Chapter 61: The Lantern Gate Unclosed

Inside the technical support van, the air felt as if it had solidified into a block of cold metal, broken only by the low, persistent hum of the servers.

Dong Lan’s fingers slid rapidly across the touchpad, each tap sounding like a death knell for a crime that had lain dormant for years.

On the thermal imaging display, a crimson patch indicating abnormally high temperatures appeared like a gaping wound, precisely aligned with the structural blueprint of Incinerator No. 7 in Section B.

“Confirmed.” Her voice was utterly flat, yet it dropped the temperature in the van a few more degrees. “The cavity behind the rear wall—non-original design, manually excavated. Based on the infrared scan’s contours, the inner space is about thirty square meters.” She zoomed in on the image, highlighting a barely perceptible pipeline extending from the red zone and merging into the city’s complex underground drainage network.

“A vent, connected to the city’s sewers. The perfect exhaust and escape route.”

Her gaze shifted to another screen, displaying three months’ worth of sanitation department waste removal data—endless figures, silent as a swarm of ants.

Dong Lan filtered for the crematorium’s records and marked every Wednesday’s data in red.

“Found it,” she pointed at an anomalous curve. “Every Wednesday at dawn, there’s a consistent spike in ash removal, far exceeding the normal residue from incineration. Captain Song, what they’re burning isn’t ledgers—it’s living witnesses.”

Across from her, Su Wan sat with her head bowed, fingertips caressing a timeworn copy of “A Study of Lantern Customs in River City.”

The edges of the pages were curled, exuding the scent of old paper and dust.

She seemed oblivious to Dong Lan’s discovery, as though immersed in a world woven from words and incantations.

Suddenly, her finger paused at a chapter titled “Guiding the Soul’s Path.”

“We were wrong. All of us.” Su Wan’s voice was hoarse, brittle like a desiccated leaf. “In old customs, ‘Guiding the Soul’s Path’ wasn’t for leading the dead, but for showing the living the way. It’s a mark—a brand of identity. Each lamp’s position corresponds to a fixed range of activity for a ‘Lantern Slave.’”

She picked up a red pen and, without hesitation, circled three spots on the map of River City spread before her: the crematorium in the east, the ‘Sunshine Home’ orphanage in the west, and the Volunteer Association in the city center.

Three points forming a perfect equilateral triangle.

“Look here,” she tapped the triangle’s center with her pen. “The crematorium is the endpoint, the orphanage the starting point, and the volunteer center the screening and transfer station. This whole area falls under ‘Sunshine Home’s’ influence—a vast, invisible hunting ground.”

At 10:17 a.m., silence reigned in the interrogation room of the First Detention Center, so absolute that one could hear the second hand crawling along the clock on the wall.

Song Zhao sat alone across the table, his expression unreadable as he stared at the janitor curled up in the chair.

The man’s hands were cuffed to the table’s rings, his head bowed so low it nearly touched his chest, his whole body shuddering like a leaf in the wind.

No matter what Song Zhao asked, he only shook his head, jaw clenched tightly, refusing to utter a single word.

Song Zhao stopped speaking, merely watching him in silence.

Minute by minute, the tension in the air grew heavier.

At last, Song Zhao slowly closed his eyes.

The lights in the room seemed to dim for a split second.

Three seconds later, he snapped his eyes open. His pupils had turned into two bottomless whirlpools, locking onto the man’s gaze.

“Every night at midnight, you wake up in terror,” Song Zhao’s voice was soft, yet it pierced the man’s most fragile nerve like an ice pick. “You hear someone knocking on your bed, again and again. Isn’t that right? That’s your sister’s voice—she was locked in the third storage compartment under Incinerator No. 7 in Section B.”

The man’s body jerked violently, as if struck by electricity.

He began trembling uncontrollably, his lips turning visibly purple.

Leaning forward, Song Zhao’s voice dropped to a hypnotic murmur: “Your name is Xiao Zhou, isn’t it? When you were seven, you lost your sister at the lantern festival. Xu Zhaoshan found you, lit a lantern for you with his own hands, and told you, ‘Cut off familial love, and you may survive.’ He said your parents didn’t want you anymore, and only following him would keep you alive. But…” Song Zhao’s eyes fell to the faded pocket of the man’s trousers, “Every night before you sleep, you reach under your pillow for a blue cloth strip your mother wove for you. It still carries her scent.”

A strangled wail burst from the man’s throat, raw and desperate like a trapped beast’s final cry.

He collapsed onto the table, sobbing uncontrollably.

Years of fear, longing, and guilt broke through at last, flooding the room.

Between broken sobs, he confessed the entire process: every Wednesday before dawn, exchanging ledgers by the Section B vent with a night watchman known as “Old Qin.”

12:55 p.m., a safe house on the city’s outskirts.

Su Wan cross-checked Xiao Zhou’s recorded confession with notes from an anonymous memoir, her expression growing graver.

“The core of their control system is a threefold shackle.” She wrote three words on a whiteboard: “ritual hypnosis, familial threats, nocturnal dream suggestion. First, the highly symbolic lantern-lighting ritual creates an initial psychological anchor, convincing them they’re chosen ‘Lantern Slaves.’ Then, they use missing relatives as hostages to prevent resistance. Finally,” she paused, “by unknown means, they invade their dreams at night, reinforcing control through terror and suggestion. The nightly knocking that Xiao Zhou mentioned is a textbook example.”

“What about physical traits?” Dong Lan’s voice came from behind her computer, still working through Old Qin’s surveillance footage and city personnel files.

“There are some.” Su Wan pulled out a file on shoe prints Old Qin had inadvertently left behind. “See here—all deeply controlled ‘Lantern Slaves’ have a pronounced inward collapse of the right foot’s arch. It’s skeletal deformation from years of intense, ritual kneeling.”

“That’s enough,” Dong Lan hit the enter key. A complex biometric modeling program spun into action.

Thousands of records flashed across the screen, rapidly filtered and compared.

Moments later, three files were flagged in red.

“Based on gait analysis and psychological profiling, we’ve identified three likely infiltrators.” Dong Lan’s gaze lingered on one file. “One is a loaned clerk in the city archives—last week, he accessed the sealed files of ‘Sunshine Home.’”

A chill swept the safe house. The enemy had infiltrated their ranks.

4:09 p.m., a blind spot in the crematorium’s surveillance perimeter.

Song Zhao swiftly changed into a gray janitor’s uniform, cap pulled low, and slipped silently into the staff locker room with a cleaning cart.

The air was heavy with disinfectant and faint traces of incense.

He quickly located the central return vent of Section B’s air system, unscrewed the grate, and carefully applied a coating of colorless, odorless fluorescent developer to the inner rim.

His task finished, he vanished down the corridor like a shadow.

Night deepened, and the crematorium was so quiet that only the low drone of refrigerator compressors remained.

The night watchman, Old Qin, hunched and carrying a ring of keys, made his rounds as usual in the empty corridor.

At the Section B vent, he reached into the opening and pulled out a hardbound notebook wrapped in oilcloth.

As he withdrew his hand, his right index finger brushed the developer Song Zhao had spread earlier.

Hundreds of meters away, Song Zhao sat in the technical van, eyes fixed on his laptop screen.

He remotely activated a device pre-installed opposite the vent, switching to ultraviolet mode.

On the screen, Old Qin’s right index fingerprint and a faint lantern-shaped emblem on his dark uniform sleeve glowed eerily green under the UV light.

“Got it,” Dong Lan’s voice came through.

But Song Zhao did not order an arrest.

He stared at the fingerprint, seized by a powerful intuition that the truth ran far deeper.

He sent the image to Dong Lan: “Run this fingerprint through the national missing persons’ DNA database for familial matches.”

Minutes later, the results appeared.

The words on the screen made everyone in the van gasp.

The print belonged to Qin Zhong—Old Qin. His only direct family match: Qin Yue, female, disappeared during the 2003 Lantern Festival at age six.

Her missing person registry number matched exactly with the sequence numbers Su Wan had decoded for the first batch of “Lantern Slaves.”

3:12 a.m., the darkness was impenetrable.

Song Zhao returned alone to the Section B vent, a statue merged with the night.

This time, Old Qin came.

But he didn’t retrieve a ledger as Xiao Zhou had described.

Instead, he approached the vent, drew something from his coat, and carefully tucked it into a crack at the vent’s edge.

Then, from his pocket, he produced a small glass lantern, no larger than a palm, lit the candle within, and placed it silently beside the vent before leaving.

He never spoke—a ritual, reverent and sorrowful.

The flickering flame illuminated what was hidden in the stone crevice—a weathered brass key.

Only after Old Qin had vanished did Song Zhao approach.

He picked up the key, cold and weighty in his hand.

By the lantern’s weak glow, he saw two tiny Arabic numerals engraved on the bow—07.

Section B, Incinerator No. 7.

Clutching the key, he gazed into the bottomless vent, its darkness devouring all light and sound.

Now he understood Old Qin’s role.

“You’re not the gatekeeper…” he whispered into the void, “You’re the lantern-keeper waiting for his daughter to come home.”

No sooner had the words left his lips than he sensed a faint rustle from beneath the distant trees.

He spun around to glimpse a thin figure slip away, vanishing into the deeper night—Xiao Zhou.

Song Zhao’s pupils contracted sharply.

In the instant before Xiao Zhou disappeared, he saw the man’s tightly clenched fist holding a charred blue cloth strip.

Why was he here?

A heaviness settled in Song Zhao’s chest.

He looked down at the brass key in his hand, then up at the darkness that had swallowed Xiao Zhou’s silhouette.

Tonight, Old Qin had left the key, and Xiao Zhou had appeared—everything had veered off its prescribed course.

This key was no longer merely a tool to unlock a door—it was an activated switch, an invitation whose consequences no one could foresee.

The night wind stirred, making the solitary lantern’s flame tremble, as though it might go out at any moment.

Song Zhao knew he had no time left to hesitate.

This shaft into the underground darkness—tonight, someone had to descend and uncover the truth.

He gripped the cold key, feeling the weight of a father’s twenty-year vigil and the unspoken secrets of a “Lantern Slave.”

Something within that darkness was beginning to awaken.