Chapter Forty: The Truth is a Lie

The moon reflected in the shop window was shattered into pieces by the cold, white light of the convenience store.

Shen Mo’s hand, gripping his iced Americano, had grown stiff. Beads of condensation from the cup seeped into his sleeve, yet he felt nothing—his entire focus was fixed on the blurred silhouette in the glass.

“Teacher Shen?” Xiao Wu’s voice came from behind, trembling uncontrollably. “That public account post was deleted again. I managed to take a snapshot of the comment section.”

As Shen Mo turned, the hair on the back of his neck stood up in the draft.

Xiao Wu’s laptop screen glowed a ghostly blue. The open document was densely packed with screenshots: under every article detailing the "Bizarre Incidents at the Old Qiyin School Campus," a comment would appear exactly at the 23-minute mark, written in piercing, blood-red font: *“What you are telling is not the truth; it is what it wants you to say.”*

“I’ve checked the IP address seven times.” Xiao Wu’s fingertips slid rapidly across the trackpad to pull up the tracking records. “Every time, it points to… the ruins of the old teaching building, which was demolished three years ago.” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he turned the screen toward Shen Mo. “What’s even more sinister is that I analyzed the character spacing in that comment—” He opened another window, where Morse code dots and dashes pulsed against a black background. “It says ‘Save me,’ repeated seventeen times.”

The convenience store’s radio suddenly blared a promotional announcement. Su Wanying placed her hand gently over the back of Shen Mo’s.

Her palm, warm and soft as jade, pressed against his chilled skin. “Let’s upload the evidence to an overseas server,” she said softly, though a fire burned in her eyes. “The children’s drawings, Teacher Lin’s journals, and the three thousand pages of analysis you wrote—”

“It’s useless.” Shen Mo interrupted her, the straw clinking against the ice in his cup.

He stared at the pulsing code on the computer screen, his throat tightening. “Do you remember what Zhao Yuhang wrote in his diary before he fell to his death? ‘The teacher’s words spin in my head, and as they spin, they turn into a different voice.’” He pulled a metal pen from his pocket and scratched a shallow mark into the tabletop. “Communication is contagion. Every retelling feeds new nutrients to the ‘Reverberation.’”

Su Wanying’s eyelashes fluttered.

She recalled the live broadcast of the official press conference three days ago—the spokesperson adjusting his gold-rimmed glasses, stating it was “caused by collective psychological suggestion,” while the cameras held by reporters below looked like countless mechanical eyes swallowing the truth.

In the evening news, Teacher Lin’s photo was captioned “The Paranoid Idealist,” and Shen Mo’s name appeared at the bottom of a list of “Suspected Affected Experts,” accompanied by an old photograph from three years ago when he performed an autopsy on a serial killer.

“Then what do we do?” Xiao Wu’s fingernails dug into his palms. “We can’t just watch the truth be buried in the dirt—”

“Buried in the dirt.” Shen Mo suddenly looked up, a sharp glint in his eyes. “Seal all the manuscripts in lead boxes and bury them at the bottom of the well at the old Qiyin School site. Lay copper mesh over the surface to block electromagnetic induction.” His voice grew faster, like a pathologist deducing a time of death on an autopsy table. “The Reverberation relies on the flow of information to sustain itself; physical silence can sever its transmission chain. We aren’t trying to make the truth disappear; we are trying to… put it into hibernation.”

The wellhead at the old school was covered in moss, and the moonlight stretched the shadows of the three of them into long, thin lines.

Shen Mo crouched by the well, the weight of the lead box making his wrists ache.

Inside were the original teaching logs of Teacher Lin, Zhao Yuhang’s sketchbook, and the investigative report he had spent three months compiling—every page had been soaked in flame retardant, and every piece of digital data was etched onto anti-magnetic discs.

“Do you need help?” Su Wanying’s voice came from behind.

She was holding a brown paper bag containing the final digital recorder—it held the complete recording of Teacher Lin’s last lecture before the fire, as well as every inference Shen Mo had spoken to the corpses in the morgue.

Shen Mo took the recorder; the metal casing felt like a frozen stone against his palm.

He pressed play. Teacher Lin’s voice drifted out, mingled with static: “Children, the true voice is never heard with the ears…” This was followed by Zhao Yuhang’s sobbing, and then his own voice, trembling in the wind on the rooftop: “You could have asked for help, why did you jump?”

Finally, a whisper, as gentle as a breeze over old book pages: “But some scars only grow in the heart.”

Shen Mo’s pupils contracted violently.

He suddenly realized these sounds were not recordings, but living things—they coiled around each other within the recorder like a nest of hungry snakes, slithering from his fingertips into his veins.

“Don’t throw it.” He stood up abruptly, the recorder bruising his palm. “They don’t need an audience; they only need to be spoken.”

“Teacher Shen?” Xiao Wu’s flashlight beam wavered, catching the cold sweat on Shen Mo’s forehead. “What’s wrong?”

Shen Mo did not answer.

He stared at the mouth of the well, where a thin mist hovered, as if someone had exhaled in the darkness.

He raised the recorder and smashed it against the well wall. The moment the plastic casing shattered, a gray mist surged from the well, condensing in the air into a line of text: *“Only when you cannot speak is it the true silence.”*

Su Wanying grabbed his arm, her nails digging into his flesh. “Shen Mo!”

Only then did he realize he was shaking.

The gray mist swept across his face, carrying a familiar scorched scent—the smell of the fire scene, the smell of Teacher Lin’s sweater burning.

Xiao Wu’s flashlight dropped to the ground. In the circle of light, the ashes were crawling into his sleeves, into Su Wanying’s hair, and into the cracked brick seams by the well.

“Go.” Shen Mo dragged them toward the school gate, his soles crushing the broken glass scattered across the ground. “Leave, now.”

In the taxi on the way back, none of the three spoke.

As they passed the convenience store, Shen Mo caught a glimpse of himself in the window reflection—his lips were moving silently, as if reciting something.

He whipped his head around, his neck hitting the car window, and he gasped in pain.

“Just now…” Su Wanying started, then hesitated, her fingers lightly touching the back of his hand.

Shen Mo shook his head.

He pulled out his phone. The moment the screen lit up, a new message appeared: *“Notification from your ‘Anomaly Monitoring’ subscription: At 3:00 AM today, a male corpse was discovered in the classroom of Class 2, Grade 12 at the Seventh High School. Preliminary assessment indicates death by freezing. No external injuries, but the ambient temperature at the scene was 28°C.”*

His thumb hovered over “View Details,” but he could not bring himself to press it.

The streetlights outside the car window flickered past, cutting his face into alternating fragments of light and shadow.

The smell of formalin in the morgue was stronger than usual.

Shen Mo stood before the seventh corpse, the rubber-gloved tip of his finger resting on the deceased’s rigid earlobe.

The body temperature read 3.7°C, yet the air conditioning was clearly set to 25°C.

He looked up at the security camera on the ceiling; the lens was veiled in a layer of dust. Xiao Liu, the guard on duty last night, had said the camera had suddenly auto-formatted all recordings.

“Teacher Shen?” The intern Xiao Wang’s voice came from behind. “The bureau called. They said this case belongs to our team.”

Shen Mo said nothing.

He removed his gloves, his fingertips lightly brushing the deceased’s closed eyelids.

There was a faint layer of gray there, like a trace left by a calligraphy brush.

He remembered the gray mist by the well, his own silently moving lips in the convenience store window, and the photo Su Wanying had sent him that morning—the back of a bronze mirror from a new museum exhibit, engraved with the words he hadn’t dared to say in the taxi last night: *“When the truth is alive, it is light. Once it is spoken by others, it becomes a shadow.”*

The scalpel on the tray clinked softly.

Shen Mo gripped the handle, the metallic chill crawling from his palm into his veins.

He looked down at the deceased’s right hand. Wedged in the fingernails was a piece of paper, incredibly thin. He unfolded it to reveal half a line written in charcoal: *“Next time…”*

A breeze blew from outside the window, carrying a faint, lingering scent of something scorched.

As he met the eyes that had been painted on with a brush, the corners of the paper figure’s mouth suddenly curled upward.

At the same time, a matchmaker’s voice shrieked, “The auspicious hour has arrived! Bow to heaven and earth!”

Suddenly, the blaring sound of a *suona* horn rang out from nowhere.