Chapter 53: The Echo of the Police Badge

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Silence. That was the only sensation Song Zhao felt when the regression ended.

The brightly lit corridor outside the intensive care unit seemed, in that moment, to transform into the abandoned, snowbound factory from nineteen years ago.

The scent of disinfectant, mingling with the remembered tang of rust and blood, made his stomach churn.

Su Wan steadied his trembling body, feeling the muscles of his arm tense like iron under the fabric—so taut that even through his sleeve, the tremor born from the depths of his soul was palpable.

“Song Zhao? Are you alright?” Su Wan’s voice sounded distant, almost unreal.

Song Zhao did not answer.

His gaze was riveted to the segment of IV tube the nurse had just removed from Old Zhang’s arm.

He could still feel the chill of it lingering on his fingertips—the key to hell itself.

The monitor’s alarm had ceased, replaced by the hushed pronouncement of death from the doctor and the stifled weeping of the family.

A life had just ended before his eyes, and yet another evil, spanning nineteen years, was only now revealing its grotesque face.

“I’m fine,” Song Zhao finally spoke, his voice hoarse, as if sandpaper scraped across wood.

He pulled free from Su Wan’s grasp and staggered toward the nurse. Under her surprised gaze, he asked, almost pleading, “May I have that?”—referring to the IV tube segment about to be discarded as medical waste.

The nurse hesitated, but seeing the redness in his eyes and the lost look on his face, she nodded and placed it into an evidence bag.

He had to leave this place.

Not to escape, but to hunt.

The web woven by Zhou Mingyuan and Zhao Zhenbang had at last exposed a loose thread. And what he needed to do was to follow it, dragging every last one of them from the shadows and into the sunlight for judgment.

9:36 a.m., inside the safe house.

The air brimmed with the bitterness of coffee and the low hum of electronic devices.

Song Zhao had not slept all night; his eyes were bloodshot, but his fingers on the keyboard remained steady as steel.

On the screen, the words “West Street Case Review Report—Draft” were glaring.

Every detail he’d relived the night before—Zhou Mingyuan’s orders, Zhao Zhenbang’s collusion, his father clutching his police badge as he was dragged into the fire—had been transmuted into cold, unyielding text.

These words, together with the decrypted B7 log, Xiao He’s testimony, Old Zhang’s final note, and the secret conversation recorded on the digital recorder, formed a complete and unbreakable chain of evidence.

“I’m going to submit this to the city bureau’s complaints office,” Song Zhao said as he compiled, encrypted, and saved all the files onto a USB drive. He looked up at Dong Lan, who had just entered.

“No!” Dong Lan’s face was more grave than ever. She strode over and pressed down on his hand.

“Half an hour ago, my informant in the city bureau office sent word: Zhou Mingyuan has already issued internal orders through the secretary-general, demanding all departments strengthen ‘information security management.’ Any review applications for old cases, especially those related to West Street, are to be detained immediately, and the submitters subjected to ‘ideological assessment.’”

She paused, lowering her voice further: “In plain terms, this is a net laid out especially for you. The moment you submit your material, they’ll slap you with accusations of ‘fabricating evidence, malicious association, and inciting internal discord.’ You won’t be reporting a crime—you’ll be turning yourself in.”

Song Zhao’s body went rigid.

He had anticipated countless obstacles, but never such swift and ruthless countermeasures.

Zhou Mingyuan hadn’t just sealed off every official channel—he’d dug the pit and was waiting for him to fall.

Silence thickened in the room, like ink spreading.

After a moment, Song Zhao nodded slowly. There was no disappointment on his face—only a calm, as though he had burned all bridges behind him.

He unplugged the USB drive, plugged it into his laptop, and his fingers flew across the keys.

He uploaded the entire report, along with all attachments, to three anonymous judicial oversight platforms, each with servers located overseas, setting them to auto-release in seventy-two hours.

“What are you doing?” Dong Lan exclaimed.

“Plan B,” Song Zhao replied softly, gazing out the window as if he could see the river of city lights beyond the concrete.

“If the system muzzles me, then let the streetlights bear witness to it all.”

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12:07 p.m., a luxury residential district in the city’s south.

Zhao Zhenbang’s wife, Liu Yun, was tidying up her husband’s discarded clothes.

He hadn’t come home the previous night, calling only to say he was working late at the office.

Liu Yun was long accustomed to this routine, but deep in the wardrobe, she was startled to find her husband’s small safe slightly ajar.

Her heart skipped. He’d been distracted and forgetful lately.

She opened the cabinet door to check if any important documents were missing, but saw only a box of his regular blood pressure medication.

Recalling his recent unstable readings, she picked up the box, intending to drop it off at his office later that day.

She did not notice, hidden within the paper insert of the box, a minuscule recording device, smaller than her fingernail, lying silently in wait.

Night fell. Zhao Zhenbang sat alone in his office, the ashtray before him already overflowing.

His phone suddenly vibrated—an encrypted number he didn’t recognize.

He hesitated, then answered. A digitally altered, genderless voice came through the receiver: “Director Zhao, your wife is truly considerate. Tomorrow afternoon, she’ll wear a gray coat and bring your medicine to the city bureau. She’ll hand it over to someone waiting at the entrance.”

A jolt of terror shot through Zhao Zhenbang.

A gray coat… he’d bought her one just last week.

They knew about the recorder, even his wife’s planned route and clothing for the next day!

This was not a warning—it was a final ultimatum.

Zhou Mingyuan no longer trusted him. He was going to use what Zhao Zhenbang cherished most—his family—to recover the recorder, and then… silence him.

“What do you want?” his voice shook.

“We want nothing,” the voice replied, flat and emotionless. “We’re merely reminding you what should remain where it is. Some people are better off not knowing too much.” The call ended.

Zhao Zhenbang slumped to the floor, terror and despair tightening around his throat like a noose.

It was over.

Whether he handed over the recorder or not, it was over.

No one knew Zhou Mingyuan’s ruthlessness better than he did.

Late that night, he drove away from the city bureau like a ghost, aimlessly wandering the streets.

Eventually, he parked by the riverfront park.

The river churned in the darkness, mirroring the chaos in his heart.

He sat on a cold bench for two hours, passing from terror to regret, and finally to a bleak, desperate resolve.

With trembling hands, he dialed a number he both hated and owed.

“Is this Song Zhao?… This is Zhao Zhenbang. Tomorrow morning, before the press conference, I want to meet. There are things… that cannot be left to rot in the dirt.”

4:50 p.m., inside a municipal engineering van disguised as a technical support vehicle.

Dong Lan stared at the signal trace on the screen, brows knitted tight.

“There was an anomalous jump in Zhao Zhenbang’s phone signal—a five-second burst, routed through multiple encrypted relays. After the call, he didn’t go home or return to the office, but drove to Riverside Park.”

“He’s turning,” Su Wan said immediately. “That anonymous call must have been from Zhou Mingyuan. He pushed too hard.”

“I’ve checked his driving records for the past ten years,” Dong Lan brought up another file. “There’s something odd. No less than thirteen times, between two and four in the morning, he’s driven to the city archives, each time lingering for at least half an hour. Yet he’s never once gone inside. Not a single time.”

“What’s he looking for? Or rather, what is he afraid of?” Song Zhao mused aloud.

What could be in the archives to cause such dread and indecision?

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A flash of inspiration struck Su Wan.

She swiftly dug through the stack of files, pulling out the original 1998 West Street Arson Demolition Case transcript she’d gotten from Old Ma, flipping to the final page.

“Something’s off!” she pointed to the page number at the bottom. “This page was replaced. The ink absorption and paper fiber sheen are subtly different from the previous pages.”

She immediately pulled up the standard military document format from the 1990s, also provided by Old Ma, for comparison.

“According to the archival regulations of that time, all case files involving major casualties had to include, after the main transcript, a ‘Witness and First Reporter Registration Form.’ But this copy is missing that appendix!” Her voice trembled with excitement. “That appendix was deliberately removed!”

Taken together with Zhao Zhenbang’s late-night visits to the archives, a bold hypothesis formed in her mind.

She spoke softly, as if afraid to disturb something lurking: “He wasn’t going there to cover up a crime… He was trying to recover something. To get back that missing registration form—to prove that he was the first to report the case all those years ago.”

8:29 p.m., the riverside park pavilion. The world was still, save for the whisper of wind in the leaves.

Song Zhao stood alone in the pavilion, facing this fateful meeting.

His hand was buried in his pocket, clutching the segment of IV tube from Old Zhang’s hospital room, sealed in an evidence bag. The icy touch of the plastic kept his mind sharp.

From the darkness emerged a hunched figure: Zhao Zhenbang.

In just one day, he seemed to have aged a decade. His face was gaunt, his eyes clouded.

He walked up to Song Zhao without a word and, without preamble, handed him a digital recorder—the very one his wife had nearly brought to the city bureau.

“This contains the recording of Zhou Mingyuan personally ordering me to eliminate all those with knowledge of the truth,” Zhao Zhenbang rasped. “He said, ‘Song Jianguo must die, or we all go down with him.’ Those were his exact words outside the factory all those years ago.”

As Song Zhao took the recorder, the chill of its metal casing against his fingers triggered the “Eye of Truth” without warning once again!

But this time, the vision was utterly different.

No flames, no blood.

He saw a much younger Zhao Zhenbang, two decades earlier, sitting in his office, his face etched with struggle and fear.

With trembling hands, he pulled the original “Witness Registration Form” from the case file, tore it to pieces, and fed it into the shredder.

He then took a letter of accusation from his drawer, the envelope clearly addressed to “Provincial Discipline Inspection Commission Supervision Office.”

He dropped the letter into a mailbox on the street.

The scene shifted rapidly. Three days later, the letter came back, unopened, stamped in red with only six words: “No such recipient found.”

Zhao Zhenbang collapsed on the steps outside the post office, buried his head in his hands, and, in a deserted corner, wept like a child.

The vision ended abruptly.

Song Zhao’s eyes snapped open, but in his mind appeared a line of system text he’d never seen before: [Memory anchor activated. One-time deep memory excavation of a single piece of evidence available.]

He had achieved a regression within the regression!

What he saw now was not mere surface events, but the deepest memory bound to this recorder—Zhao Zhenbang’s own.

Song Zhao looked up, his gaze complex as he regarded the man before him, now crushed by the weight of it all. In a voice rough with emotion, each word forced from his throat, he said: “You weren’t the mastermind… You were the first who tried to stop this from happening.”

Zhao Zhenbang shuddered, staring at Song Zhao in disbelief as tears welled instantly in his eyes.

Just then, at the park entrance, a black Audi rolled to a halt.

Its headlights remained off, a predator lurking in the shadows.

Inside, Li Guodong—the director of internal affairs at the city bureau—sat stone-faced, not looking toward the pavilion. Instead, he opened a blue folder in his hands.

Under the faint glow of the passenger light, the title on the file’s first page was unmistakable: “Preliminary Investigation Report on Deputy Party Secretary Zhou Mingyuan’s Suspected Interference with Judicial Integrity.”