Chapter Thirty-One — You Burned Away My Life

The scent of disinfectant was the first thing to seep into his nostrils.

Shen Mo opened his eyes, the stinging sensation sharp. The ceiling light looked as if it had been soaked in water, its glow blurring into hazy circles. A dull, throbbing ache pulsed in the back of his right hand—only then did he realize he was lying on a hospital observation bed, the fluid from the IV drip trickling into his veins.

"You're awake?" Su Wangying’s face suddenly leaned in close, her hair carrying the chill of the hospital corridor. There were dark, bruised shadows beneath her eyes, her lab coat was crumpled, and her left hand tightly gripped a wadded-up medical report.

Shen Mo tried to lift his hand to remove the IV tape, but she pressed down on his wrist. "The doctor said there’s abnormally high-frequency activity in your temporal lobe, similar to post-traumatic flashbacks, but they can't identify a stressor." Her fingertips were trembling. "You were delirious while you were unconscious. You kept saying things like, 'I am not a loser,' and 'I’ve been dissected.'"

Shen Mo’s temples began to throb again. He raised his left hand, rubbing his forehead with his knuckles. Fragmented images flickered across his retinas: wind from a rainy night rushing down his collar, a damp piece of paper pressed against his face, the ink bleeding into the dark red characters of a name: "Zhao Yuhang."

"There’s a voice in my head that isn't mine," he said, his voice raspy. "It’s like someone flipping through a book—page after page of... someone else’s memories."

Su Wangying’s grip tightened. She pulled her phone from her bag, swiped to the photo gallery, and held it before his eyes. "While you were unconscious, this flashed across every electronic billboard in the city."

The photo was a 0.1-second capture from surveillance footage—it was his face, the corners of his mouth turned up, but the smile looked like crumpled paper, and his eyes were glistening with moisture. "It was also on the dashcams of three different car accidents," she said, scrolling through the screen. "The drivers said the smile 'looked like it was crying.'"

Shen Mo’s pupils contracted slightly. He noticed an odd, luminous speck in his own eyes in the photo. When zoomed in, he could clearly see the details within the speck: a faded blackboard with chalk writing that read, *Human Anatomy: Lecture Seven*—the very classroom where Zhao Yuhang had held his final lecture before committing suicide.

"Xiao Wu analyzed the raw frame data," Su Wangying said, her throat moving as she swallowed. "He said... that thing wasn't burned to death. It hid in the very moment you burned it, becoming a part of your memory."

Shen Mo pulled out the IV needle, beads of blood blooming on the bedsheet. He stumbled as he rose, and when Su Wangying reached out to steady him, he side-stepped her.

"To the Electrical Education Building," he said, grabbing the coat draped over the back of the chair. "I need to examine the medium it left behind."

***

The Electrical Education Building was still cordoned off with police tape. Shen Mo wore rubber gloves, crouching before the charred remains of the video equipment. Within the blackened metal casing, a chip the size of a fingernail shimmered coldly at the tip of his tweezers.

When the results from the laboratory spectrometer arrived, his hand, still clutching a coffee cup, suddenly tightened. There was no original course content in the magnetic signal, only a reverse-encoded data stream—like a snake biting its own tail.

"Memory reflux." He wrote the words on the whiteboard, the pressure of his pen tearing through the paper. "The viewer’s emotional feedback is injected into the footage, forming a closed loop. My anger and instability when I burned it were all captured and reverse-written into my neural sensory system."

Su Wangying rested her chin on her fingertips. "So now it doesn't need a projector, as long as..."

"As long as I am being watched," Shen Mo completed the thought. "It can be activated through the gaze of others, using my body to express itself."

The cognitive isolation experiment lasted three days. Shen Mo covered every mirror in his house with black cloth, set his phone to black-and-white mode, and even applied frosted film to the reflective surfaces of his refrigerator.

On the morning of the fourth day, he had Su Wangying point her phone’s front-facing camera at him, with the screen feed projected onto the living room television.

"Start," he said, his voice like a taut string.

On the television, the corners of his mouth began to slowly lift. In reality, the muscles in his face remained perfectly still.

Su Wangying’s breathing grew ragged; she nearly dropped the phone. The "him" on the screen turned his head, his eyes shifting toward Su Wangying outside the frame, his lips parting to silently mouth three words: "See... me."

Shen Mo grabbed a power bank from the coffee table and hurled it at the television. Amidst the sound of shattering glass, his back was already soaked in cold sweat. Su Wangying knelt to pick up the shards, but the final residual image on the screen continued to repeat that eerie lip movement.

"It is learning how to become me," Shen Mo stared at the fragments on the floor, his voice as faint as a sigh.

Deep in the night, the anatomy lab smelled of the sweet, raw stench of formaldehyde.

***

Shen Mo stood before the dissection table, the metal teeth of the bone saw gleaming under the overhead lights. He rolled up his left sleeve, goosebumps rising on his skin in the cold air. When the tip of the saw touched his forearm, his eyelashes fluttered, but he did not pull away.

"If it is information," he said to the empty air, "then I will dissect myself and dig it out."

The moment the saw pierced his skin, the door was slammed open. Su Wangying lunged forward, knocking over the instrument tray; tweezers and hemostats clattered to the floor. She grabbed his wrist and saw beads of blood trailing down a winding, irregular mark—it was a sequence of Morse code.

"Save me..." she translated the first half, her voice suddenly choking. "It is learning how to become me."

A light tapping sound came from the window. Both of them looked up simultaneously. Moonlight leaked through a gap in the clouds, illuminating the glass windows of all the old buildings, making them shine like silver.

Every pane of glass reflected the same image: Shen Mo standing on the edge of a rooftop, behind him countless "selves" in white lab coats, one after another crossing the railing and falling into the darkness.

*Ding.*

The notification sound of a mobile phone shattered the silence. Su Wangying pulled out her phone; a message from Xiao Wu was on the screen: "The Municipal Public Security Bureau's Internal Affairs Division is looking for you. They say they need to speak with Forensic Examiner Shen."

Shen Mo looked down at the bloodstains on his arm. Footsteps echoed in the corridor, growing closer. He heard someone knock on the door, the voice cold and official: "Forensic Examiner Shen? Director Chen wants to see you for a talk. Bring three copies of the statement."