I know how to make them all confess.”

He raised the evidence bag. The earring swung in the light, like an eye that would never close.

“Not because of what I saw,” his voice was low and resolute, “but because she never stopped screaming.”

Night deepened.

Song Zhao pocketed the earring, said nothing more, and strode out of the building.

His figure stretched long beneath the streetlights, cast upon the frozen ground, bearing an irrevocable resolve.

He had found the door to hell; now, he would personally kick every demon through it.

There would be no turning back. The end might not be light—but a reckoning, thorough and absolute.