Chapter 45: The Red-Eyed Father

At 4:05 a.m., the desk lamp in the library’s ancient books section cast a warm golden glow into the silence.

Su Wan’s fingertips were smudged with graphite as she carefully pulled out Xiaoya’s past three months of drawings from a brown paper bag, one by one.

Her breathing was soft, yet in the empty room, it sounded distinct.

The first week’s drawing was of a rainbow and a sun. In the second week, a little girl in a red dress appeared. By the third week, there was a “father”—a man with blurred features; and in the fourth week, his eyes were painted an arresting red.

Su Wan had thought last week, while sorting, that it was simply a child’s fondness for color. But now, arranging all the drawings in chronological order, she suddenly noticed that each “red-eyed father’s” pupils were slightly upturned, as if pulled by an invisible thread, always directed toward the source of light in the upper right corner of the paper.

What about the “green-eyed doctor”?

She found the drawing from half a month ago: a man in a white lab coat crouched in the lower left corner, shadows nearly devouring half his face. With each subsequent drawing, the area covered by shadow grew larger, until yesterday’s new piece—where the green eyes were completely hidden in the darkness, only half a pupil visible. The curve of this eye remarkably resembled the red-eyed father’s.

Su Wan’s fingers paused.

She took out her tablet, scanned each drawing to create digital versions, then opened the layering function.

As the timeline slid from left to right, the arcs of the rainbow, the position of the sun, and the angle of the red eyes gradually overlapped. By the thirty-seventh drawing, faint lines suddenly emerged on the screen.

She leaned closer, her breath quickening.

Those lines outlined a corridor, a protrusion at the corner resembling an access control system, and a circle at the end unmistakably a ventilation shaft—almost identical to the structural diagram of the foundation’s underground levels.

Su Wan remembered the architectural plans Song Zhao had shown her last week. With trembling fingers, she pulled up the comparison image; the lines matched perfectly.

“The child remembered all the paths through her drawings,” she whispered, her voice quivering with fear.

Xiaoya was only eight. Perhaps she didn’t understand what she was recording at all; after repeated hypnosis, her body remembered the places to avoid surveillance, the doors to circumvent, before her mind did.

The colors on the paper were not innocent—they were erased memories struggling to surface.

When the first bird sang outside, Su Wan captured the overlaid map and sent it to Song Zhao.

As her phone screen lit up, she saw his message from 2 a.m.: “Lin Wei’s therapy is scheduled for nine this morning. Proceed as planned.”

At 9:59 a.m., the clock in the foundation’s third-floor treatment room struck ten as Lin Wei pushed open the door.

She wore a faded blue blouse, the ends of her hair damp with morning dew. Like a reed soaked by wind and rain, yet she stood straighter than ever.

“Dr. Zheng,” she said, sitting on the sofa with her hands folded on her knees. “I dreamed of Song Zhao burning the ledger.”

The man adjusting the equipment stilled.

He wore gold-rimmed glasses, his eyes behind the lenses gleaming coldly green, like specimens soaked in formalin. “Did you stay up late again, Teacher Lin?”

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“But in the flames, someone was smiling,” Lin Wei lifted her eyes, her pupils narrowing slightly under the lamp. “He wore green eyes.”

Dr. Zheng’s fingers gripped the edge of the equipment so tightly his knuckles turned white.

He forced a gentle smile and took a pocket watch from the drawer. “Shall we play a little game? Breathe with the rhythm of the watch…”

In the adjacent monitoring room, Song Zhao pressed his fingers against his earpiece.

He stared at the swaying pocket watch on the screen, his Adam’s apple bobbing—this was the beginning of deep induction.

Three days ago, he and Lin Wei had rehearsed this twenty times. Now, hearing her breathing grow lighter, his own heartbeat quickened.

“Confirming the memory override program,” Dong Lan’s voice came through the earpiece, accompanied by keyboard clicks. “Brainwave monitoring shows theta waves are unusually active. He’s about to make his move.”

Song Zhao clenched the recording pen on the desk.

The pen felt the warmth of his palm—like a grenade waiting to explode.

At 12:18 p.m., Dr. Zheng’s computer suddenly chimed with an unread email.

He removed his gloves and clicked it open, pupils shrinking—the sender was “Chairman Lin’s Private Secretary,” and the content read: “Deputy Mayor Zhou is exerting pressure. Advise abandoning the vehicle to protect the leader, and transfer core evidence.”

“Impossible!” He sprang up, the chair scraping loudly against the floor.

On the surveillance screen, sweat beaded on his forehead as he blurted, to the still-hypnotized Lin Wei, “I am the core! Those ledgers, those medicine bottles… I was in charge of all of them!”

Dong Lan’s laughter echoed through the earpiece: “Recording saved. Clarity: 98%.”

Staring at Dr. Zheng’s contorted face on the screen, Song Zhao recalled the medicine bottle he saw in the evidence department three months ago—the lingering scopolamine matched perfectly with Lin Wei’s blood samples.

So it wasn’t negligence; it was his overconfidence, confident enough to expose all secrets during hypnosis.

At 4:37 p.m., sunlight slanted through the foundation’s activity room windows.

Su Wan crouched before Xiaoya, holding a box of colored pencils. “Xiaoya is so good at drawing little stories. Can you draw ‘the person you fear most’?”

The little girl bit her lip, glanced at the security guard at the door, and slowly spread out the paper.

As the pencil tip touched the paper, she suddenly looked up. “Sister Su, Daddy said I must be brave.”

“Daddy’s right.” Su Wan gently held her hand. “Brave children draw what scares them, then defeat it.”

The pencil moved faster and faster.

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The green-eyed doctor was drawn inside an iron cage, thorny vines wrapped around the bars; the red-eyed father stood outside, clutching a key. At the top of the drawing, in crooked lettering, was written: “Save green eyes, he’s locked by the devil.”

Dr. Zheng opened the door just as Su Wan was blowing dry Xiaoya’s drawing.

His gaze swept over the paper, his Adam’s apple rolling violently, fingers unconsciously digging into the doorframe—the shape of the cage was identical to the storage room on the second basement level; the key matched exactly the one he kept in the third drawer of his desk.

“Would you like to see it, Dr. Zheng?” Su Wan looked up, her fingers softly brushing over the word “devil.” “Xiaoya says the devil has green eyes.”

Dr. Zheng’s face turned deathly pale.

He staggered back, knocking over a tray of paints in the corner. Orange-red liquid spread across the floor, like a pool of congealed blood.

At 7:42 p.m., in Lin Haoyu’s office, the crystal chandelier cast shifting shadows across Dr. Zheng’s face. “I need to transfer everything early!” He gripped the desk, voice trembling. “They have the drawings, the recordings…”

“You’re exposed.” Lin Haoyu reclined in his leather chair, tapping his phone—on the screen was Song Zhao’s freshly sent arrest warrant. “From the moment you shouted ‘I am the core’ during hypnosis, you were exposed.”

Police sirens drew nearer.

Song Zhao stood in the municipal bureau’s monitoring center, watching as Dr. Zheng was handcuffed on screen, fingers unconsciously rubbing his police badge at his waist.

The metal rim pressed painfully into his skin, reminding him of that rainy night twenty years ago—his father lying in a pool of blood, the murderer’s eyes glinting cold green in the headlights.

“The true devil is never afraid of fire,” he murmured to the monitor, his voice drowned out by the sirens.

Meanwhile, Xiaoya rolled over in the children’s room.

Moonlight slipped through the curtain’s seam, illuminating the drawing by her pillow.

She murmured and smiled, her voice as light as a feather. “Daddy… today you smiled.”

At eleven o’clock that night, Song Zhao stood at the window.

His phone lit up: a location message from Su Wan—Yongan Orphanage, the old site.

In the photo, a rusty iron gate hung with a new lock, a glimpse of a ventilation pipe through the crack—perfectly matching the underground structure in Xiaoya’s drawings.

He took out his toolkit, the soft clash of metal pliers ringing clear in the silence.

Moonlight crept up the windowsill, casting his shadow on the floor—like a blade unsheathed.

At 5:17 a.m., as the wind carried morning mist into his collar, Song Zhao stood outside the power room at the old Yongan Orphanage site.

He looked up at the ventilation shaft overhead, fingers gripping the crowbar, listening to his own heartbeat—just as it was on that rainy night twenty years ago.