Chapter 90: The One Who Burns the Records Fears Fire Most

Two white tablets rolled from the medicine bottle into the dry hollow of his palm, steady as stone.

He tossed them into his mouth without even reaching for water. His throat moved once, swallowing down the bitterness and the finality together.

Outside the window, the first pale glimmer was struggling to pierce the dense fog before dawn. The city had not yet awakened, but an invisible net had already begun to tighten.

At five forty-one in the morning, around Chen Yanting’s residence, the air was wet and cold as a sponge soaked in ice water.

Lin Shuyue gave a signal, and two assault teams cut off every escape route from the villa in silence, concentrating on the basement, the only entrance and exit equipped with an independent ventilation system.

The breaching device gave off a short, heavy thud. The door gave way, and a foul blast of mold and scorched circuitry rushed out to meet them.

In the basement, the indicator lights on several servers flashed wildly, their eerie green glow reflecting on the taut faces of every team member.

At the center, a computer screen blazed to life, its red digits a shock to the eye: Iron Box file upload countdown: 00:03:17.

“The target is uploading the core evidence. Cut the main power physically. Now!” Lin Shuyue’s voice was calm, without the slightest ripple.

A technical officer lunged forward, his hand already reaching for the breaker on the wall.

The instant before he pulled it, Su Wan’s voice came through Lin Shuyue’s earpiece, cool and nearly merciless. “Captain, wait. Mirror hijack protocol has been activated.”

Almost at the same time, beneath the progress bar on the screen, a line of nearly imperceptible green code began to run.

Like a ghost parasite clinging to its host, it copied every bit of outgoing data at the speed of light, then sent it through a preset encrypted tunnel to twelve distributed nodes established in advance across the globe.

Some of those nodes were heavily guarded university archives; some were folk memory vaults hidden deep within the web; two even belonged to international transparency organizations.

They were havens for data, Noah’s arks for the truth.

“Three, two, one...” The officer stared at his stopwatch and, at the exact moment the countdown hit zero, yanked down the breaker.

With a sharp click, the entire basement fell into silence and darkness.

The hum of every server stopped dead. Only the pale, lifeless beams of the emergency lights remained.

On the central computer screen, the last frame froze in place, clearly displaying the words Upload Complete.

The assault team exchanged looks, certain they had failed.

Only Lin Shuyue knew that this was, in fact, the most perfect part of the plan.

In her earpiece, Su Wan let out a soft, relieved breath. “They wanted to burn history, not realizing the kindling had already been scattered everywhere.”

At ten oh-eight in the morning, the temporary interrogation room at the city detention center was almost painfully bright.

Wei Chengyuan wore a gray detainee uniform and sat in the interrogation chair, showing not the slightest trace of defeat. If anything, he carried the air of someone looking down from a great height.

He regarded Lin Shuyue across from him as though she were a child who had mistaken make-believe for a real game.

Lin Shuyue turned a laptop toward him. On the screen were the execution logs for the Twin Plan, extracted just moments earlier from the local hard drive of Chen Yanting’s computer.

Every folder was orderly, every file name cold enough to raise gooseflesh: the schedule with detonation times set down to the second, scripts for guiding public opinion across different media platforms, even complete plans for consoling each victim’s family and analyzing their psychological vulnerabilities.

Wei Chengyuan gave it a cursory glance, then curled his lips into a disdainful smile. “Impressive. You’ve won, and turned the final words of a mad old man into scripture. But who would believe it? The fantasy of a fanatic, the stiff movements of a few corpses, and your carefully invented pathological narrative? People don’t need truth. They need stories about heroes and villains. And I’m clearly not the villain they want.”

The moment his words fell, the interrogation room door was pushed open.

Tang Yurou walked in, colder than the light in the room.

Without looking at Wei Chengyuan, she placed two brain scan reports side by side on the table and slid them toward him.

“Do you remember Lu Chenzhou?” she asked. Her voice was not loud, yet it cut like a scalpel, opening up the calm Wei Chengyuan had tried to manufacture.

Wei Chengyuan’s pupils contracted almost imperceptibly.

Lu Chenzhou, the first member of the emergency team to show “abnormalities” and the one who had ultimately “died in the line of duty.”

“His lesion was in the left temporal lobe,” Tang Yurou said, tapping one of the reports where an abnormal patch was marked, “just like yours.” She pointed to the other report. “And your son, during a medical exam abroad last year, showed the same early-stage change in the same location. This is from the medical records in his school file.”

She displayed the two reports together. The same region, the same shape of shadow, like a cursed family brand.

“This is not inheritance,” Tang Yurou said, each word deliberate, every syllable striking like a nail driven into Wei Chengyuan’s nerves. “It is contagion. Everyone who signed an operational order, everyone who came into contact with the core of the Twin Plan, is becoming the next victim.”

For the first time, the eyes that had always remained proud and contemptuous showed a crack.

It was a collapse mixed with shock, fear, and disbelief.

The authority and design he had been so proud of looked absurd and powerless before the cold facts of science.

At twelve fifty-five in the afternoon, the restoration site at the old river lock was soaked in a fine, unending rain.

Song Zhao returned to that concrete tomb with Lao Zhang once more.

River wind, heavy with moisture, cut at their faces like a blade.

Kneeling down, Song Zhao discovered that upon the sealed concrete surface, someone had etched a new mark with a sharp instrument.

It was faint, nearly impossible to notice unless one looked closely.

He brushed away the mud and rainwater with his finger. It was a series of short, rhythmic cuts: Morse code.

He took out his phone and translated it quickly. Only two words appeared on the screen.

I heard.

Song Zhao’s heart gave a sudden lurch.

He pulled out the recorder he had kept with him all along and pressed play.

The looping voice extracted from the police badge model rang out through the wind and rain: Song, present at your post.

The hoarse electronic voice mingled with the wind and rain, making it seem all the more eerie and sorrowful.

Lao Zhang, who had been silent for a long time beside him, suddenly began to tremble violently.

He snatched the recorder from Song Zhao’s hand as though seizing a red-hot brand, then, facing the surging river, used all his strength to roar, “Present!”

That single word was ragged and broken, yet it cut through layer upon layer of rain, like an answer long overdue, echoing over and over along the empty riverbank.

Not far away, Xiao Lin, disguised as a construction supervisor, quietly activated the hidden camera on his collar and recorded the moment in full.

At the same time, high above the city, Su Wan remotely accessed the municipal broadcast system.

During the gap between the midday news segments, an audio clip with no warning was forcibly inserted.

It was neither music nor advertisement, but a special melody woven from siren tones of seven different frequencies.

There was no narration, no subtitles. It simply sounded, in silence, across every corner of the city for sixty-eight seconds.

It was a wordless tribute to the seven fallen, and an awakening of the city’s collective memory.

At two eighteen in the afternoon, in the preparation office for the provincial high court’s special investigative tribunal, Lin Shuyue placed the fully assembled evidence package on the heavy desk before the tribunal president.

Inside were the original data from the Iron Box, the upload logs intercepted by Su Wan, the linkage evidence tying Wei Chengyuan to the others, and Tang Yurou’s medical report, enough to overturn everything.

The tribunal president read for a long time. Only the rustle of turning pages disturbed the office.

At last he looked up and fixed Lin Shuyue with a sharp gaze. “This evidence is enough to put several people behind bars for the rest of their lives. But if that were all, there would be no need to establish a special investigative tribunal. Tell me, Captain Lin, who exactly do you intend to hold accountable?”

“The system itself,” Lin Shuyue replied without hesitation. “The decision-making mechanism that allows the emergency team to become scapegoats by default. The chain of silence that buries individual truth in the name of overall stability.” She drew out the last document from the folder and handed it over. “This is our draft legal opinion on classifying the Renxu incident as historical fraud. The main statutes cited are Article 22 of the Archives Law and Article 397 of the Criminal Law. We are not only pursuing individual responsibility. We are repairing a system that has fallen ill.”

The tribunal president was silent for a moment, then picked up his pen and signed his name on the order to establish the tribunal.

His strokes were forceful and sure.

“The tribunal is approved for establishment.”

At six thirty-three in the evening, in the disciplinary inspection technical office, Song Zhao sat alone before the enlarged model of his father’s police badge, the room empty around him.

He opened an encrypted notebook and rapidly recorded the broken images that had flashed through his mind through the Eye of Truth: a silver cuff link glinting under dim light, a blurred figure in a raincoat standing by the river, static crackling from an old walkie-talkie, and the words, It has been decided above... He had never mentioned these details to anyone. They belonged to him alone, and they were the key to the final truth he sought.

He closed the notebook and stood, preparing to leave.

And at that very moment, an ear-splitting alarm blared from the detention center’s medical monitoring unit.

Wei Chengyuan suddenly collapsed in his solitary cell, convulsing violently, foam spilling from his mouth.

Medical staff rushed in and performed EEG monitoring, only to discover that the left temporal region of his brain was discharging with extreme abnormal intensity. The waveform matched, exactly, the final medical record taken just before Lu Chenzhou’s death.

Tang Yurou stood before the surveillance monitor, watching Wei Chengyuan struggle in agony on the screen. There was no pity in her eyes, only the calm of one who had witnessed fate fulfilled.

She said softly, “This time, it is not they who are erasing history. It is history that has begun to settle accounts with them.”

On the other side of the city, Su Wan shut down every monitoring interface.

The faint glow of the screens faded from her eyes, but the silent storm had only just begun to gather.

Those scattered sparks, those hijacked data streams, were now being drawn by an unseen gravity toward the oldest and safest place of all.

There, the last fortress of memory stood, and there, too, would the first foothold of the counterattack be found.