Chapter 47 - The Curtain Call Missed by 0.7 Seconds

When the second hand swept across the dial for the 25,920th time, Shen Mo’s eyelashes were the first to move.

Su Wangying was holding his hand, her fingertips pressed against the faint, intermittent pulse at his wrist.

That beat suddenly grew stronger. When she looked up, she collided with a pair of mist-veiled eyes—his pupils resembled glass marbles soaked in cold water, reacting sluggishly to the harsh glare of the overhead light before finally constricting into two tiny black needles after a long moment.

"Shen... Shen Mo?" Her voice trembled. Her other hand went to feel his forehead, which was abnormally cold.

He opened his mouth, his Adam’s apple bobbing. The sound that came out was like sandpaper scraping against metal: "The thirteen relics in your exhibition..." The trailing end of his sentence was cut off by a cough. His fingers clamped down hard on her wrist. "...were not collected by accident. They were 'chosen'."

The monitor’s beeping suddenly changed pitch.

Xiao Wu bolted up from his computer, his glasses sliding down to the bridge of his nose: "Brain waves! The temporal lobe and prefrontal lobe are coupling at low frequencies. This is fucking more dangerous than when he was in a coma—"

"Pen." Shen Mo interrupted him, his other hand groping along the bedside table.

Only then did Su Wangying notice half of a blood-stained notebook sticking out from beneath his pillow.

As she pulled it out, the pages rustled softly. Symbols intertwined with bloodstains and frost patterns crawled across the paper like living things, the edges of some characters glowing with a faint blue fluorescence—the exact self-created engraved script of the lingering echoes from before.

"These symbols..." He licked his dry, cracked lips, his gaze locked firmly on Su Wangying. "Are seeping out from the locked zone of the brain. The source is the exhibit list of the special exhibition 'Urban Memories: The Vanishing Thirteen'." Every word he spoke seemed as though he were chewing on crushed glass. "Every single exhibit has served as a medium for other bizarre incidents."

Su Wangying’s fingertips trembled against the paper.

She suddenly remembered that three days ago, during the setup of the exhibition, the moment she touched a bronze clasp, a burning pain had flashed across her palm; as she wiped a stone tablet, out of the corner of her eye she had always caught a glimpse of a vague outline in the shadows.

At the time, she had simply thought it was due to staying up too late, but now, thinking back, those anomalies were like a movie played in slow motion, every single frame screaming a warning about something.

"I’ll go pull the archives." She turned to leave, but was reined back by the hem of her clothes caught by Shen Mo.

His fingernails almost pinched into the back of her hand: "Check the work log. Find the record for the 1983 dance shoes."

The archive room’s air conditioner hummed overhead.

When Su Wangying turned to the page for November 7th, every hair on the back of her neck stood on end.

On the beige log paper, her familiar handwriting clearly read: "1983 dance shoes, donated by Elder Cheng, stored in Warehouse B7." Yet she distinctly remembered that the donor list for this special exhibition did not contain anyone surnamed Cheng at all—and even more bizarrely, beneath her signature column was stamped the red seal "Approved and Warehoused", yet she had never laid eyes on these dance shoes, nor had she ever stepped foot in Warehouse B7.

The blue glow from the surveillance room monitor cast a sickly pale hue over Xiao Wu’s face.

He pulled up the warehouse footage from three days ago, fast-forwarding to 2:17 in the morning: Su Wangying in the footage was wearing a beige knitted cardigan, identical to the one she wore today, but her eyes were closed like a marionette pulled by strings.

She walked toward shelf B7, retrieved a black velvet exhibition box, clutched it to her chest, and stood there motionless for a full eighteen minutes. Her lips parted slightly, and the frequency with which her throat moved matched the syllables of the curtain call speech without a single error.

"This is impossible." Su Wangying’s fingertip pressed against her own shadow on the screen. "I was clearly at the hospital staying with—" She suddenly stopped dead—three days ago in the early morning was precisely the time Shen Mo had been rushed into the emergency room.

She remembered sitting in the corridor the entire night; how could she possibly have appeared in the warehouse?

"Memory has been tampered with." Shen Mo appeared at the doorway of the surveillance room, heaven knows when.

He leaned against the doorframe, the hem of his white lab coat carrying the scent of hospital disinfectant. "The lingering echo invaded your consciousness through the medium, creating a loophole in time." His knuckles pressed against his temples, which were throbbing heavily. "Xiao Wu, check the timeline of anomalous events across the city."

The sound of the keyboard tapping was like dense raindrops.

On Xiao Wu’s screen, the event nodes marked in red gradually connected into a web: the day after the bronze clasp appeared in a news photo, a wave of collective auditory hallucinations broke out in the old district; three hours after the stone tablet was photographed by tourists, a mountaineering team lost their way at the foot of the mountain; the night the ice cubes trended online, the owner of a cold drinks shop saw the face of a drowning person floating inside the freezer...

"Correlation coefficient 0.87." Xiao Wu swallowed hard, pulling up the model he had built. "Every outbreak of lingering echoes occurs after the exhibits gain public attention. It’s not that the objects carry obsession; it’s that 'being gazed at' is activating the resonance." He zoomed in on the thirteen points of light at the center of the model. "When all thirteen mediums are simultaneously exposed to a high-empathy field..." The screen suddenly flashed a blinding white light, and when it lit up again, the thirteen points of light had formed a loop. "...they will form a cognitive resonance loop, amplifying a single obsession to a city-wide scale."

Shen Mo’s breathing suddenly grew rapid.

He grabbed his coat and threw it on. The metal handle of a bone saw slipped out of his pocket and struck a chair with a sharp clang: "Let’s go check the dance shoes."

The musty odor of Warehouse B7 was mixed with the scent of turpentine.

Shen Mo’s gloved hand hovered three centimeters above the black velvet exhibition box, his knuckles turning white from the exertion.

The moment Su Wangying helped him lift the lid of the box, a scorched smell poured out—a charred pair of ballet shoes curled inside the velvet, and the tip of the left shoe bore a speck of pale green fluorescent powder, exactly identical to the reagent he used to mark crime scenes on his last case.

Amidst the humming of the spectrometer, cold sweat beaded on Shen Mo’s forehead.

Staring at the compositional analysis report on the screen, his voice trembled: "There are fabric fibers from the auditorium seats in the ash." He looked up at Su Wangying, his eyes frighteningly bright. "She maintained a posture facing the audience until the moment she died. The obsession isn't death; it’s the 'unfinished curtain call'."

"So as long as someone watches..." Su Wangying abruptly covered her mouth.

"The ritual must be completed." Shen Mo finished her sentence. "Otherwise, all observers will fall into the cycle of the 'unfinished'. Last time’s collective auditory hallucination was the audience waiting for applause, the mountaineering team getting lost was looking for the exit, and the drowning person in the cold drinks shop..." His Adam’s apple bobbed. "...was waiting for that 0.7-second curtain call."

The midnight autopsy room was sliced in half by the projector’s light.

In the footage sent by Director Lin, wind suddenly swept through the empty exhibition hall.

The shadows of all the exhibits swayed simultaneously, like pendulums manipulated by an invisible hand.

The static in the audio recording suddenly became clear.

Countless voices overlapped in whispers, drifting from far, far away: "Almost... just a little bit more..."

"0.7 seconds!" Shen Mo abruptly stood up, knocking over the spectrometer.

Amidst the loud crash of metal hitting the floor, the characters of frost deep within his pupils suddenly sharpened—"The curtain call is off by 0.7 seconds", and every single character was dripping with tiny shards of ice.

He grabbed the bone saw and rushed toward the wall. The sound of the saw teeth cutting through the white paint was like fingernails scratching a chalkboard: "We have to make it 'unfinished'."

A crisp "crack" echoed from outside the window.

Su Wangying ran to the window and saw that the landscape lights on the museum dome were flickering bizarrely.

The central spotlight suddenly blazed to life, its beam shooting straight toward the exhibition hall like a giant eye snapping open.

"They’re preparing the ritual." Shen Mo wiped away a trickle of blood from his nose and shoved the bone saw into Su Wangying’s hand. "There is only one way now—" His gaze pierced past her, landing on the newly carved characters on the wall. "Break the resonance loop before the curtain call is completed."

Su Wangying looked down at the bone saw in her hand; the metal handle still retained the warmth of his palm.

She thought of her own blindfolded self in the surveillance footage, of the unfamiliar signature in the log, of that single pair of dance shoes in the display case that had always been waiting.

"When?" she asked.

"Now." Shen Mo tore off his hospital gown, revealing the black work uniform he had already worn underneath. "Is the exhibition hall setup complete?"

Su Wangying’s cell phone suddenly vibrated.

Opening the work group chat, she saw the latest message sent by Curator Chen: "Tomorrow morning at nine, rehearsal for the special exhibition opening ceremony. All exhibits have been returned to their places."

The wall clock in the autopsy room struck two in the morning.

Shen Mo snatched the notebook from the table. The frost-patterned characters flowed between the pages like a countdown.

He turned to Su Wangying. The mist in his eyes had cleared somewhat, burning brighter than ever before: "Take me to the exhibition hall."