Chapter 43 - Little Tormentor

Shen Mo stood in front of the vending machine in the hospital corridor for ten minutes.

He stared at the comparative weather data chart sent by Xiao Wu on his phone screen, pressing his knuckles against the cold metal casing until the pads of his fingers turned red. For the past ten years, the family thermometer readings recorded by Older Sister Xiaobing always showed temperatures 4.1°C lower than the city meteorological bureau's concurrent data every March.

Even more eerily, this 4.1°C temperature difference corresponded precisely to the latitude and longitude coordinates of the old well from 1982.

"Forensic Pathologist Shen?" A nurse pushing a treatment cart walked past, noticing his pale complexion. "The materials you requested are ready in the doctor's office."

Shen Mo’s Adam’s apple bobbed.

He thought of the frost flowers on Grandma Wu's hands, and of Su Wangying saying that the more fiercely the charcoal burned inside the bronze hand warmer, the colder the frost on the furnace wall became—those who tried to fight temperature with temperature were actually supplying fuel to the lingering echoes.

Xiaobing's home was on the top floor of an old-style apartment building in the historic district.

The sound of the rusted door lock resembled fingernails scratching a blackboard. The moment Shen Mo stepped across the threshold, he saw a row of glass jars placed on the windowsill, each bearing a label: "Morning Fog, March 5, 1993," "Freezing Rain, March 12, 1995."

The jar at the very back was covered in dust, its label written in childish handwriting: "By the Well, March 21, 1982."

"She records it every day." Xiaobing stood with his back to him, pouring water into an aluminum kettle. "Dad taught her to observe cloud cover and measure ground temperature, saying she would take over his work when she grew up." The moment the bottom of the kettle touched the gas stove, a blue flame flared up with a hiss, illuminating the old scar on the back of his neck—a scratch from shattered ice back when he had lain over the well to pull his sister up.

Shen Mo’s gaze landed on the iron box resting on the coffee table.

The edges of the box lid bore marks of being gouged by fingernails, clearly having been opened repeatedly.

Just as he reached out, Xiaobing suddenly turned around, and the enamel cup in his hand clattered onto the floor.

"My sister wasn't being careless," Xiaobing’s voice sounded like sandpaper grinding. "Three days before she fell, she said there was a sound at the bottom of the well, like a child crying, saying, 'It hurts so much from the cold.' She always crouched by the well shouting, 'I'm coming to save you'." He squatted down to pick up the cup and fished a yellowed slip of paper from his trouser pocket. "She left this for me."

The edges of the note were charred black, and the words were written in pencil, crooked and shaky: "I want them to feel it too."

Shen Mo’s temples throbbed violently.

He recalled the patients in the case files who claimed they "wanted to apologize to the people of that year," and the visitors in the exhibition hall holding up their phones to photograph the ice core—they were all "feeling" their own guilt, yet they had never truly touched the girl struggling in the icy water, nor her final thought at the very moment: to let those who stood by the well, watching her sink while "unable to move," taste the sensation of the cold gripping their hearts.

"So the frost flowers start from the heart," he murmured. "What she wants isn't revenge, it’s for us to..."

"Experience it firsthand," Xiaobing finished for him, his Adam’s apple moving as he swallowed. "Just as she experienced it."

The museum closing alarm sounded at two in the morning.

Su Wangying stood at the doorway of Curator Lu’s office, clutching *An Examination of Ice Offerings* retrieved from an ancient texts collection. "After the ice disaster in the Ming dynasty, the common people would submerge the ice from the disaster year into deep pools, calling it 'severing the root of the cold.'

Look at this exhibition label—" She pointed toward the ice core exhibition glowing with night lights outside the window. "Every visitor now says, 'How breathtaking,' but the flashlights on their phones are brighter than the torches of back then."

Curator Lu’s reading glasses slid down to the bridge of his nose.

He gazed at the bluish ice pillar glowing faintly inside the display case, remembering how a mother had made her child touch the glass yesterday and say, "Look, this is the bad guy." "But this is urban memory..."

"Memory shouldn't be a wound." Su Wangying stepped closer, her fingertips gently brushing the old photograph on his desk—the one taken when he was twenty years old by the old well. "You were also by the well that day, weren't you?"

Curator Lu’s hand trembled violently.

The young man in the photo wore a green military uniform, standing at the very back of the crowd, clutching a rope so tightly his knuckles had turned white.

"You wanted to rush forward that day," Su Wangying said softly. "But the people in front pulled you back and said, 'It's too dangerous,' so you stayed right where you were and watched her sink." She pulled out her phone and brought up Grandma Wu’s CT scan, where frost-flower-shaped shadows crept all over the elderly woman’s heart. "Now you let more people look at it from a 'safe distance.' How is that any different from back then?"

The office wall clock struck three times.

Curator Lu suddenly stood up and grabbed his coat. "To the exhibition hall. I want to hear your plan for sinking the lake."

The dawn of the final exhibition day was shrouded in white noise.

Xiao Wu squatted in the museum's server room, staring at the jumping spectrum analyzer on his laptop—the 18Hz infrasound peak was being chopped into fragments by 3,000Hz white noise.

He switched off the power to the last surveillance camera, turned to his partner, and said, "Remember, no one is allowed to take photos with their phones today, not even for Moments."

Shen Mo, wearing lead-lined gloves, gently placed the ice core specimen into a custom-made sealed box.

The interior walls of the box were lined with sound-absorbing cotton, and its bottom was embedded with magnets—Su Wangying had said the elders recounted that "submerged ice must reach the severed veins of the earth," and the deep lake in the suburbs happened to lie at the intersection of two subterranean rivers.

Xiaobing walked at the very front, carrying the box.

His rubber boots trod across the frosted grass. Ah Huang darted out from somewhere, its tail drooping, the white frost on its fur sparkling in the morning light.

It did not bark, merely following silently in the tracks of the cart wheels, as if escorting someone on their final journey.

The wind by the deep lake was colder than in the city.

The four of them stood on the shore, none of them speaking.

Xiaobing’s fingers lingered on the lid of the box for three seconds, and then he gave it a hard push.

The splash made by the lead box was very small, yet as it sank, it dragged up a string of air bubbles, like someone exhaling underwater.

A white mist suddenly billowed from the surface of the lake.

The mist was so thick it refused to disperse, spreading outward from the center. When it touched the reeds along the shore, it vanished as if devoured by something.

Shen Mo’s thermal detector emitted a "beep"—the temperature around the lake jumped from -2°C to 0.8°C.

His phone vibrated in his pocket.

It was a call from Grandma Wu, the old woman’s voice trembling. "Little Shen... my stove... went out by itself." She sniffed. "Just now, I felt a piece of ice melt inside my heart, and it feels all warm."

The car windows on the journey back were veiled with a layer of mist.

Shen Mo traced a circle with his fingertip, gazing at the brightening sky outside.

Ah Huang had run to the roadside at some point, lying low in the withered grass, and shook its body for the first time—frost flowers fell in a flurry, melting into tiny puddles on the ground.

He opened his notebook, his pen tip hovering over the conclusion page of the "Late Spring Cold Snap Incident."

As the ink touched the page, a photograph slipped out from the back cover—an enlarged detail of the group photo by the well in 1982, handed to him by Xiaobing.

The little girl's hand was reaching toward the water's surface, while the shadows of everyone on the bank were distorted, as if grasped by an invisible hand, all pointing toward the depths of the wellhead.

"What fell that night was never just one person," he said softly.

The overhead lights in the autopsy room flickered on at four in the morning.

Shen Mo stood before the eighth corpse of a "freezing victim," his tweezers lifting the skin around the deceased's heart.

Under the magnifying glass, the frost-flower-shaped ice crystal patterns seemed to embed extremely fine, fingerprint-like traces.

His phone suddenly vibrated.

Su Wangying sent a message: "The municipal hospital just sent over a new case; abnormally low-temperature tissue was detected inside the deceased."

Shen Mo’s fingers paused.

He stared at the white-sheet-covered body on the autopsy table, suddenly recalling the note from Xiaobing's sister—"I want them to feel it too."

And this time, what needed to be "felt" might no longer be just guilt.