Chapter 54: The Rusty Nail Pierces the Flesh

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3:17 a.m., Safe House.

The air was as heavy as mercury, every breath laced with a metallic chill.

Song Zhao gently slid the weighty voice recorder into the port of the shielded chamber, his movements delicate, as if handling a volatile work of art on the verge of explosion.

The chamber door closed with no sound, shutting out all external electromagnetic signals and leaving only the cold blue glow of the control panel.

Su Wan sat before the spectrum analysis software, her fingers flying over the keyboard like a flurry of birds.

The original audio file was imported, a jagged waveform unfurled across the screen, resembling a vicious scar.

She donned the monitoring headphones and turned the gain to maximum. The harsh background static instantly burgeoned, filling the entire room.

“The noise is overwhelming—the human voice is almost completely compressed,” Su Wan frowned tightly, beginning to strip away the background noise frame by frame.

As layers of high-frequency interference were peeled away, a deep, nearly imperceptible pulse signal stubbornly emerged.

It was remarkably regular, like a faint but resolute heartbeat, pounding beneath the sea of static.

Su Wan’s pupils contracted. She immediately called up another set of data for comparison.

A few seconds later, she tore off her headphones, her face grave: “Captain Song, something’s wrong.”

Song Zhao’s gaze shifted from the shielded chamber to her screen.

“Look here,” Su Wan pointed at the regular pulse, “its frequency and cycle are an exact match for the clock synchronization signal used by our municipal bureau’s internal communication system in the late 1990s.” She took a deep breath and uttered the chilling conclusion: “This recorder… it wasn’t secretly used in some private setting. It was a live recording, made a second time in an environment covered by an official monitoring system.”

A place under official surveillance.

Song Zhao’s eyes returned to the recorder lying silently in the shielded chamber, its metal shell glinting coldly in the dim light.

Zhao Zhenbang, an old traffic officer—how did he get hold of something like this?

And why would he choose to leave evidence in this manner?

His fingertips lightly touched the icy button as Song Zhao closed his eyes.

The world plunged into darkness. Only the cleansed recording echoed in his mind.

He sank into the “Eye of Truth,” letting the sound serve as a coordinate, drawing his consciousness back into the past.

Darkness receded. A sparsely furnished office materialized before him.

The clock on the wall clearly indicated December 23, 1998, 9:48 p.m.

A man in a dark jacket, his back to Song Zhao, sat in a broad office chair—Zhou Mingyuan.

His fingers tapped rhythmically on the mahogany desk, the frequency and cadence perfectly matching the electric pulse Su Wan had just isolated.

He did not speak, merely waited.

Moments later, the red phone on the desk rang. Zhou Mingyuan picked up the receiver, his voice deep and clear, as if speaking directly into Song Zhao’s ear.

“Song Jianguo must die.”

No preamble, no explanation—just a single, final-judgment command.

As the words fell, Song Zhao’s eyes snapped open, his chest heaving violently.

Cold sweat beaded on his forehead. He steadied himself against the console.

This was not Zhao Zhenbang’s later retelling, nor a transcription.

This was the original recording, from the very source of the crime.

10:09 a.m., Technical Support Van.

Inside, the air seemed vacuumed out, leaving only the low hum of equipment.

Dong Lan’s fingers tapped in the final command, and a long-buried record popped onto the screen.

“Found it.” She pushed up her glasses, lenses reflecting dense streams of data. “Municipal bureau communications log, December 23, 1998, evening. At 9:50 p.m., there was indeed an encrypted call initiated from Zhou Mingyuan’s office, logged as urgent official business, the recipient: ‘Security Coordination Group.’”

She let out a soft, cold laugh, thick with irony: “Issuing a purge order via the official system—ensures the command is executed precisely, yet perfectly hides the traces among masses of work logs. Absolutely watertight.”

Meanwhile, Su Wan made a breakthrough of her own.

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She cross-referenced the exact recording timeline with the attack chronology reconstructed from Old Zhang’s deathbed memories.

“They overlap,” she murmured, her voice trembling, “from Zhou Mingyuan giving the order to Old Zhang’s group receiving the go-ahead—seventeen minutes. That’s more than enough time to confirm the target and details. Old Zhang’s team didn’t kill by mistake in the chaos. They knew exactly who they were sent to kill from the start.”

Targeted elimination.

The phrase stabbed each heart in the van like an icicle.

Song Zhao stood silently in the center of the compartment. Sunshine poured outside, but its brightness could not pierce the shadows of old cases inside.

After a moment, he took the audio file from Su Wan and began editing with practiced hands.

He clipped the crucial phrase—“Song Jianguo must die”—along with the tapping and call connection sounds, into a concise sixty-second highlight.

Then he opened the electronic file of “West Street Case Review Report,” embedding the audio as a special attachment.

At the hearing, this weapon would be the sharpest sword to cut through the darkness.

12:43 p.m., City Archives Perimeter.

Li Guodong drove an unremarkable gray sedan slowly past the archive across the street.

His gaze seemed casual, but it locked firmly onto a black car parked beneath an old locust tree.

That same car had parked in the same spot at the same time for three consecutive days.

He said nothing, but after passing the intersection, he turned into a side alley and accessed the internal system on his phone.

By filtering records from nearby traffic checkpoints, he traced the plate number to a familiar name—Zhao Zhenbang.

Li Guodong frowned.

Why was Zhao Zhenbang coming to the archives?

He expanded the time frame to a week and found that Zhao Zhenbang came every day, but never got out to enter the building.

He only circled the archive in his car at closing time, then quietly drove away.

As if performing a ritual—or searching for something.

What was he looking for?

Why should a retired old traffic officer be so obsessed with dusty files?

Li Guodong’s instincts told him this was no coincidence.

Suddenly, he recalled something and quickly looked up the 1998 archive transfer list.

Amid the dense entries, he found an unremarkable note: The original West Street case file, due to the scene involving a traffic accident investigation, was jointly filed by the city traffic police accident division.

In theory, the traffic police should have kept a duplicate record.

Li Guodong’s pulse quickened.

He immediately called Dong Lan, keeping his voice low: “Dong Lan, check an access record for me—has anyone applied to view the ‘West Street Arson Case’ files at the city archive in recent years, especially the traffic police division’s records?”

5:26 p.m., Safe House.

Su Wan exhaled deeply, feeling utterly drained.

After five straight hours of work, she finally cracked the last layer of military document encryption that Old Ma had provided.

As the garbled text on the screen receded like a tide, a clear document emerged.

It was the replaced original page—“Witness Registration Appendix.”

There was only one entry, but it was enough to set off a storm.

It clearly stated: On the evening of December 23, 1998, at 5 p.m., a homeless man claiming to scavenge near West Street ran to the nearby traffic police post to report that he had seen “several men carrying multiple gasoline canisters furtively into the backyard of No. 37 West Street.”

And on the signature line for the officer who took the report, three vigorous characters were boldly inscribed—Zhao Zhenbang.

The report time was a full four hours before the arson.

A chill climbed Su Wan’s spine, flooding her limbs.

She gasped, murmuring, “He… he received the report! But this record was replaced.”

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Song Zhao had been standing behind her the whole time, eyes fixed on that signature on the screen.

The words Zhao Zhenbang had spoken in the riverside pavilion thundered in his mind: “Some things… can’t just rot in the ground forever.”

In that instant, he understood.

Zhao Zhenbang’s repeated circuits around the archive all these years were not acts of remorse or nostalgia.

He was searching—searching for the evidence he himself had recorded, then destroyed by his own hand, or under duress.

He wanted to know if the faint trace he left behind might ever see the light again.

7:51 p.m., Riverside Park.

The evening breeze carried the river’s dampness, rustling the willows along the bank.

Song Zhao sat alone on the bench where he had last met Zhao Zhenbang.

His hand was in his pocket, fingers tightly gripping a remnant of IV tubing brought from Old Zhang’s hospital room.

For the first time, he had brought a “memory anchor” to an uncertain rendezvous.

He needed a deeper truth.

He gently touched the metal end of the tube; the coldness felt like a key.

He closed his eyes and activated his power.

This time, he tried shifting the target from Old Zhang’s memory to Zhao Zhenbang, whose memory had intersected with Old Zhang’s—a “retrospective of a retrospective.”

The darkness in his vision was deeper and thicker than ever before.

A wave of dizziness crashed over him, but he forced himself to remain steady.

Suddenly, the scene brightened—not Zhou Mingyuan’s office, but a disordered duty room.

Zhao Zhenbang stood by a desk, tearing up a written statement with trembling hands.

The image shifted to late night.

Zhao Zhenbang sat at the same desk, under a dim lamp, his hands shaking so badly he could barely hold a pen, as he wrote a letter of accusation.

Each character was carved with all his strength, nearly cutting through the paper.

He sealed the letter in a manila envelope, glued it shut with painstaking care, and in the recipient field, wrote, stroke by stroke: “To the Provincial Commission for Discipline Inspection, Complaints Office.”

Three days later, post office.

The letter was returned unopened, a cold blue postmark stamped on the envelope, the words clear and jarring: “No such recipient organization found.”

Zhao Zhenbang collapsed as if his bones had been extracted, clutching his head, sobbing in pain like a wounded animal.

Song Zhao’s eyes snapped open, a stabbing headache piercing his temples, a warm liquid trickling from his nose.

He wiped it away, fingers stained red.

He ignored his body’s protest and simply stared out at the shimmering river, murmuring, as if to the man weeping in memory, or to himself:

“You weren’t an accomplice… you were the first to try to stop it.”

Before the words had faded, a figure quietly turned and melted into the deeper shadows beneath a distant tree behind him.

It was Li Guodong, clutching a freshly printed map from the technical team, crisscrossed with red lines.

Night deepened and the city fell silent.

But for some, sleep would not come tonight.

A new, more urgent race had already begun, quietly, before dawn.