Chapter Four: The Drowned Man

Beneath that patch of skin, a ring-shaped pattern slowly emerged, reflecting a distorted light in his pupils.

That light seemed like a key, unlocking a long-sealed door deep within his mind.

Zhou Mingyuan’s regenerative fingerprints were not an isolated case; there existed a certain resonance between them and this cufflink—something he had yet to comprehend.

He immediately retrieved the ion scan report of the cufflink, enlarged the screen, and repeatedly compared it with the distribution map of the “Technetium-99” element.

At first, he assumed the radioactive residue would be evenly scattered like dust, but the reality was quite the opposite.

These trace elements exhibited a bizarre “memory-like deposition”—almost all concentrated within the finely engraved circle on the inner side of the copper cufflink.

Their distribution was highly irregular, as if some intense emotion had fiercely “burned” inside the metal, imprinting its mark on the atomic level.

This was not mere physical adhesion; it was more akin to an engraving.

A sudden impulse stirred in Shen Mo’s heart. He retrieved the vacuum-sealed cufflink from the evidence storage box.

Donning anti-static gloves, he carefully fixed it onto the microscope stage.

A microscopic camera slowly advanced, probing the tiny cracks on the inner wall caused by age.

Under normal light, everything appeared usual, revealing only the cold texture of metal.

But he did not give up and switched to ultraviolet enhancement mode.

The moment the mode changed, the screen captured a faint yet unmistakably clear blue fluorescent trace deep within the cracks.

The trace was as fine as a spider’s thread, shaped like ripples spreading out after a stone is thrown into a still lake, pulsating weakly at a frequency barely perceptible to the naked eye.

It was still alive.

Shen Mo held his breath as an unprecedented shiver rose along his spine.

He whispered hoarsely, shaken, “It’s not a curse… it’s a ‘field’.” An energy field constructed by extreme obsession, capable of distorting physical laws.

The next morning, an emergency alert from the municipal bureau interrupted Shen Mo’s thoughts.

A bizarre homicide had been discovered in a high-end apartment in the southern part of the city.

Lin Wanqing, a woman living alone, was found dead in her bedroom, her body rigidly lying on the bed.

The preliminary autopsy report from the forensic center was full of contradictions: her lungs were filled with freshwater, her trachea contained clear algae remnants, and even typical riverbed sediment particles were detected beneath her fingernails.

All evidence pointed to drowning.

Yet, not a single drop of water was found at the crime scene.

Doors and windows were intact and locked from the inside, with no signs of forced entry.

The humidifier in the bedroom had not been turned on and was dry inside, and professional instruments measured the room’s humidity at only 42%, unusually low for a coastal city.

The prevailing opinion among the police was that the victim was drowned elsewhere, and the killer had used a clever method to move her body back to the bedroom and fabricate a sealed-room scene.

Shen Mo personally returned to the scene for a second inspection.

Traces of the police’s earlier investigation still lingered in the apartment, with a mixture of incense and a stale odor in the air.

Ignoring the obvious clues, he walked straight to the bed and knelt down to carefully examine the corpse.

Soon, on the smooth outer side of the victim’s calf, he discovered several nearly imperceptible parallel pressure marks.

These marks were extremely shallow but distributed with unusual regularity; their depth variation perfectly matched the pressure distribution characteristics an object experiences at different water depths in fluid statics.

What alarmed him further was that the victim’s skin folds displayed the “pruney” swelling typical of prolonged immersion in water, yet when his fingertips touched the skin, it was cold and dry, showing no sign of moisture contact.

It was as if she had been drowned in an invisible body of water that existed only for her.

Shen Mo stood and surveyed the bedroom, which was dry to an almost unnatural degree.

He took a pack of highly absorbent blue silica gel powder from his inspection kit and scattered it evenly on the floor, especially between the bed and the doorway, as if sowing seeds.

Under his colleagues’ puzzled gazes, he waited quietly.

One minute, two minutes… Just when everyone thought the effort was in vain, a change occurred.

The evenly spread blue powder near the foot of the bed slowly revealed a faint yet complete outline of a footprint.

That outline absorbed moisture more strongly than the surrounding area, darkening in color, its shape intact and path clear, extending from the bed to the direction of the door.

It was as if, not long ago, a soaking-wet person had stepped across an “invisible puddle” here.

Shen Mo immediately requested all social records and communication data of the deceased Lin Wanqing.

Among the vast data, one clue caught his attention: Lin’s close friend Zhao Wan had, at least five times over the past year, urged her in WeChat conversations not to go near that riverside, warning it was too dangerous.

An hour later, in the city bureau’s interrogation room, Zhao Wan appeared nervous and sorrowful.

At first, she evaded all questions, insisting Lin Wanqing merely liked to stroll by the river occasionally and showed no signs of abnormality.

Shen Mo did not argue but slid a photocopy of the victim’s diary across the table.

On the paper, Lin Wanqing’s elegant handwriting read: “I dreamed again that he sank. The water was so cold. This time, I still couldn’t hold onto him.”

At those words, Zhao Wan’s psychological defenses collapsed instantly.

Covering her face, she finally confessed everything.

Lin Wanqing’s college lover, Chen Hao, had, ten years ago, jumped from the bridge of the old city river on a stormy night, never to resurface, after fierce opposition from both families.

Since then, Lin Wanqing had changed.

Every year, on rainy nights, she would go alone to the riverside, sit where Chen Hao had leapt, and remain there until dawn.

Last summer, on another stormy night, Lin Wanqing unexpectedly found a broken stone tablet washed ashore on a shallow part of the river.

The tablet was old, with two faintly carved characters: “Lin · Chen.”

She believed it was a reply from Chen Hao and secretly brought the fragment home, hiding it in a secret compartment of her dressing table.

“Since then, she started saying strange things,” Zhao Wan choked back tears, her voice trembling. “She said once she held that stone while sleeping, woke at midnight, and felt the river water suddenly warm, as if… as if he was holding her.”

Shen Mo immediately took Su Wanying and drove to the old city river, a place heavy with tragedy.

The river was murky and slow, its banks worn by years of erosion.

Su Wanying carefully collected moss samples from cracks in the riverbank stones, intending to compare them with the algae found in the victim’s lungs.

At that moment, an old fisherman silently rowed a small boat with a black canopy toward the shore.

He seemed to recognize Shen Mo’s police uniform and hesitated briefly before handing over a yellowed photograph wrapped in a plastic bag.

The photo, taken in the 1970s during river dredging, featured a complete stone tablet at its center, the inscription clearly visible: “Life and death are decided together, a promise to you,” signed “Chen ×× presented to Lin ××.”

“That was before the tablet broke,” the old fisherman, Old Wu, said in a low voice. “My grandfather said it was erected by a pair of lovers long ago. One year, a great flood broke it into several pieces. Since then, rumors say you can hear someone crying in the river at midnight, like they’re piecing the stones back together.”

Shen Mo’s heart sank sharply. He immediately retrieved the city’s meteorological data from the past decade on his phone.

An astonishing coincidence appeared: on the night Lin Wanqing was found dead, around midnight, the humidity in the old city river area suddenly surged to 98%, a record nearly identical to that of the stormy night ten years earlier when Chen Hao drowned.

He took out a portable infrared thermal imager and scanned the area beneath the riverbed where Old Wu had indicated the stone tablet might be buried.

On the screen, amid the normal blue cold light, an irregular abnormal heat gradient stood out beneath the riverbed.

The heat was faint but steady, as if a “memory heat source” underground was quietly activated in some unknown cyclical manner.

Back at the forensic lab, Su Wanying had reached a conclusion: the diatoms isolated from Lin Wanqing’s lungs matched perfectly, genetically, with those collected from the moss on the riverbank stones.

The mystery was beginning to unravel layer by layer.

Shen Mo immediately devised a bold simulation experiment.

He placed the stone tablet fragment found in Lin Wanqing’s bedroom inside a large sealed environmental chamber. The technicians then precisely controlled the chamber’s humidity at 98%, while playing the recorded thunderstorm sounds from the stormy night ten years ago in a continuous loop.

Time passed, minute by minute.

Three hours later, an incredible phenomenon occurred.

The once-clear chamber air condensed into visible thick fog, and small amounts of water pooled on the metal floor.

Tests confirmed the water’s composition closely matched that of the old city river.

Su Wanying, wearing protective goggles, cautiously approached the stone inside the chamber and suddenly let out a sharp exclamation: “Captain Shen, look at the tablet’s surface!”

Shen Mo looked up to see the once-faint carved characters “Lin · Chen” on the stone fragment slowly oozing droplets of dark red liquid, like freshly opened wounds.

The liquid was neither blood nor rust but, in the sealed air, emitted a faint, unmistakable scent of the old city river’s water.

Shen Mo’s gaze did not linger on the tablet but fixed intently on the steadily rising and stabilizing temperature and humidity curve displayed on the monitor.

He picked up a pen and slowly wrote the first sentence of his report on a blank sheet:

“The lingering echo is not a simple replay of the past… it is a recreation of a ‘reality constructed by obsession.’”

He put down the pen, eyes deep and thoughtful as he regarded the words.

He knew this report, soon to be submitted, would challenge the existing framework of understanding.

This report itself was the beginning of a storm.