Chapter 106: No One Waits Behind the Rusted Gate

Song Zhao returned to the transit station on a windless morning.

The abandoned ventilation shaft lay silently at the edge of the Gobi Desert. Its iron grate was so rusted it had taken on the color of the surrounding sand, resembling a skeleton picked clean by time. Three days ago, he had held a silent memorial ritual here—no eulogies, no wreaths, only a copper tag inscribed with "R08," which he had personally wedged into a concrete crack along the shaft's rim.

At the time, he thought that was the end.

But now, he crouched in a corner against a mud wall used by herdsmen to leave messages, his fingertips slowly tracing a faint, cross-shaped scratch.

It was too fresh.

The plaster of the wall was brittle, weathered and peeling from years of wind erosion, but this mark had clean edges with no signs of crumbling. Clearly, it had been carved repeatedly with a dull object. Song Zhao held his breath and put his noise-canceling headphones back on, attempting to capture any residual vibrational frequencies in the air.

Though his neurological damage had eased, his "reverberation perception" could still manifest under specific conditions—like now, as his fingertips rubbed the scratch, a faint, rhythmic echo of metal scraping sounded in his ears: three shorts and one long, like the letter "S" in Morse code.

This was the internal marking method for evacuation routes used by the emergency response team, known only to core members.

And the last person to use this symbol was Lu Chen.

Song Zhao jerked his head up, scanning his surroundings. The surveillance system had long been paralyzed, and the nearest patrol point was five kilometers away.

If Lu Chen had truly returned... he hadn't come to reveal himself, but to confirm one thing: whether someone had accepted the promise hidden in that cassette tape.

"You saw the light," Song Zhao whispered, as if addressing the void. "Then you turned and buried yourself back in the darkness."

He stood up, brushed the dust from his trousers, and immediately pulled up all cold-chain transport declaration records for the border from the last three days. His system access was granted by a disciplinary inspection warrant just signed by Chen Yan.

Data streams scrolled across his screen until two refrigerated trucks marked "Vaccine Transport" triggered an alert. Originally scheduled to head to the highland epidemic prevention station, they had abruptly changed routes after entering the southwest checkpoint. Their GPS signals were lost for four hours in the mountains, finally pointing to an abandoned biological laboratory site code-named "Black Cliff B-7."

Song Zhao stared at the coordinate circled in red on the map, his pupils contracting.

It had been a military cooperative test base in the nineties, sealed in 2003 after an unexplained fire, with the official announcement citing "facility damage and destruction of documents."

But he knew some things were never truly burned away.

Meanwhile, the lights at the Kashgar Laboratory remained on through the night. Lin Wan stood before a spectrometer, traces of developer staining the edges of her gloves.

She had just completed the third restoration scan of Lu Jingshu’s household registration cancellation certificate. When the wavelength was calibrated to 415 nanometers, a nearly imperceptible shift appeared at the edge of the official seal—a characteristic of anti-counterfeiting overprint technology that wasn't introduced until after 1999.

This document had been backdated.

She quickly accessed the civil affairs historical database, filtering for death registrations between 2000 and 2004 that were centrally processed under the pretext of "sudden mental illness."

Seven cases, all from different provinces, yet they shared a chillingly consistent pattern: the relative column was blank or marked "lost contact," all cancellation procedures were fast-tracked by the same level of approval, and there were no subsequent records of any appeals.

Even more bizarrely, the original registered addresses of three of these individuals overlapped with the early charitable project sites of the Wei Foundation.

"This isn't a death registry," Lin Wan muttered to herself. "This is a systematic erasure."

She packaged the data, encrypted it, attached her analytical report, and sent it to Chen Yan. The email subject line contained only two words: "Traceability."

At the Jiangcheng Forensic Center's negative-pressure autopsy room, Tang Yurou was extracting the final trace of blood components from tissue samples recovered from a cryogenic chamber. Mass spectrometry showed the donor’s body contained a high concentration of FZ09—a sedative never publicly released.

She scoured the toxicology database and finally found a clue in a military anesthesia test report numbered "MDL-2002-γ." The project was led by a battlefield medical consultant with the code name "Raven."

The name column read: Shen Wei.

Her hands trembled slightly.

An old professor had told her in confidence that FZ09 was not originally designed for treatment, but to render the human body incapable of movement while remaining fully conscious, facilitating the long-term maintenance of organ viability. The metabolic cycle was precisely controlled at 72 hours.

"This means... they were harvesting organs from the living." Tang Yurou closed her eyes, images of those transport pods disguised as "donations" flashing through her mind.

She spent the night drafting a supplementary judicial appraisal report, every line as cold and sharp as a knife. When she hit the send button, the first light of dawn outside the window illuminated a copy of the *Handbook of Sleepless Evidence* on the corner of her desk—the inscription on the flyleaf, "To all of R08," appearing particularly clear in the morning light.

At the same moment, Song Zhao closed his laptop, his gaze falling on an old photo on his desk—a picture of him and Shen Yan from their time on the special task force. The latter stood in the shadows, his expression complex.

What he didn't know was that deep in the mountains of the southwest, beside a secret road leading to the abandoned laboratory, an inconspicuous engineering vehicle was slowly coming to a stop.

The door opened, and a young man in logistics uniform hopped out, looking up at the entrance of the building half-buried in the rock face. He pulled out a yellowed, hand-drawn map, his fingertips gently caressing the familiar layout of the ventilation ducts.

The wind blew from the valley, carrying the scent of rust and silence.

Behind him, in a surveillance blind spot that no one noticed, a crow landed quietly. Its claws were tangled with a piece of faded red cloth—the identification band worn by the children of the Emergency Center twenty years ago.

Shen Yan stood before the rusted iron door. The wind emerging from the rock crevices carried the smell of aged mold and decaying metal.

He did not enter immediately. Instead, he pressed his hand against the cold door frame, his fingers sliding along a subtle groove—a mark his father had taught him when he took him to inspect the cold storage as a child: B-zone mezzanine, turn left at the third ventilation shaft, location of the emergency backup power.

He knew this path; he could walk it with his eyes closed.

He had been one of the executors of what lay behind the Wei Foundation’s "Charitable Resettlement Project" ten years ago. Now, he was the only one left who knew the truth, and the only one who could piece together the original appearance of this underground labyrinth from memory.

When applying for the investigation mission, he had written only one sentence in his report: "I am familiar with the darkness here."

His utility light illuminated the collapsed corridor, concrete chunks pinning down snapped cables, tiny ice crystals floating in the air. The search-and-rescue dog growled at the entrance to Zone B and refused to go further, as if it had smelled a terror that did not belong to this era.

Shen Yan crouched down and pushed aside a pile of twisted metal mesh, revealing a segment of a buried ventilation pipe. He reached inside and felt a connection interface that hadn't completely broken—the shape of the plug didn't match modern standards; it was the specification for a vintage military refrigeration system.

Further in, the space narrowed abruptly.

He squeezed into the mezzanine and saw a small refrigeration unit standing alone at the end of the ruins. Its casing was mottled like alligator skin, and the nameplate had long since corroded away. But when he moved to the back and pried open the protective cover, his gaze froze.

On the circuit board, a line of tiny characters was engraved beneath the insulation layer: *R07-α Prototype · Serial Number: 0421*.

His breath hitched.

R08 was not the beginning, but a continuation.

They had tried it long ago, in deeper, earlier places, using living people for thermal control experiments to test the limits of organ preservation. And the termination of R07 was not a failure, but a relocation.

He carefully scraped off a layer of black residue from the back of the control panel—it was thick, slightly oily, like the remains of a long-leaking coolant.

After sealing it in a bag, he noticed a micro-memory card slot inside the panel. It had been warped by heat, but the surrounding solder joints showed signs of someone having forcibly hot-swapped it.

He took his father's old work manual from his backpack, the yellowed pages densely packed with operation logs and encrypted command codes. Relying on memory to cross-reference, he attempted to recover fragments of data from the drive using a portable device.

Three hours later, a fragmented record popped up on the screen:

[2003.06.17 04:18] R07 termination protocol executed. Target relocated to G-line—code name 'Scavenger.'
Command source: Central Archiving System (Access Level: Black Raven III)
Execution confirmed: All local logs and associated personnel files synchronized and cleared.

"Scavenger..." Shen Yan whispered the word, a chill running down his spine.

This wasn't a person's name; it was an automatic response mechanism embedded in the cracks of the system. Once a case approached the core of the truth, it would activate like a virus, clearing traces, erasing witnesses, and burning evidence.

He looked up at the cracked ceiling. Moonlight filtered through the gaps in the rock, shining on the refrigeration unit that was still faintly running.

The humming sound was almost inaudible, yet it had persisted for twenty years.

Meanwhile, Song Zhao sat in the mobile command vehicle, four streams of information converging before him into a map of blood.

The locations of the seven abnormal death cases formed an arc; the trajectories of the two cold-chain trucks intersected at "Black Cliff B-7"; the R07 site was marked as the center; and the code name "Scavenger" appeared for the first time in the deletion logs of Lu Jingshu’s file. Seven points and one line created a closed loop spanning Jiangcheng, Kashgar, and three southwestern provinces.

This was no accident; it was a systematic cover-up.

Just then, an urgent notification from the border police cut into his system: a truck declaring itself to be carrying air conditioning repair equipment had attempted to run the checkpoint. After being intercepted, a large quantity of burned document fragments was found inside.

On one charred page, half an official seal remained.

Song Zhao zoomed in on the image, his pupils shrinking.

The shape matched perfectly with the forged cancellation seal Lin Wan had discovered.

"They're still cleaning up the scene..." he murmured, his voice as cold as a blade scraping against glass.

Tang Yurou stood behind him, looking at the flickering fire imagery on the screen. "Can we still track them?"

Song Zhao didn't answer. He simply put on his gloves, his gaze fixed on the freshly printed report of the ash composition on the corner of the table.

The wind had already begun to blow. This time, the fire would not act alone.