Chapter Thirty-Seven: Enveloped in Black Qi

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Shen Mo’s pen lingered for a full three minutes at the end of the sentence, “It is not reproducing the past…”

After the fading echo of a car horn outside the window died away, a child’s voice from his memory began playing on repeat: “Autumn rain has a box of brightly colored paints…” It was a passage from the third-grade language textbook at Qiyin School. He had found it in the archives the week before, with a rainbow still scrawled in crayon along the edge of the page.

He suddenly pulled off the cap of his fountain pen and wrote heavily in his notebook:

“It is completing an unfinished expression.”

At 2:17 a.m., when Xiao Wu’s video call window popped up, Shen Mo was using the tip of a scalpel to prise open a sealed bag.

Under the cold white light, the layer of ash gave off the faintest bluish tint. The instant the blade touched the powder, fine gooseflesh rose along the back of his neck—the physiological warning that came to him only before dissecting a severely decomposed corpse.

“Brother Shen, guess what I dug out of the data center’s backup system?” Xiao Wu’s face was squeezed into the lower-right corner of the screen, a wall of flickering code behind him. “A program called Echo_Loop. It’s like a book-eating worm, mixing scans of old textbooks with symbols from blackboards, then pushing encrypted packets to electronic displays all over the city.”

He tapped the keyboard, and a stream of green data filled the screen.

“I spent half the night breaking it. The trigger condition is… a human gaze lasting more than eighteen seconds.”

Shen Mo’s fingers tapped a steady rhythm against the desk. Eighteen seconds. He remembered seeing that number in a case report on aphasia: the average time those children waited for a teacher to respond after raising their hands to speak in class.

“It turns reading into a punishment for staring.” Xiao Wu swallowed. His eyes behind the lenses were threaded with red. “The longer you stare at the screen, the more you become like they were back then—silenced by the world.”

The point of the fountain pen pierced a small hole in the notebook page.

Shen Mo rose abruptly, the chair scraping across the floor with a shrill cry.

He opened a drawer and took out the stack of charcoal rubbings he had made from the blackboard symbols in the school ruins. The edges were still stained with scorch marks.

“Send me the animated chart, Xiao Wu.” His voice was low, as though steeped in ice water. “I need to reconstruct Teacher Lin’s signing sequence.”

For the next three days, the autopsy room became a makeshift training hall.

Su Wanying leaned against a cabinet of instruments, holding a copy of the Comprehensive Dictionary of Chinese Sign Language. Her fingertips trembled faintly in time with Shen Mo’s movements.

“Relax your wrist a little more.” She walked over and gently supported his stiff right hand. “Teacher Lin had a habit when expressing ‘suffering.’ She would rub the base of her thumb against the hollow between the thumb and forefinger. It was the same gesture she used to comfort crying children.”

Shen Mo could smell the faint sandalwood fragrance on her, mingled with the formaldehyde that permeated the autopsy room.

He stared at his reflection in the mirror and swallowed.

“Like this?”

“Lighter.”

Su Wanying’s fingers settled over the back of his hand. The warmth of her touch made his muscles tremble faintly.

“As though a butterfly had landed on a wound.”

The reflection in the mirror suddenly blurred.

Shen Mo’s temples throbbed. Orange-red afterimages flashed before his eyes—not the autopsy lamps, but flames.

He heard the brittle crack of shattering glass, the piercing wails of children, and a woman shouting:

“Cover your ears! Don’t breathe!”

“Shen Mo!” Su Wanying’s hand pressed hard against his shoulder.

Only then did he realize that his right hand was shaking uncontrollably. The red light on the temporal-lobe monitor was flashing wildly.

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“You’re imitating her, and you’re becoming her.” Her voice was taut with a strain he had never heard before. “Yesterday, the monitor showed a thirty-seven percent overlap between your neural activity and that of aphasic patients. Today it’s already fifty-two percent.”

Shen Mo tore off the monitoring electrodes. Sweat ran down the back of his neck and into his collar.

He bent to pick up the dictionary from the floor. An old photograph slipped from between its pages: Teacher Lin standing before a blackboard with several children in her arms. Everyone was smiling. Her hand position was exactly the same as the sign for “quiet” in the animated chart.

“She isn’t trying to punish us.” He handed the photograph to Su Wanying, his fingertip brushing the eyes of one of the children. “She only wants to be heard.”

The rain fell thickly on the night of the operation.

The three of them crossed the alley behind the data center in waterproof clothing. Shen Mo could hear the rain drumming against their umbrellas, uncannily like the alarms at the fire twenty years ago.

Xiao Wu walked in front, clutching his laptop. His soles squeaked in the standing water.

“I’ve hacked the cooling system. The access code expires in three minutes.”

The instant the machine-room door opened, a cutting blast of air-conditioning rushed out with the hum of the servers.

Shen Mo’s breath caught. The smell was too much like the autopsy room—metal, electric current, and some indescribable, bitter chill.

He set up the projector before the main server. While Su Wanying adjusted its angle, her fingertip swiftly traced the sign for “careful” across the back of his hand.

“Begin.” Xiao Wu’s voice came from the control console, carrying an electronic echo.

The animated chart cast a pale blue glow across the server’s silver casing.

Shen Mo drew a deep breath and raised his hands.

The first gesture was “education”—both hands crossing before the chest, as if holding a book.

He felt the nerves in his fingertips pulsing. It was not pain, but a stranger sensation, an itch like ants crawling through his veins toward his brain.

“We are not incomplete. We are simply different.”

As his hands formed the sentence, the indicator lights on every server began flashing in unison. Green streams of light flowed across the metal casings like a luminous forest.

The cooling pipes emitted a low vibration whose frequency matched his heartbeat exactly.

Su Wanying suddenly seized his arm.

On the monitoring screens, images from aphasia wards across the city began shifting. Patients who had once been able to produce only garbled syllables were now raising their hands in unison.

Some formed the sign for “mother.” Some signed “pain.” One little girl traced a rainbow across her palm with her forefinger.

“They’re repeating it.” Her voice trembled. “They’re… speaking.”

The final gesture was “thank you”—both hands crossed over the heart, then lifted gently upward.

Just as Shen Mo’s palms were about to reach his collarbones, the lights throughout the building suddenly went out.

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In the darkness, the servers’ hum became a gentler vibration, like someone humming softly under their breath.

Then every electronic screen lit up in succession.

The library’s e-book displays, the advertising screens in shopping centers, the fare meters in taxis—even the phone in Shen Mo’s pocket—all showed the same line of pale-gold sign-language animation:

“Thank you for hearing us.”

The old textbooks closing by themselves on the shelves sounded like sighs rising one after another.

Shen Mo removed his gloves and touched the warm dampness on his face.

Was he crying?

How could tear ducts impervious even to a scalpel shed tears over this?

As he left the machine room, he turned back as if possessed and glanced at the mirrored casing of the server.

In the reflection, his lips did not move, yet the warmth in his eyes seemed unfamiliar to him. It was a compassion that had settled over twenty years, like a lake in late autumn—chilled to its depths, yet still shimmering with ripples.

It was already past midnight when he returned home.

Shen Mo removed his raincoat and hung it in the entryway. Then he noticed that the notebook on the coffee table lay open.

He distinctly remembered closing it before bed.

In the center of the blank page, a line of small text had been written in blue-black ink:

“When you tell the truth, your voice sounds most like hers.”

The handwriting looked much like his own, yet subtly different.

There was a tenderness in the strokes he had never possessed, like a spring breeze moving across the ridges between fields.

He took out his phone and checked the security footage. At 2:17 a.m., the bathroom mirror glowed with a cold light.

In the image, a man in a white shirt stood with his back to the camera before the mirror.

He raised his hands and formed several gestures in the air.

Because of the angle, Shen Mo could not make out the exact signs, but he recognized the sentence from Teacher Lin’s lecture:

“Let the silent be seen.”

A wisp of ash suddenly swept past the window.

Shen Mo walked over and saw it pause briefly against the glass, forming the outline of a smile before the night wind scattered it.

As he closed the window, he heard a faint sound from beneath his pillow—the temporal-lobe monitor.

He took it out and looked at the screen. The neural activity curve was still flickering gently, shaped uncannily like someone’s heartbeat.

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