Chapter 79: Ashes That Speak

The icy air seemed to freeze time itself.

Inside the City Bureau’s Archive Restoration Room, only the low hum of equipment and Su Wan’s own heartbeat remained. At three seventeen in the afternoon, the room felt like an isolated island, cut off from the world.

Su Wan, wearing anti-static gloves, carefully laid out the stack of carbonized pages she had retrieved from the burnt bottom drawer of the archive cabinet onto the vacuum worktable. They resembled a pile of cursed butterfly wings—fragile, scorched, their edges curled, emitting a faint scent of dust mingled with despair.

She activated the micro-indentation scanner. A gentle blue light, as sharp as a surgeon’s blade, silently swept across the surface of the pages, scanning line by line for those lingering strokes invisible to the naked eye.

On the screen, a waterfall of data refreshed, gradually reconstructing blurred shapes of characters. Su Wan breathed softly, afraid even the slightest puff of air would scatter these last remnants of evidence.

Suddenly, her gaze froze, every muscle in her body tightening in an instant.

In the partially reconstructed phrase, “Before Chen Yanting signed the transfer order,” the last stroke of the character for “Wei”—the lower half of the “ghost” radical, which should have ended cleanly—appeared with an unnaturally inward curling hook.

It wasn’t a slip of the pen. It was as if the writer’s wrist had been violently yanked by some irresistible force, causing the stroke to deviate, and then, with all their might, the person forcibly dragged the pen tip back to its original path, determined to finish the character.

The ink deepened noticeably at the hook, forming a tiny dot, like a droplet of blood frozen in time.

Su Wan leaned closer to the screen, almost able to feel the struggle and pain of that moment.

She took off her protective goggles, her fingertips unconsciously tracing the twisted trajectory on the cold table, whispering so softly it was barely audible, “This isn’t a record—it’s a struggle.”

At four oh nine, the door to the restoration room opened silently.

Old Jian entered, leaning on a black ebony cane, his steps slow but each one resonating with heavy echoes.

He didn’t ask Su Wan what she had found, as if he had already anticipated it. He glanced at the enlarged image on the scanner screen, the murky waves in his eyes stirring slightly, then extended a finger, thin as a twig, and pointed precisely at the abnormal hook through the air.

“This abruptness—it’s not hesitation,” Old Jian’s voice was raspy, as if sanded by coarse paper. “It’s a tremor. Specifically, a classic tremor from resistance.” He set his cane beside the worktable and drew from the faded pocket of his old jacket a notebook wrapped in worn, frayed kraft paper.

Flipping deftly to a certain page, he revealed hand-drawn examples of abnormal handwriting, densely annotated in tiny script.

He pointed to an image, uncannily similar to the one on the screen. “See, when writing this ‘Wei’ character, his right arm was tightly controlled from behind, possibly even twisted upward. But he was still exerting force, trying to control the pen tip—look here,” he indicated the ink dot, “the ink pooled, showing the pen lingered on the paper for over 0.8 seconds. This pause only happens when muscles are in extreme spasm.”

He handed the notebook to Su Wan. At the top of the page, the title stood out: “Comparison Table of Coerced Writing Features.”

“I’ve only seen this kind of hook three times,” Old Jian’s gaze grew deep. “All in cases where an external force twisted the wrist and forcibly stretched the shoulder muscles. The writer was enduring immense pain at the time.”

At five thirty-four, Su Wan left the restoration room.

She didn’t exit through the main door, but circled to the back of the building, unscrewed an inconspicuous maintenance hatch, and slipped into the underground ventilation duct.

The duct was dark and damp, filled with the smell of rust and mold.

At a junction in the main duct, a small figure was already waiting.

It was A Ying, the archive’s cleaner, a girl who almost never spoke.

They exchanged no words. Su Wan took out a small handwriting tablet from her pocket.

A Ying accepted it, first pointing to her ears with a “shush” gesture, then miming a rising flame with her hands, her eyes full of fear.

She quickly scribbled in shaky letters: “That night, nine twelve, I saw it. It was Wei Chengyuan, Deputy Director Wei himself, who led the group up. The fire burned for three whole hours.”

Su Wan’s heart sank. She looked at A Ying, signaling her to go on.

A Ying’s hands trembled, her writing quivering: “They took away all the surveillance hard drives. I hid in the vent, could hear everything. In the end, I saw him walk out of the fire, carrying a black iron box—not big, but it looked heavy.” She paused, recalling some overlooked detail, then added in even firmer writing: “Before leaving, he stood in front of Cabinet Seven for a long time, looked back once—that’s the cabinet you’re investigating.”

At seven eleven, night had fallen. Su Wan had just returned to the restoration room when a stack of photocopied papers was silently slipped through the door crack.

She picked them up at once, the footsteps at the door already gone.

It was Xiao Lin, the new intern in the archives.

The papers were copies of last week’s meeting minutes signed by Wei Chengyuan.

A note was tucked in between, bearing a single line: “He favors vintage Hero fountain pens, with dense ink—this is his handwriting when relaxed.”

Su Wan immediately placed the minutes on the scanner for pressure trajectory comparison analysis.

On the screen, two handwriting models appeared side by side.

On the left, the “Wei Chengyuan” from the meeting minutes—strokes flowing confidently, every turn assured, no hesitation.

On the right, the “Wei” on the carbonized paper—like a nerve struck by electricity, full of breaks, tremors, and struggle.

The data analysis quickly popped up: the writing pressure, speed, and tremor frequency between the two signatures were markedly different—not the product of the same person in normal and coerced states, but rather a clash of two distinct physiological and psychological conditions.

At ten fifty-six that night.

The entire City Bureau building lay deep in sleep, the restoration room’s light shining stubbornly like a lone star.

Su Wan activated the laboratory’s most precise and rarely used device—the acoustic resonance platform.

She fixed the least damaged carbonized sheet with the “Wei Chengyuan” impression onto the vibration platform.

Adjusting the frequency from low to high, she slowly swept through the paper fibers’ resonance range.

When the frequency reached a critical point, a miracle happened.

A slender mechanical arm hovered above the sheet, its micro-probe moving in response to the faint resonance caused by the impressions in the paper fibers.

It was no longer scanning—it was “listening” to the paper’s memory.

On the screen, a virtual pen tip tracked the mechanical arm’s motion, slowly retracing every move left by the writer against a dark backdrop.

One, two, three characters gradually emerged: “Wei Chengyuan.”

As the final stroke of the last character landed in the lower right corner, the device captured a segment of extremely faint yet distinctly rhythmic vibrations.

It was not the tremor from writing, but deliberate tapping with the pen tip in a non-writing pattern, producing a cadence.

Tap, tap, tick, tap.

Then, a brief pause.

Su Wan’s pupils contracted sharply.

This wasn’t unconscious tremor—it was a code!

She nearly lunged at the computer, pulling up the Morse code chart.

Her fingers, cold with excitement, trembled as she typed in the corresponding letters.

S...O...S...

A distress signal.

Su Wan shot to her feet, staring out the window at the archive building crouched like a giant beast in the night.

He wasn’t signing an order to condemn someone, but using his own name, with the last bit of power he could muster, to call for help from some unknown existence.

Her lips moved, her voice hoarse: “He was still alive—he was calling for help.”

SOS.

Who was that signal meant for?

And who received it, only to let it be buried forever in the ashes?

Su Wan’s gaze returned to the worktable.

That carbonized paper, the twisted “Wei” character, the decoded distress signal, the mysterious iron box A Ying mentioned, and the last glance Wei Chengyuan cast at Cabinet Seven… countless clues spun wildly in her mind like scattered stars, lacking the thread to tie them together.

The night was still long.

She donned her protective goggles again and cranked the resonance device to maximum power.

The distress signal could not have appeared just once.

If this was his only way to communicate with the outside world, then among those papers burned to ash, more, perhaps even more vital information must be hidden.

She stared intently at the waveform flickering on the screen, flames burning in her eyes bright enough to light up the silent night.

She knew that before dawn, she had to find the next code.

For the killer took the iron box, but may not have cleared away all the ashes.

And sometimes, ashes speak louder than steel.