Three days later, at two in the morning, the city bureau building was still brightly lit, but a corner of the forensics department had fallen into a dead silence.
A young technician was slumped over his desk, in a posture that suggested he was merely tired from work and taking a short rest.
However, his cold skin and stiff limbs silently announced the arrival of death.
The preliminary results from the forensic examiner made the arriving Lin Zhiyuan suck in a cold breath.
The cause of death was sudden cardiac arrest, but strangely, the deceased's pupils were dilated to an unbelievable degree, far beyond the physiological limit for a typical heart attack patient, as if he had seen the most terrifying sight in the world just before dying.
Even more horrifying were his outstretched hands.
On the palm of his left and right hands, a perfectly clear fingerprint was imprinted. The swirling patterns belonged neither to the deceased himself nor to anyone in the database—they were identical to the unknown set of patterns that had materialized on Zhou Zhenguo's corpse three days ago.
Lin Zhiyuan's face was grim as he met the hurried arrival of Shen Mo, his voice lowered to a whisper. "The deceased is named Wang Bin. He was on the night shift last night. I checked; he was the technician responsible for cataloging Zhou Zhenguo's personal effects. He personally handled that brass cufflink."
Shen Mo's gaze swept across the scene.
The knuckle of Wang Bin's right index finger was unnaturally twisted, showing signs of slight bone dislocation, as if it had been forcibly bent back to its limit by an immense force.
He didn't immediately touch the body, but walked straight to Wang Bin's computer.
The screen was still on, frozen on an unsent email draft.
The subject line read: "Urgent Report on Abnormal Situation in Evidence Locker No. 3."
The body contained only two lines of text, like a delirious rambling typed in a hurry: "Last night I dreamed I was scraping my own skin with my hands, like scraping off old wallpaper... When I woke up, my fingernails were full of skin flakes. I tested them. They're not mine."
Shen Mo's heart sank.
Scraping off his own skin... newly grown fingerprints.
The two things instantly connected in his mind.
He immediately turned and ordered Lin Zhiyuan, "Pull the evidence room's check-in/check-out records right now. I want to know all movements of that cufflink before the incident, down to the minute."
The records were quickly brought over.
They showed that just yesterday afternoon, the day before the incident, evidence item "A074"—Zhou Zhenguo's brass cufflinks—had been briefly checked out by Wang Bin. The reason given was "to supplement high-definition detail photos for archival purposes."
It was checked out for one hour and returned directly to storage afterward.
The trail of clues once again pointed to that small cufflink.
Without a moment's delay, Shen Mo drove back to the city funeral home's morgue.
The air was still cold, and the smell of formalin seemed even stronger than last time.
When Auntie Chen heard he wanted to inspect Zhou Zhenguo's belongings again, her face instantly turned pale, her eyes darting away with a lingering, panicked fear.
"Officer... Officer Shen," she stammered, "after that day... I just felt that thing was cursed. I... I didn't dare keep it with the body. I put it in a sealed bag and locked it in that old, disused metal evidence locker in the innermost room."
Shen Mo followed her to the deepest part of the morgue.
The old metal locker was covered in rust spots, like a relic from a bygone era.
Auntie Chen used a string of rusty keys to open the lock, and a wave of stale, cold air rushed out.
Deep inside the locker, a transparent, sealed evidence bag lay quietly.
The cufflink was still inside.
But Shen Mo's pupils suddenly contracted.
He clearly remembered that the bag was dry when he had placed the cufflink back inside last time.
But now, the inner wall of the sealed bag was coated with a thin, fine mist, as if something inside the bag had heated up dramatically in the sealed environment and then slowly cooled down.
Putting on sterile gloves, Shen Mo carefully took out the cufflink.
The metal felt colder than expected, as if it had just been taken out of an ice cellar.
He turned on his portable investigation lamp and switched it to ultraviolet mode.
Under the purple light, the characters on the cufflink's surface were starkly visible.
The three words, "You are traceless," were a deeper color than three days ago, as if the ink had completely seeped into the metal's texture.
What startled him more was that at the edges of the characters, fine, web-like cracks had appeared, spreading outward from the ends of the strokes.
This thing... it was as if it were alive, "growing."
Back at the police bureau's lab, Shen Mo cast aside all superstitious thoughts of "curses" and began a bold simulation experiment.
He found an ordinary metal button of similar material and weight to the cufflink, placed it in a constant temperature incubator, and connected it to a weak bio-electric signal to simulate the most basic environment of human contact.
Twenty-four hours passed. The metal button showed no change.
Had the experiment failed? No, perhaps a key "fuse" was missing.
He requested a sealed sample from Zhou Zhenguo's body from the medical examiner—a strand of hair with a complete follicle.
He carefully attached this strand of hair to the back of the ordinary metal button and started the bio-electric signal simulation again.
This time, a miracle happened.
Thirteen hours into the experiment, the monitor for the high-precision microscope showed that extremely faint scratches began to appear on the smooth surface of the metal button.
They were very shallow, almost invisible to the naked eye, but as time went on, the scratches slowly deepened and connected. The final shape they outlined bore a striking resemblance to the mysterious fingerprint patterns on Wang Bin's palm and Zhou Zhenguo's body.
Shen Mo understood instantly.
This wasn't a curse; it was a phenomenon of "information replication" he had never seen before.
The extreme emotions of unwillingness, fear, and regret that Zhou Zhenguo felt before his death, that powerful "obsession," had been "engraved" into this cufflink that he wore day and night, by some unknown principle.
This cufflink had become the medium.
And to activate and "read" this information, a biological "key" was needed—the DNA of the person who touched it.
Once someone touched the cufflink, their biological information would become the fuse, activating the "obsession program" stored within.
This obsession would then retroactively invade the person who touched it, creating hallucinations on a mental level (the dream of scraping skin) and physically forcing the replication of that set of fingerprints representing "judgment."
Wang Bin's death was because his body couldn't withstand this forced rewriting at the information level, leading to a systemic collapse. The cardiac arrest was just the final result.
His broken finger was likely a self-inflicted injury he had unconsciously committed in his dream while trying to scrape off his own skin.
"Judgment"... whose judgment?
Shen Mo immediately pulled up the entire case file for the twenty-year-old bank robbery wrongful conviction.
The yellowed pages gave off a musty smell, pulling him back to that era where lives were treated like grass.
The name of the deceased, Zhou Wenhai, was listed prominently.
The file recorded that Zhou Zhenguo, as a key eyewitness, had insisted that Zhou Wenhai was the robber and had provided fabricated "key evidence," ultimately leading to Zhou Wenhai being sentenced to death and swiftly executed.
Shen Mo flipped through the pages, one by one, until he reached the end of the file.
It was a photo of Zhou Wenhai's immediate family signing the death notification.
In the photo, a haggard-looking woman was signing, and behind her stood a boy of about ten.
The boy wasn't crying. He was just staring intently at the camera, his eyes devoid of the innocence a child should have, containing only a cold hatred that transcended his age.
Shen Mo enlarged the old photo, cropped the boy's facial features, and compared them with the image of a suspicious man captured by the surveillance cameras outside the funeral home over the past few days.
A perfect match. The boy from back then had grown into a silent, taciturn young man.
The surveillance showed that this man never stepped into the funeral home to report a case, never went near Zhou Zhenguo's memorial hall, and never even spoke to anyone.
He just appeared on the street corner opposite the funeral home at dusk every day, like a statue, standing there silently. His gaze passed over the wall, staring for a long time at the tall chimney of the crematorium, until the last wisp of smoke dissipated into the twilight.
Shen Mo slowly closed the file, his fingertip lightly tracing the photo of the cold cufflink.
He muttered to himself, as if asking himself, and also as if asking the avenger hiding in the shadows, "Who will be the next person to touch the cufflink?"
However, after this question, a deeper, broader fear rose in his heart.
The "information replication" theory he had discovered perfectly explained the current case, but the theory itself was like a Pandora's box.
This phenomenon, which used an "object" as a carrier and an "obsession" as a carving knife, could it exist only in this one small cufflink?
Perhaps, in the long, dusty river of history, there had already been countless precedents, but their language had remained unintelligible to all.
(End of Chapter)