Chapter 91: A Delayed Roll Call, But No One Will Be Missing

The torrent of data fell silent beneath Su Wan’s fingertips.

She leaned back in her chair with a small, weary breath, and only after the last command had been completed did the taut nerves in her body finally release a faint, delayed shiver of exhaustion.

Shen Yan stood behind her, silent as a mountain. His shadow enveloped her, shutting out the cold, colorless white glare of the server room.

He did not look at the file on the screen titled Technical White Paper on the Institutional Erasure Mechanism. He only watched Su Wan’s tired profile.

Her voice was very soft, yet it struck like a steel nail driven straight into the most painful corner of his memory. “Every file your father burned has been reborn here.”

Shen Yan’s throat moved once. He said nothing, but Su Wan could feel that the long-lingering gloom around him had been split open by that single sentence, a slit so fine that a thread of light had slipped through.

At nine o’clock that morning, in the press hall of the Provincial Higher People’s Court, a sea of camera flashes suddenly rose like a storm-tossed wave.

Lin Shuyue stood behind the podium in a crisp disciplinary commission uniform, her expression grave, her gaze sharp as a blade as it swept across the faces below—some stunned, some confused, some exhilarated.

The large screen behind her no longer displayed the customary red-and-white backdrop. It had become a deep, dark blue.

When she announced in a voice devoid of all emotion, “Regarding the Renxu Incident, the Provincial Commission for Discipline Inspection and Supervision and the Provincial Higher People’s Court have jointly decided to establish a special investigative tribunal,” the murmuring below was forcibly suppressed, and the air seemed to harden into a viscous gel.

Then, without giving the reporters a single chance to ask a question, she turned slightly and signaled to the technicians to play the footage.

There was no stirring music, no lengthy narration—only a specially processed audio file, slowly unfolding.

It was the sound of police sirens, but broken apart and reassembled into seven melodies of varying length and pitch, interwoven into a requiem of sorrow and endurance.

Xiao Lian’s synthesis technique had made the audio completely avoid all ordinary frequencies. It was not shrill, yet it could slip precisely into the ear and stir the deepest unease and grief.

On the screen, seven black-and-white photographs appeared one by one in time with the music. From youth to middle age, their smiles had been frozen in the past. Their eyes shone with life, as though they could pierce through the screen and gaze at the world they had protected with their lives, only to be forgotten in the end.

“We will initiate a full accountability process against all those responsible for the Renxu Incident on charges including historical fraud, abuse of power, and intentional homicide,” Lin Shuyue said, each word landing like a judge’s gavel upon every heart in the room.

A veteran reporter immediately seized the microphone, his voice trembling slightly with excitement. “Director Lin! The central suspect in this case, the former municipal Party secretary Chen Yanting, has already passed away from illness. How does the disciplinary commission intend to hold him accountable?”

The question was like a stone thrown into a deep lake, sending ripples of curiosity through the hall.

To hold a dead man accountable?

Was this a legal joke, or a declaration of war unlike any before it?

Lin Shuyue fixed her gaze on the reporter and answered calmly. Beneath that calm lay a force strong enough to overturn rivers and seas. “Death is not the end. Forgetting is. In accordance with the law, we will apply to the Supreme People’s Court for exhumation and autopsy to determine Chen Yanting’s true cause of death.”

A collective gasp erupted.

The entire press hall was instantly detonated.

Exhumation and autopsy.

These four words carried a shock far beyond anything that had come before.

They meant that this struggle would no longer be confined to archives and evidence. It would go straight to the most primitive, most direct method of prying open a grave long since sealed by final judgment, of challenging the last vestige of dignity left to a vast and entrenched power.

At twelve forty in the afternoon, the river wind cut like a blade.

Song Zhao stood alone at the edge of the riverside platform, with the rushing water below him, as though it meant to carry every secret in the world into the sea.

Behind him, seven police-badge models, blackened and warped by fire, hung from ultra-thin steel wires. In the wind they struck one another, making a series of small, crisp sounds, faintly ghostlike.

He did not turn around. He merely pressed play on the recorder in his hand.

The tribute piece synthesized from police siren frequencies poured from the tiny device, struggling alone against the howling wind.

Almost at the same moment, Su Wan, on the other side of the city, remotely accessed the municipal broadcasting system.

The noon news had just ended, and an advertisement was about to begin.

She caught the three-second gap with perfect precision and pushed the audio stream into it.

There was no narration, no subtitles. In every taxi, shopping mall, office tower, and roadside shop across the city—anywhere the radio was on—a strange melody suddenly sounded for sixty-eight seconds, without warning.

Drivers at the wheel would feel a sudden pang of unease. Shoppers would instinctively stop in their tracks. White-collar workers in office towers would awaken from the fog of their lunch-hour drowse.

No one knew what it was. They only felt that the sound was like a summons from a distant age, like a cry without words.

Not far from the riverside viewing platform, at the edge of the crowd, an old man in a worn jacket—Old Zhang—slowly took a flattened slip of cigarette pack paper from his pocket.

With trembling hands, he silently raised it. On it were seven names, crookedly written in ballpoint pen.

His cloudy eyes looked toward the solitary figure on the platform, his lips moving, though no sound came out.

The wind passed over, as if speaking those names for him.

At two oh nine in the afternoon, at the site of the old Waterworks main control room.

Dust danced in shafts of light that streamed through the broken windows. Everything here remained exactly as it had been years ago, as if time itself had been sealed in place.

Song Zhao led a sharp special task force back to the scene. He went straight to the enormous control console, crouched down, and behind an inconspicuous metal panel beneath the tabletop, he retrieved a metal box scorched by fire as well.

Inside were seven genuine police badges, hidden there and spared from the blaze and the later cleanup.

He took them out one by one and laid them carefully on the conference table from those years ago. Beneath each badge was a name.

The cameras had already been set up. The red recording light came on.

Straightening his collar, Song Zhao faced the lens. His voice was steady and hoarse. “This is not revenge. This is repayment.”

He paused, then lifted the first badge. “They were not the cold, nameless ‘identity unknown’ entries in the file. They were Song Jianguo.”

On the large screen behind him, a photograph of his father in his youth appeared at once, full of vigor and valor.

“Li Zhenbang.”

“Wang Weiguo.”

With every name he spoke, his voice grew heavier, and another vivid face lit up on the screen behind him.

When he finished the seventh name—Zhou Zhiqiang—and gently set the final badge back on the table, every member of the task force present, men and women alike, unconsciously straightened and offered silent salutes to those seven faces.

After the recording ended, Lin Shuyue walked to his side and asked softly, “What do you want to do next?” She could feel that beneath Song Zhao’s calm exterior, a volcano was being held down, one on the verge of eruption.

Song Zhao’s gaze passed over her and drifted toward the murky river outside the window. His voice was so soft it was nearly scattered by the wind. “Make sure everyone hears it.”

At 6:59 in the evening, the sky was as dark and heavy as iron.

On Su Wan’s computer screen, the final data synchronization bar at last reached one hundred percent.

All the core evidence in the disciplinary commission’s cloud archive, including the white paper that had just been generated, had been encrypted and distributed to twelve top-secret backup nodes across the country.

That meant that unless someone could destroy all twelve top-level servers belonging to different systems at the same time, this evidence would never die.

She shut down the terminal, let out a long breath, and looked out the window.

The rain that had lasted all day had somehow already stopped. A huge rent had been torn through the thick clouds, and cold moonlight poured down like a waterfall, bathing the churning river below. Every ripple glittered with silver.

Hundreds of kilometers away, in a border town utterly unlike River City, Bai Zhiyu stood before an old fireplace.

She opened a velvet box. Inside lay a bronze key of classical design, resting in silence.

It was one of the relics left by her father, Lin Haoyu: a key to a Swiss bank vault.

She had once believed it contained the fortune her father had left her. Now she understood that what it locked away was his crime, and his final token of allegiance.

Without expression, she tossed the key into the blazing fire.

The bronze heated swiftly, reddened, and finally melted little by little, warping out of shape until it merged with the burning charcoal.

At the very instant the flames rose and painted her pale face red, she seemed to hear the wind from distant River City, to hear that melody that had echoed above the city for sixty-eight seconds.

She whispered, “I heard it.”

At the same moment, in the cemetery on the western outskirts of River City, Song Zhao stood before his father Song Jianguo’s gravestone and placed upon the cold stone a newly cast police badge, bright with moonlight.

Wind came off the river and swept through the pine grove, making a sound as vast as the sea, as if answering the oath he had never spoken aloud, yet had already carved into his bones: this time, history would not be washed away again.

After the noise and upheaval of the day, the city gradually sank into the silence of deep night.

The storm of daylight seemed to have settled into dust. The banner of justice had been raised high.

And yet, beneath that hard-won calm, an invisible undercurrent was gathering at greater speed.

Their counterattack had been so public, so resolute, that it was like a loud battle cry. Though it had shaken their enemies, it had also laid their own position bare.

Shen Yan remained alone in the underground data room of the municipal archives. He had promised Su Wan that he would stay there until dawn.

He believed in Su Wan’s skill. He believed in the unbreakability of blockchain.

And yet, for some reason, the unease in his heart only grew stronger.

He stared at the intertwined streams of data on the monitoring screen. Everything was normal.

But just then, one indicator light on the backup power system flashed once, without warning and with the faintest tremor, its rhythm uncannily close to a heartbeat.

That was not a malfunction. It was more like a sigh.