Chapter 94: Before Empathy, Leave Evidence First

Page (1/3)

At 9:07 PM, in the emergency underground passage beneath the Technical Support Center.

The air was thick with a cold metallic scent mixed with damp concrete.

Song Zhao pressed his back against the wall, breathing shallowly, like a soulless shell relying only on his eardrums and fingertips to perceive the outside world.

He could hear his own heartbeat, and also the hesitant footsteps pausing at the end of the passage—the intruders were waiting for him to reveal his position.

But Song Zhao did not move.

A moment ago, in the control room, a fleeting touch had allowed him to catch residual echoes from the refrigerated cabinet’s door frame: two heartbeats, rhythm deliberately suppressed but still betraying signs of training—right foot landing slightly heavier, stride consistently at 78 centimeters, with an error margin no greater than 2 centimeters.

This was a standard tactical synchronization step, commonly used by special operations units during nighttime raids.

But they had made a fatal mistake: they did not cut off the emergency lighting’s backup power.

The faint green glow was enough to outline human silhouettes.

Song Zhao closed his eyes, letting the heartbeat frequencies from the echoes reverberate in his mind, overlapping and comparing them with the actual footsteps.

The person on the left front had steadier steps, the leader; the one to the right rear was slightly unsteady, injured or nervous.

They were spaced 0.8 seconds apart, deliberately staggered to avoid sonic reflection interference, but they overlooked the influence of humidity on sound transmission.

He knew exactly what to do.

His right hand silently slid toward the fire valve at his waist, fingertips hooking the pull ring, gathering strength.

Three seconds.

Two seconds.

Just as the man on the left raised his hand to activate a thermal imager, Song Zhao yanked the fire valve down fiercely!

“Shhh—!”

A high-pressure water mist roared out, instantly enveloping the entire passage.

Alarms blared sharply, red lights flashed, and water droplets struck the metal walls like rapid drumbeats.

The intruders reacted swiftly, retreating immediately, but the mist distorted the infrared, disabling the thermal imaging.

Song Zhao was already in motion.

Nan Zhi Fist emphasized “low sweeps for high defense, elbows and knees as blades.”

He slid close to the ground, his right leg whipping toward the outside of the left front man’s knee, striking precisely at the joint gap.

The man grunted and collapsed. Before he could rise, Song Zhao’s elbow hammered down like an iron hammer on the shoulder’s Jing Well point, twisting the arm into a lock.

The other shouted in rage and drew his gun, firing blindly, shattering the overhead light.

Glass exploded in shards.

Song Zhao used the noise as cover to roll and sidestep, placing the captive in front of him as a human shield.

Gunfire resumed, bullets grazing metal cabinets, sparks flying.

Unable to lock on, the shooter turned and fled, footsteps urgent but still maintaining tactical rhythm.

Song Zhao did not pursue.

He pressed on the captive’s carotid artery, confirming unconsciousness, then searched him quickly. As the glove slipped off, a dark blue tattoo starkly appeared on the inside of the left arm—a twisted serpent entwined around the number “14,” beneath which was a tiny line of Latin: “Veritas in Tenebris.”

Song Zhao’s pupils contracted sharply.

He had seen this symbol before.

At the scene of the West City massacre fifteen years ago, a cigarette butt under the kitchen stove bore the same pattern on its packaging.

That case was classified as a vendetta murder at the time; the killer had never been caught.

The evidence had mysteriously disappeared in the third year after the case was sealed.

Now, it appeared on a military-trained assassin ordered to eliminate anyone connected to “Echo.”

Page (2/3)

He stared coldly at the unconscious man, his mind racing through deductions: the list of victims’ relatives from the massacre, companies linked to the Foundation, investigators who had died suspiciously in recent years... An invisible thread was slowly emerging, connecting past and present.

Five minutes later, Song Zhao delivered the captive to the disciplinary committee’s temporary detention point.

Facing Chen Yan’s questioning, he replied calmly: “Judging by footprint depth and center of gravity shift, the suspect is left-handed and exposed a flaw during the ambush.” Not a word about the echoes.

At 4:18 AM, Lin Wan’s desk lamp was still burning.

Her fingers flew over the keyboard as dozens of windows filled her screen.

She finally decrypted the encrypted section in the captured phone, disguised as a psychological intervention hotline.

A recorded voice played—a mechanical female tone stating calmly: “Eliminate all evidence contacts related to ‘Echo.’”

A chill ran down her spine.

This was not a simple silencing—it was a sophisticated system of social erasure.

She pulled up nearly three years of reception records from the “Heartbridge Psychological Counseling Center” under the Shen Wei Foundation and cross-referenced internal personnel flow data from the judiciary.

The startling discovery: at least seven investigators declared “dead from illness” or “accidental deaths” had registered under aliases.

All their deaths clustered within two weeks before a high-level hearing.

She closed her eyes sharply, constructing a complete chain in her mind—psychological manipulation creating the illusion of mental breakdown, hospitals issuing death certificates, funeral homes canceling identities, and cryogenic preservation concealing the body.

The so-called “postmortem revival” was merely reawakening those marked for elimination, implanting false memories to turn them into puppets or test subjects.

“They’re not killing... they’re rewriting lives,” she murmured, fingers trembling as she opened the updated “White Paper,” naming this model the “Three-Phase Erasure Protocol,” and setting an automatic push program to broadcast across the entire network one hour before the special investigation court convened.

At 11:02 AM, the Provincial Disciplinary Committee meeting room.

Chen Yan stood before the projector, voice steady: “We have applied to exhume Chen Yanting’s body for autopsy. The armed police will arrive at the funeral home at 2 PM today to escort the process.”

The room erupted in murmurs.

Suddenly Shen Yan stood up: “I request to join the operation. As a Wei family descendant, I have old acquaintances locally who may reduce resistance.”

Song Zhao sat quietly in the corner, watching him.

This young man, once his comrade-in-arms, now wore a face full of resolve but could not hide the cracks beneath his eyes.

After the meeting, Song Zhao intercepted Shen Yan in the stairwell.

“Your father’s name,” he said softly, “appears in the peripheral investigation notes of the massacre fifteen years ago, in the anonymous tip-off list for the forced demolition murder three years ago, and in the co-sign section of the first batch of ‘Echo Project’ test subjects’ approval documents... They won’t let you live to prove anything.”

Shen Yan smiled bitterly: “If I don’t go, who will prove he’s not the killer?”

Song Zhao was silent for a long moment, then withdrew a black device no larger than a matchbox from his inner pocket, pressing it into Shen Yan’s hand.

“Stick it inside your shirt pocket, near your heart. Don’t let them inject you.”

Shen Yan nodded and turned away.

At the corridor’s end, sunlight slanted in but could not penetrate the deep shadow in Cheng Ye’s eyes.

Instead, it ignited the fuse of everything to come.

At 3:49 PM, outside the suburban funeral home’s mortuary.

Tang Yurou stood before the iron gate, carrying a silver case as the wind lifted strands of hair from her forehead.

She glanced up at the surveillance camera, then slowly opened the case, withdrawing a portable Raman spectrometer.

The device emitted a faint hum as it powered on; its screen glowed blue.

She knelt, fingertips gently tracing a ring of dark gray sealing glue around the coffin base.

At 3:49 PM, outside the suburban funeral home’s mortuary.

The wind slipped through the iron gate’s cracks, carrying the cold scent of rust and formaldehyde unique to funeral homes.

Tang Yurou crouched before the coffin; the spectrometer’s blue light reflected in her pupils like a silent alarm.

The device beeped twice, displaying a waveform on screen—peak anomalies concentrated at 420 nanometers wavelength, a typical response of nano-scale fluorescent markers.

Page (3/3)

Her fingertips trembled.

Such markers do not occur naturally.

They are engineered to activate under specific pressure or temperature shifts; once the coffin lid opens and the seal breaks, fluorescent particles vaporize and disperse, triggering remote signal transmission through air flow.

In a sense, the coffin itself was a living beacon.

“Cut communications,” she whispered to Cheng Ye behind her, voice barely audible, as if fearing to disturb the sleeping dead.

Song Zhao nodded, already signaling the perimeter technicians to sever all wireless frequencies.

He knelt, withdrawing a small inert gas spray canister from his tactical bag—argon, which neutralizes potential airborne chemical triggers.

He slowly sprayed around the coffin, a silvery mist like sheer veils enveloping the casket, isolating it from any external disturbance.

Tang Yurou took a deep breath, donned double-layer latex gloves, and used non-magnetic tweezers to scrape a small sample from the sealing glue’s edge, sealing it in a vacuum tube.

Her movements were steady but knuckles paled.

She understood that at this moment, they were not just opening a coffin, but defusing a bomb set two decades ago.

Song Zhao rose and personally took the coffin-opening tools.

Insulated gloves fit snugly, blocking electrical currents and possible bioelectrical sensing traps.

He slowly inserted the hydraulic prop rod into the coffin lid’s seam; metal rubbed with a faint “creak,” like awakening an ancient mechanism.

The instant the lid lifted, a wave of musty cold air struck their faces.

The corpse’s face was swollen, waxy gray skin, slightly bulging eyeballs, but the jawline was too rounded and the nasal bone collapsed at an odd angle.

Tang Yurou quickly switched on a portable light source, adjusting it to side illumination, shining into the mouth.

Using a micro retractor, she gently parted the lips, staring a moment until her pupils contracted sharply.

“Teeth,” she whispered, “three front teeth have porcelain veneers with evidence of secondary restoration on the gum line. Chen Yanting’s dental records show only two fillings and no cosmetic treatment.”

Song Zhao silently bent down, eyes fixed on the corpse’s right hand—an old fracture on the second joint of the pinky, but Chen Yanting’s injury was on the left hand.

He slowly looked up, locking eyes with Tang Yurou.

“A body double,” he said, voice rumbling as if from the depths of the earth.

Tang Yurou withdrew a sampling needle, drew a vial of blood from the corpse’s neck, and quickly loaded it into a portable centrifuge.

Three minutes later, the plasma layer showed an abnormal milky white.

“Lipid emulsion residue,” she said tensely, “a hallmark of cryogenic preservation and revival. They use drugs to maintain metabolic illusions, then fake death and place the double in the coffin as a substitute.”

She looked up at Song Zhao, her eyes reflecting the mortuary’s pale light.

“The real Chen Yanting is still inside the ‘Echo Chamber.’ They didn’t kill him. They need him alive—as a control subject or... a living database.”

Song Zhao said nothing.

He stared at the meticulously fabricated corpse, but in his mind flashed the cigarette butt from the West City massacre fifteen years ago, the serpent tattoo, and the Latin on the assassin’s arm tonight—Veritas in Tenebris.

Truth hides in darkness.

And they were stepping deeper into the very core of that darkness.

The wind swept past the iron gate again, lifting Tang Yurou’s hair.

She closed the device and whispered, “The data is encrypted and sealed... but they will definitely know we opened the coffin.”

Song Zhao slowly closed the coffin lid, voice low: “They aren’t afraid we opened the coffin. They fear that we’re beginning to understand their rules.”

He turned and walked toward the car, his shadow stretched long by the setting sun, like a blade slicing light from shadow.

Yet at this moment, he did not know that the USB drive beneath his insole silently pulsed with a memory long dead but not yet extinguished.