Chapter 89 They Signed a Death Warrant, Not an Inquiry Order

At 4:09 a.m., in the climate-controlled server room of the disciplinary inspection technical division, the air seemed frozen into ice. Only the deep hum of server fans filled the silence, like the breathing of some immense creature in sleep.

In Su Wan’s pupils, the screen reflected a torrent of code racing downward, a cold electronic flood trying to wash away a buried truth.

Her fingers danced over the keyboard with precision and calm, as though she were not operating a machine but performing a delicate surgical operation.

The “Renxu Funding Flow Map” unfurled slowly at the center of the screen like a crimson web.

Seven “voluntary resignation letters,” each bearing a different name, became seven ghostlike nodes, forcibly dragged into that web.

When three decades of related municipal project appropriation records and personnel transfer files were overlaid and imported as third-party variables, the core of the dynamic tracing model began to emit a warning buzz of overload.

Data crashed together and screamed.

Su Wan held her breath and stared at the center of the web.

A faint hidden thread, after countless washes of data, finally emerged stubbornly into view.

Like a coiled viper, it surfaced quietly after each “accidental death,” and within three months, it funneled a sum marked as “special emergency stability funds” from an untraceable offshore account into the pool belonging to the municipal bureau’s logistics division.

Then, almost on the same day, the money would be fully transferred under the lofty pretense of “equipment upgrades” into a specific account: the infrastructure project overseen by Wei Chengyuan.

Seven deaths, seven precisely timed transfers, not the slightest deviation, like an intricate ritual rehearsed again and again.

“Found it.” Su Wan’s voice was very soft, yet it pierced the machine-room noise and sank into Lin Shuyue’s ears.

Lin Shuyue said nothing. She simply turned her gaze to another split screen.

It was the original approval documents Su Wan had retrieved, scanned at high magnification so that every signature on every file had been enlarged to the limit.

Su Wan activated the module for analyzing pen-pressure curves.

On the screen, seven different names, parsed by the computer, produced seven nearly perfectly overlapping waveforms.

“Look here,” Su Wan said, pointing to a tiny, almost imperceptible tremor in the curve. “At the moment the stroke begins, the pressure and the hesitation before it land exactly the same.”

She switched to ink-flow rhythm analysis. The rise and fall, the turns, the endings of all seven curves were like a duet carved from the same mold.

“And the degree of deformation in the paper under pressure,” she said, bringing up a three-dimensional simulation. The microscopic indentations in the paper fibers beneath the pen tip, both in depth and spread, pointed to the same conclusion.

The machine room fell into dead silence, broken only by those seven ghostly curves screaming soundlessly on the screen.

“It wasn’t written by seven people,” Su Wan said at last, turning to look at Lin Shuyue. In her eyes flickered a complicated light mixed with fear and excitement. “It was the same hand, wearing different masks, that signed these seven death notices.”

She did not wait for Lin Shuyue to answer. Her hands moved swiftly across the keyboard, naming the harrowing comparison chart The Fingerprint of Pen Pressure in Institutional Forgery, and in the encrypted email’s note, she summed it all up in one cold line: “This is not corruption. It is systemic silencing.”

The instant the email went out, at 8:56 a.m., in the isolation archive room of the forensic center, which was always kept at an absolute low temperature, Tang Yurou’s terminal received Lin Shuyue’s encrypted order.

The order was simple to the point of chill: urgently retrieve the brain tissue section data of Lu Chenzhou, Wei Chengyuan, and three other deceased “Rust Chain” members whose identities were classified as top secret.

These data were sealed in the deepest level of the biobank, in a forbidden zone even families had no right to inquire about.

Tang Yurou pulled on insulated gloves and opened the liquid nitrogen container.

White frost burst out, like a flock of resentful spirits breaking free of their bonds.

She carefully removed the sealed samples and placed them into the neural microstimulation playback device.

The technology had originally been used to study memory formation, but what Tang Yurou needed to do now was listen to the lingering echoes deep within the dead.

She inserted the electrodes precisely into the temporal lobe region of the samples, where hearing and part of memory were governed.

As a faint current was introduced, the waveform on the oscilloscope began to jump violently, as though simulating a long-since-quieted neural storm.

Tang Yurou did not interpret the complex EEG readings. Instead, she activated the sound-wave conversion program.

Then, through the monitoring headset, came a sound so deeply unsettling it made her skin crawl.

It was not language, nor static, but a low-frequency vibration carrying a compulsive rhythm.

Thunk... thunk-thunk... thunk...

As if someone trapped in a sealed space were striking metal pipes with all their strength, desperately sending out a plea for help.

Tang Yurou recognized it at once: the rhythm was almost exactly the same as the blurred distress recording from the drainage culvert incident years ago.

She tested every sample one by one, including Wei Chengyuan’s and Lu Chenzhou’s.

The result was horrifying: every brain repeated that same low, dull knocking sound.

A terrible thought struck her like lightning.

This was no coincidence, nor some accidental lesion.

Tang Yurou suddenly realized that this neural vibration was the “psychological echo trauma” formed in the brain after long-term, repeated execution of some kind of “purge order.”

That knocking may have been the sound they heard when they killed their first victim. From then on, it was burned into their subconscious, becoming a nightmare from which they could never escape.

Every time they pulled a trigger, every time they carried out a silencing, they were not merely completing a task. They were reliving, over and over in their own minds, that first, deepest terror and trauma.

In the encrypted report she submitted to Song Zhao, she used no technical terms at all. She wrote only the most direct conclusion: “They are not carrying out orders. They are repeating trauma. Every killing is another injury to their own minds.”

She titled the report with only four words: “They Are Listening.”

At 12:13 p.m., in the temporary command post the provincial disciplinary commission had set up on the outskirts of the city, the atmosphere was as heavy as a sky before a storm.

Lin Shuyue placed Su Wan’s The Fingerprint of Pen Pressure, Tang Yurou’s They Are Listening, and a third report she had compiled overnight from related evidence on the conference table, and requested an emergency hearing on the Rust Chain case.

The response was silence, followed by an upper-level leader’s blunt obstruction: “Comrade Lin Shuyue, Comrade Chen Yanting is critically ill and hospitalized. The situation is complicated. At this juncture, reopening old matters from thirty years ago is inappropriate, and it will not help stabilize the larger situation.”

Lin Shuyue did not argue.

She simply brought up an audio file from her portable device and pressed play.

First came a piece of music in the conference room, synthesized from sirens of seven different frequencies—tragic and solemn. It was a tribute created online by a hacker known as Little Ripple in memory of seven police officers who had died in the line of duty.

After sixty-eight seconds of music came a long, suffocating silence.

Just when everyone thought the audio had ended, a harsh crackle of static followed, and then a blurred, distant voice emerged.

It was a fragment recorded on the night of July 19, 1987, by the audio equipment in the duty room of the municipal water bureau, the night of the culvert accident:

“...Post A has not responded, Post A has not responded... Post B, Wu Zhiming, is requesting to execute the emergency valve-opening procedure alone...”

After a brief pause came a cold, mechanical, synthesized system warning:

“Warning: dual authorization mode. One missing, and it burns. Warning: one missing, and it burns.”

The recording cut off there.

Lin Shuyue turned off the audio and swept her gaze across everyone in the room, her voice not loud, but each word weighed like iron.

“The official conclusion from thirty years ago was that Wu Zhiming violated procedure, caused the gate to lose control, and triggered the tragedy. But the system logs tell us clearly: one missing, and it burns. This was not an accident. It was deliberate murder. And the so-called emergency response team was, from the very beginning, a crematorium designed to dispose of everyone who might leak the truth.”

The conference room sank into a deathly silence.

At last, someone broke it with a hoarse voice and asked softly, “The original document that issued the emergency inspection order... can you prove it was altered?”

Lin Shuyue nodded, her gaze unwavering. “Yes. But I need a witness—a person who saw the original with their own eyes.”

At 3:27 p.m., in the abandoned ward of the psychiatric hospital on the west side of the city, sunlight filtered through filthy windows and cast mottled shadows.

Song Zhao, accompanied by Shen Yan, found Old Zhang, who had been temporarily placed there.

The old man was curled up on a worn mattress in the corner, clutching an empty pillow tightly in his arms, while his hand gripped a crumpled piece of cigarette-paper wrapper as though it were his only lifeline.

When he saw Song Zhao, his eyes were clouded with fear.

Song Zhao did not approach. Instead, he held out a photocopy of a document from afar: the “emergency inspection order” his father, Song Changming, had received before his death.

He pointed to the signature block at the end of the file, where there was only one signature.

“Uncle Zhang,” Song Zhao said softly, “my father once said this order originally had two names on it. One was his direct superior. The other... was your father.”

Old Zhang, who had long been sunk in a haze, suddenly trembled.

His gaze slowly sharpened, moving from the document to Song Zhao’s face.

Something shattered in those clouded eyes, and something else began to gather again.

Then he suddenly lifted his head, and his expression cleared like a blade. It was as if thirty years of fog had been split open by lightning.

“Chen Yanting...” Old Zhang’s lips quivered as he forced out the name. “He came too... He was there that day, at the culvert. The rain was too heavy. I couldn’t see his face clearly. I only remember him saying to my father, ‘The decision has already been made upstairs,’ and then he left... He left...”

Song Zhao slowly closed his eyes.

The moment his fingertips brushed the cold edge of the document, a familiar, tearing dizziness surged into his mind.

The Eye of Truth flickered involuntarily, revealing a fragment of a broken image: before the culvert gate in a torrential downpour, two figures in old-style raincoats stood blurred in the rain.

One of them held a document in hand—the very order now in Song Zhao’s grasp.

And the other, turned away from the imagined camera, revealed in the instant of turning a silver cufflink of unusual design beneath the black sleeve of a raincoat.

The image cut off abruptly.

Song Zhao opened his eyes. The last trace of warmth had drained from them, leaving only bone-deep cold.

He said in a low voice to Shen Yan beside him, as though speaking to himself: “It wasn’t an error in the order. It was a conspiracy.”

At 7:11 p.m., at the seventh encrypted relay node in the disciplinary commission’s cloud system, Su Wan’s monitoring system sounded a shrill alarm.

After hours of silence, Wei Chengyuan’s terminal made one final desperate attempt—to connect to the master control room and remotely trigger the “Iron Box” detonation program placed throughout the city.

His IP address had been disguised through three layers of intricate obfuscation, finally pointing to the backup power hub of the municipal archives, a place that appeared absolutely secure and physically isolated from the network.

“Trying to slip out of the shell?” Su Wan let out a cold laugh and worked the console in a storm of rapid keystrokes.

She did not try to trace it. Instead, she directly ordered the physical power lines of the archives’ backup system to be severed.

At the same time, a data decoy packet she had prepared long ago was injected in reverse into the line Wei Chengyuan was using.

The decoy perfectly simulated the false signal of “the Iron Box original authorization file is being uploaded,” with the progress bar moving slowly and convincingly.

It was a deadly trap.

The other side, believing victory was at hand, would inevitably lower its guard and devote all its computing power to receiving the false file.

Three minutes later, Su Wan’s tracing code precisely locked onto the true control terminal that had issued the command—not some secret high-tech lair, but an old laptop hidden in the basement of Chen Yanting’s residence.

“Net it in.” Upon receiving the coordinates, Lin Shuyue said only two words, then led the assault team off at once.

In the technical room, however, Song Zhao chose to remain behind alone.

From a hidden storage cabinet, he took out the seven repaired police badge models.

He walked to the corner where they had first been discovered, pried open the floor’s concealed compartment, and carefully buried the seven badges there once more, as though completing a burial rite delayed by thirty years.

He whispered, so softly only he could hear: “This time, the roll call will not be interrupted.”

And at that very moment, on the other side of the city, in Chen Yanting’s lavish study:

The once powerful elder sat quietly in a wheelchair, his face pale, yet his eyes unnaturally bright.

He stared fixedly at the old laptop screen before him, where a forged progress bar was jumping, showing “Upload Progress: 98%.”

Victory seemed within reach.

Slowly, he lifted his hand, picked up a small pill bottle on the desk, and twisted off the cap.