Chapter 46 - Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock

Shen Mo’s thumb hovered over the call-end button on his phone for three full seconds.

Before Xiao Wu’s voice was torn into fragments by the electric current, the final syllable remained lodged against his eardrum—"consistent."

He stared at the faint blue light seeping through the gap of the manhole cover. That light looked like a frozen firefly, flickering on and off, yet possessing more vitality than any living creature.

"Shen Mo?" Su Wanying’s flashlight beam swept over, the light grazing the back of his hand as he gripped the bone saw, the metal handle pressing a red mark into his palm. "Was that Xiao Wu on the phone?"

"An abnormal pulse in the underground pipe network, matching the frequency of the children’s recording." When Shen Mo looked up, rainwater dripped from the brim of his cap down the back of his neck, the cold making his eyelashes tremble slightly. "It’s burrowing deeper into the city."

Su Wanying’s fingertips unconsciously stroked the silver chain at her neck—it was an old key she had picked up from Granny Wu’s old residence, and right then, it was burning hot against her skin.

"I’ll go check the surveillance cameras." Her hair brushed across his shoulder as she turned. "Let’s see where else this light connects to."

Shen Mo didn’t answer.

He squatted down and gently pried open the gap of the manhole cover with the tip of the bone saw.

The ghostly blue suddenly surged, as if someone had overturned fluorescent ink down in the well, crawling up his gloves along the arc of the saw teeth.

A layer of white frost instantly crystallized on the surface of the gloves, and he heard the faint cracking sound of ice layers, remarkably similar to the frozen honeycomb briquettes on Granny Wu’s coal stove.

His phone vibrated in his palm.

Xiao Wu’s video call popped up. The screen showed a shaky flashlight beam illuminating a damp concrete wall—the interior wall of an old town cable vault.

"Look at this, Brother Shen!" Xiao Wu’s voice carried static, the back of his right hand pressed against the well wall. "These carved marks! I took them with a macro lens—"

The frame zoomed in.

The dense scratches on the wall were as fine as needlework, yet arranged in a certain eerie pattern: some spiraling upward, others intersecting into nets, and a few of the deepest ones even oozing pale cyan liquid, shimmering with a cold light under the lens.

Shen Mo’s breathing suddenly grew hurried.

He pulled out his portable autopsy record book and flipped to the page clipped with the deceased’s photo—the homeless man autopsied last week, whose skin was covered in frost crystals whose spreading paths matched the direction of the wall carvings with absolute precision.

"This isn't Morse code, not sign language, not even any known script." Xiao Wu’s Adam’s apple bobbed, his left hand gripping the detector for dear life. "But if I stare at it for more than ten seconds, I start getting dizzy and the back of my neck turns freezing cold... exactly like the temperature difference in Granny Wu’s old house."

Shen Mo’s nails dug into the edge of the logbook.

He recalled the pupils of the deceased on the autopsy table—dilated, scattered, yet in the very last moment before death, using frozen fingers to carve similar marks onto the edge of the autopsy table.

"It’s creating its own language," he heard his own voice sounding like shattered ice crashing against glass. "It’s no longer borrowing our symbols; it’s starting to speak with its own rules."

Xiao Wu’s detector suddenly let out a piercing shriek.

The light in the video shook violently, accompanied by the sound of metal colliding: "Damn it! The temperature of the well wall is plummeting! I have to—"

Before the call was cut off, Shen Mo captured one last image: the liquid oozing from the carvings on the wall was crawling up the back of Xiao Wu’s hand, crystallizing into identical symbols on the surface of his skin.

The shadowless lamps in the autopsy room went out abruptly at 3:17 AM.

Shen Mo stood in front of the refrigerated cabinet, his breath condensing into a mist before him.

Spread out on the workbench behind him were the carved photo files sent back by Xiao Wu, the records of citizen interviews compiled by Su Wanying, and the 1982 meteorological log provided by Xiao Bing—the latter section circled in red was glaringly conspicuous: the "Granny Wu wearing a dark green cotton-padded robe" and "pine-scented coal stove" that all patients stubbornly insisted upon did not exist at all in the actual records.

"This isn't memory," Su Wanying’s voice came from behind him.

She was holding a stack of medical records, her hair tips still damp with rain. "They’ve been implanted with the exact same memory. It’s like... like someone handed a copy of the same videotape to everyone who ever came into contact with the carvings."

When Shen Mo turned, the hem of his white lab coat brushed against the tape recorder at the corner of the table.

He pressed the play button, and a chorus of children’s voices poured out from the speaker: "The day big sister fell in, the fire was burning fiercely, but we were all so cold..."

"It’s reshaping reality in reverse." He grabbed a marker and drew two overlapping circles on the white board. "The public discussion heat around the 'late spring cold snap' can affect local temperatures. The hotter the discussion, the lower the temperature—Xiao Bing’s climate chart has already verified this."

The marker punctured a hole right through the word "affect."

He remembered the conversation he heard in the neighborhood this morning: an elderly woman buying vegetables saying "this late spring cold snap is truly bizarre," and a schoolchild holding a phone reciting "netizens say there are wronged spirits in the well."

These voices were like seeds, falling into the soil of the lingering echoes, sprouting, branching out, and finally growing into icicles capable of freezing a person to death.

"It’s starting to feel on our behalf." Shen Mo’s fingertips pressed against his temples, where it was throbbing violently. "If we don't speak, it speaks for us; if we don't remember, it writes for us; and now—"

"Now it wants to live on our behalf," Su Wanying finished the second half of the sentence.

She gently placed the medical records on the workbench, the words "Memory Implantation Syndrome" on the cover warmed slightly by her body heat. "If this keeps up, the cold snap of 1982 will become everyone’s 'shared memory,' becoming a 'history' that actually took place."

At 5:00 AM, the door to the autopsy room was pushed open a crack.

Xiao Bing stood in the shadows, clutching a crumpled meteorological chart in his hand. "I did what you said, correlating the temperature data of March for the past three years with the Weibo topic heat of the 'late spring cold snap'..." He paused, his throat moving. "The correlation coefficient is 0.87."

Shen Mo’s hands were unusually steady as he took the chart.

He remembered the year Xiao Bing was seven, when his sister fell into the well, and this silent boy squatted by the well edge, drawing the sun on the ice surface with frozen-red fingers.

Now, the red correlation curve on the chart looked remarkably like that unfinished sun from back then, except the color had shifted from warm yellow to a blinding, glaring scarlet.

"We must sever the information chain." He turned to look at the iron cabinet against the wall, which locked away the asphalt felt fragments, the rubbing of the carvings, the well soil brought by Ah Huang—all the media of the lingering echoes.

"But it has already seeped into every corner of the city, replicating and mutating like a virus. Ordinary physical isolation is useless."

"Then what do we do?" Xiao Wu’s voice came from the doorway.

His right hand was wrapped in gauze, and faint cyan carvings were faintly visible beneath the skin of his wrist. "We can't possibly seal up every well in the city, can we?"

Shen Mo’s gaze swept across everyone’s faces: the dark circles under Su Wanying’s eyes, the crumpled chart in Xiao Bing’s grip, the carvings on Xiao Wu’s wrist, and Ah Huang curled up beneath the autopsy table—its tail no longer wagging, just lightly tapping the floor over and over, as if counting something.

"I will build a firewall," he said.

The wall clock in the autopsy room struck precisely at 6:00 AM.

Shen Mo sat before the autopsy table, surrounded by the media of the echoes: the asphalt felt fragments gave off a scorched black sheen under the desk lamp, the tape recorder looped children's voices, the carving rubbings were pinned to the wall with silver nails, and the well soil brought by Ah Huang was contained in a glass jar, slowly frosting over.

Su Wanying stood to his right, holding a syringe: "The neural inhibitor will dull your pain, but your cognitive activity will drop by 30%." Her fingertips paused on the needle. "Are you sure you want to do this?"

"A grave doesn't rot." Shen Mo tore open the collar of his white lab coat, exposing the vein below his collarbone. "I am going to make it completely die within my mind."

Xiao Wu clutched the EEG monitor, the brainwave curves on the screen looking like threads tangled by the wind. "You’re using your brain as a container! What if it breaks through the suppression—"

"Then we die together." Shen Mo’s voice was as light as a sigh. "Still better than letting the whole city be buried with us."

The moment the needle pierced his skin, he saw Su Wanying’s eyelashes tremble.

Her shadow fell upon the back of his hand like a leaf about to fall.

"Begin," he said.

The Morse code on the asphalt felt floated before his eyes: "You shouldn't seal up the voice."

The children’s voices vibrated inside his eardrums: "The day big sister fell in, the fire was burning fiercely, but we were all so cold..."

The trajectories of the well wall carvings projected onto his retina, perfectly overlapping with the frost paths on the deceased’s skin.

Shen Mo closed his eyes and began to recite all known information, word by word, as if dissecting the most delicate corpse: "March 12, 1982, temperature -5℃; Granny Wu wore a dark blue cotton-padded jacket, the coal stove burned honeycomb briquettes; six children passed the wellhead, no one pushed anyone; the girl’s fall was accidental, not man-made."

His left hand grabbed the bone saw, carving the opposite logic onto the wooden surface of the autopsy table: "She did not fall," "The fire never went out," "No one was indifferent."

Amidst the friction sound of the saw blade against the wood, he heard the blood vessels in his temples bursting.

Warm liquid gushed from his nasal cavity, dripping onto the words "No one was indifferent," staining the final stroke of the word "indifferent" into a blood-red blur.

The EEG monitor emitted a piercing alarm.

Xiao Wu’s cries sounded as though they came from underwater: "Brother Shen! Brainwaves show the temporal and parietal lobes are entering dormancy!"

"Continue." Shen Mo’s voice was indistinct, his right hand groping for his glasses frame, turning the autopsy room mirror toward himself. "Bring me a pen."

Su Wanying’s hand trembled as she handed it over.

He gripped the pen, its tip pressed against the mirror surface, beads of blood trickling down between his fingers onto the glass, blurring into a hazy red: "From this moment on, I am the lie."

The reflection in the mirror slowly closed its eyes.

A wind suddenly rose outside the window.

The symbols on all the rubbing rubbings began to weather away, as if erased by an invisible hand; the frost in the well soil jar cracked with a "crack" sound, shattering into fine powder; Ah Huang lifted its head, let out a long, drawn-out howl, and then collapsed to the ground, its tail twitching twice before lying still.

Shen Mo’s pupils contracted in the darkness.

He heard a voice resounding from the depths of his consciousness, like an ice pick piercing bone marrow: "You were right... Now, it's your turn to shut up."

Then, the darkness washed over.

The wall clock in the autopsy room stopped at 9:17.

Su Wanying gripped Shen Mo’s wrist; his pulse was like a gossamer thread, appearing and disappearing.

Xiao Wu’s fingers flew across the EEG keyboard, the monitor’s alarm weakening then strengthening, strengthening then weakening.

Xiao Bing squatted next to Ah Huang, gently touching its ears—the dog was still breathing, just sleeping very deeply.

Outside the window, sunlight filtered through the blinds, casting narrow golden patches across Shen Mo’s face.

His eyelashes twitched, then went still again.

When Su Wanying lowered her head, she saw he was still gripping that pen in his palm.

The pen barrel was stained with blood, pressing a red mark into his palm.

"Will he wake up?" Xiao Wu’s voice was terribly hoarse.

Su Wanying did not answer.

She reached out to close Shen Mo’s eyelids, her fingertips pausing when they touched his eyeballs—deep within the pupils, a line of extremely faint frost-words was trembling gently with his breath, like snow ready to melt at any moment.

And the autopsy room wall clock, after two hours of standing still, suddenly began to tick once more.

The second hand went "tick," "tock," counting every single second of Shen Mo’s coma.