Chapter 44 - Cold Fire Burning Tomorrow

The chill of the autopsy room had weight to it, wrapping around the body like a frozen, damp cloth.

Ice crystals clung to the cuffs of Shen Mo’s lab coat, and the tip of his forceps pressed against the left palm of a seven-year-old boy. The skin there exhibited spiderweb-like frost patterns spreading from the web of the fingers toward the center of the palm, resembling an ice net intricately woven beneath the skin with fine needles.

"The third re-examination report." Intern Xiao Zhou placed a sheet of printed paper onto the workstation, the drone of the printer causing the shadowless lamp to sway. "The silicate content in the gastric contents has an eighty-seven percent match with the soil samples from the old well filled in on the day the exhibition closed."

Shen Mo’s Adam’s apple bobbed.

He remembered when he received the call from the municipal hospital three days ago, the doctor on duty had said, "The deceased is an ordinary child who never went to the exhibition," and back then, he had even drawn a question mark in his notebook.

Now, that question mark had turned into an ice pick piercing his palm—the boy had never been anywhere near that well, so why were there fragments of sedimentary rock unique to the well wall inside his stomach?

"The medical records have been pulled up." Xiao Zhou handed over a tablet, the screen’s harsh glare deepening the bruised shadows beneath his eyes. "The parents said the child had been sleepwalking for three consecutive weeks, getting up promptly at two o'clock every morning to build a well in the corner with building blocks. Once finished, he would curl up by the 'well' and cry, saying, 'Sister is cold, Sister wants a hug.'"

Shen Mo’s fingertips paused on the phrase "two o'clock in the morning."

He recalled standing by the deep lake the night before, feeling his phone vibrate as the lead box sank while Grandma Wu said, "A piece of ice in my heart has melted"; he remembered the photographs in the envelope from little Bing, where all the shadows pointed toward the wellhead—could the ice-submersion ritual of that year have also taken place at two in the morning?

A scalpel suddenly slipped from between his fingers, clattering against the metal tray.

Xiao Zhou jumped in fright, looking up just in time to see the chief forensic pathologist’s pupils contract to pinpoints. Shen Mo was staring at the boy’s soles, where the frost patterns and the palm’s webbed network had merged into one, looking like two frozen paths leading from the palms to the soles of the feet, and from the soles to the edge of the autopsy table, as though...

"As though he crawled across the surface of the ice," Shen Mo heard his own voice, sounding like frozen steel wire. "Pressing his palms and the soles of his feet against the ice sheet, crawling toward someone."

His cell phone vibrated in the pocket of his lab coat.

It was a video call invitation from Su Wanying. When her face appeared on the screen, the oak bookshelves of the museum’s reference room were visible in the background, with melted snow clinging to the tips of her hair. "Check the local forum."

The view switched to a computer screen, where a thread titled "Memories of the Old City" was being continuously refreshed.

The latest anonymous post was titled, *"My grandfather said the crying from the well that year was sharper than the north wind,"* and the content detailed how "a coal stove had been buried beneath the third brick by the well" and "an aunt in a blue cloth apron clutched half a roasted sweet potato"—these very details were the "stories of yesteryear" that Grandma Wu had shared with visitors as a volunteer before the exhibition closed.

"The IP addresses are all in the children's section of the municipal library." Su Wanying’s fingers glided across the keyboard. "I just went there. There are five children gathered in a corner listening to a story. The storyteller is..."

The sound of children murmuring suddenly drifted through the video, like a flock of little pigeons pecking at glass.

The camera shook as it panned toward the children’s reading area. On a dark green sofa, Grandma Wu sat with her back to the camera.

Her blue cloth tunic was washed pale, and a gray scarf was draped across her knees—the very same scarf she had wrapped around little Bing on the day the exhibition closed.

"No matter how fierce the fire was that day, it was useless..." Grandma Wu’s voice sounded like a jammed cassette tape. "She called me sister, but I couldn't move, I couldn't move at all..."

The camera zoomed in.

The five children stared blankly at the old woman, fine sweat frosting their eyelashes, their index fingers rhythmically scratching the armrest of the sofa—the trajectory of their fingertips matched the spiderweb frost patterns Shen Mo had seen on the autopsy table.

"Wanying!" Shen Mo shouted. Su Wanying in the video turned abruptly, and her constricted pupils flashed across the lens.

By the time the image stabilized again, Grandma Wu had already stood up. Her scarf slipped to the floor, and like a puppet pulled by strings, she swayed as she walked toward the picture book shelf in the children's section.

The children followed her one after another, their shoe soles dragging a rustling sound across the floor, like a swarm of snakes slithering over an ice sheet.

The phone was suddenly interrupted by another incoming call.

Xiao Wu’s face was squeezed into the screen against a backdrop of blue light from the server room. He pushed up his black-rimmed glasses. "Brother Shen, the psychological screening report you wanted is out. Among the elementary school students in the West City district, the proportion of children who report 'hearing crying from the bottom of the well' or 'feeling the floor turning to ice' has increased by forty-seven percent compared to three months ago."

"Surveillance," Shen Mo blurted out.

"Already pulled." Xiao Wu clicked his mouse, and the screen switched to surveillance footage—on the screen, a little girl with a ponytail stood on tiptoe to pull out a picture book titled *Past Events of the Old City*. When she flipped to a certain page, her pupils suddenly dilated, and her fingers clawed desperately at the book page.

The camera zoomed in. The illustration on that page depicted a snowy scene at the wellhead, with the shadows of the onlookers distorted and pointing toward the center of the well, matching the old photograph provided by little Bing down to the last detail.

"They aren't looking at a story," Xiao Wu’s voice was as low as a whisper. "The story is picking its people."

Goosebumps rose on the back of Shen Mo’s neck.

He grabbed his lab coat and rushed out the door. The cold air of the autopsy room poured into his collar, making him shiver. This cold was different from the chill of the deep lake; the lake's cold was dull, while this current cold carried tiny thorns that drilled straight into the marrow of his bones.

Grandma Wu’s door was unlocked.

Shen Mo pushed the door open. The residual warmth of the coal stove still lingered, but the ash inside was cold.

In the old woman's room, the wall calendar was frozen on March 1982, and beneath the glass sat a yellowed group photograph—the very same old photo little Bing had given him.

He reached out and touched the wall.

The instant his fingertips made contact, ice shards seeped out from the cracks in the masonry like an old woman's tears.

Shen Mo gritted his teeth, snatched a screwdriver from the table, and pried away the layer of plaster. Wrapped inside the wall was a piece of tarp, its edges charred black by smoke and fire, stained with dark brown blemishes.

"Sweat and condensed exhaled breath crystallization," the laboratory test report spat out of the printer two hours later. "These substances can store memory information, similar to..."

"Similar to DNA," Shen Mo finished for the technician. "Grandma Wu spent forty years tending fires to seek atonement. Every time she told the story, her body temperature and emotions activated the memory spores trapped within the tarp. Following her breath and the warmth of her hands, they burrowed into the bodies of those who listened to the story."

At eleven o'clock in the deep of night, the bitter aroma of instant coffee drifted through Shen Mo’s apartment.

As he stood before the whiteboard organizing his clues, a scratching sound suddenly came from the kitchen, resembling someone scraping the floor tiles with their fingernails.

A-Huang crawled out from beneath the sofa, its tail drooping, its front paws scratching frantically at the grout lines of the kitchen floor tiles.

It let out a whimper from its throat, a sound that didn't sound like a dog barking, but rather like a child sobbing in broken phrases: "Sis... ter... cold..."

Shen Mo swept the beam of his flashlight across the floor.

A wisp of white mist seeped out from the floor cracks, condensing into frosted characters upon the tiles: "She said... you finally heard."

He jerked his head up.

Moonlight filtered through the screen window, casting its glow onto the old building across the street. The glass of a certain window suddenly clouded with white mist, gradually solidifying into silhouettes—seven children holding hands, their feet casting no shadows, stepping forward one by one toward a wellhead lingering just outside the frame.

"We thought we had ended the lingering echo," Shen Mo pulled out his fountain pen, writing on the newest page of his notebook. "In reality, we only carried it forward, sending it into the dreams of the next generation."

The tip of his pen paused.

The sound of a cell phone vibrating drifted in from outside the window—it was a call from Su Wanying.

When he answered, he heard her breathing was somewhat hurried: "Director Lu just called me... The projection equipment in the museum’s archives turned on automatically at three in the morning."

Shen Mo’s fountain pen rolled off the desk, blooming a blot of ink across the word "dream."