Chapter 84: The Moment the Lights Came On During the Blackout

The substation was thick with the acrid stench of ozone mingled with aging wiring, while the dull hum pressed against the eardrums like a swarm of caged hornets.

Lin Shuyue stood by the doorway, her stern gaze sweeping over the hesitant faces of the technicians; her very presence was a silent urging.

The disciplinary order in her hand seemed like a branding iron, radiating an authority that brooked no argument.

"Cut the main line," said the senior mechanic at the head of the group, glancing from Lin Shuyue to the pliers in his hand, sweat beading on his forehead. "Director Lin, this is no small matter. The entire courthouse security system will..."

"Wait."

A cool voice cut him off.

Su Wan stepped out of the shadows. In the stark light of the emergency lamps, her face looked a little pale, but her eyes shone with startling brilliance.

She strode to the console, her fingers tracing over the dusty schematics until they stopped at a complicated junction.

"Not a full shutdown," she said rapidly, every word crisp. "What we need is to create a voltage dip lasting 0.8 seconds. A moment so brief it is nearly invisible to the naked eye, but long enough to trigger the backup power switch. At the instant of switchover, there will be a slight current rebound between the primary and backup circuits." She looked up, her gaze burning over the group, then pointed to an unremarkable instrument in the corner, an antique oscilloscope Old Wei had dug out from some warehouse. "What we need is not a black screen. We need that fleeting 'heartbeat.'"

The senior mechanic froze, staring at the young woman before him as though she were speaking some heavenly script.

A power cut was a power cut. What was all this fuss about?

But Lin Shuyue understood at once. She gave the old mechanic a nod. "Do as Engineer Su says."

At 2:36 a.m., deep inside the courthouse, in a temporary restoration room.

The air hung motionless as water, broken only by the faint electric whisper of a live simulation circuit.

The weathered iron box lay quietly on the workbench, several slender probes connected with surgical precision to the corroded interface of its lock.

Su Wan held her breath, staring without blinking at the steady green line on the oscilloscope.

Behind her, Lin Shuyue’s hand slowly curled into a fist, the knuckles turning white.

Minute by minute, second by second, time dragged on with the weight of centuries.

Then suddenly, the green line on the oscilloscope jolted violently, like the final heartbeat of someone dying, before settling once more into stillness.

Now!

Su Wan’s pupils contracted.

Almost at the same instant, the lights in the restoration room flickered so faintly they were barely perceptible, quick as an illusion.

Click.

The soft sound rang out in the deathly still room like thunder.

The magnetic lock that had plagued them for weeks, that had resisted every ordinary method, sprang open at once.

They had done it.

Su Wan felt her heart nearly leap from her throat.

She exhaled slowly, then reached out with utmost care, her fingertips trembling slightly with strain.

She lifted the lid, and a stale, moldy scent from thirty years of sealed paper rushed out.

Inside the box lay a stack of yellowed documents, quiet and still.

The title on the top sheet was printed in old-style type: Supplementary Explanation Concerning the Death in the Line of Duty of Officer Song.

Lin Shuyue held her breath as well, leaning closer, her gaze locked on the signature at the end.

Date: July 20, 1987.

And in the signature line was a forceful, unmistakably familiar hand: Wei Chengyuan.

At 6:19 a.m., in the evidence storage room.

The first sliver of dawn filtered through the iron bars of the high window, casting mottled shadows over the cold concrete floor.

Song Zhao sat alone at a metal desk, the document removed from the iron box spread open before him.

He had been sitting there for three hours, chewing over every single word of the report again and again.

The air carried the particular stale odor of an archive, but what Song Zhao smelled was something that would not leave him: the blood and dampness of the culvert from thirty years ago.

The handwriting in the report had blurred somewhat with age, yet its contents drove into his eyes like steel needles: "Upon investigation, it was found that while conducting a safety inspection of Culvert No. 3, Song discovered signs of unauthorized alteration in the main control valve password, severely inconsistent with the original records and presenting a major safety hazard. He intended to bypass the usual procedures and report directly to the Municipal Discipline Inspection Commission. After receiving the urgent report, then Deputy Director Wei Chengyuan instructed: 'Given the special circumstances and the gravity of the matter, contain the situation on site. Do not let it spread.' That night, Song lost contact in the culvert work zone and was later determined to have died in the line of duty."

Song Zhao’s fingers repeatedly brushed over the words contain the situation on site, and a chill tremor ran through his fingertips.

Yet his handsome, sharply defined face showed nothing at all, calm as an iceberg.

He knew what that phrase meant in certain contexts.

It was not protection. It was confinement, blockade, and... silencing.

He slowly closed the file, with no furious roar and no tears of grief.

He simply took out his encrypted private phone, calmly photographed every page of the report, encrypted the images again, and uploaded them through a special channel he had never used before to the provincial discipline commission’s server.

Once the confirmation of successful transmission lit up, he erased every trace from the phone, returned the document to the evidence bag exactly as it had been, and sealed it away once more.

When it was done, he stood up. The morning light stretched his shadow long across the floor, lonely and resolute.

At 10:05 a.m., an emergency meeting in the second inspection office of the municipal discipline commission.

The atmosphere in the conference room was grim, every eye fixed on Lin Shuyue at the head of the table.

Her expression was even harder than it had been at dawn, her gaze like a blade.

"Everyone," she said without a single superfluous word, pressing the projector remote.

On the screen, the photo of the iron box, the photocopied documents, and Wei Chengyuan’s signature were enlarged one by one, displayed clearly before everyone.

"Thirty years ago, we lost an outstanding comrade. We always believed it was an accident, an unsolved case. But now the truth tells us—"

She paused, her sharp gaze sweeping the room. "This was not an unsolved case. It was murder. And the murderer used the very system we are proudest of as a shell to conceal his crimes for thirty years!"

When the words fell, the room erupted in shock.

Wei Chengyuan, a name that within the political and legal system was nearly synonymous with authority and exemplar, was now bloodily linked with the word murder.

Ignoring everyone’s astonishment, Lin Shuyue’s voice grew colder still. "According to the relevant provisions of the Supervision Law, I hereby announce the immediate initiation of retention-in-custody review procedures against Wei Chengyuan, the executive deputy director of the municipal public security bureau. The action team has already departed."

The conference room fell into a deathly silence, broken only by the faint airflow of the central air conditioning.

After the meeting, Lin Shuyue’s young secretary, Xiao Lin, returned to the archives room.

He opened his work log and, under the record for that day, wrote only one line: Today, I saw the light. When he finished, he closed the notebook, his face carrying an unprecedented calm.

He left the office building and walked with steady steps to the mailbox on the corner, sliding in a thick stack of photocopies.

The envelopes bore no sender information. The recipients were three media outlets known for their in-depth investigations, as well as the provincial high people’s court.

He knew Lin Shuyue’s official channels would need time, but some things, once brought into the light, could never be returned to darkness.

At 5:48 p.m., in the restoration room.

A sudden downpour had just ceased, and the air was filled with the fresh scent of wet earth.

Su Wan placed the iron box that had unleashed the storm back into the custom evidence case, then gently closed the lid.

A slant of sunlight broke through a seam in the clouds, like a stage spotlight, landing just right in the corner of the workbench.

There, laid a faded photograph that Song Zhao had secretly left with her.

In the photo, a young man in an old-style police uniform held a child-sized Song Zhao in his arms, smiling with uncommon brightness.

It was Song Zhao’s father, Officer Song.

Su Wan reached out and lightly brushed the young man’s smiling face in the photograph with her fingertips, then said in a voice only she could hear, "We read what you wrote."

Across the city, in the monitoring center of the municipal public security bureau, Xiao Lin sat at his familiar workstation and, for the first time, ignored the regular pattern of tapping in the headset—the secret signal language known as the lamp code.

It had been his covert line of communication with a superior; over the past several years, he had faithfully relayed every order like a puppet on strings.

Slowly, he took off the headset and threw it onto the desk.

On the screens, countless surveillance feeds interwove and flickered, reflecting his own young, exhausted face.

He looked at himself in the screen and murmured, "I’m not a tool anymore."

Night fell once more, and after the cleansing rain the city seemed unnaturally quiet, as though everything had already settled into dust.

The news that Wei Chengyuan had been taken away spread only within a very narrow circle, yet it had already stirred an invisible tidal surge beneath the surface.

Everyone thought that what followed would be a long struggle over evidence and procedure.

And yet, in the dead of night, when all had sunk into sleep, Song Zhao’s phone, encrypted to the highest level, suddenly vibrated in the silence.

There was no call, no text—only a system push from the backend of the provincial evidence data center.

It was a cold, impersonal alert, triggered by no human hand:

Warning: Archive No. A-07201987 (Officer Song's death-in-the-line-of-duty case) original forensic file access privileges have been urgently elevated to the highest level.
Operation IP location: Municipal Forensic Center, constant-temperature autopsy room.

Song Zhao stared at those words on the screen, his pupils shrinking sharply to pinpoints.

The autopsy report from thirty years ago—the file he had thought would never again be touched by anyone—had moved.

And the time was 4:03 a.m.