Chapter 41: The Cold Is Because Someone Is Weeping

As the wind outside the autopsy room, thick with the scent of burning, snaked through the ventilation duct, Shen Mo’s tweezers hovered three centimeters behind the victim’s right ear.

There, a fingernail-sized frost flower lay imprinted. Its radial patterns extended from a central point, the edges as sharp as if carved by a scalpel.

"Professor Shen?" The intern, Xiao Wang, stood by the doorway clutching a record book. A pen in his lab coat pocket had leaked, leaving a blue-black blotch on the fabric. "Captain Wang says the Municipal Bureau of Forensic Science just sent over the re-examination report for the sixth case. The frost pattern on the skin is identical to this one."

Shen Mo did not respond.

He swapped the tweezers for a cotton swab and gently brushed the edge of the frost. The frost shavings fell onto a glass slide, catching the cold light under the microscope.

The autopsy room was kept at a constant 25°C; the wall thermometer read 25.3°C. Yet, the fine hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, as if pricked by invisible needles of ice.

"Set the incubator to 25°C," he said, peeling off his rubber gloves and pressing his knuckles against the workstation. "Put this tissue sample inside. Stay here and watch it for three hours."

Xiao Wang’s Adam’s apple bobbed. "But... you said last week that in a temperature-controlled environment, abnormal crystallization should cease growth."

"That is why we must verify." As Shen Mo turned, the hem of his lab coat caught the tray, sending metal instruments clattering to the floor.

He stooped to retrieve them, his peripheral vision catching the old-fashioned wall clock—the hands pointed exactly to 10:17 AM.

The precise time of death of the male corpse at the Seventh Middle School the night before.

Three hours later, at 3:17 AM, the fluorescent lights in the autopsy room flickered twice.

When Xiao Wang’s phone alarm blared, he was dozing at the workstation, startled so badly he nearly knocked over the microscope.

As he leaned in to observe the incubator, his molars chattered uncontrollably. The frost flower, once only the size of a fingernail, had now spread to the very edges of the slide, and the tips of its radial patterns were pointing, in perfect unison, toward the northwest.

"Professor Shen!" Xiao Wang’s voice was choked with tears. "It... it’s still growing!"

Shen Mo burst into the room, his lab coat unbuttoned.

He stared at the slide in the incubator, his throat tightening as he pulled out his phone to display an old photograph—a 1982 floor plan of the Seventh Middle School. The location of the old well was marked exactly in the northwest.

"Contact the Municipal Meteorological Bureau." He pulled out his fountain pen and scribbled furiously in his notebook, the ink tearing through the page. "Request the surface temperature and humidity data for the western district over the past week."

At that same moment, in the city museum’s artifact warehouse, Su Wangying’s ponytail swept across dusty archive boxes.

She crouched among the piles of documents, her fingertip resting on a file labeled "Old City Memory Exhibition Inventory." The final line read: "Non-physical exhibit: 1982.1.17 Extreme Cold Night Well-Core Ice Sample, sealed in a 50×50×50cm acrylic box; no physical record retained."

"Impossible." She murmured as she turned the page. A yellowed photograph fluttered out: an ice core held in a gloved palm, its surface webbed with spider-like cracks. In the background, the old school gate of the Seventh Middle School was visible.

"So it wasn't 'non-physical'—it was 'physical'." She shoved the photo into her canvas bag, knocking over a wooden rack as she turned. A stack of volunteer registration forms scattered across the floor.

That was when Grandmother Wu appeared.

She was carrying a chipped copper hand-warmer, a sweet scent of ginger and sugar drifting from the gaps in the lid. Her graying hair was tied with a blue cloth strip, and she bore a striking resemblance to the girl huddled by the well in the 1982 photograph.

"Girl, looking for the ice core?" The old woman’s voice sounded like sandpaper rubbing against a ceramic bowl. "I’ve been burning this warmer for forty years, just waiting for someone to ask." She crouched beside Su Wangying, the heat from the warmer seeping through the fabric onto Su’s knee. "That winter was wickedly cold. Black mist rose from the well, and the ice was hard enough to use as a mirror. When that child fell in, a dozen of us stood around the edge. The moment our hands touched the ice, it felt like being branded—not by heat, but by a freezing pain. Later, when the police hauled him out, they said the boy’s body was as hard as an ice sculpture, but he was still wearing a smile."

Su Wangying noticed coal dust under the old woman’s fingernails. "Do you come to the exhibition hall to burn your warmer every March?"

"I burn it for the ice core to see." Grandmother Wu pulled a charred piece of ginger from the warmer. "They call this a commemoration, but I know. What’s frozen in that ice isn't just well water—it’s our fear. Fear of reaching out, fear of taking responsibility, fear that we might fall in too." She suddenly grabbed Su Wangying’s wrist, her nails digging into her pulse point. "Go and check: those who fell ill, did they all stand in front of the ice core for more than three minutes?"

Three kilometers away, Xiao Wu was staring at his computer screen, the sound of his typing like a machine gun.

His round-rimmed glasses were fogged over by the steam from a cup of instant noodles on the windowsill.

"Found it!" He slammed the table, his chair scraping harshly against the floor. "Since the exhibition opened on May 1st, 117 visitors have lingered in the ice core section for over 180 seconds."

The heat map on the screen began to blink.

Red dots represented the movements of the deceased, while yellow dots traced the path of the crowds—the two overlapped perfectly at the Seventh Middle School, the old town market, and the municipal hospital’s emergency room.

Xiao Wu’s fingers trembled as he pulled up the body temperature data. "A drop of 0.6°C on the first day, 0.7°C on the second, 0.8°C on the third... by the seventh day, it dropped straight to 3.7°C. This isn't an illness; this is..." His voice choked. "This is being frozen, bit by bit, right into the bone by that cold."

The autopsy room phone rang at 5:17 AM.

When Shen Mo answered, he heard Xiao Wu’s breathing rattling like a bellows. "Brother Shen, I’ve modeled it. The increase in cases is directly proportional to the 'gaze time multiplied by audience density,' with an R² value of 0.98."

Shen Mo bit down on his pen cap until it warped. "I have the data from the Meteorological Bureau. The night surface temperature in the west is 2.3°C lower than the rest of the city, with 15% higher humidity." He looked down at his own notes—*Low temperature is not caused by the environment, but 'crystallizes' from within the human body*—the pen tip poked through the paper. "I’m going to the museum now. I’m bringing the thermal imager and the infrasonic detector."

The glass curtain wall of the museum exhibition hall shimmered with a cold, blue light in the morning sun.

Shen Mo, wearing a faded gray T-shirt and carrying a camera bag, blended in with a group of morning exercisers.

As he paused before the ice core display case, the micro-thermal imager inside his watch began to vibrate. On the screen, the forehead areas of the surrounding audience flickered with pale blue spots, like a dusting of crushed ice.

"Attention visitors, please do not touch the display case," the docent’s voice echoed from above.

Shen Mo pretended to adjust his camera angle, using a scraper to gently brush the edge of the acrylic box. The collected crystals glowed a ghostly green under his UV light pen.

As he pulled out a test tube to collect the sample, the decibel meter suddenly buzzed: 18Hz, perfectly matching the wind noise spectrum of the 1982 cold snap in the archives.

"Dr. Shen?"

The familiar voice made his back stiffen.

Director Lu stood on the other side of the display, his gaze behind gold-rimmed glasses sharp as a surgical blade. "Did you not say you never believed in the 'temperaments of these old antiques'?"

Shen Mo stuffed the equipment into his bag, his movements slow, as if dismantling a bomb. "Director Lu, I need to shut down this exhibit."

"Impossible." Director Lu tapped the glass of the case. "This ice core is a living fossil of the old city's memory. We awakened it so that future generations would remember the warmth of humanity during that cold snap."

Shen Mo pulled a file from his bag.

The first page was an electron micrograph of the frost flower from the victim's skin, the radial pattern looking like an open spiderweb. The second page was a photo of Grandmother Wu crouching before the display with her hand-warmer; the coals were burning bright, but her face was wrapped in a white mist, her expression unreadable.

"You are commemorating the winter," his voice was as soft as a sigh, "but it is remembering the deaths."

Director Lu’s fingers froze on the file.

Outside the window, the stray dog, Ah Huang—the one that always wandered around the old well site—was curled into a fur ball, fine frost coating its back, not even the tip of its tail moving.

As he left the museum, Shen Mo’s phone vibrated in his pocket.

A message from Xiao Wu popped up: "As of noon today, 32 new visitors have lingered for over three minutes." He looked up at the exhibition entrance and caught a glimpse of a figure with a camera—wearing a red windbreaker and carrying a "City News" press badge.

The wind picked up again. This time, the scent of burning was mingled with the smell of freshly stoked charcoal.