Chapter 62: The Flame Endures

The stale air was thick with the scent of rust and ancient dust; every breath felt like swallowing grit. Song Zhao could no longer sense the numbness in his limbs—only the ghostly green glow reflected off the tiny night-vision lenses marked him as the strangest living thing in this tomb of silence.

The chill from the pipe wall seeped through his combat suit, stabbing deep into his marrow. Fifteen meters—every inch of crawling brought him closer to hell. At last, his fingertips brushed against a surface, smooth and unlike the corroded pipe wall.

He knew he had arrived.

Boiler No. 7 in Sector B—a steel grave, abandoned long ago, yet deep within the city's veins, it nourished a malignant tumor no one could see.

The brass key felt unnaturally warm, an anomaly amid the surrounding cold. It was toothless, engraved with tight spiral grooves, resembling the fingerprint of some unknown creature. Song Zhao carefully aligned it with the lock, almost fused with rust, and twisted gently.

There was no harsh screech of metal—just a dull, heartbeat-like click.

The iron door swung inward, opening like the silent maw of a beast.

The world beyond froze Song Zhao’s breath. A thick smell of tung oil mingled with the rot of old wood rushed at him. A solitary oil lamp flickered in the darkness, casting shadows across dozens of photos on the wall.

All were black-and-white portraits of children, each face marked by a numbness and emptiness far beyond their years, as if their souls had been drained. Beneath each photo, a cold metal plate bore a string of numbers and an occupation—police station, courthouse, television station, newspaper office... These children were seeds scattered throughout River City, now grown into a tangled forest of roots and trunks.

In the center of the ancestral hall, a heavy ledger lay open on a wooden table. Song Zhao, gloved, swiftly flipped through the pages; his micro-camera faithfully recorded every contract of sin.

These names, these positions, formed a web vast enough to overthrow River City’s entire law enforcement system.

His fingertip, in turning the pages, accidentally brushed the rough leather edge of the ledger. Instantly, the world spun.

The ancestral hall vanished; the biting cold surged from his fingers into his brain.

He saw Xu Zhaoshan, the seemingly virtuous philanthropist, standing in an even darker secret chamber. The left hand, no longer the gloved prosthetic seen in media, was a grotesque, bloody stump.

With this mutilated hand, Xu dipped into lamp oil and pressed it onto the smooth forehead of a child, about seven or eight years old.

The child’s eyes were blank, unmoving.

Xu Zhaoshan’s voice echoed from the abyss, seductive and chilling: “Lamp oil touches your soul. You will become my eyes, seeing everything I wish to see.”

Song Zhao jerked his hand away; the vision vanished. Yet his chest heaved, cold sweat soaking his back.

It was no hallucination—it was a memory imprint, sealed within the ledger.

He forced down the tide of nausea, completed the final recording, and slipped from the hall of sin like a phantom.

9:41 a.m. In a safe house in the southern part of the city, the air was thick with the bitter scent of instant coffee.

Su Wan’s expression was darker than the coffee itself. She sat with arms crossed, staring hard at two parallel documents on her laptop screen.

On the left was the “Lamp Slave” list Song Zhao had brought back; on the right, the public roster of River City’s legal and political officials.

Names highlighted in glaring red—each one a shock.

“Seven. We’ve confirmed seven,” Su Wan’s voice was hoarse. “Forensics, archives... Captain Song, the two who handled my father’s file ten years ago are both on this list.” Her fingernails dug into her arm, the nightmare sealed for a decade finally showing its vicious face.

Song Zhao silently lit a cigarette. Smoke curled as his gaze grew darker.

He remembered the strange “Eye of Truth,” remembered Xu Zhaoshan’s mutilated hand.

This was not merely corruption and infiltration—it was a black art, a ritual forging the living into tools.

“This page,” Su Wan suddenly pointed to a corner of the screen, “is encrypted. These symbols... I’ve seen them.” She quickly pulled a yellowed tome from the mountain of files—“Customs of Lamp Rituals in River City,” her father’s relic.

On a certain page, an illustration of the “Soul-Guiding Diagram” appeared, its symbols arranged almost identically to the encrypted ledger.

“It’s a soul-guiding formation, folklore says it’s used to lead lost spirits home,” Su Wan murmured. “But why is it in the ledger?”

“Get a folklorist to decipher it,” suggested Dong Lan, the technical team’s ace.

“No,” Song Zhao crushed out his cigarette. “Scholars only know what’s written in books. We need someone who knows what was never written.”

A flash of inspiration—the memory of an idle conversation with his old partner Qin Chuan before retirement.

“There’s a strange old woman near West Mountain, spent her whole life with lamps, never speaks of their virtue or vice.”

12:06 p.m. Under an abandoned stage on the city’s outskirts, wild grass thrived.

Song Zhao found Lin Su’e.

The old woman, thin as a withered branch, sat quietly on a battered bench, letting mottled sunlight fall across her body.

Her hands stroked a crooked, battered lantern, as if caressing the face of her child.

Song Zhao said nothing, only took a small “Soul-Guiding Road Lamp” charm from his pocket and placed it gently on the stone table before her.

Lin Su’e’s fingers trembled; for the first time, ripples appeared in her cloudy eyes.

She looked up, her voice worn nearly smooth by years: “Xu Zhaoshan betrayed the lamp.” Her words rustled like wind through dead leaves. “The Lin family tended lamps for generations, lighting the path home for lost souls, giving them peace. But he… he used the lamp to sever the living’s path, turning them into mindless puppets, damned forever.”

She shakily drew a manuscript wrapped in kraft paper from her bosom, handed it to Song Zhao.

“This is the ‘Lamp Cipher,’ the secret code used by lamp slaves to pass messages. Xu Zhaoshan thinks it’s lost.” She pointed to a line, “Three lamps never face, nine steps—hard to turn back. Remember: If your people contact them, and see one with blue cloth wrapped around their finger, pass the secret signal. That’s a Lin family plant, maybe they can be saved.”

5:37 p.m. On a bench outside the city library, people came and went.

Su Wan placed a copy of “Modern Western Art History” on the bench, the pages holding a photocopy of the Lamp Cipher.

She rose and entered the library like any ordinary reader.

Half an hour later, a young man in library staff uniform—Xiao Zhou—quietly collected the book while tidying scattered volumes.

Night fell. The library’s archive room night watchman dozed.

Using the excuse of changing clothes, Xiao Zhou slipped into a deserted corner, quickly etched a line of tiny characters in the dust on the floor with his fingernail, then wiped them away with his foot.

But that momentary scratch was captured by the micro infrared scanner Dong Lan had installed in the air vent.

“Wednesday. Ledger moved to the second level of the air shaft. They’re clearing people,” Dong Lan projected the decoded message onto the screen.

“‘Clearing people’ is their slang—it means all exposed or at-risk lamp slaves will be transferred through special channels to overseas branches. Once they’re moved, we lose all leads.”

Time was suddenly compressed to the limit.

8:11 p.m. Su Wan was sorting through clues, desperately seeking a breakthrough before Wednesday arrived.

Her phone vibrated—a multimedia message from an anonymous sender.

Opening it, her blood seemed to freeze.

It was a severely yellowed old photograph.

In the picture, a little girl with pigtails cried at the library entrance, being forcibly carried away by a man in a white shirt.

That girl was her at seven.

Several meters behind, a man stood quietly, smiling gently, his hair bound in a signature silver topknot.

Xu Zhaoshan.

Su Wan’s heart gripped by an invisible hand—she could barely breathe.

She flipped the photo. On the back, in fierce ink, a line slashed across the paper as if to cut it.

“If Su’e speaks, you must be burned.”

If Lin Su’e told anything, you must be reduced to ashes.

Song Zhao snatched the phone, eyes narrowing as he saw the photo and the message.

He instinctively gripped his badge at his waist, the cold metal biting deep into his palm.

He finally understood.

The Lantern Society had never let Su Wan go. Her father’s death, her childhood abduction—none were isolated events.

They didn’t want her silenced. They wanted her to “return to the lamp,” to become the new lamp slave.

Outside, night was thick as ink.

A black, unmarked sedan had silently parked below their building.

Its engine was running, but the headlights were off—like a beast lurking, breath held, poised to strike.

Suddenly, two dazzling beams snapped on without warning, slicing through the darkness, locking onto their window with deadly precision.