Chapter 83: Who Taught Cement to Breathe?

At 5:39 in the morning, before the sky had even begun to pale, the city still lay in sleep.

An unremarkable black sedan slipped soundlessly into the parking lot of the retirement home in the eastern district.

Tang Yurou opened the car door, and the cold mist of dawn wrapped around her at once, carrying the damp odor of rotting vegetation.

The corridor of the home was filled with the mingled scents of disinfectant and the breath of old age, so quiet that one could hear the faint snoring from a distant room and the echo of one’s own heartbeat.

She stopped before a north-facing single room. On the nameplate, written in hasty marker strokes, were the words: Wu Jianguo.

The file said that Wu Jianguo had been the B-shift operator at the Yunjiang Water Bureau thirty years ago, and Wu Zhiming’s partner.

After his son disappeared, he had gone half-mad, and five years ago relatives sent him here.

The room was dark; the only light came from the gray dawn beyond the window.

A gaunt old man was curled in a wheelchair by the window, like a withered sculpture.

That was Old Wu.

Hearing the door open, he did not stir. Only a pair of clouded eyes stared through the glass, fixed upon some void far away.

Tang Yurou did not disturb him. She merely stood quietly to the side.

Minute after minute passed. The air hung still, like a sheet of ice.

No one knew how long had gone by before the old man suddenly lifted his hands from his knees and began to gesture slowly and stiffly in the air before him.

The movements were exceedingly complex. Fingers, wrists, and arms twisted and paused at angles that defied common sense, as if he were manipulating some invisible and exquisitely precise machine.

“The main control valve... is at the end of Tunnel No. 3 beneath the river.” His voice was dry as if rubbed with sandpaper, each word forced out with difficulty from the depths of his throat. “You have to pass through... a collapsed section. Very dangerous.” His gaze remained vacant, yet the motions of his hands grew clearer and clearer, filled with a kind of unquestionable certainty.

“Zhiming... the last time he went underwater, when he came back, his fingers... would not stop shaking.”

The old man’s breathing quickened, and in his murky eyes there surfaced the faint glimmer of fear.

“He said, ‘They changed the password, but not the rules.’ The rules... the rules cannot be changed.” He murmured to himself, as though explaining things to an unseen listener.

Suddenly, his entire upper body lurched forward. One hand shot high into the air and made a downward twisting, pressing motion. The posture was identical to the valve-opening gesture the corpse in the concrete mound had shown when struck by electricity.

“We... we practiced for three years.” Old Wu held that pose for more than ten seconds, his arm trembling violently from the strain. “Three years... the muscles remember... better than the brain.” As the words fell away, he seemed to have spent every last ounce of strength. He collapsed back into the wheelchair and became once more a lifeless sculpture.

At 8:15 that morning, in the city forensic center.

On a vast holographic projection screen, two dynamic three-dimensional models were running in synchronized slow motion.

On the left was a motion-capture model generated from Old Wu’s recorded gestures; on the right, a scan model of the muscle-memory reaction in Wu Zhiming’s corpse under electric shock.

Data streams raced across the bottom of the screen, and at last froze on a bright red number.

“The margin of error is under 2.3 percent,” Tang Yurou said, her voice especially clear in the quiet analysis room.

She turned to Lin Shuyue beside her and handed over the freshly printed report.

“The conclusion is clear: the last operation Wu Zhiming performed in life was opening that mysterious main control valve. And the place where he was sealed into the concrete corresponds exactly to the riverbank exit of Tunnel No. 3 beneath the river. This was not a random disposal of a body, Director Lin. This was a return to place. The killer put him back at his final post.” She paused, then added a still more chilling inference. “Wei Chengyuan’s annual injection of preservatives into the concrete mound on the memorial day was not to mask the smell either. It was a ritual. Not concealment—an offering.”

Lin Shuyue’s gaze left the model and settled on Tang Yurou’s face, sharp as a blade.

“An offering... he treated a corpse as an idol.”

At 12:07 noon, in the underground control room of the Yunjiang Water Bureau.

It was like a giant metal heart, with only the low hum of servers moving through the cold air.

Song Zhao stood before an old-fashioned, dust-covered dual-password terminal.

According to the records, the machine had never been used again since that “system upgrade” thirty years ago.

He took a deep breath and pressed his palm against the scratched biometric panel.

A green light came on, and the system activated.

A line of cold text appeared on the screen: “A-shift authority verified. Please enter the B-shift coordinated action to unlock the hidden partition.”

Coordinated action.

Song Zhao closed his eyes. In his mind, he replayed the video sent over from the forensic center again and again: that rigid corpse, under the stimulation of electric current, lifting its arm unnaturally to make that eerie and precise valve-opening gesture.

He slowly raised his right hand to the height of the screen, turned his wrist, curled his fingers loosely, and imitated the motion in the video, rotating and pressing downward inch by inch.

Every joint in his body gave a faint protest. The movement was utterly non-ergonomic, filled with a harsh mechanical stiffness.

Time seemed to stop.

The cursor on the screen flashed wildly. The system appeared to be engaged in a vast comparison and struggle of data.

After several seconds, the shrill beeping ceased, and a brand-new interface popped up. Green text announced triumphantly: “Hidden partition unlocked. Permission verification passed.”

At 3:41 in the afternoon, deep within the control room, a heavy lead door slowly slid open.

Inside the hidden partition was a vast vault. In the center, mounted upon a pedestal, rested a sealed iron box about half a meter square.

The box was made of some dark alloy, and a line of stamped numbering was chiseled into its shell: Renxu 0719.

“The nineteenth day of the seventh lunar month in the year Renxu,” Su Wan said softly, pulling on a pair of white antistatic gloves.

Carefully, she lifted the iron box from the pedestal. It was heavy in her hands.

The lock was not mechanical, but an extremely old electronic magnetic-stripe lock, with only a lonely power port beside it.

“The power interface standard... comes from the same source as the city court’s archive server.” She measured the port parameters with a microprobe, her brows tightly furrowed. “Part of the opening program for this lock is written in the hidden system at the Water Bureau, and another part is stored in the court’s server. They split the key in two, thinking that so long as the two systems were not connected, no one would ever be able to open it.”

In another monitoring room, Xiao Lin, who was handling external technical support, saw the scene through the security feed.

He quickly wrote a few words on a sticky note, folded it up, and slipped it into a return box used for transferring physical evidence, addressed to Su Wan.

The note contained only four words: Old Wei can crack it.

At 7:03 in the evening, in the restoration room temporarily commandeered by the task force.

Su Wan tried to simulate the voltage and data flow of the court server using a backup power supply borrowed from the municipal library, entering commands again and again.

The lock mechanism on the iron box emitted a faint buzzing sound and trembled slightly, but that final barrier still would not open.

It had failed.

A simulated signal could never replace a true key.

She set down her tools in annoyance and walked to the window.

The setting sun was slowly sinking below the horizon, staining the entire city in a magnificent orange-red glow.

Her gaze drifted unconsciously over the distant cluster of buildings, and at last came to rest on the imposing, solemn edifice of the city court.

On the side of the building was an inconspicuous gray transformer room.

A mad thought struck her like lightning.

The Water Bureau... the court... electricity... According to the city planning archives from thirty years ago, the central dispatch point for the emergency grid serving all major institutions in the city was at... the Water Bureau!

The backup generators for the city court building were powered directly by the Water Bureau’s emergency grid!

These were not two independent locks. This was a series circuit!

She spun around at once, grabbed the encrypted phone on the desk, and directly called Lin Shuyue.

The moment the call connected, she offered no explanation, only a sentence that sounded almost like an order: “We need to make the court lose power once.”

At the same moment, in the riverside cemetery on the western outskirts of Yunjiang City.

Wei Chengyuan stood alone before that unremarkable concrete mound.

The evening wind crossed the river, carrying moisture and chill.

He unscrewed a medical glass bottle and slowly, reverently poured the colorless transparent liquid inside—high-purity formalin—along the cracks in the concrete.

The liquid seeped in and vanished at once, as if swallowed by thirsty earth.

He gazed at the concrete mound as though looking upon a long-lost old friend, and whispered in a voice only he could hear, “You kept the secret safe, and I kept you safe.”

Night fell completely.

Lin Shuyue hung up Su Wan’s call and stood wordlessly before the floor-to-ceiling window of her office.

Outside, the lights of the city came on one after another like stars, outlining the bustling silhouette of Yunjiang City.

Her gaze passed through the brilliant sea of lights and landed precisely on the court building in the distance, now sunk into a silhouette of darkness.

Cut the city court’s power.

How bold that idea was, and how absurd.

This was not merely pulling a breaker. It was a direct intervention in a national judicial institution. One misstep, and the chain reaction could swallow them all whole.

But she knew Su Wan would not speak without reason.

That iron box, sealed away for thirty years, might well be the only key to unraveling every mystery.

Her fingers tapped lightly against the cold glass, the rhythm steady and firm.

The office was utterly silent, save for the ticking of the wall clock, its second hand counting down to some approaching moment.

At last, she stopped tapping, turned back to her desk, and from a locked drawer took out a red folder stamped with the highest secrecy seal.

On its cover were embossed two gilded characters: Discipline Inspection.

The darkness outside grew deeper and deeper.