Chapter 92: The Flame Never Dies, and the Roll Call Goes On

Under the cold glow of the fluorescent lights, the data stream writhed across the screen like a soundless snake.

Su Wan’s fingertips hovered above the keyboard, the joints whitening faintly with the force of her grip.

The route map before her looked like an intricately tangled web, and the encrypted packet at the seventh node was the prey suspended at its center, waiting for the first touch of sunlight.

Six hours. The countdown had already begun.

Song Zhao’s silence lasted only three seconds, and in those three seconds, the air in the underground data room seemed to harden into glass.

Then his voice broke the stillness, low and powerful: “Then let it grow legs. Let it run. Let it outrun everyone who wants to catch it.”

At ten oh five in the morning, sunlight pierced the old blinds and cut bright shafts through the dust-filled air.

The control room at the former Water Bureau site carried the mingled scent of rust and old paper.

The core members of the task force stood around an improvised conference table made from two desks pushed together, the atmosphere grave and solemn.

At the center of the table lay seven police badges, charred black and warped by fire, silently bearing witness to all they had endured.

Beside them was the long-spread map of the Renxu fund flow, a document that had consumed nearly half of Song Zhao’s father’s life’s work. Every thread upon it looked like a scar that could never fully heal.

Song Zhao’s fingers brushed lightly over a list of universities.

“We can’t keep hiding them in any fixed place,” he said, his gaze moving over everyone present. “Any fixed fortress can be broken from inside or out. The only way is to let them move.”

He put forward a plan so bold it bordered on madness: all core evidence, including the seven badges and the original fund flow map, would be handed over in sealed custody to a newly formed university consortium archive alliance.

The alliance consisted of public memory research centers from five of the country’s leading universities, each serving as backup for the others, with shared supervisory authority.

And, most crucially, they would launch the mobile exhibition program.

“A mobile exhibition?” Lin Shuyue frowned. As the city bureau’s representative, she could not help feeling instinctively uneasy about placing core evidence in public view. “That’s too risky.”

“It isn’t about hiding,” Song Zhao said. His voice was not loud, yet every word struck like iron. “It’s about spreading. A single spark can be crushed underfoot. But if you scatter the embers and let them burn in all directions, then when the wind rises, they become a prairie fire. Our purpose is not to protect the evidence. It is to protect the truth. And truth needs witnesses. The more, the better.”

Shen Yan, who had remained silent until now, suddenly lifted his head. His expression was complicated, marked by a pain that could barely be seen.

“My father...” he said. “When he was alive, the thing he feared most was anything in the family being dragged beyond its proper circle. He always said that once a matter, once an object, was placed under the magnifying glass of scholarship—publicly discussed, studied, cited—it would leave its original orbit. It would no longer be a private affair that some department could handle behind closed doors. It would acquire a public nature and become part of history.”

His words were like a key, instantly unlocking everyone’s thinking.

“That’s right,” Tang Yurou said at once. As the forensic pathologist, her voice was calm and professional. “The pathological narrative report on Wei Chengyuan should not merely be sealed away in the case file. I suggest anonymizing it and incorporating it into the teaching case library of Jiangcheng University’s medical school. Let future forensic students learn from it, learn how to identify this kind of ‘trauma of power’—the kind twisted and concealed by authority—from a body. That, in itself, is a form of inheritance.”

Lin Shuyue stared at the handover order in front of her. Every word on it felt as weighty as a mountain.

She thought of the sound from the archive center last night, that sigh-like anomaly in the system. She thought of Song Zhao’s words: let them have no time to burn it.

At last she understood. What they were doing was not waging a battle of offense and defense against an invisible force. They were changing the rules of the battlefield itself.

No longer hesitating, she picked up the pen and signed her name.

The scratch of the nib across the paper rang out with unusual clarity in the silent control room.

At twelve thirty-six noon, the river wind howled, tugging at the hem of Song Zhao’s clothes.

He stood alone on the high embankment, the surging river below him carrying the secrets this city had layered upon itself.

In his hand he held a brand-new police badge. The silver insignia flashed with a chill brilliance beneath the leaden sky.

On the circular base before him, the seven charred badges formed a ring, like seven silent sentinels.

Song Zhao bent down and gently set the new badge into the empty space at the center.

The eighth badge, neither more nor less.

It stood for every witness who had not been erased. It stood for themselves.

The moment the badge settled into place, the emergency broadcast speakers scattered throughout the city suddenly shattered the noon quiet.

No warning. No prelude. Without any sign, a strange audio file was injected into the system.

It was an old man’s hoarse cry, wrung from the last of his strength: “Arrive—!”

Then seven police sirens, each at a different frequency and slightly distorted, interwove into a tragic and piercing wave of sound that split the heavens.

The recording was not long. Exactly sixty-eight seconds.

Citizens exercising along the riverbank came to an abrupt halt.

Some instinctively pulled out their phones to film the bizarre scene; others stood in solemn silence, their expressions grave.

An elderly retired policeman with gray hair and a sturdy frame trembled faintly. He gripped the arm of a young man beside him and asked in a tight voice, “Son, what is this... what is it for?”

The young man shook his head in confusion. “I don’t know, sir. It has no beginning and no end, but it sounds like... like someone is calling the roll, calling people home.”

At three nineteen in the afternoon, the Evidence Preservation Center of the Provincial High People’s Court.

The atmosphere was solemn and taut.

Lin Shuyue stood before a row of server racks, personally overseeing as technicians imported the entire digital archive of the Renxu case—more than one hundred gigabytes of encrypted data packets—into the judicial blockchain evidence preservation system.

Every byte would be stamped with a time mark and turned into a unique, irreversible hash.

This was the digital line of defense in their plan. Once complete, no one would be able to alter or delete the archive by technical means.

A notary stood by, ready to conduct judicial notarization the instant the hash was generated.

The progress bar moved slowly but steadily toward one hundred percent.

Then, just as completion was at hand, a crimson permissions warning window suddenly flashed across every screen.

“The Supreme Court filing channel has been temporarily frozen!” one technician cried out.

The official explanation on the window was cold and arrogant: “Due to major unresolved historical issues, an interdepartmental consultation process must be initiated. The channel is suspended.”

Lin Shuyue’s heart plunged.

Tang Yurou reacted with astonishing speed. She did not challenge anyone. Instead, she rushed to a technical terminal, her hands becoming a blur over the keyboard as she rapidly pulled the system’s backend logs.

One line of small text made her pupils contract sharply—the freezing order did not come from the Supreme Court’s main server, but from an internal network IP that had long since been注销 in the system, its physical address pointing to the city bureau building.

She recognized it immediately. It was the dedicated IP address of Chen Yanting’s office terminal during the years he served as deputy director.

A “ghost” long dead was still manipulating the network of power in the living world.

“They’re using rules outside the rules to block us,” Tang Yurou said, her face dark with anger. She did not waste time on it. Instead, she immediately opened a new document and rapidly drafted an emergency memo titled “On Abnormal Administrative Interference Encountered by the Judicial Evidence Preservation System,” attaching all technical details: IP address, freeze time, command code, everything.

When she finished, she did not submit it through ordinary channels. Instead, she used the Discipline Inspection Commission’s internal dedicated encrypted line to send the memo directly to the provincial supervisory office on duty.

At the same time, in another corner of the court lobby, Song Zhao passed by a public comment box as though by chance.

He took a court-issued comment form from his pocket and quickly copied a few lines onto the back.

They were notes from the old notebook his father had left behind, records of the fleeting details of the Eye of Truth.

He wrote nothing extra. At the very end, he added only one line: “Please thoroughly examine the silver cuff link among Wei Chengyuan’s belongings.”

Then he folded the note and, like any ordinary citizen submitting an opinion, slipped it casually into the slot of the mailbox.

At seven oh two in the evening, the last glow of the sunset vanished completely below the horizon, and the city’s lights began to blaze one after another.

Inside the Discipline Inspection Commission’s technical office, Su Wan let out a long breath.

The screen before her showed that the university consortium had formally confirmed receipt of the first batch of evidence, and all five universities had simultaneously posted announcements on their official websites for the opening stop of the mobile exhibition program, to be held at a cultural center in a remote grassroots community in the western region.

The first spark had been thrown.

She shut down the terminal, rubbed her sore eyes, and prepared to leave.

As she stood, her gaze accidentally swept across the temporary desk Shen Yan had used.

A notebook lay open on it, apparently left behind in his haste.

One hastily sketched page caught her eye like a magnet.

It was a circuit layout diagram.

At a glance, she recognized that the structure matched the architectural plans of the secret study chamber in Wei Chengyuan’s room with uncanny precision.

And on the drawing, one section had been circled in red, with a small annotation beside it: “Backup power, independent of the municipal grid, directly connected to the diesel generator set behind the mountain.”

A horrifying thought struck Su Wan like lightning.

She dropped back into her chair at once, hands trembling as she brought up a program and began reverse-tracing all regional power outages in Jiangcheng over the past seven days.

A line of data flashed up instantly: around the former site of the psychiatric hospital in the western district, there had been a power failure lasting seventeen minutes at one o’clock in the morning last night.

That was where Old Zhang was now being housed temporarily.

She snatched up the phone and dialed Song Zhao’s number, nearly shouting into the receiver.

The moment the call connected, her voice turned sharp and tremulous with fear.

“Song Zhao! They haven’t given up on burning the archive... they’ve only changed how they’re doing it! They don’t want to burn paper anymore—they want to burn people!”

At that moment, Song Zhao was standing before his father’s grave.

The night wind was desolate, sweeping through the empty cemetery as if carrying with it the lingering echo of the emergency broadcast from the distant city.

He closed his eyes, his cold fingertips lightly touching the cold tombstone, the name engraved there being both the beginning and the end of everything he had done.

Before Su Wan’s horrified cry could fully cut through the line, he seemed, in a trance, to hear from the depths of the river beneath his feet an answer traveling across time and space:

Arrive—

The wind suddenly sharpened into a keening wail, like the sobbing of the dead.

Song Zhao’s eyes flew open. His fingers around the phone tightened at once, and a chill more cutting than winter’s night surged up his spine and to the crown of his head.

He knew that the abandoned psychiatric hospital was no longer a place of refuge.

It had become a trap, a silent crematorium prepared for the last witness.