Chapter 34: Where Should the Scalpel Cut?

The minute hand of the autopsy room’s wall clock had just ticked past 1:00 AM. Shen Mo removed his blood-stained rubber gloves; the bone saw on the metal tray still glinted with a cold light.

As Su Wangying handed him an iodine-soaked cotton swab, he noticed her fingertips trembling slightly. Ever since her left hand had begun writing uncontrollably in the blood earlier, her breathing had been punctuated by faint, barely audible gasps.

"I’m going to the nursing home." He unclipped his ID badge from his neck, the metal clasp clicking against the tabletop.

Su Wangying, who was cleaning a wound on the back of his hand, froze. "Now?"

"Now." He stared down at the thin, long blood streak on his hand—a cut from the bone saw when his left hand had spasmed. The edges of the wound were as neat as if measured by a ruler. "Zhao Yuhang’s obsession didn't just appear out of thin air." He raised his eyes, his gaze behind his lenses cutting through layers of tissue like a scalpel. "An echo needs a medium, a trigger, and above all, an original source. When Professor Zhou forced me to sign that fraudulent report back then, he was winding the clock for all of this."

Su Wangying pressed her fingers gently against the back of his hand. The iodine seeped into the wound, and the sting made him frown. "Do you know what he's like now?" Her voice was low, as if afraid of shattering something. "I went to the suburbs for some field research last week and passed by that nursing home. The caregiver says he keeps his eyes open all night, with twenty-year-old academic journals piled by his bed, their edges curled from constant turning."

Shen Mo pulled his white coat over his arm and turned, the motion stirring a breeze that caused the experiment logs on the autopsy table to flutter. "That’s exactly why I must go now." He grabbed the portable EEG monitor from the table; the black device felt as heavy as lead in his palm. "Guilt ferments, and fear settles. Twenty years is enough for a lie to become a truth even he believes. I need to pull that thorn out while he can still distinguish reality from hallucination."

Su Wangying said nothing more. She bent down to pick up the car keys he had dropped. The metal keychain swirled around her finger before she tucked it into her coat pocket. "I’ll drive."

Ivy covered the outer walls of the suburban nursing home. The twilight light filtered through the gaps in the leaves, casting a mottled web across the ground.

When Shen Mo stood at the door of Room 302, he heard rhythmic snoring from within. The caregiver had said Professor Zhou always slept at this hour, but he noticed a shadow flickering within the sliver of light leaking beneath the door.

"Professor Zhou." He pushed the door open, the cold white light of the monitor sweeping across the room.

The old man on the bed was covered by a beige blanket, his eyelashes casting shadows beneath his eyes, yet his Adam's apple moved with a rhythmic rise and fall—an unnatural frequency characteristic of someone feigning sleep.

Shen Mo placed the monitor on the bedside table; the metal casing bumped into something hard. He looked down and saw half of a *Forensic Anatomy Atlas* peeking from the edge of the blanket. The spine was severely worn; it was an old edition from twenty years ago.

"You didn't save him because you were afraid of losing your title as a doctoral supervisor." He pulled up a chair and sat down, his knees nearly touching the edge of the bed. "You made me write that report because I was the most 'objective' of the interns." He tapped his knuckles against the *Atlas*. "But you forgot: objectivity isn't heartlessness; it’s preventing personal desire from polluting judgment."

The body under the blanket suddenly shuddered.

The old man’s eyelashes fluttered violently, like butterfly wings caught in a gale, until he finally opened his eyes. His pupils were dilated, the whites filled with bloodshot veins. The moment he saw Shen Mo, his Adam's apple bobbed. "Little... Little Shen..."

"Zhao Yuhang’s experimental data was correct." Shen Mo interrupted him. "Three years ago, you said his operational errors led to sample contamination, but it was actually you who tampered with those samples. You needed a paper that could secure your election to the Academy of Sciences, and his results stood in your way."

The old man’s hand emerged from under the blanket, his fingernails a pale, grayish-blue. As he gripped Shen Mo’s wrist, it felt like a withered branch scraping against skin. "You... how do you know?"

"His death report stated there was half a tablet of antidepressants in his stomach." Shen Mo let him hold on as he attached the EEG electrodes to the man's temples. "A man who takes his medication on schedule doesn't suddenly jump to his death on an impulse." He pulled out a digital recorder with his free hand. "But this is what confirmed it for me."

The moment he pressed play, a young man's voice spilled out through the static, thick with tears: "Professor Zhou, I’ve re-run the experiments three times, the data is still the same... please look at these scans, the mitochondrial structure really shows no abnormalities..."

"No!" The old man suddenly erupted, his thin, frail arms knocking over the bedside table, sending the monitor crashing to the floor. His face turned deep red, and tears streamed down his wrinkles. "That tape should have been destroyed long ago! I told Little Wang to burn it in the lab... he said he watched it turn to ash with his own eyes..."

"It wasn't destroyed." Shen Mo bent down to pick up the monitor; the brainwaves on the screen were spiking violently. "It was waiting for someone who could 'hear' it."

A sudden, sharp pain exploded in his temples, as if someone were driving a bone chisel into his skull. He gripped the edge of the bed as the world began to distort. In the rain, a young man in a white coat knelt on the ground, clutching wet experimental reports to his chest, looking up at the third-floor office window. Behind that window, a younger version of himself, wearing a forensic intern's uniform, was looking at his watch, his fingers holding the fountain pen Professor Zhou had just shoved into his hand.

"Dr. Shen!" Su Wangying’s voice sounded as if it were coming from very far away.

He felt a warm liquid flowing from the corner of his mouth. He reached up to touch it—it was blood. He had bitten through the inside of his cheek without realizing it.

"Emotion..." He grabbed Su Wangying’s wrist; the monitor was vibrating hot in her palm. "It’s not memory; it’s emotion. The despair of being denied by an authority, the suffocation of being abandoned by the world..." He looked up at Professor Zhou, who was curled up at the head of the bed, clutching his head and repeating, "I didn't mean to."

"You and Zhao Yuhang’s obsession are in resonance." He gasped for air. "Every time you recall what happened back then, you add fuel to his obsession. And I..." He pressed his knuckles against his own chest. "I am the wielder of the blade in the white coat, the 'authority' he saw at the very end."

On the drive back, Shen Mo asked Su Wangying to turn on her phone’s video recording.

Streetlights swept past the car window, casting alternating light and shadow across his face. On the screen, his reflection sat quietly in the seat, until the high beams of a truck ahead swept over them—the reflection’s left arm suddenly lifted, the index and middle fingers curled into a half-closed fist, then slowly relaxed.

Su Wangying slammed on the brakes. The electrical crackle from the car’s speakers stung their eardrums. "That was..."

"Zhao Yuhang’s habit." Shen Mo stared at the phone screen as the reflection returned to normal. "Whenever he was nervous during experiments, he loved to clench and unclench his fist like that." He reached out to turn off the recording, his thumb gently wiping across that moment on the screen. "I used to think that autopsies were to prove the dead were telling the truth. Now I realize that sometimes, the corpses are speaking, and we simply aren't listening."

He pulled the recorder from his pocket and pressed it into Su Wangying’s palm. "Next time... don't let me listen for too long."

The night breeze, carrying the scent of sycamore leaves, poured into the car. On the glass of an old building in the distance, two silhouettes suddenly flashed side-by-side—one in a white lab coat, the other in a blue-and-white school uniform. Between them lay a burning bone saw, its sparks scattering into tiny stars in the wind.

"What was that?" Su Wangying pointed out the window.

Shen Mo squinted, but when he looked again, only their own reflections remained on the glass.

Just as he was about to speak, his phone vibrated in his pocket. Su Wangying glanced at the screen; it was a call from the Municipal Archives. After listening for a moment, she turned to him and said, "They said they received a donation of old books today, including a Republic-era *Book of Burials*. They want me to go organize them tomorrow."

Shen Mo nodded, though his gaze remained fixed on the glass window. He didn't notice that when Su Wangying hung up, her fingertips pressed lightly against her phone case—the caller had mentioned that the flyleaf of the old book had dark red marks, like dried blood.

She touched the back of her burning neck and tucked the phone into her coat pocket. The night wind lifted her hair, and a sycamore leaf drifted in, landing on her knee. Faintly visible on the leaf’s veins were a few faded, brush-written characters: "Seeing these words is like meeting in person."