Chapter 61 - When the Name is Blank, the Man Lives

At 3:17 AM, the overhead light in the dissection room suddenly flickered twice.

Shen Mo’s knuckles pressed against the microscope’s eyepiece, while his left hand still pinched the yellowed sheet of paper that had slipped from Professor Lin’s manuscript.

The curled corner of the paper was stained with brown water marks. As he brought it closer, he caught a very faint scent of mildew—resembling old items stored away for years in a dusty study, yet mixed with a trace of an elusive turpentine aroma.

It matched precisely with the crystalline components extracted from his earwax after his seventh night of vigil.

"Knock, knock."

The moment the glass door was tapped, Shen Mo’s pupils contracted slightly.

He swiftly pressed the paper face-down onto the microscope stage. By the time he turned around, he had recovered his usual composure, though his fingertips gently rubbed against the inside of his lab coat pocket—inside lay the rib fracture model obtained from Old Wu, currently growing slightly warm against his heartbeat.

Su Wangying stood outside the door, holding something wrapped in red silk.

Night dew still clung to the tips of her hair, and her museum employee badge jingled with a faint silver glimmer at her collar. "Professor Lin said you need 'a medium capable of carrying memories'." She untied the red silk, revealing a palm-sized bronze plaque. Its surface had been polished extremely smooth, emitting a warm, gentle glow under the cold white light. "This is the backing of an old exhibition label from the deepest part of the archives, registered in 1947."

Shen Mo’s gaze fell upon the bronze plaque.

He noticed tiny scratches along the edges, looking as though they had been wiped repeatedly. "It didn't burn in the fire?"

"It did." Su Wangying’s fingertips brushed across the back of the bronze plaque, where several charred spots remained. "But someone picked it back up from the ashes." When she looked up, the cold light of the dissection room was reflected in the depths of her eyes. "Those names that failed to get engraved on tombstones back then—actually, someone has always remembered them."

Shen Mo’s Adam’s apple moved slightly.

He bent down, retrieved the bone flute from the drawer—ever since the seventh night of the vigil, a layer of frost had perpetually coated the flute's body, but at this moment, it was gradually growing warm again in his palm.

The paper beneath the microscope was suddenly flipped up at a corner by a draft, and he caught sight of the marginalia reading, "Names cannot be mended, only borne." The handwriting left shallow indentations on the back of the paper, as if tremendous force had been applied while writing.

"To the potter's field," he said abruptly.

Su Wangying’s eyelashes fluttered, yet she did not ask why.

She merely wrapped the bronze plaque carefully back in the red silk, her movements as gentle as wrapping fragile porcelain. "Ah Huang is waiting downstairs."

The night wind of the potter's field carried sand grains that whipped against his face.

Shen Mo stood at the center of the ruins, the bone flute pressed against his chest, and could clearly feel the vibration of his own heartbeat transmitted through the hollow bone tube.

Ah Huang squatted beside his feet, its tail sweeping across the sandy ground to kick up fine, drifting dust—it was marking its "safe zone," an instinct taught to it by the veteran funeral home staff.

Darn on the dot of 1:00 AM.

Shen Mo turned on the recording device, its red indicator light glaring like a vigilant eye in the darkness.

He took a deep breath and began walking along the route of the virtual footprints.

First step: the pressure of the military boot’s forefoot sinking into the sand grains; second step: a stride length three centimeters shorter than that of an ordinary person—the characteristic patrol gait of a wounded soldier.

At every spot, he pressed the bone flute against his lips and blew the correct sequence of notes.

The sound of the flute dispersed, wrapped in the wind, startling a few night-roosting crows. Amidst the flapping of their wings, he heard the resonance formed by his own breathing within the bone tube.

The seventh step.

The semi-circular indentation on the sand was clearer than it had been in previous days.

Shen Mo halted, the moonlight illuminating his tightened jawline.

He recalled the crossed-out marks over "Twelve patrols, the roster may be mended" in the manuscript, and remembered the arrangement of the turpentine crystals under the microscope—they were not formed naturally; they resembled more a carrier of certain information.

"Click."

He deliberately let out half a breath.

The third phrase of notes slid from an F-sharp to an F-flat, the tail end carrying a cracked, hoarse edge.

Ah Huang suddenly pricked up its ears, its front paws scraping a half-arc in the sand, while a low whimpering emanated from its throat.

Shen Mo could feel his eardrums vibrating. The screeching sound inside the walls was louder than it had been on the seventh night, but this time, he did not cover his ears.

Tenth step. Eleventh step. Twelfth step.

By the time the final stretch of flute music dissolved into the wind, Shen Mo’s fingertips were stiff with cold.

He squatted down and gently buried the bone flute into the sand.

He stood the bronze plaque upright above it, its smooth surface reflecting the moon like a wordless tombstone.

Ah Huang padded over, nudged the bronze plaque with its nose, and then settled down beside it, resting its chin on its front paws while the tip of its tail lazily flicked the ground.

"Crack—"

The recording device suddenly burst out with a sharp click.

Shen Mo’s pupils shrank violently. He grabbed the device and rewound it, isolating that sound at 00:12:07: exceptionally faint, like the crisp snap of a pen tip breaking, yet carrying a bizarre resonant frequency.

He fished out his phone and sent a message to Director Lin, receiving an almost instantaneous voice reply back: "All sensors have captured it, completely cancelling out the residual wave you monitored on the seventh night."

When the pre-dawn light crept over the horizon, Shen Mo stood before the electroencephalogram (EEG) machine in the dissection room.

The green waveform pulsed across the screen; the 0.7Hz residual wave had vanished, replaced by a 1.3-second flat line—matching Su Wangying’s data on "blank sleep" down to the exact fraction.

His fingers hovered over the print button, suddenly recalling how the wandering figures in the wind of the potter’s field last night had gradually blurred and finally dissipated into the morning mist.

"Ding."

His phone vibrated with a message from Su Wangying: "Something is appearing on the bronze plaque."

In the photograph, fine, dense incisions were emerging on the smooth surface of the bronze plaque, as if slowly carved by some invisible, sharp weapon.

Shen Mo magnified the image, discerning the outlines of those marks—they were numbers, names, dates, all the imprints burned away by fire, wiped away by the years, and forgotten in the passage of time.

When the door of the dissection room was pushed open, Ah Huang’s paws tapped a "da-da" rhythm against the floor.

It carried a cloth bundle in its jaws and dropped it at Shen Mo’s feet. Inside were the manuscript fragments sent by Professor Lin, with a sticky note pressed right on top: "Zhou Mingyuan's fountain pen was destroyed in the fire, but his ink bottle was found."

Shen Mo opened the final autopsy file.

In the photograph of the deceased gripping the bone flute in their right hand, the knuckles were turned white from exertion.

He picked up a red pen and wrote in the blank space of the report: "Deceased: Unknown.

Cause of death: Completing a ritual that should never have been completed."

As he closed the file, the morning sunlight streamed through the window blinds, casting a grid of golden spots across the tabletop.

Ah Huang squatted on the windowsill, gazing out toward the direction of the funeral home's outer wall—the mist there had already cleared, but its tail was still wagging gently, as though speaking of things only it could understand.

Shen Mo removed his lab coat, hung it over the back of his chair, and unconsciously rubbed his cuff links.

Pinned there was a miniature recorder that he had secretly worn during his seventh-night vigil.

At this moment, the red dot on its screen was still blinking, recording the frequency of his every heartbeat, the rhythm of his every breath, and every possibly overlooked, strange sound originating from the depths of his own body.

He pressed the pause button, then released it.

Tomorrow, he thought, tomorrow he would recalibrate the parameters of the EEG machine.

Some data, perhaps, required a more careful... interpretation.