Chapter 82: The Hand in the Cement

The word “status” cut through the radio static like an icicle, driving straight into Lin Shuyue’s eardrum.

He did not even have time to press for details before the voice on the other end of the line changed to Tang Yurou’s, calm and stripped of all emotion. In the background came a sharp, unbroken sound of cutting, like industrial noise, or the wailing of the dead.

4:18 a.m., the municipal bureau’s underground evidence cold room.

The air here was colder than an ordinary winter night, carrying the sweet, metallic reek of death mixed with formaldehyde and old rust.

A massive block of concrete lay quietly on the stainless-steel autopsy table, like a mute tombstone.

Tang Yurou was wrapped head to toe in a white protective suit, only her eyes visible, focused with the keen intensity of an eagle about to strike.

Wearing double latex gloves, she held a diamond saw and cut slowly, steadily, along the line drawn in advance.

Sparks flew; white dust spread under the harsh lamps, only to be sucked away at once by the powerful extractor beside her.

Rebar crossed within the mass like bones, and the concrete shell was thicker than anyone had imagined, a full fifteen centimeters.

This was no mere concealment of a body. It was a seal, obsessive to the point of madness.

When the blade at last broke through the final layer of concrete and touched something more fragile than steel yet more tenacious as well, the piercing noise ceased abruptly.

What remained was a faint, grating sound, enough to make the teeth ache.

Tang Yurou paused for a moment and signaled for her assistant to adjust the angle of the lights.

Under the beam, the outline of an incomplete skull emerged.

She did not continue cutting. Instead, she picked up a delicate probe and carefully cleared the debris from the surface of the cranium.

Then, speaking into the miniature recorder pinned to her chest, she stated in a very low voice, as if performing a sacred rite: “The deceased shows abnormal myelin thickening in the brainstem region. This is not natural aging, but a neuroadaptive change caused by prolonged exposure to deep-water pressure.”

Her voice echoed through the empty cold room, every word ringing with force.

Turning slightly, she brought up a comparative chart of diving-related neurological pathology on the floating screen before her.

Among countless complex images of nerve fibers, she used a laser pointer to circle with precision the region that most closely matched the condition of the deceased.

“Based on the degree of thickening and the pattern of cellular abnormality,” she concluded, a faint tremor in her voice, “while alive, he must have descended at least thirty times, by the standards of a professional diver. Each time, he came close to the body’s absolute pressure limit.”

A man sealed in concrete. A professional deep-water diver.

Two utterly unrelated identities, drawn together by some uncanny force, like two enormous magnets, with an abyss of mystery opening between them.

10:03 a.m., the joint neuroscience electrophysiology laboratory of the city’s first medical college.

Bright sunlight filled the day, yet could not enter this room packed with precision instruments and tangled wiring.

The body had already been cleaned and now lay quietly on the experimental table.

He looked to be in his forties at most, his muscles taut, clearly a man who had undergone strict training in life.

Tang Yurou stood shoulder to shoulder with Chen Mo, the youngest professor at the medical college, both of them solemn.

“Muscle memory is the body’s final last words,” Chen Mo explained as he calibrated the equipment. “Intense, repeated, procedural actions leave a deeper imprint on neural pathways than words ever could. In theory, as long as the nerve bundles have not completely decayed, we can ‘awaken’ them with microcurrents.”

Tang Yurou nodded and, with tweezers, lifted a microelectrode finer than a strand of hair. Under Chen Mo’s guidance, she inserted it precisely into the ulnar nerve bundle of the corpse’s right arm.

More than a dozen electrodes were placed in sequence, linked to a low-frequency pulse simulator.

On the screen, complex waveforms began to flicker.

“Start low-frequency pulse, 0.5 hertz,” Tang Yurou ordered.

Current flowed silently into the long-cold body.

One second, two seconds, five seconds... There was no response.

Fine sweat broke out on Chen Mo’s forehead.

Just as he was about to adjust the parameters, the corpse’s right arm suddenly jerked, as though tugged by an invisible thread.

Everyone held their breath.

This was not the usual postmortem spasm.

After the twitch, the arm slowly rose, with an eerily measured steadiness, almost machine-like in its precision.

The elbow bent, the forearm lifted, and at last it came to rest before the chest—palm down, index finger, middle finger, and ring finger pressed tightly together, the little finger slightly raised, while the thumb stubbornly rotated outward.

The hand then turned around the wrist in a precise ninety-degree counterclockwise motion.

When the movement was complete, the arm remained rigid there, like a frozen statue.

The monitoring screen faithfully recorded the entire trajectory of the motion and its angular parameters.

“Repeat the stimulation,” Tang Yurou said, her voice slightly hoarse.

A second time, a third time, a fourth... Each result was exact to the millimeter, like a perfect replay from a computer program.

“This is not a spasm,” Tang Yurou said, turning off the recorder and addressing the stunned onlookers. “This was the final moment of his life—or rather, the action he repeated thousands upon thousands of times in his life, etched into the bones. A procedural action replay.”

2:47 p.m., the technical division of the municipal bureau, digital information recovery room.

The air smelled of old paper mingled with the cooling fans of servers.

Su Wan, dark circles beneath her eyes, stared fixedly at the screen.

On the left was the motion trajectory analysis video sent by Tang Yurou; on the right, the scanned copy of the 1985 edition of the Yunjiang Water Conservancy System Operation Manual, recovered from the archive’s piles of old papers.

The work was monotonous enough to drive a person mad, comparing frame by frame, page by page.

The manual’s pages had yellowed with age; the type was old-style lead print, and the illustrations were crude hand drawings.

Su Wan drank cup after cup of coffee until her cursor slid to the appendix section of the manual—“Emergency Opening Procedure for the Main Control Valve.”

There, a nearly forgotten hand-drawn diagram aligned perfectly with the trajectory in the video.

From the posture of the hand to the angle of rotation, every detail matched without the slightest discrepancy.

Su Wan’s heart lurched.

Her gaze dropped to a line of pencil notes beside the diagram, the handwriting sloppy but pressed deep into the page.

“Two keys, one action; without both, burn.”

Those words struck through Su Wan’s mind like lightning.

Burn?

Burn what?

The equipment, or... a person?

Almost instinctively, she captured the image and sent it through an encrypted channel to Lin Shuyue, who was out in the field, attaching only one sentence: “This is not a warning. It is a secret order.”

6:12 p.m., the main control center of the Yunjiang Water Authority.

The glow of sunset cast a golden layer over the vast building.

Lin Shuyue, expression cold, slapped a special authorization order bearing the bright red seal of the provincial discipline commission onto the duty engineer’s desk.

“I require the immediate restart of the dual-password verification system for Beacon One.”

The elderly engineer adjusted his glasses, confusion all over his face. “Officer Lin, this system... it has never been activated again since it was built in 1987. It’s only... only a historical backup facility.”

“It never sounded thirty years ago does not mean it is unimportant,” Lin Shuyue said, her tone leaving no room for argument. “Now, it must sound for us once.”

Under Lin Shuyue’s and several officers’ watchful eyes, the engineer reluctantly removed layer after layer of sealed protective covers and entered a long series of complex commands into an ancient terminal.

The system, dormant for more than thirty years, was awakened. The screen first flashed a cascade of garbled code before finally bringing up a blue interface with a single concise prompt:

“A-position operator verification passed. Please enter the second operator’s biometric data to complete dual-key authorization.”

“The second operator?” the engineer stammered.

At almost the same moment, Lin Shuyue’s phone rang. It was Tang Yurou.

“The corpse fingerprint model is ready. It can be matched at any time.”

“Upload it immediately!”

A few seconds later, Tang Yurou transmitted the deceased’s three-dimensional fingerprint model to the main control center.

The engineer imported it into the system, and the progress bar on the screen began to move slowly.

Every person present had their heart in their throat.

With a crisp ding, the bar reached the end.

A match successful prompt appeared on the screen, along with the second operator’s registration information.

Name: Wu Zhiming. Position: B-position.

The deceased was exactly the B-position operator registered back then.

9:55 p.m., late at night, Tang Yurou returned alone to the laboratory.

She did not go again to look at the body awaiting its final conclusion. Instead, she placed a tissue sample taken from Wu Zhiming’s hand beneath a high-powered electron microscope.

On the screen, the arrangement of the muscle fibers was magnified tens of thousands of times.

Among those normal textures, Tang Yurou discovered traces of compression that were extremely faint but arranged in a strikingly periodic pattern.

She called up Wu Zhiming’s ninety-degree counterclockwise rotation model and compared the muscle activation frequency against those traces.

A perfect match.

This meant that Wu Zhiming, before being sealed in concrete, or perhaps even while he was being sealed, had continued to repeat that valve-turning motion obsessively, over and over.

Until even his muscle fibers bore this eternal scar.

Tang Yurou switched off the microscope and leaned back weakly in her chair.

Looking out at the heavy darkness beyond the window, she murmured to herself, as if speaking to the dead man from thirty years ago: “You did not die in concrete... You died in silence.”

He died from an order that could never be completed, from a call no one answered, from a responsibility carved into his very marrow.

And on the other side of the city, in a dim corner of the municipal archives, the young officer Xiao Lin finally found, among the thousands of case files he had been sorting through, a damaged logbook titled Yunjiang Water Conservancy Hub A/B Position Duty Log.

Wearing white gloves, he carefully turned to the section for 1987, searching page by page.

At last, his finger stopped on July 19, 1987.

The sign-out column on that page was different from every other day before and after it.

In red pen, a single line had been heavily circled, the handwriting carrying a trace of panic and confusion:

“Neither A nor B has signed out today.”

Xiao Lin closed the logbook and sealed the evidence bag.

He walked to the window and looked out at the Yunjiang River, black as ink in the night.

This time, he took out his phone and looked at the case backup files that should, by regulation, have been deleted on schedule. For the first time, he did not press the delete key.

An operator named Wu Zhiming from B-position was already dead.

So where was the A-position operator who had been on duty with him, who had vanished with him, who should have opened the valve with him?

Tang Yurou’s phone screen lit up with the photograph Xiao Lin had sent.

Her gaze locked hard on the words “Neither A nor B has signed out today.”

Two keys, one action.

Wu Zhiming was Key B. The key that concrete could not entomb, that death could not erase.

Then what of Key A?

Thirty years of time are enough to turn a living man into a faded name in the archives, into a speck of dust no one cares to notice in the world.

But Tang Yurou knew the chain of logic was still missing its most crucial link.

She had found the silent witness. Now she had to find the silent accomplice, or perhaps... another silent victim.

She needed to find the other half of the living key.

Her fingers moved swiftly through her contacts and called up a number long buried in dust.

The instant the call connected, she offered no pleasantries, her voice calm and decisive.

“Help me find someone. The A-position operator from the Yunjiang Water Authority thirty years ago. I want every piece of information. Now. Whether he is alive or dead, I will find him.”