Chapter 95: Severed Threads Will Reconnect Themselves

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At 6:13 a.m. deep into the night, in front of the offline terminal at the Western Technical Support Center, the air seemed to freeze into a block of ice.

Cheng Ye did not rush to decode the data inside the USB drive—it could be a trap or bait.

He chose to trust his intuition: whatever his father left fifteen years ago would never reveal its secrets so easily.

He carefully placed the USB drive into a vacuum-sealed chamber and, through the blast-proof glass, activated the infrared thermal imaging scan.

On the screen, against a dark blue background, three abnormally cold spots slowly appeared, like ghostly flames flickering in the night, arranged in a perfect equilateral triangle.

Song Zhao’s pupils suddenly contracted, and his breath momentarily stopped.

He would never forget this pattern until his last breath.

Fifteen years ago, these were the three scratch marks made by a sharp object on the heavy wooden door lock of his father’s office—exact in position and angle.

A flood of memories overwhelmed his reason, as if he had returned to that blood-red dusk.

He turned sharply, rushed to the personal storage locker in the corner, and rummaged out a dusty wooden box from the bottom shelf.

Inside lay an old-fashioned wrist guard, its edges heavily worn—a relic of the Southern Branch Boxing style passed down from his grandfather.

With trembling hands, Song Zhao untied the leather straps of the wrist guard and, feeling between the rough inner folds, found a cold, hard foreign object.

It was a miniature copper piece smaller than a fingernail, oxidized to a dull hue, with two tiny characters etched with a needle: “Renxu · Midnight.”

Holding the copper piece, Song Zhao returned to the sealed chamber and, through the glass, compared its edges with the cold spots’ virtual contours on the screen.

A miracle happened—the three pointed corners of the copper piece perfectly matched the locations of the three cold spots, fitting seamlessly.

So that was it.

This was not a digital marker but a physical one.

Fifteen years ago, at the moment before his father’s death, he must have touched this USB drive and used some extreme low-temperature method to leave this “key” on its casing—one only Cheng Ye could understand.

Cold was the temperature of death and the coordinate of memory.

He slowly closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, only icy resolve remained.

He whispered into the air, as if speaking to the lost soul of fifteen years ago, “You didn’t want me to escape; you wanted me to return.”

At 1:40 a.m., underground data room of the Ancient Archives Library.

Lin Wan’s fingers flew over the keyboard, the keystrokes like urgent drumbeats.

On the screen appeared a layered analysis of a 1998 structural blueprint of the Water Authority building.

Her gaze was sharp as an eagle’s, finally locking onto an area labeled “Emergency Command Room.”

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The blueprint showed that directly beneath this room lay a 1.7-meter-high mezzanine space—no stairs, no entrance, absent from any official records.

What shocked her even more was that the ventilation ducts inside this forgotten mezzanine aligned almost perfectly with those she had just retrieved from another top-secret archive—belonging now to a biological laboratory under the Shen Wei Foundation.

The past and present were eerily connected through these cold, hollow ducts.

She immediately pulled up the three-point coordinates of the USB drive’s metallic cold spots sent by Song Zhao and input them into her self-developed reverse spatial positioning model.

Massive data streams surged across the screen, culminating in a blinking red dot in the mezzanine space on the blueprint.

It was a hidden data transmission node, physically isolated yet maintaining a faint signal through old pipelines.

Lin Wan’s heartbeat quickened as she dug deeper, forcibly awakening a fifteen-year-old communication record—on the very day Cheng Jianguo died, his specially encrypted police radio had exchanged a pulse response lasting only 0.8 seconds with this node.

An unnoticed echo from underground.

The mystery was unveiled.

She promptly picked up her encrypted phone, calling Chen Yan, her voice trembling with excitement: “They used the old system as a ‘time anchor’ to forge new evidence. The ghosts of the past have never truly left.”

At 10:09 a.m., in the temporary disciplinary inspection command center, the atmosphere was suffocating.

Chen Yan hung up the phone, his expression grave.

Without hesitation, he submitted a highest-level access request to the Urban Construction Archives under the official title “Historical Archive Rescue Project,” targeting all infrastructure approval files from the three medical institutions under the Shen Wei Foundation.

Opposite him, Tang Yurou rapidly compared every architectural drawing she could find.

Her expertise lay in forensic pathology and medical processes; now, her finger traced back and forth between the ventilation shaft layouts on the blueprints and the operational flow of a standard cerebrospinal fluid drainage surgery.

Suddenly, she stopped, pointing to two marked spots on the drawings, looking up at Chen Yan: “These two ventilation shafts connect directly to the sterile area of the operating rooms, and their locations are extremely concealed. If they were conducting live neural interface experiments, this would be the perfect place.”

She paused and added, “Their so-called ‘echo chamber’ doesn’t require large, sophisticated equipment, only three conditions: absolute constant temperature, total darkness, and minimal physical vibration. These could be met by a specially modified refrigerated truck or… some forgotten underground archive.”

At 12:26 p.m., the abandoned site of the Water Authority.

Rubble cast fragmented shadows under the scorching midday sun.

Song Zhao, accompanied by Shen Yan, once again set foot on this scorched earth of fifteen years past.

He did not disturb the ruins but instead unloaded a portable geological radar from the vehicle, scanning the cracked foundation inch by inch where his father’s office had been.

The radar’s buzzing was monotonous and dull until a signal waveform suddenly deviated sharply on the screen.

About 1.7 meters below the surface, a clear cavity reflection appeared, along with irregular metallic echoes inside.

They had found it!

A gleam flashed in Song Zhao’s eyes as he immediately instructed the technicians to begin careful excavation at the pinpointed spot.

Two hours later, a rust-stained metal safe was unearthed from the damp earth.

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The safe was small but extremely heavy, its lock an outdated, double-row tooth police standard type long since obsolete.

Shen Yan crouched down, scrutinizing a blurred brand on the side of the safe, his face changing: “This is a field evidence storage box issued uniformly by the ‘Renxu Group’ back then. Each had a unique number and was supposed to have been fully cataloged and destroyed.”

Song Zhao said nothing, donned insulated gloves, and slowly opened the safe with specialized tools.

No explosion, no traps—just a wave of musty, scorched paper odor wafted out.

Inside lay a well-preserved magnetic tape and a half-burned, incomplete photocopy of an autopsy report.

In the signature section of the report, three characters were faintly discernible—Zhou Zhengsheng.

Yet Song Zhao’s gaze was fixed on the pressure marks of those characters, an unnaturally hesitant and delayed tracing.

At 7:55 p.m., in the Evidence Analysis Room of the Support Center.

Outside the window, rain poured in torrents and thunder roared.

Song Zhao fed the old tape into professional restoration equipment. After a burst of harsh electrical noise, a hoarse, urgent male voice crackled intermittently from the speaker: “…they’re not dead… echoes can awaken… don’t trust the cremation records… I’m at D7…”

The voice abruptly cut off, leaving only silence.

Song Zhao ignored the content, focusing intently on the spectrum analysis graph on the screen.

In the last few frames before the voice vanished, he caught an extremely faint background sound—a very low frequency, nearly infrasonic compressed refrigeration hum.

He suddenly rose from his seat, fingers flying over the keyboard, pulling up the general layout map of the Western City Logistics Park.

When he compared the operating frequency data of the underground refrigeration units of the D7 cold chain storage center with the resonant peak in the recording’s background sound, the two waveforms matched perfectly.

He turned to Lin Wan beside him and said, “D7 isn’t the end point—it’s a live transfer station. What my father left behind isn’t evidence; it’s a map.”

Before he finished speaking, the massive surveillance screen on the wall flickered momentarily with the live feed from the D7 warehouse.

It was a millisecond-level signal interference—too quick to notice, but Cheng Ye’s eyes caught it.

As the image stabilized, between the tightly closed heavy cold storage doors, something pale seemed to flash by.

Like a crooked finger, moving ever so slightly in despair.

Song Zhao’s gaze froze instantly.

He slowly approached the map, his eyes passing over the red mark of the D7 warehouse, extending to a wider area—the intersecting highways, railways, and the high-voltage power grid running through the entire park.

The plan of action had to change.

A frontal assault would be suicide; they needed a god’s-eye view—a vantage point to oversee the whole situation and seize control of the enemy’s lifeline.

His finger finally rested on the base of a towering high-voltage power tower, three hundred meters from the D7 warehouse.