Chapter 32: Shadows Can Blink, But I Cannot

The metallic click of the doorknob turning was colder than a knock.

Shen Mo did not move, staring at the beads of formalin condensation on the edge of the autopsy table. He heard the crisp tap of leather boot heels against the tiles, sounding like the meshing of gears in a precision instrument—Director Chen always wore bespoke Oxford shoes, a detail he had noted by chance in an autopsy report.

"Forensic Pathologist Shen." Director Chen’s voice was like compressed ice, carrying the dry rustle of paper rubbing together.

He placed a kraft paper bag on the autopsy table, and three pages of statements slid out. "The statements of the three witnesses require your verification."

Shen Mo finally looked up. Director Chen’s lenses reflected a cold light, obscuring his pupils—the standard defensive posture of an internal affairs officer. When Shen Mo reached out, his knuckles slightly deformed from years of gripping a scalpel, he caught a familiar scent of sandalwood the moment his fingertips touched the papers. Su Wanying always said it was the distinct smell of old archives, but at this moment, it felt like a thin needle piercing his taut nerves.

The first statement was a handwritten record from the night-shift nurse at the Municipal Third Hospital. The ink was still fresh; the words "February 17, 03:12, hallway outside the morgue" had bled into a small blotch, like a drop of congealed blood. The nurse described "Shen Mo" wearing a white lab coat with brownish stains—suspected blood—on the cuffs. When she called out to him, he turned suddenly, his eyes looking "as if covered in a layer of frosted glass."

The second was a printout from a taxi driver, the timeline seamless: departed from Shen Mo’s residential compound at 02:58, stopped at 03:07 at the site of a tape factory that had burned down half a year ago. In the remarks column, the driver had circled a note in red three times: "He sat in the back seat. I watched him in the rearview mirror, and he was watching the mirror too—but when I hit the brakes and looked again, the seat was empty."

The third was the thinnest: an incident report from the surveillance center. "February 17, 03:00-03:30, the surveillance footage of the B1 floor of the Municipal Third Hospital shows 0.7 seconds of noise; no clear frontal image of Shen was captured at any other time."

Shen Mo rubbed his thumb over the words "clear frontal image." He recalled Su Wanying holding up her phone three days ago to show him the "himself" moving on the television—the screen resolution was 1080p, yet the face in the video had always looked pixelated, as if censored.

"I need to see the home surveillance from that night," he said, his voice as steady as a scalpel slicing through a rib. "My house has a 24-hour connected camera; the cloud backup should still be there."

Director Chen’s Adam’s apple bobbed. Shen Mo knew he was weighing the risks—was it compliant to allow a suspect to access their private surveillance? But in the next second, the man pulled out his phone, his knuckles turning white as he entered the password. "The department's technical division has already synchronized the data."

The moment the phone screen lit up, Su Wanying’s breathing suddenly felt close to his ear. Only then did Shen Mo realize she had been standing behind him, her fingers gripping the back of his suit jacket with enough force to nearly pull the threads loose.

The surveillance footage showed his study. At 03:05 on February 17, the desk lamp was on, and he was hunched over his desk writing an autopsy report, the nib of his fountain pen scratching against the paper. At 03:08, he stood up to pour a glass of water, the glass glinting coldly in the moonlight. At 03:12, his shadow suddenly paused in the corner—not the person, but the shadow.

The shadow wearing the lab coat detached itself from his ankles, like a cloud of ink dispersed by the wind, and slithered along the base of the wall toward the door. The Shen Mo in the surveillance footage remained oblivious, head down, organizing files, until 03:27, when the shadow slid back into the frame and reattached itself to his feet.

"So, they didn't see me," Shen Mo said, his fingernails digging into his palms. "They saw my shadow."

Su Wanying’s fingers were trembling. She pulled a yellowed, thread-bound book from her canvas bag, the cover half-eaten by insects, with the title *Records of Strange Light and Shadow*. "Notes from a Daoist at the Xuanmiao Temple in Suzhou, 1934. It says, 'The shadow is born of the form; in time, it will devour its master.' The remnant was originally parasitic in the magnetic tape; once the tape burned, it found a new medium."

"Public imagery," Shen Mo picked up the thread. "Surveillance, photographs, other people's memories. And the shadow is the most stable visual residue—it follows me 24 hours a day, more reliable than any electronic device."

Su Wanying nodded. "Like a virus switching hosts. Now it doesn't need a physical medium; as long as someone is looking at you, looking at your shadow, looking at any surface that reflects you..."

"It comes alive," Shen Mo finished for her.

A sudden gust of wind blew into the autopsy room through the vent, causing the statements on the table to flutter. The last page landed on the taxi driver’s statement: "He was watching me in the rearview mirror, and I was watching him in the rearview mirror."

At ten that night, Shen Mo’s study was wrapped in black cloth like a silkworm cocoon. Two floor-to-ceiling mirrors stood facing each other, with his shadow trapped in between. Su Wanying stood guard outside the door with a recording device; a video call window with Xiao Wu was minimized in the corner, the computer screen casting a ghostly blue light.

"Begin," Shen Mo’s voice sounded muffled in the enclosed space.

He raised his left hand; the shadows in both mirrors raised their left hands simultaneously. Lowered, synchronized. Fisted, synchronized.

When he raised his hand for the third time, the shadow in the left mirror suddenly raised its right hand—in reality, his own arms were hanging at his sides, his fingertips still stained with the red ink he had used for marking.

"Ultraviolet lamp." His voice didn't waver, though his Adam’s apple bobbed.

Su Wanying passed the UV lamp through the gap in the door. The cold, white light swept across the floor, and a pale blue halo rose from the edges of the shadow, like the snowy noise of an old television changing channels.

"0.3-second delay, 15-pixel frame error." Shen Mo pulled out a notebook and poked a hole in the paper with his pen. "It’s not a light projection; it’s information... it’s copying my movements, but it’s starting to have its own 'thoughts'."

His phone vibrated. Xiao Wu’s face suddenly zoomed in, his glasses fogged with a thin layer of sweat. "I cracked the campus surveillance log system! There’s a process called VIEW_SHADOW that wakes up every 23 minutes and pushes a 128x128 grayscale image to every connected screen—"

The screen cut to Xiao Wu’s computer, and a silhouette began to unfold. The lab coat, the slightly pursed lips—even the curve of the Adam’s apple was identical to Shen Mo’s. "The key is the timestamp!" Xiao Wu’s fingers hammered on the keyboard. "The nurse’s sighting was at 03:12, the process push was 03:10; the taxi driver was 03:07, the push was 03:05—every time you were 'seen', it pushed the image first!"

Shen Mo’s fountain pen dropped to the floor, rolling into the shadow.

He suddenly remembered the "himself" that had spoken on television three days ago—when Su Wanying held up her camera, was that "him" actually looking at Xiao Wu behind the lens? Was it looking at every terminal capable of receiving an image?

The late-night study felt even more stifling. Shen Mo loosened his tie, feeling a layer of sweat at the back of his neck. He closed his eyes to write his experimental notes, the nib scratching against the paper, until he heard a "rustle"—the manuscript page had turned itself.

When he opened his eyes, the blank page was crawling with ink. *You burned my life, I return the favor with a dream.* The handwriting was crooked, exactly the same as what he had written on the back of his emergency room form while unconscious.

His shadow was cast on the wall. At this moment, the shadow was slowly turning its head, the corners of its mouth curling into an arc—while he himself remained pinned against the back of his chair, his hands still gripping the pen, not even his eyelashes moving.

Outside the window came the hum of an electronic billboard switching advertisements. Shen Mo looked up just in time to see a 0.1-second flash of white light on the LED screen of the office building across the street. By the time he blinked, the "himself" on the screen closed its left eye and winked at him.

His phone vibrated again. He picked it up; the screen was blindingly bright—it was a missed call from Su Wanying. Just as he was about to call back, the screen automatically opened the input interface, and his fingers danced across the keyboard without his control.

"Wanying, tomorrow morning at eight, see you at the usual spot."

The moment the send button was pressed, Shen Mo let go abruptly. The phone fell to the floor, the screen shattering into a spiderweb of cracks. He stared at his right hand. The sequence of movements just now had been as fluid as if carved into his DNA—yet he knew, he hadn't moved a muscle.

The shadow at the base of the wall was still smiling. Moonlight leaked through a gap in the black cloth, illuminating the fountain pen that had rolled near the shadow’s feet. It was moving slowly, carving jagged marks into the floorboards like a dying snake.