Chapter 105: This Time, We Check In Alive

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The cheap curtains of the guesthouse could not fully block the moonlight. Its pallid glow cast a narrow streak across the floor.

At three in the morning, Song Zhao’s eyes were webbed with red veins. He had not turned on the lights; only the glow of his laptop illuminated his intent face.

The unsigned old photograph was repeatedly processed by the spectral restoration software Lin Wan had provided. Each calculation felt like another prolonged session of torture.

The noise was stripped away layer by layer, as though dust were being swept from a skeleton buried by time. Details struggled to emerge amid distortion and reconstruction.

Finally, when the algorithm erased the last layer of Gaussian blur, Song Zhao’s breath stopped.

The mottled sign on the emergency center in the background of the photograph came sharply into focus.

Its lettering and method of suspension were not those of the original from 1999. They were the new style adopted during reconstruction after the fire of 2003 that had consumed everything.

A cold conclusion pierced his mind: Lu Chen was not only alive; he had returned to those ruins. After twenty years of silence, he had used a seemingly ordinary photograph to chisel a tiny yet fatal flaw into the timeline.

This was not an oversight. It was a trap—a riddle prepared for one particular person.

He was confirming whether there was still anyone in this world capable of understanding his “echo” across twenty years.

Without the slightest hesitation, Song Zhao remotely breached the security system of the border logistics park.

It was the most likely place for Lu Chen to be hiding: a chaotic crossroads of people and interests, with a constant flow of movement. Countless shipping containers stood like steel labyrinths, enough to make anyone disappear into thin air.

He set the search period to the previous three weeks, narrowing the target to nighttime, especially the hours before dawn.

The tedious investigation continued for nearly two hours, until the appearance of one figure made the blood in his veins begin to flow again.

The surveillance footage was poor, but the man appeared around two in the morning every Wednesday. He wore greasy maintenance overalls, carried a toolbox, and inspected the refrigeration equipment in the cold-chain zone.

He never spoke to anyone. His head was always lowered, his cap pulled deep over his face.

But once, when he bent to pick up a fallen wrench, the outline of his back in that instant, the stoop of his figure, and the habitual droop of his left shoulder overlapped perfectly with the eighth person standing at the far edge of the photograph.

Song Zhao shut off the surveillance feed. The heartbeat in his chest sounded heavy as a drum.

He did not report to his superiors. He did not even tell Chen Yan.

Lu Chen’s rules demanded an answer in the same language.

From the pocket against his body, he took out the copper plate already warmed by his skin. It was the identification tag of his father, Cheng Rui.

He found an old Nanzhi-style boxing wrist guard polished bright by years of handling, and carefully slipped the copper plate into the inner lining.

Then he tore off a note and, with the most ordinary carbon pen, wrote a single line:

“Bent branches do not break; the roots remain in the earth.

You have been hiding for twenty years. It is time to come back and sign in.”

He left no name. Anyone who understood would understand.

He contacted a herder who traveled year-round between the border and the transfer stations, handed him the wrapped wrist guard, and merely said it was an old belonging of a longtime friend. He asked the man to place it in Ventilation Shaft Seven in Zone D of the transfer station.

That was a blind spot in the surveillance network, as well as the central hub of the entire logistics park’s abandoned pipeline system—enough to carry anything silently to wherever it was meant to go.

For forty-eight hours, Cheng Ye scarcely slept.

Every second felt like walking across burning sand.

The maintenance worker did not appear again, as if he had vanished from the face of the earth.

Just as Song Zhao’s patience was about to run out, a new email arrived in his encrypted mailbox. It had no subject and no sender information, only an audio attachment.

He put on his headphones and pressed play.

After a hiss of static, a low, steady hum filled his ears—the sound of a large refrigeration compressor running.

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Next came a faint yet grating scrape of metal, slow and laborious, as though someone were exerting all their strength to wrench open an industrial valve long since rusted shut.

At the very end of the recording, the noise faded away. A hoarse yet extraordinarily clear voice spoke, each word forced from a throat frozen in ice:

“The master tape of the D7 compartment log is hidden inside the R08 refrigerated cabinet. The password is the number of lightning strikes on the night you were born—thirty-seven.”

Song Zhao closed his eyes sharply. His fingertips trembled uncontrollably.

He remembered his mother mentioning that night of thunder and lightning in her farewell letter:

“That night, lightning struck the ancestral hall seven times, burning through the main beam. Everyone in the village said it was an omen of disaster. But your grandfather smoked his dry tobacco and looked toward the mountaintop. He said, ‘The wrath of Heaven does not stop at the earth’s surface. There is much more that we cannot see.’”

Seven times.

Everyone remembered only the seven terrifying strikes visible above the earth.

But Lu Chen had clearly listened to his grandfather’s words as well.

Thirty-seven.

Song Zhao’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. He drew a deep breath and entered “37.”

He remotely accessed the abandoned backup terminal of the transfer station’s internal system—a data island forgotten in the depths of the network.

The progress bar began to move. A massive data package slowly downloaded onto his computer.

He immediately forwarded the file to Tang Yurou.

It was a sleepless night.

When the eastern sky began to pale, Tang Yurou called him. Her voice trembled with excitement.

“Song Zhao, it’s all real… There isn’t the slightest damage to the data on the master tape.”

After an overnight comparison and voiceprint identification, the evidence was conclusive.

The data package contained not only every settlement record between Shen Wei and an overseas organ-trafficking organization conducted through encrypted accounts, but also a complete recording of Zhou Zhengsheng personally falsifying the autopsy reports of seven team members in the dissection room.

Most horrifying of all were several audio files hidden at the end of the logs. They clearly recorded the seven team members’ entire passage from struggling to silence after being injected with highly concentrated potassium chloride.

The chain of evidence was complete.

The time for counterattack had arrived.

Song Zhao divided all the evidence into three lines of attack and advanced them simultaneously, leaving the enemy no chance to catch its breath.

The first was led by Chen Yan, who submitted the core financial evidence and the recording of the forged reports directly to the disciplinary authorities, bypassing every channel where interference might exist.

Within an hour, nationwide arrest warrants and asset-freezing orders targeting Shen Wei and the protective network behind him were issued simultaneously.

For the second, Tang Yurou rapidly organized the characteristics of the illegal medical cold-storage chain she had analyzed from the data into an academic paper titled “A Pathological Identification Model for Illegal Medical Cold-Storage Chains in Border Regions,” which she published openly.

The paper’s rigor and practical value drew the attention of senior officials. Three days later, it was adopted directly by the Ministry of Justice and designated as mandatory training material throughout the national judicial and law-enforcement system for combating emerging forms of crime. In theory, it sealed off the criminal model used by Shen Wei’s organization completely.

The third line, and the most dangerous, was led personally by Song Zhao.

Working with the border police, he conducted surprise inspections of three large medical refrigeration units that the Shen organization had donated to border regions in recent years, under the pretext of inspecting charitable supplies entering the country.

Shen Wei’s son, Shen Yan, volunteered to join the operation. As a former member of the Wei Foundation, he stood before the cold machinery and identified the coded markings understood only by insiders.

When technicians pried open the hidden compartment of one unit and exposed a precision-engineered low-temperature transport chamber for living human organs, Shen Yan’s legs gave way. He collapsed to his knees.

He did not look at the horrifying equipment. Instead, he turned toward a Uyghur boy who had just been rescued from another hideout and repeatedly apologized in a hoarse voice.

“My father’s crimes should never have been yours to repay… I’m sorry…”

Seven days later, Cloud River City held a long-overdue recognition ceremony for the Renxu Emergency Team.

The names of the seven fallen were engraved on the Heroes’ Memorial and officially designated as deaths in the line of duty.

Beside the seven newly made plaques, the staff quietly erected an eighth. It read:

“Lu Chen, Field Evidence Archivist, Missing in 2003, Returned to Duty in 2024.”

When the ceremony ended and the crowd dispersed, an old man in a worn technician’s uniform and with graying hair silently approached the monument.

He did not stay long. He merely took a rust-speckled work badge from inside his coat, placed it gently at the foot of the monument, then turned and walked away, his stooped back merging with the distant dusk.

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Song Zhao stood some distance away and watched in silence. He did not follow.

He knew that, for Lu Chen, the best place to belong was back in the shadows where no one knew his name.

He walked forward, took out a newly cast police badge belonging to his father, Cheng Rui, and gently pressed it against the glass covering the eight-person photograph on the monument.

“ this time, it is those of us who survived who call your names.”

That evening, Lin Wan arrived in Kashgar on the last flight.

She brought with her a box of carefully restored Republican-era files she had discovered while investigating the history of the Wei Foundation.

On top of the box lay a yellowed household-registration cancellation certificate.

Name: Lu Jingshu.

Date of cancellation: 1998.

In the column for cause of death, five shocking words had been written in ink:

“Insanity; suicide.”

She had been Lu Chen’s mother.

“He did have a home,” Lin Wan said softly. “The fire twenty years ago burned away more than the emergency center. It consumed the last thing he had to hope for. He buried his home in the evidence.”

One month later, the inaugural training course of the Western Criminal Investigation Technical Support Center officially opened in Kashgar.

Song Zhao stood before a crude lectern. Seated below him were thirty grassroots technicians from pastoral districts, mining areas, and border outposts.

Their eyes were plain and sincere, their hands covered with the calluses of years of labor.

Song Zhao did not lecture on complicated theory. Instead, he opened an old metal box and took out a cassette tape bearing a handwritten label:

“Renxu Supplementary Recording 08.”

He placed the tape in an old-fashioned recorder.

When he pressed play, the familiar hoarse voice slowly emerged:

“They said it was a drill, but I saw Shen Wei’s people moving bodies… I recorded it… I can’t let the evidence fall asleep. I can’t let them die for nothing…”

When the recording ended, the classroom was utterly silent.

Song Zhao looked around at everyone and said calmly:

“From today onward, every one of you is R08. This is not a designation. It is a promise: so long as there is anyone in this world who cares about traces, the light will always remain in the lowest place.”

After class, Song Zhao received several messages.

Shen Yan had submitted his application and was officially transferring to the western support program, starting with the most basic logistics work.

Tang Yurou had mailed him the latest edition of her personally revised Handbook for Sleepless Physical Evidence. On the title page, she had written: “To everyone at R08.”

Chen Yan sent a screenshot:

“Zhou Zhengsheng’s death sentence approved. Shen Wei’s extradition imminent.”

Standing before the office window, Song Zhao saw Lin Wan calibrating a newly arrived spectrometer in the temporary laboratory in the courtyard. The afterglow of sunset gilded the edges of her white gloves with a warm sheen.

He removed the noise-canceling headphones he had worn without fail. In recent days, the “residual-sound perception” caused by his nerve damage had nearly faded away, leaving only the warmth of ordinary sensation in his fingertips.

He suddenly smiled—a smile of lightness after setting down every burden.

He turned back to his desk, picked up a pen, and solemnly wrote on the first page of a new notebook:

“Song Zhao, signed in today.”

Outside the window, a breeze passed through the empty corridor and stirred a faint echo, like an answer twenty years overdue—clear and calm.