Chapter 88: This Time, History Will Not Be Washed Away by the Flood

Backup power hummed to life with a jolt, and the sickly white light at once banished the dark, yet it could not disperse the suffocating chill that clung to the air.

The emergency systems in the Discipline Inspection and Technology Office could sustain only the most essential equipment. The giant display was a field of static, and only the server indicators deep within the racks blinked on like ghosts.

“Cut the network physically, now!” Su Wan’s voice shattered the silence. Her fingers flew across the backup keyboard so fast they seemed to leave afterimages, lines of code racing before her eyes. “They cut the main power because they wanted to plant a backdoor the instant our system rebooted, or else... wipe the hard drives outright.”

“It’s too late,” Shen Yan said with eerie calm. He stood behind Su Wan like a silent statue, but his gaze was as sharp as a blade, fixed straight on the master computer that had just lost its signal. “Seventeen seconds have passed since the alarm. If they moved quickly enough, the data may already be contaminated.”

Lin Shuyue’s heart sank to the bottom of a frozen abyss.

The safe they had just taken from the hidden compartment in Shen Yan’s father’s study now lay quietly on the table like Pandora’s box, radiating an ominous presence.

They had not even opened it, and yet the enemy already knew it existed.

This invisible net was larger, and more sensitive, than they had imagined.

“The password.” Lin Shuyue looked at Shen Yan, her tone brooking no argument.

Without hesitation, Shen Yan leaned down and murmured a string of numbers in her ear, inaudible to anyone else.

His breath carried a trace of coolness, like the thin mist of a winter morning. “My father always said some accounts can’t be kept on paper. I used to think he meant memory. Now it seems he meant something else.”

Su Wan took the numbers and her ten fingers danced over the custom lock as if transformed into a flock of butterflies.

The whir of the temperature-controlled server room fans became the only background sound. Every failed password attempt, every red error beep, struck the hearts of all present like a hammer blow.

At last, on the fifth try, a green light flickered to life on the lock’s screen, and the safe answered with a soft click.

There was no paper, no ledger, not even a memory stick.

Inside lay only a wafer-thin sheet of special alloy, laser-etched with an intricate network diagram.

Su Wan connected it to the scanner. Three seconds later, the diagram was projected onto the backup screen, every detail laid bare.

“The Rensxu Funds Flow Chart...” Lin Shuyue murmured, her pupils contracting violently.

In the image, an offshore account marked with a skull loomed like a venomous spider at the center, and over the course of thirty years it had sent out seven financial lines.

The endpoint of each line corresponded to a name they knew all too well: the direct family member of one of the seven emergency team members.

Every payment labeled as a bereavement stipend had been timed with pinpoint precision for the third day before each member’s supposed accidental death.

The fatal blow was the small line of text in the lower left corner, like a poisoned needle stabbing into every eye that saw it: “First disbursement: July 18, 1987.”

That date was a full three months earlier than the day Song Jianjun, Song Zhao’s father, had died in the line of duty.

This was not compensation. It was a purge, scripted long in advance.

When the morning sunlight pierced the clouds, the preparatory chamber for the Special Inquiry Tribunal was already filled to the brim.

The atmosphere was as heavy as lead.

Standing at the podium, Lin Shuyue presented the funds chart, the psychological profile of the handwriting, the pathological report on the brain abnormalities, and Old Zhang’s belated testimony, one by one, onto the giant screen.

The chain of evidence locked together, cold and irrefutable.

“Do you really mean to shake the entire system with nothing but a dubious funds chart and a madman’s testimony?” an experienced judge asked, pushing up his glasses, his tone openly skeptical. “This evidence cannot directly prove authorization from above.”

A low murmur rippled through the hall.

At that moment, Tang Yurou stood up. She said nothing, only pressed play.

A specially processed audio file echoed through the chamber.

On the left channel were the final fragments of communication transmitted through the internal frequency by the seven team members before their deaths, voices strained and broken, choked with static and the roar of the environment.

On the right channel was the intercepted instruction recording code-named Rust Chain, the voice disguised, deep and hoarse.

Individually, they seemed unrelated.

But when Tang Yurou overlaid the voiceprints of the two audio tracks, the entire hall fell into dead silence.

“We removed the semantic content and analyzed only the microscopic structure of the speech,” Tang Yurou said, her voice clear and forceful. “Look: the seven members’ speaking cadence in their final moments, the pause patterns between words, even their unconscious breathing frequency, all overlap with the Rust Chain directive pattern to a remarkable degree. This is no coincidence. It is the vocal echo that appears only after someone has been deeply influenced by the same psychological control system under extreme pressure. They were unconsciously imitating the person who issued the orders.”

On the screen, two waveform curves writhed together like entwined serpents, matching eerily at every crest, every trough, every pause.

In the silence, the presiding judge slowly rose, swept his gaze across the room, and finally settled it on Lin Shuyue. In measured tones, he announced, “After deliberation, the tribunal has decided to reopen the investigation into the major safety incident at Jiangcheng Waterworks Group. The Special Inquiry Tribunal is hereby established, effective immediately.”

Noon sunlight scorched the earth.

On the high embankment by the river, the wind howled.

Song Zhao stood alone. Behind him, seven scorched police badge models hung by fine steel wires, swaying in the wind and striking one another with a brittle, broken sound, as if crying.

He opened a voice recorder.

What came out was not a human voice, but a special audio piece synthesized by Xiao Lian from the original frequencies of a siren: seven notes of varying pitch and length, interwoven without melody, yet forming a heart-rending lament.

At the same time, hundreds of miles away, Su Wan tapped a key with the tip of her finger.

The entire city broadcast system was instantly linked in.

The midday news had just ended, the commercials had not yet begun, and this abrupt audio clip, unexplained and unannounced, cut across the airwaves.

It was like an invisible blade slicing through the city’s afternoon calm.

Countless people woke from their lunch-hour rest. Drivers at intersections lowered their windows in confusion. Workers in office buildings froze in place.

No narration, no subtitles, only this wail, sustained for a full sixty-eight seconds.

Sixty-eight seconds: the exact span from the moment the emergency team received the dispatch order to the moment it completely lost contact with headquarters.

The former site of the Water Bureau’s main control room had long since been sealed in dust and neglect.

Song Zhao led the special investigation team back into this place forgotten by time.

He walked straight to the dust-covered control console, groped for a moment, and from behind a loosened metal plate beneath it retrieved seven more badge models, identical to the first.

They were new, cold, and in stark contrast to the burnt wreckage behind him.

He lined them up in a row on the long conference table, while cameras already set in place waited behind him.

The red recording light came on.

“This is not revenge,” Song Zhao said hoarsely, but with an unshakable force. “It is a debt being repaid.”

He picked up the first badge and faced the lens. “They were not the cold, anonymous ‘unidentified persons’ in the files. He was Song Jianjun.”

A black-and-white portrait, sharp and proud, immediately appeared on the screen behind him.

“Li Zhenbang.”

“Wang Weiguo.”

With each name he spoke, a living face emerged on the screen.

When the seventh name fell, the entire room stood in solemn stillness, and only the camera continued its soundless record.

“What else do you want to do?” After the recording ended, Lin Shuyue walked up beside him and asked in a low voice.

River wind poured in through the shattered window, stirring the ends of her hair.

Song Zhao’s gaze passed beyond her to the muddy river outside, where the water churned and surged onward without end.

He spoke slowly, his voice so light it seemed almost ready to be carried away by the wind: “Let everyone hear it.”

At 6:59 in the evening, the progress bar for the final data synchronization in the Discipline Inspection Cloud Database finally reached one hundred percent.

Su Wan let out a long breath and confirmed that every piece of evidence, including the lethal Rensxu funds flow chart, had been encrypted and distributed to twelve independent backup nodes across the country—from digital archives at leading universities, to private memory heritage repositories, and even one sent to an international transparency organization.

She severed all external connections and shut down the terminal.

Outside the window, the all-day downpour had somehow ceased. The dark clouds had dispersed, leaving a sliver of moon hanging in the sky.

Moonlight filtered through the clouds and spilled across the still-turbulent river, illuminating overlapping ripples like a vast wound that could never be smoothed away.

Almost at the same moment, hundreds of miles away, Bai Zhiyu cast a brass key into the hearth at home.

Flames shot up at once, greedily devouring that heavy past.

Firelight reflected on her serene face as she whispered, “I heard it.”

And Song Zhao stood before the grave of his father, Song Jianjun.

He gently placed a newly cast, gleaming police badge before the cold tombstone.

The wind suddenly rose, lifting the mist off the river and setting the pines and cypresses to sobbing. The sound was like grief and like a reply, answering the vow he had never spoken aloud:

This time, history will not be washed away.

It seemed everything had finally settled into dust.

Leaning back against the cold chair, Su Wan was overwhelmed by exhaustion.

Yet just as she prepared to stand and leave, the corner of her eye caught the status light of a server that had just completed its self-check.

It was a row of green lights, all signaling normal operation, but the last one at the end flickered once with an almost imperceptible pulse.

Just once.

Like an eye hidden in the dark late at night, blinking swiftly.

Her nerves snapped taut, and drowsiness vanished without a trace.

This was not a signal a self-check should produce.

She straightened abruptly and put both hands back on the keyboard.

On the screen, lines of ordinary system logs scrolled at speed, showing nothing amiss.

But that strange flicker was like a thorn lodged in her mind.

The backups had been completed; the enemy could no longer delete the evidence from outside.

But if... their aim was not deletion, but alteration?

Not at the backup end, but at the source.

An undetectable, ghostlike modification command may already have been lying dormant in the deepest layer of the system, waiting for a moment no one noticed, to awaken in silence.