The city's clamor receded swiftly outside the car window as Shen Mo sped towards the Municipal History Museum. The thought in his mind grew clearer: if this phenomenon of "obsession made manifest" truly existed, it was impossible that it had only happened once.
Human emotions are so intense; the resentment, love, and grief accumulated over the long river of history must have left their marks in some unknown corners.
In the museum's reception hall, the air was filled with the dusty scent of old paper and camphor wood.
The person who received him was a young woman with thin-framed glasses. Her name tag read "Conservator, Su Wanying."
Her gaze was calm and focused, as if she were appraising an ancient artifact in need of repair, rather than a police officer who had come seeking help with a bizarre story.
Shen Mo skipped all preamble and stated his purpose directly, already prepared to be treated as a madman or a novelist.
However, Su Wanying just listened quietly, her fingertips tapping unconsciously on the tabletop.
After he finished, not only did she not laugh, but she pushed up her glasses and said softly, "This phenomenon you're describing, we have some unwritten discussions about it internally. We call it 'Object Corrosion'—the traces left after an object is eroded by intense spiritual energy. Please, follow me."
She led Shen Mo through a corridor marked "Staff Only" and into a climate-controlled storage room.
The light here was dim. Rows of massive metal shelves held objects covered in white cloths, like a sleeping city.
Su Wanying retrieved a yellowed file from a cabinet labeled "Qing Dynasty - Ministry of Punishments." Then, wearing white gloves, she carefully lifted a heavy iron instrument from a storage box beside it.
It was a pair of brutally designed pliers, with flat jaws clearly meant for clamping fingers.
Su Wanying spread the conservation file on the workbench. "A Qing Dynasty torture instrument, a finger-branding clamp. Used for interrogation. The jaws would be heated red-hot before use."
She pointed to a passage in the file. "Thirty years ago, we performed rust removal and conservation on it. The master craftsman in charge had the same nightmare for three consecutive nights, dreaming that his palm was branded through by the red-hot iron clamp. The pain was so real it woke him up in the middle of the night. At first, everyone thought it was psychological, until he found some carbonized organic residue while cleaning the inside of the jaws."
Shen Mo's breath caught.
"We commissioned the best laboratory at the time for analysis," Su Wanying's voice was exceptionally clear in the silent storeroom. "Ultimately, in the tiny crevices of the inner jaws, they successfully extracted a minuscule amount of heat-damaged human skin tissue DNA. After a database comparison, this DNA pointed to a scholar who was wrongfully executed in a literary inquisition during the late Qing Dynasty. The records state that he refused to confess until death, was subjected to this cruel torture, and eventually died in prison."
Shen Mo's heart sank. This was a perfect corroboration of his "information contamination" theory.
Su Wanying continued, "Our hypothesis is that certain extreme emotions, such as intense pain, injustice, or hatred, if the spiritual will of their carrier—the person involved—is strong enough, can be 'written' into an object that can be preserved for a long time, much like data. We call these objects 'Memory Condensates.' Under specific conditions, such as a similar environment or emotional stimulus, this sealed 'memory' can be activated, 'replayed,' and even... 'evolved'."
"Object Corrosion..." Shen Mo mulled over the term, feeling as though a bolt of lightning had split the fog in his mind.
He immediately took out his phone, brought up the photo of the cufflink, and showed it to Su Wanying.
Su Wanying stared at the strange symbol on the screen for a long time before she slowly spoke. "It's made of brass. Copper is an excellent conductor. It not only conducts heat and electricity, but in ancient esoteric theories, it can also 'conduct thought.' The ancients used bronze mirrors to ward off evil and copper coins for divination. Perhaps it wasn't just superstition, but a simple understanding based on this property."
The two looked at each other, instantly reaching a tacit understanding.
One had a bizarre real-world case, the other had a deep theoretical and historical basis. Cooperation was the only option.
"I need to test the specific material composition of this cufflink," Su Wanying's tone became decisive. "The museum has a collaborative project with a local university's physics lab. We can borrow their equipment to perform an ion beam scan analysis."
The results came out the next afternoon, so astonishing that it left them both speechless.
The report showed that the main body of the cufflink was a copper alloy, but it contained trace amounts of a rare element that should absolutely not exist in natural copper ore—Technetium-99.
"Technetium-99..." Su Wanying's expression was exceptionally grave. "It's a man-made radioactive isotope, a product of Uranium-235 fission, with a half-life of 210,000 years. It barely exists in nature. Its main sources are nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons testing."
Nuclear testing... a detail Shen Mo had overlooked exploded in his mind.
He suddenly remembered that the prison where Zhou Wenhai was executed had a very peculiar location—it was built on the former site of a decommissioned nuclear physics research institute from the Cold War era.
That cufflink had spent the final moments of a death row inmate's life with him, an inmate who harbored a monstrous grudge, in an environment filled with high-intensity residual radiation.
That night, Shen Mo stayed up all night in his office, staring at the redrawn cufflink symbols on the whiteboard.
He deconstructed and reassembled the seven seemingly chaotic arcs over and over again, until a thought flashed through his mind in the early hours of the morning.
What if this wasn't just a symbol, but a word?
He immediately pulled up the ancient script database and tried to apply variants of ancient seal script.
An hour later, he succeeded.
The seven arcs could be perfectly deconstructed into three twisted variants of ancient seal script: "Wu," "Hen," "Pan."
A traceless judgment.
Shen Mo felt a chill run up his spine.
This wasn't a curse; it was a verdict from hell.
He thought of another key point: the forensic report confirmed that the carvings on Zhou Zhenguo's chest were made with his own fingertips, with no tools involved.
To carve such deep marks on the hard sternum with fingernails would require a pressure of at least 800 Newtons, equivalent to the instantaneous impact of a small hydraulic press.
He quickly performed physical calculations on paper, reverse-engineering the kinetic energy required to apply this force.
The result was obvious. Simple muscle contraction was absolutely impossible.
The only explanation was that some immense potential energy was conducted through the skin as a medium and released instantaneously at the fingertips.
Just as Su Wanying had said, copper could "conduct thought," and perhaps it could also conduct energy.
The next morning, the shrill ring of the phone woke Shen Mo, who had just collapsed at his desk less than an hour ago.
It was an urgent notification from the bureau: Zhou Wenhai's son, Zhou Mingyuan, had been caught trying to break into the city bureau's evidence room in the early hours of the morning.
In the interrogation room, Zhou Mingyuan remained silent, his eyes vacant, as if his soul had been drained.
Shen Mo observed him through the one-way glass. Suddenly, his gaze locked onto Zhou Mingyuan's right hand.
The hand rested limply on the edge of the table. On the palm was a faint, slight swelling. The texture of the skin seemed different from the surrounding area, faintly showing a very light, ring-shaped protrusion.
A terrible conjecture made Shen Mo's scalp tingle.
He immediately applied for an emergency physical examination of Zhou Mingyuan.
The results from the forensic center confirmed the speculation he was most unwilling to face.
Under a high-powered microscope, beneath the epidermis of Zhou Mingyuan's right palm, a new, unfamiliar set of fingerprints was slowly forming. Its pattern was completely identical to the "regenerated fingerprint" his father, Zhou Wenhai, had left on the cufflink.
The cufflink had been sealed in the evidence bag the entire time. Zhou Mingyuan had never touched it.
This meant that the force known as "obsession" or "Object Corrosion" had already detached from its original medium and was beginning to carry out "targeted contamination" through a deeper link—bloodline, or perhaps an equally intense emotion of grief and indignation.
Shen Mo looked up at the dark clouds that had gathered outside the window at some point, pressing down on the city's skyline, making it gray and heavy.
He finally understood completely. This was no longer a simple case.
This was a "reality decay" that was silently spreading.
He turned and strode quickly towards the forensic center's data analysis room. He had to, immediately, re-watch the high-definition image data of the regenerated fingerprints on Zhou Mingyuan's palm. He felt as if he had missed something.
Deep within those strange patterns, it seemed there was a secret hidden even deeper than the fingerprints themselves.
The computer screen lit up. He pulled up the video file he had just saved, pressed play, and the image began to loop. The ring-shaped patterns slowly emerging from under the skin were reflected in his pupils as a distorted light.
(End of Chapter)