Chapter 65: The Whisper of the Rusted Blade

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At six in the morning, dawn in Jiang City still hovered at the horizon, like a thin veil of ash pressing on the spines of the buildings.

Song Zhao crouched in the corner of the attic in his father’s old house, his knees dusted with years-old wood shavings and grime.

He caressed a rusted police issue dagger in his hand; the blade had long lost its luster, the edge was warped, yet only the faint scratch on the guard caught the morning light and glinted with a chill, like cold iron.

When Old Zhou brought him the knife last night, he’d said only one thing: “A week before your father left, he quietly took this from the police archive folder and brought it home.” His tone was calm, yet it landed like a heavy stone in dead water.

Song Zhao stared at that scratch, his heartbeat suddenly lagging—a beat slow. It was almost identical to the corrosive patterns on the boning knife from the crime scene photos of the slaughterhouse dismemberment case five years ago.

Not a coincidence.

Was it the same tool, or the same oxidized mark left by the same environment?

He fished out a battered leather notebook, hands trembling as he flipped open a page. Several yellowed photo fragments were pasted inside; one showed a blurry house number: “17 Zhaoyang Alley.”

The last investigation his father worked on before his death was precisely the demolition approval project for Zhaoyang Alley.

And the dismemberment case, officially closed as “perpetrator suicide,” had occurred just fifty meters beyond the demolition boundary, in the abandoned slaughtering workshop of an old food-processing plant.

Suddenly, he realized: these were not two unrelated cases.

His father’s disappearance, the “accidental” car crash, Xu Zhaoshan’s dying words—“Your father… came here too”—and the line Su Wan found in the tattered volume, The Jiang City Disaster Chronicles: “When the light dies, someone will bring a lamp.” All pointed to a deeply buried node.

He picked up his pen and wrote a line in his notebook, the ink sinking heavily into the paper: “If Father’s death wasn’t an accident, then does this knife point to another scene, one that’s been covered up?”

The pen paused, as if he could hear the whisper of rusted iron.

Evidence Storage Center, 6:40 a.m.—morning light had not yet arrived.

The air was chilled with a blend of metal and disinfectant, the red dots of surveillance cameras blinking steadily, like the breath of some dormant creature.

Song Zhao stood before the evidence shelves in Area B, his gloves fitting snugly, movements light but steady.

He had applied for temporary access under the pretense of “assisting with cold case evidence sorting.” Dong Lan had quietly authorized him backstage, leaving only a brief warning: “Ten minutes. The system auto-locks after.”

His gaze swept over the evidence box labeled “2018-SL-047.” He carefully drew out the boning knife—thirty-seven centimeters long, single-edged, a thick spine, tip curved like a hook.

Five years ago, it had been dredged from the sludge at the edge of the chemical pit, hastily closed as the “murder weapon.”

The autopsy report noted seventeen victims, identities unknown, their remains mixed into meat products and sent to market—only discovered after an anonymous tip-off.

Song Zhao drew a deep breath, fingertips lightly touching the rust at the knife’s hilt.

In an instant, his pupils contracted, golden patterns unfurling like vines across his irises—“the Eye of Truth” awakened.

The scene before him twisted, light and shadow rearranging.

A cold storage.

The iron door half-open, cold mist billowing.

Blood dripped from the hooks, splattering dark red flowers onto the cement.

The scene shifted, as if advancing from a third-person view.

A man in a dark rubber apron, his back to the viewer, dragged a naked corpse toward the mincer.

Suddenly, the corpse’s right hand twitched violently, grabbing the man’s sleeve, tearing off a strip of cloth and quickly stuffing it into a length of stitched pig intestine nearby.

With a click, the mincer roared to life, blood mist spraying—the vision cut off abruptly.

Twenty seconds of recall ended.

A stabbing headache, sharp as steel needles, pierced his temples. Vision blurred; everything seemed shrouded by a gray veil.

He gripped the iron shelf, knuckles white, cold sweat streaming down his brow.

A persistent ringing in his ears, like countless rusted blades scraping inside his skull.

And just then—

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Footsteps sounded in the corridor, coming closer, their rhythm steady and oppressive.

Song Zhao snapped his eyes shut, forced down the dizziness, and quickly returned the boning knife to its place, retreating behind an evidence cabinet in the surveillance blind spot.

He held his breath and heard the iron door swing open, followed by a voice, low and menacing:

“Officer Song? Or should I call you ‘ex-officer’ now?”

Qian Shikang entered, the burn scar on his face shining waxy yellow under the dim light.

He carried a slaughterhook, its tip tapping the iron table with a sharp clang, like tolling a death knell.

“I hear you’re digging up old debts from five years ago?” he sneered. “The lunatic killed, then jumped into the chemical pit—never even found all the bones. Still think you’ll unearth something?”

Song Zhao turned slowly, forcing himself upright, voice cold and calm: “I’m only here to verify an evidentiary connection. But you—a slaughterhouse owner—why do you know so much about the crime scene details?”

Qian Shikang’s eyes flickered, but his grin deepened.

He stepped closer, his gaze like a blade scraping over Song Zhao’s face.

“There are some doors,” he murmured, voice like it seeped from the earth, “that, once opened, can never be shut.”

With that, he turned and left, footsteps receding.

Silence returned to the storage.

Song Zhao leaned against the cabinet, fingers still trembling.

He glanced down at his glove—there was a cut in the palm, blood beading and dripping to the floor.

The drop landed precisely where he had stood earlier, aligning with a fine crack in the concrete.

He suddenly recalled a line from his father’s notebook: “Blood doesn’t lie; it always follows the shortest path.”

Slowly, he raised his head and looked out the window.

Dawn had broken through the clouds, casting dappled light on the plane trees outside the evidence center—like the mottled shadows of old, unresolved cases.

He knew that tonight, he would have to return to that place.

The place his father had visited, where Xu Zhaoshan burned himself, where the victim hid clues in his final breath.

The rusted knife’s whisper had not faded. The wick was about to catch.

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Night fell like ink, soaking the desolate outskirts west of Jiang City.

The abandoned slaughterhouse stood amidst the ruins of demolition, a flayed and boneless beast, its hollow doors and windows the rotted sockets of its eyes.

Song Zhao scaled the rusted wire fence, landing with steps so light they were nearly silent, though his heart pounded like drums in his ears.

The stench hit him—a mix of old blood, animal offal, and chemicals, the reek of death seeping into every crack in the walls.

He switched on his flashlight, the beam slicing through darkness, illuminating the tangled overhead rails.

Iron hooks hung down, some still looped with blackened lengths of leather, swinging gently in the breeze, as if something had only just been removed.

He closed his eyes, replaying the vision in his mind: the cold room, the man in the apron, the corpse’s sudden spasm before the mincer started—the strip stuffed into the pig intestine. No, not a strip of cloth—a USB stick.

“Surgical table… should be third row, Area B,” he whispered, voice swallowed by the darkness.

The ground was littered with discarded pig stomachs, shriveled and black, layered like rotting leaves.

He knelt and searched inch by inch, not recoiling even as his fingers touched cold, clammy remains.

Time crawled in the silence, every second a step on a knife’s edge.

At last, among a heap of ruptured casings, he felt something hard—a short length of suture, stained dark red, with a sliver of plastic at the end.

He took a deep breath, donned his gloves, and touched the tip of the thread.

Golden patterns climbed his pupils again, the world twisting—

The cold room returned.

The right hand of the corpse clutched the apron man’s sleeve, tearing off a strip and shoving a USB drive into the freshly stitched pig intestine.

The image shook violently, as if the observer was in great pain.

Just before the mincer thundered to life, the camera lifted slightly, and under the cold light, the USB’s surface flashed—ZY-07.

The recall lasted a full twenty-five seconds.

Song Zhao’s eyes snapped open, his left eye losing focus, the world collapsing into a gray whirlpool.

Pain thundered in his skull; he staggered back, heel slipping—

Below, the mouth of a deep pit fumed with acrid vapor; residual acid still corroded the iron frame at its edge.

He teetered, nearly falling in.

At that critical moment, frantic metallic clatter echoed from the vent above.

“Song Zhao! Hold on!”

It was Su Wan’s voice.

He looked up, and in the gloom, a slender book-restoration tweezer poked from the vent, its tip wrapped in cloth.

Summoning all his strength, he clung to it.

“Pull—!” she gritted out, veins bulging in her arms.

He was dragged away from the abyss, collapsing on the ground, cold sweat soaking his back.

Su Wan slid down the rope, pale but steady: “Your note with the coordinates—I spent three hours tracking you here.”

Back in the library’s underground restoration room, the light was gentle as ever, but the air was taut with tension.

With micro-tweezers, Su Wan extracted a chip the size of a grain of rice from the pig intestine fragment and placed it into a data recovery device.

The screen flickered for a long while, restoring only thirty-seven percent of the data.

She pulled up a copy of “Secret Ledgers of the Jiang City Butchers’ Guild from the Republican Era,” tracing her finger over the account code formats: “See, these codes follow a pattern. ‘ZY’ isn’t random—it’s the initials of ‘Zhaoyang,’ used by the guild for marking shell accounts for illegal ledgers. ‘07’ means the seventh account.”

She looked up, voice trembling: “And this coding system now appears in ‘Morning Light Scholarship Foundation’s’ overseas transfers—that’s Lin Haoyu’s charity front.”

Song Zhao stared at the line of transfer logs on the screen, fragmented but clear: ZY-07 → an offshore company in northern Myanmar, amount: 2.8 million yuan, note: project subsidy.

He suddenly laughed, voice hoarse: “The accounts my father was tracing never really stopped. They burned the bodies and destroyed the files, but never imagined someone would hide the evidence in a pig’s intestine with their dying breath.”

At three a.m., he anonymously emailed the reconstructed video animation and code index to the disciplinary commission, then uploaded a blurry but recognizable image of a wrist tattoo to a local forum—with a single caption: “The real killer in the five-year-old dismemberment case wears a serpent tattoo.”

At six in the morning, a trending topic quietly appeared in the city’s searches: #SerpentTattooOfTheRealDismembermentKillerExposedFiveYearsAgo

His phone vibrated. Dong Lan called, her voice grave: “The provincial office received the public opinion report; the ‘Slaughterhouse Case’ review procedure is underway. But… Qian Shikang filed a complaint last night with the city bureau, accusing you of ‘illegally entering the crime scene.’”

The call ended, dawn still absent outside the window.

Su Wan suddenly looked up, pointing to a corner of the screen: “This signal source… its last jump was at an abandoned temple on the Myanmar border. Satellite images show it was once Xu Zhaoshan’s early retreat.”

Dong Lan, watching the tracking system in the technical support van, frowned tightly: “The signal’s weak, but it’s still sending encrypted packets… source confirmed.”

At 5:55 a.m., the technical support vehicle idled outside the southern data relay station, engine humming low.