Chapter 58: Negative Space is Alive

At four in the morning, the autopsy room was bone-chilling. The hem of Shen Mo’s white coat was still stained with the red ink seeping from Su Wangying’s wrist—a shade so akin to the bloodstains on Chen Sui’s death report from the fire archives that his hand had nearly slipped when he injected her with a tranquilizer just moments ago.

His phone vibrated on the edge of the dissecting table, displaying an unread message from the museum’s administration department.

He swiped the screen, his pupils suddenly contracting: "Curator Chen will hold a press conference at 9:00 AM. Theme: The Launch of the Reverberation Art Exhibition, featuring the premiere of seven 'misunderstood artworks'."

"Damn it," he muttered a low curse, sending the metal tray clattering loudly.

The scalpel slipped from his fingertips, leaving a long, thin scratch across the marble countertop—the exact curve of the dancer’s eyelid in the group oil painting.

At seven sharp, when the mahogany door of the museum’s conference room was flung open, Curator Chen was plugging a USB drive into the projector.

He pushed up his gold-rimmed glasses, the reflection obscuring half his face: "Forensic Doctor Shen arrives just in time. I need a professional to endorse the 'artistry' of the exhibits."

"The common thread among all seven exhibits is that they have been over-interpreted." Shen Mo loosened his tie, the dark circles from a sleepless night blooming beneath his eyes. "The oil painting is endowed with the 'curse of the gaze', the guqin is rumored to bring death to whoever plays it—do you know how these labels came to be?" He slammed a stack of data charts onto the table. "After every exhibition, the audience's internal theta wave synchronization rate rises by 37%. They aren't looking at art; they are 'feeding data' to an obsession."

Chen Curator’s fingers paused on the USB drive: "Fear stems from ignorance, and the exhibition itself is a cure. The public has the right to know—"

"The right to know that you are fueling the reverberations?" Shen Mo grabbed the other man’s wrist, the touch feeling like gripping a cold, hard stone. "During the 1987 theater fire, Chen Sui’s obsession was 'to become the one who watches', which is why she demands that the audience seating always contains someone 'trying to understand'. Now, displaying these seven items is equivalent to opening live-streaming rooms for seven Chen Suis!"

"Impudent." Chen Curator shook off his hand, his gold-rimmed glasses sliding down to the bridge of his nose. "I am a curator, not a firefighter." He turned and pressed the projection button, seven exhibit photographs draped in red cloth blanketing the white wall. "Besides, your so-called 'reverberation' is nothing more than—"

"The sketches in your drawer."

Director Lin’s voice came from the doorway.

He was holding a camera, the lens still smudged with the dust from Curator Chen’s office: "At three in the morning, I filmed it."

The projection switched to a blurred close-up: inside a deep wooden drawer, a yellowed sketch lay spread open, depicting the dance posture of the "pseudo-finale," but the originally broken movement lines were reconnected, the ink pooled heavily at the tip of the final stroke.

The small print in the corner was magnified: "True art should not be left empty."

Curator Chen’s face instantly turned ashen.

He staggered back two steps and caught himself on the edge of the table, his knuckles turning pale: "This is... my practice draft from college, it has nothing to do with the present."

"Nothing to do with it?" Shen Mo snatched the copy of the sketch, his finger jabbing at the "completed" movement lines. "Chen Sui’s obsession is 'to become the one who watches', because her finale was left blank by the fire. You want to 'complete' history, so you are replicating her logic—using new people 'trying to understand' to feed a new obsession."

The conference room fell into a dead silence.

The phoenix tree leaves outside the window were whipped up by the wind, slapping against the glass like someone knocking on the door.

"I need to verify this." Shen Mo suddenly turned around. "Lin Yan, didn't Chen Sui write in her diary that the finale was meant to be blank?"

The girl standing against the wall clutched her canvas bag, her knuckles whitening: "My aunt said that negative space is the breath of dance. She... she drew a whole page of blankness in her rehearsal notebook before she died."

"Help me scan the manuscript." Shen Mo softened his tone, as if soothing a startled cat. "Turn it into a transparent film and paste it over the original painting's position on the wall after the museum closes tonight."

Lin Yan’s eyelashes fluttered: "And then?"

"No painting, no sound, no person." Shen Mo fished out the remote control for the cold light lamp. "Only a blank phantom."

The exhibition hall after closing resembled a silent tomb.

As Xiao Zhou (Lin Yan) stood on tiptoe to affix the film to the wall, the back of Shen Mo’s neck began to tighten again—the exact sensation from rushing into Su Wangying’s dormitory last night, as if a fine needle were crawling beneath his skin.

The cold light lamp clicked on.

The pure white wall reflected the blank manuscript on the film; no dancers, no lines, just a uniform grayish-white, like a freshly wiped blackboard.

"Get out." Shen Mo urged Lin Yan toward the door. "From now until dawn, don't let anyone in."

The blue light of the surveillance monitor flickered across his face.

At 2:00 AM, the hands of the thermo-hygrometer held steady at 22°C and 50% humidity; at 3:00 AM, the green bar of the electromagnetic detector remained stubbornly at zero; at 5:00 AM, as the first rays of dawn spilled through the window, the wall still showed only that single patch of blankness.

"It worked." Lin Yan’s voice came over the walkie-talkie, laced with a sob. "My aunt’s obsession... didn't move."

But Curator Chen’s anger arrived faster than the morning light.

At 9:00 AM, when he kicked open the door to the exhibition hall, the film had already been torn into fragments scattered across the floor.

The old man bent down to pick them up, his fingertips freezing the instant they touched the shards. His pupils contracted violently, his lips opening and closing unconsciously as if silently reciting something.

Shen Mo’s brainwave recorder emitted a soft beep.

He stared at the leaping waveform chart: the theta waves spiked sharply at 13.7 Hz, forming a jagged peak, only to be overwhelmed by a surging tide of alpha waves 0.7 seconds later.

"I... I shouldn't have completed it." Curator Chen’s voice trembled as he stumbled backward, colliding with a display case. "That blankness... that blankness was her breath."

When the shadowless lamps in the autopsy room flared to life again in the small hours of the night, Shen Mo’s white coat was stained with Su Wangying’s blood samples.

The paper strip of the electroencephalograph slowly spat out curves. The residual 0.7 Hz waves were no longer coherent, fractured in the middle by a flat, straight gap—the exact duration of her dreamless "blank sleep" from the previous night.

He gazed out the window. The museum’s glass curtain wall shimmered with a pale gold in the morning light.

The dancer silhouette bearing Su Wangying’s face was still there, but this time, she did not raise her hand to point toward the art gallery; instead, her hands were crossed over her chest, as if saying: I have finished watching.

"The true way to break the deadlock is not to conquer the obsession," he spoke to the empty air, his voice as light as a sigh. "It is to teach it... how to end."

A page of the autopsy report in the corner of the dissecting table was fluttered up by a draft of wind. The name at the very top read: "Third Night Watchman, time of death: 3:17 AM."

Shen Mo’s fingers hovered above the report when his phone suddenly vibrated.

It was a video sent by Director Lin. In the frame, the red cloth of the art gallery was being pulled away, seven exhibits gleaming coldly under the spotlights. On the surface of one bronze tripod, patterns resembling the blank manuscript vaguely surfaced.

He snatched up the scalpel and walked toward the cold storage unit, the sound of metal clashing ringing exceptionally clear in the silent autopsy room.

The digital display screen of the cold storage unit flashed with a eerie blue light. On the label of the bottom drawer, the words "Third Night Watchman" were circled over and over in red pen, the ink still not entirely dry.