About half an hour later, an exhausted doctor on duty came out of the emergency room and informed them that the old man’s life was saved and he was out of immediate danger.
However, whether he could make a full recovery depended on the treatment of the blood clot in his brain. If the treatment was effective and he recovered quickly, he could be discharged in as little as a week.
Hearing this, the group thanked the doctor profusely. Zhou Yi, in particular, could finally let go of the weight on his chest.
’I can’t believe I just saved Grandpa’s life right after being reborn,’ he thought.
Following the doctor’s arrangements, Zhou Yi’s grandfather was moved from the emergency room to an observation ward in the ER, hooked up to a variety of machines to monitor his condition.
Zhou Yi ran himself ragged, rushing back and forth. One moment he was buying hospital supplies, the next he was picking up various lab reports.
He had wanted his father and aunt to go home and inform the rest of the family, but his father insisted on staying. In the end, his aunt went back alone.
Zhou Yi’s father, meanwhile, never strayed from the bedside. Though he didn’t understand the machines, he stared intently at the monitors with bloodshot eyes.
During this time, Zhou Yi also encountered a pregnant woman in difficult labor who had been rushed over from a suburban hospital. She was already hemorrhaging. The on-duty obstetrician was stomping her foot in anxiety because the hospital’s blood bank was critically low.
When Zhou Yi overheard this, he ran over without hesitation and told the doctor he was Type O and they could take his blood.
The doctor shot him a grateful look, and with no time for words, immediately had a nurse test and draw his blood.
In the end, after drawing 400cc of blood from Zhou Yi, the nurse said they couldn’t take any more, or it could be dangerous for him.
He didn’t know if the mother and her baby would survive, but he had done all he could. The rest was up to fate.
When Zhou Yi finally caught his breath and returned to the observation ward, he found his father leaning against the foot of the bed, snoring like thunder.
Zhou Yi took a deep breath, pulled his clothes tighter around himself, and dragged a stool over to sit against the wall.
He hadn’t slept all night, had been running all over the place, and had just given 400cc of blood in one go. Even in this young body, he felt the strain.
Zhou Yi yawned. A powerful wave of fatigue washed over him, making his eyelids feel as heavy as stones, forcing them shut.
But he didn’t sleep soundly. He was constantly worried about his grandfather, afraid something might happen.
「He didn’t know how long he’d slept when he was woken by thirst.」
He saw his father was still snoring, so he got up to check on his grandfather. The monitors seemed to show that everything was normal.
He wanted a drink of water but found the thermos was empty. He picked it up and left the ward.
He couldn’t find the hot water dispenser, so he headed toward the nurses’ station to ask.
But there was no one at the station. ’She’s probably busy,’ Zhou Yi figured, deciding to wait.
On the adjacent wall was a chart with information about the ER’s medical staff.
Zhou Yi glanced at it casually and happened to see the young nurse from earlier, the one with the curt tone.
Beneath her photo was a name: Du Xiaolin.
’Oh, so she’s my grandfather’s assigned nurse.’
’Wait!’
’Du Xiaolin...’
’That name...’
’That face...’
A sudden jolt shot through Zhou Yi, chasing away all sleepiness.
He had finally remembered where he had seen that big-eyed young nurse before.
In a daze, he felt as if he had returned to the records room where he had spent eight long years.
The stuffy air, the dim lights, the countless cold, old filing shelves surrounding him.
His temples had already begun to gray, and he put on a pair of reading glasses.
On the desk before him lay an old case file.
--Hongcheng City Public Security Bureau, Criminal Investigation File.
--Case Type: Homicide.
--Date Filed: March 16, 1997.
These were the faded lines of text on the file’s cover.
This case file was from twenty-seven years ago.
Yet it had never received the "Case Closed" stamp.
This meant a lost soul had been denied peace for twenty-seven long years.
And the shelves around him were filled with such unsolved cases.
He opened the file and flipped through the case records, page by page.
Until he came to a photo, yellowed with age from oxidation. It was the ID photo of a young woman.
The woman in the photo was beautiful, with a pair of lovely big eyes.
On the back of the photo were a few words: Hongcheng City Third People’s Hospital, Du Xiaolin.
Above this line of text was one very blurry, almost illegible word: Victim.
He remembered!
He finally remembered!
All the case information tucked away in the corners of his memory now came flooding back.
More than two decades later, after being sidelined, he had organized an unsolved criminal case in the archives, codenamed "Case 316."
Du Xiaolin was the victim in this case.
She was an ER nurse at Hongcheng City Third People’s Hospital.
On the day of the incident, Du Xiaolin worked the evening shift, getting off work at midnight after the shift change.
City Third Hospital was about three kilometers from her home, and that night, Du Xiaolin walked home.
In Shangyang Lane, nine hundred meters from her house, Du Xiaolin was brutally murdered, stabbed six times.
The fatal blow among the six was a stab to the carotid artery in her neck, which directly led to her death from massive blood loss.
The murder weapon was a knife with a 2.4-centimeter-wide blade, but it was never found.
The body was discovered around 5:20 in the morning by a passerby.
But because there had been a heavy downpour around 3:00 a.m., the crime scene had been compromised, leaving behind almost no useful clues.
No weapon, no fingerprints, no footprints.
There were no surveillance cameras back then, which brought the investigation to a standstill. It ultimately became a cold case.
With the help of a torrential rain, the killer had remained at large for twenty-seven years.
At the time, Zhou Yi was just a junior police officer and wasn’t qualified to handle such a vicious homicide case.
Besides, his grandfather had just passed away, and he had taken bereavement leave, leaving him no time to pay attention to anything else.
It was only later that he heard about the case from others at the station.
It wasn’t until more than twenty years later, in the archives of the Provincial City Bureau, that he officially came into contact with Case 316 through the unsolved case file.
"Case 316, March 16th, ’97," Zhou Yi murmured to himself. "Tomorrow?"
He remembered the anniversary of his grandfather’s death clearly. It was March 15th.
"No!"
Zhou Yi looked around frantically, searching for a clock.
Finally, he spotted a round wall clock behind the nurses’ station. The time was 12:27.
So, it was already March 16th. The crime wasn’t going to happen tomorrow—it was happening today!
It could even be happening right now!
"Which patient’s family are you?" a voice suddenly asked.
Zhou Yi turned to see it wasn’t Du Xiaolin, but a round-faced young nurse he hadn’t seen before.
"Where’s the nurse surnamed Du?" Zhou Yi asked urgently.
"She got off work."
"She’s already left?"
"Yeah, she left right after the shift change." Seeing Zhou Yi’s tense expression, the young nurse immediately asked, "She didn’t mess up a patient’s medication again, did she?"
"It’s nothing," Zhou Yi said, then immediately bolted back to the ward and fished the keys to the three-wheeled buggy out of his father’s pocket.
His father, still half-asleep, looked completely bewildered. Before he could even ask a question, Zhou Yi was gone in a flash.
Zhou Yi jumped on the three-wheeler and, relying on his hazy memory, sped toward Shangyang Lane.
This wasn’t the later electric type of three-wheeler, but a diesel-powered one. They were common in the nineties, mostly made in small workshops or privately modified.
Though not very powerful, it was much faster than walking.
It was just a bit noisy when driven, letting out a constant CHUG-CHUG-CHUG.
In the pitch-black night, the cold wind cut his face like a knife.
In the nineties, most of Hongcheng didn’t even have streetlights.
Tonight was a new moon, and it was so pitch-black he could barely make out the road. He could only navigate by his faint memories.
After driving for a little over ten minutes, the tricycle crossed a bridge. Zhou Yi finally remembered—Shangyang Lane was just ahead.
He remembered it because there was a headless stone lion at the end of this bridge. He always took a second look whenever he passed it as a child, so the image was etched in his mind.
After crossing the bridge, Zhou Yi twisted the throttle, but the three-wheeler just chugged a few times and lost power, slowly coming to a stop. Zhou Yi was so angry he almost swore. For it to fail at a time like this! He had no choice but to jump off and run.
In the nineties, the pace of life was slower, and with limited spending power and entertainment options, you wouldn’t see a single soul on the streets this late at night.
Usually, the only people still out and about at this hour were workers heading to or from the night shift.
He vaguely recalled that after the bridge, Shangyang Lane was several dozen meters to the south.
He had walked down that alley before. It was a small, north-south passage, just over a meter wide and a little over a hundred meters long.
To the east of the alley was the turbine factory workshop. To the west was an abandoned residential area, said to have been built by the Japanese before the founding of the People’s Republic, which later became the staff quarters for the No. 8 Cotton Mill.
However, the buildings were too old. In ’94, a torrential downpour caused many of them to collapse, killing two people. The government then explicitly forbade anyone from living there and relocated all the residents.
This area had been empty ever since, leaving it quite desolate.
Still, many people used the alley as a shortcut, since taking the main road meant a detour of nearly two kilometers.
So, plenty of people usually walked through this alley, though almost always during the day.
By the faint moonlight, Zhou Yi found Shangyang Lane.
Even though it was the middle of the night and the air was chilling, Zhou Yi was already sweating with anxiety.
He didn’t know if he could make it in time to save Du Xiaolin.
Only then did he realize he was empty-handed. He hadn’t prepared anything, not even a flashlight.
He tried to find something nearby to defend himself with—a thick branch, a wooden stick, anything would do.
But he found nothing. He didn’t dare delay any longer. Every second he wasted was a second shaved off Du Xiaolin’s chances of survival.
Zhou Yi took a deep breath and plunged into the pitch-black alley.
He didn’t dare move too quickly. First, because it was too dark, and second, because he wasn’t sure if the killer was lurking nearby.
Zhou Yi then realized that eight years of warming the bench had truly been enough to change a person.
He was actually feeling nervous, something that would have been rare for him in the past.
But despite his caution, his pace grew faster and faster.
In the narrow alley, a faint draft blowing from upwind carried the subtle scent of blood.
Suddenly, Zhou Yi saw a figure lying on the ground ahead, motionless.
His heart sank.
’Damn it! I was too late!’