Chapter 81: A Heartbeat Hidden in Ink

The air in the forensic center was always cold, sharpened by the mingled bite of disinfectant and formalin, enough to make the nose sting.

Tang Yurou’s voice was colder still, calm as though she were describing some physical phenomenon wholly divorced from emotion.

Behind her, on the huge monitor, floated a three-dimensional model of a wrist skeleton. A peculiar ring of sunken shadow stood out starkly on the radius, like a mute brand.

“Here.” Tang Yurou pointed precisely at the shadow with her laser pen. “A ring of periosteal overgrowth, deeply embedded in the radius. This could not have formed in a day or two. It is an old ligature mark caused by long, sustained external pressure.”

Song Zhao’s gaze was locked on the X-ray, his knuckles whitening under the force of his grip.

It was as though, through that icy image, he could see his father’s wrists as they had been tightly bound back then, the skin rubbed raw, flesh and blood exposed, pain seeping day after day into the marrow, until only this indelible proof of crime remained.

Tang Yurou ignored his reaction and continued in an unchanging tone: “Based on the density and depth of the overgrowth, we infer the binding lasted at least forty-eight hours, perhaps longer. And all of it occurred within a week before the deceased’s death.” She turned her head, and for the first time her sharp eyes met Song Zhao’s directly, like a scalpel cutting through the last veil of disguise. “Song Zhao, that means one thing.”

She paused, allowing the weight of her words to settle heavily in the silence of the autopsy room.

“He was bound, and under duress, he wrote every last word of those so-called confession statements.”

At eleven fifteen in the morning, in the city bureau’s evidence restoration room.

Su Wan’s breathing nearly stopped as all her attention flooded into the microscope eyepiece.

Within the field of view, two paper fibers from different sheets, magnified hundreds of times, showed an astonishing consistency.

One came from the scrap of paper taken from the wall cavity, the one inscribed with the words Help Me.

The other came from the remnants of the journal that Wei Chengyuan had personally burned in his study.

Their texture, their wood-pulp composition, even the tiny flaws left by the manufacturing process, matched exactly.

Su Wan straightened, removed her protective goggles, and quickly pulled up the bureau’s procurement records on her computer, her fingers flying over the keyboard.

The instant the result appeared, the blood in her entire body seemed to freeze.

The special paper supplied to the bureau: batch number A-0719-88.

It matched exactly the batch number of Wei Chengyuan’s journal.

A terrible thought split the mist like lightning.

That night’s frenzied burning in the study, the destructive performance that had alarmed everyone, had from beginning to end been nothing but a carefully staged deception.

What he burned was not the real evidence at all, only a duplicate he had fabricated himself from paper of the same batch, meant to help him slip away.

He was certain no one could tell truth from falsehood in a pile of ashes.

“The original...” Su Wan murmured, a chill rising up her spine. “The original had already been switched out by him.”

That old fox had not destroyed the evidence. He had hidden the most deadly knife where it was closest to him, perhaps even within the very archive he had taken as his own trophy.

He delighted in the sensation of holding everyone in the palm of his hand.

Su Wan immediately snatched up the phone and dialed Lin Shuyue’s number, her voice trembling faintly with excitement and fury. “Shuyue, listen to me. Wei Chengyuan destroyed a fake file. The real evidence has always been in his possession!”

At three forty in the afternoon, a courier package with no sender information was delivered to Su Wan.

It was small, but surprisingly heavy.

She cut it open with a paper knife. Inside was only a hard object wrapped in layers of foam paper.

Peeling away the final layer, she found an old-fashioned copper key lying quietly in her palm, still carrying a faint trace of rust.

No note. No clue.

It was an understanding, a signal passed in darkness.

Su Wan immediately thought of the person helping them from the shadows: Shen Yan.

She exchanged a glance with Song Zhao, and the two of them drove at once to the old residence recorded in the files, the one where Chen Yanting had last lived before his death.

The house had long stood vacant, its air thick with dust and the decay of old wood.

Using the floor plan they remembered, they found a built-in safe concealed behind an inconspicuous wall in the study, cleverly hidden under wallpaper.

The key went in. Turned.

With a crisp click, the heavy door swung open.

Inside there was no gold or jewelry, only a manila envelope, the seal intact.

Song Zhao’s fingers trembled slightly as he opened it and drew out a stack of yellowed handwritten pages.

At the top of the first sheet were three large characters written in fountain pen: Confession.

Turning to the first page, they found a distorted, repressed hand.

“I heard him calling me... Through that cold iron door, I heard him shouting my name with his last strength. But I did not dare turn back. I did not dare even once. Wei Chengyuan was standing behind me, his hand on my shoulder, light as air, yet heavy as a mountain. He said that if I signed, he would spare my family, spare everything I had. So I signed. The appraisal report that sent him to his death—I signed it myself.”

“And that piece of material evidence... 0719, I put it in myself when the handover was in chaos.”

Song Zhao’s breath caught violently. He raised a hand and drew a hard circle around the number 0719 with his fingertip.

That number, like a poisonous thorn, drove straight into his heart.

0719 was precisely his father’s personal code name in that year’s covert operation.

At five oh-two in the afternoon, in the city library.

A young man in black-framed glasses with an unremarkable face—Lin from the archives section—hurried to the returned-classics drop box.

He glanced around warily, then, while the librarian had turned away, quickly shoved an encrypted USB drive deep into the slot of the book return box.

The drive struck the bottom with the faintest sound.

Inside were scans of all the documents Wei Chengyuan had signed and approved over the past three months, each bearing his own handwritten marks.

Back in the corner of the reading room, Lin opened his work log and wrote a line on a blank page: If handwriting can have temperature and pain, then during these days, I suppose I have personally heard those voiceless wails.

He looked at the line for a long while, then selected it and deleted it completely.

When it was done, he let out a long breath, as though laying down a burden of a thousand pounds.

He lifted his head and looked toward the window, where an elderly man with white hair, wearing reading glasses, was carefully turning the pages of a newly restored county chronicle from the Republican era.

Sunlight passed through the glass and scattered a sheet of golden dust over the old book that carried history within it.

Night fell like ink. At eleven thirty-six, only the restoration room remained lit in the entire building.

Su Wan stood before the enormous projection screen, solemn as though she were presiding over a judgment thirty years overdue.

On the screen, all the evidence was displayed side by side: the charred remains of the paper page from the fire, the trajectory map reconstructed from pressure marks in the handwriting, the SOS waveform produced by Song’s father tapping in Morse code, the photocopy of Chen Yanting’s tear-stained Confession, and, just sent over by Tang Yurou, the X-ray of the bones bearing fatal ligature marks.

Each piece of evidence was a bullet aimed at the truth.

Su Wan took a deep breath and walked to the precise sound resonance platform in the center of the lab, a device so delicate it seemed like something from the future.

She put on anti-static gloves and carefully placed the final, and most crucial, fragment of carbon paper into the sample tray.

The machine started up, a deep hum filling the room.

A robotic arm connected to countless sensors slowly moved above the fragment, and the probe began, with micron-level precision, to trace the pressure path invisible to the naked eye across the page.

With each stutter and turn of the probe, the plotting arm at the other end simultaneously reproduced, on a fresh sheet of archival paper, the desperate handwriting from thirty years ago.

Stroke by stroke, as if weeping.

Help Me.

Those two words were written out, one stroke at a time, by the cold robotic arm in the silent laboratory.

The pauses in the pen, the weight behind each line, perfectly recreated the scene from that year.

Su Wan closed her eyes. It was as if she could hear the paper fibers groaning under immense pressure, as if she could feel the despair and unwillingness surging in the chest of the imprisoned man thirty years ago as he wrote those two words.

That silent cry for help, spanning thirty years of time, finally echoed once more tonight.

She opened her eyes. There was no hesitation left in them, only steel-hard resolve.

She walked to the machine and gently pressed the record button, capturing in full the unique vibration waveform transformed from the pressure trace.

“Now,” she said softly to the empty lab, and to the soul burdened by thirty years of injustice, “it is our turn to speak.”

Outside the window, at the far edge of the skyline, the first thread of dawn was trying to pierce the heavy clouds.

At that moment, the phone in her pocket vibrated abruptly, the screen flashing Tang Yurou’s name.

Su Wan answered, but the voice on the other end was not the calm she had expected. It was tense, suppressed, and breathing hard.

“Su Wan,” Tang Yurou said, sounding more grave than ever before, “the situation has changed. Come to the underground evidence cold storage at the bureau right away.”

“What happened?”

There was a brief silence on the other end, as though she were choosing her words carefully.

“The one we found... that ‘final witness,’” Tang Yurou lowered her voice until it was barely audible, as if afraid of being overheard by something. “The witness who should have died thirty years ago, but spoke again tonight... there’s been a small problem.”