Chapter 39: My Lips Speak the Truth, Yet Who Would Believe It?

The old photograph slid half an inch across the wooden floor, its edge casting a shadow that perfectly obscured the faded slogan. As he crouched down, his cuff brushed against the spine of a book, and the dark brown cover snapped open with a sharp sound. Several yellowed pages, stuck together by age, emitted a faint, tearing noise—it was a facsimile of Teacher Lin’s teaching journal, which he had compared page by page with a magnifying glass at a secondhand bookstore the week prior, confirming it matched the backup copies made before the archive fire.

The page currently spread open had ink darker than the others. His knuckles pressed against the tabletop, the calluses on his fingertips, formed from years of wielding a scalpel, leaving shallow indentations on the paper.

"May 17th, sunny." Next to the date was a crude drawing of a sun, a habit Teacher Lin had developed while teaching the deaf and mute children to identify the weather.

Reading down two lines, his pupils suddenly constricted: "I have begun to dream that my students are speaking with my mouth."

The fountain pen ink lingered on the word "mouth," a drop of ink blurring into a coin-sized circle, like a crater punched out by some overwhelming emotion. The scalpel in his pocket pressed against his thigh—a tool he was accustomed to carrying—the metallic coldness seeping through the fabric into his skin.

He recalled the drawings from the children at the special education school three days ago: the person in the white coat standing outside the fire, their shadow having the outline of Teacher Lin; he remembered his own uncontrollable use of sign language, identical to the word "Peace" that Teacher Lin had written on her deathbed; he recalled the abnormal brainwave frequency chart that had spiked on his computer screen when Little Wu said all sixty-three children had spoken in unison, "He told us to draw it."

"It’s not a replication," he whispered, his Adam’s apple bobbing. "It’s a message."

Ash on the windowsill suddenly cascaded down, piling into the shape of a comma on the tile floor. Shen Mo grabbed his phone and his thumb scrolled rapidly through his contacts.

When Su Wangying answered, there was the sound of porcelain clinking in the background; she was likely organizing exhibits in the museum tea room. "Dr. Shen?"

"Help me record an audio clip," he said, his speech faster than usual. "The content is to reveal the truth Teacher Lin wanted to make public before she died—that she discovered the Education Bureau had tampered with the special education school's budget audit report, and that someone had used accelerants to seal the escape routes on the night of the fire. But add one sentence at the end: 'A death report cannot cover up the truth, just as silence cannot erase existence.'"

"What are you trying to do?" There was a hint of tension in Su Wangying’s voice.

"The logic of the 'reverberation' is the encoding of linguistic behavior." He pushed open the study door, his heels clicking crisply against the stairs. "It requires a 'speaker' to carry the obsession, just as a virus requires a host. Now, I am going to be the host, but I am implanting my own antibodies."

Twenty minutes later, Little Wu rushed into Shen Mo’s living room with his hair in a mess. He clutched a silver laptop, its screen still displaying the brainwave frequency analysis. "Sister Su said you wanted to convert the audio into low-frequency vibration waves? That’s the principle of 'ground-borne sound' perceived by the soles of the feet of the deaf, but reverse neural rhythm... this is the equivalent of throwing a bomb into the resonance pool of the reverberation!"

"It’s not a bomb." Shen Mo spread the teaching journal on the coffee table, his fingertip pointing to the line about dreaming that students were speaking with his mouth. "Teacher Lin’s obsession was 'to let the truth be heard,' so the reverberation seeks a carrier that can 'speak.' I am voluntarily becoming the conduit, overriding its coding with my own linguistic structure—cognitive counter-embedding."

Little Wu’s fingers flew across the keyboard, and a green waveform appeared on the screen. "Theoretically feasible, but the risk is..." He suddenly paused, his glasses reflecting the light as he looked up. "It might treat your own will as a new source of obsession. Like pouring oil on a fire, making it burn even brighter."

Shen Mo took an EEG monitor from the drawer, the metal electrodes casting a cold light in his palm. "That is why you need to adjust the vibration frequency to interfere with its resonance cycle." He turned to Su Wangying, who had just entered—she was holding recording equipment, her hair tips dusted with the draft from the museum corridor. "Ms. Su, when recording, ensure the tone and frequency match Teacher Lin’s lectures; keep the margin of error under 0.5 hertz."

Su Wangying placed the equipment on the table, her fingers gently brushing the microphone grille. "I understand. When she gave presentations to the parents of the special education school, she spoke at 120 words per minute, with the emphasis on words like 'children' and 'future.'"

Two in the morning. The basement of the Qiyin School smelled of mildew.

Shen Mo stood in the center of three blackboards; chalk dust still lingered in the grooves, like frozen time. Little Wu was in the corner tuning the vibration generator, wires snaking across the floor like vipers; Su Wangying clutched the voice recorder, her back against the wooden cabinet where Teacher Lin used to store teaching aids, her eyes shining brilliantly in the shadows.

"Begin." Shen Mo’s voice rippled through the empty basement.

Low-frequency vibrations rose from the soles of his feet, like countless small hammers striking his shins. Su Wangying’s recording rose in tandem with his recitation: "In March 2021, I discovered that 1.7 million in infrastructure funds for the special education school had been misappropriated..."

At first, only dust drifted in the air.

When he reached the line, "You do not need to speak; as long as you look at me, I exist," black mist suddenly surged from the walls—it was the accumulated chalk dust and the remnants of the fire, now gathering into a vague human silhouette, with two deeper black holes where the eye sockets should be.

Goosebumps rose on the back of Shen Mo’s neck. He thought of the corpses on the autopsy table, the shape of subcutaneous hemorrhaging from blunt force trauma, which bore a striking resemblance to the outline of this gray shadow—it was a concrete projection of some memory.

"I am looking at you now," he took a step forward, his heel crushing the pile of ash at his feet, "but what I am about to say is not what you told me to say."

The gray shadow raised its hand. It was the sign language gesture for "tearing the throat": the thumb and forefinger forming a pincer, dragging fiercely down from the Adam’s apple.

Shen Mo’s throat felt as if it were being gripped by iron pincers. He heard his ribs give a faint "crack," stomach acid surged and burned through his esophagus, and a mouthful of blood mixed with foam sprayed onto the chest of the gray shadow—the shadow seemed to have substance, stumbling back half a step as if struck by the blood droplets.

The EEG monitor emitted a shrill alarm. Little Wu’s shouting rang in his ears but was drowned out by a high-frequency buzzing.

Shen Mo saw a hallucination: he was standing on a podium, wearing Teacher Lin’s old sweater (the one she wore for her last lecture before the fire), the room full of students, but their faces were all Zhao Yuhang—the boy who had fallen to his death from the rooftop, with purple rope marks still visible on his neck.

"Teacher, are you telling the truth?" Zhao Yuhang’s lips moved, but the voice was Teacher Lin’s. "Can silence protect us?"

"No." Shen Mo bit his tongue, the metallic, sweet blood exploding in his mouth. "Silence is an accomplice." He grabbed the bone saw tucked at his waist, pressing the blade into his palm. "I am not a vessel!" As the skin split, the pain shot through his body like an electric current. "I am a witness!"

The gray shadow emitted a shriek akin to shattering glass. Its outline began to disintegrate, the ash falling in clumps at Shen Mo’s feet, automatically arranging itself into a crooked line of text: "What you said, I am also listening to."

When Su Wangying rushed over, Shen Mo was slumped on the floor. His left hand hung limp, his fingertips stained with ash, and on the ground was half a sentence left unwritten: "Next time..."

"Do you still remember who you are?" She crouched down, pressing a handkerchief against the wound on his palm.

Shen Mo stared at the ceiling, where the afterimage of the gray shadow lingered before fading away. He pulled out the voice recorder from his pocket and pressed play—it was the sound of his own voice from when he first began investigating the case: "Every anomaly has a physical trace."

But the ending now contained a whisper, the tone as gentle as a spring breeze brushing over old book pages: "But some traces only grow in the heart."

Outside the window, a piece of ash drifted past the glass. Under the moonlight, the ash seemed to form the shape of half a mouth, the upper lip raised, the lower lip trembling, as if speaking, or perhaps swallowing.

Little Wu suddenly gasped, pointing to the computer screen: "Look at this—" He pulled up the surveillance logs from the special education school. On the screen, the drawing books of the sixty-three children were turning their pages automatically. On the new paper, a man in a white coat holding a scalpel was performing an "autopsy" on a mass of gray shadow.

Shen Mo pulled off the EEG electrodes, a drop of blood landing on the monitor and blurring into a small red dot. He pulled out his phone, opened his encrypted email, and dragged the investigation report he had compiled over the past three months into the drafts folder—it contained scans of the tampered audit report, chemical analysis of the accelerants from the fire scene, and recordings from twenty-three witnesses.

"Tomorrow," he said, his voice as raspy as sandpaper on wood, "turn it over to the police."

Su Wangying’s hand gave a gentle squeeze to his wrist.

The ash outside the window finally dispersed. Moonlight washed over the blackboard once more, illuminating a piece of paper that had somehow drifted into a wall crack—it was the facsimile page of Teacher Lin’s teaching journal, with a sentence circled in red ink: "The truth will not be silent; it has never been the mouth that speaks."