Chapter 65: What Is the Truth After All?

The musty smell of the storage room, mingled with the bitter fragrance of old wood, pierced into Shen Mo’s nostrils. His fingertips were still resting on the edge of the secret compartment.

The fountain-pen handwriting of his father on the envelope was obscured by dust, yet it pierced his retina like a fine needle—he had never seen his father’s handwriting; his mother always said his father had left in such a hurry that he hadn't even left a single note.

At this moment, this line of words clearly stated: You are a step closer to the truth.

He took half a step back, colliding with the old wooden cabinet.

His knuckles pressed against the grain of the cabinet door, and he suddenly remembered the tremor of seven years ago when he had sneaked into his mother’s drawer and been caught.

His mother hadn't scolded him; she had simply squatted down, pressing his trembling wrist with her warm, cool hand: "Xiao Shen, some things, if seen too early, will crush a person."

Now he finally understood that what his mother had hidden wasn't candy, but a secret heavier than death.

When the tweezers lifted the envelope, the opening split only a narrow seam.

The edges of the letter paper were stained with tea, resembling an old, repeatedly fondled handkerchief.

He didn't rush to pull it out; instead, he put on rubber gloves—this was the instinct of a forensic pathologist; any evidence potentially carrying biological traces needed to be protected.

When the cold light of the ultraviolet lamp swept across the paper surface, his breath nearly stopped.

Layers of overlapping shadows emerged on the letter paper, like rubbings covered over countless times.

The topmost layer was his mother's graceful, regular script: "It would be good if you came back." The second line of ink was lighter: "It would be good if you come back." The third line left only: "Come back." Until the bottom layer, the carbonized handwriting was nearly melting into the paper fibers, barely discernible: "...I am still writing, and you are still listening."

The scalpel gently pried open the envelope, and half an old photograph fell out.

He had never seen the man in the white lab coat in the photograph, but the setting in front of the mourning canopy was too familiar—it was the unidentified corpse case he handled in the suburbs last year; the blue cloth pattern of the mourning canopy matched the one in the photograph down to the very last detail.

The bone flute at the man's side emitted a faint glow, and its crack position completely matched that of the sheep bone flute on the autopsy table.

"This is not a suicide note," he said to the empty air, his voice echoing in the storage room.

A suicide note should have an end, but every word on this letter paper seemed to be breathing. The edges of the carbonized handwriting at the very bottom emitted an extremely faint fluorescence—that was the residual color developer excited by ultraviolet light when new ink covered old traces. "It is still writing."

That night, he had a dream.

It was his childhood home. The lampshade was a beige woolen one knitted by his mother, and her silhouette in the lamplight was as hunched as a bow.

The fountain-pen tip moved rustlingly across the letter paper. He leaned in closer, wanting to see what was written, only to find that every single word was "Shen Mo." "Shen Mo, if your dad were alive, how much he would want to hold you." "Shen Mo, today you said you saw infant remains in anatomy class, so I got up in the middle of the night to knit you a woolen hat." "Shen Mo, I kept his bone flute in the secret compartment, waiting for you to grow up..."

His mother suddenly turned her head, her eyes devoid of light. "You shouldn't have read this letter," her voice sounded as though it were submerged in water, "now it's your turn to write."

When Shen Mo woke up with a start, the sweat on his back had soaked through his pajamas.

Moonlight leaked through a gap in the curtains, shining on the sticky note by his pillow.

The handwriting was his mother's, and every character carried a playful little hook: "It didn't rain today, but he is still wet."

His fingers grazed the edge of the sticky note—the paper was of the Morning Light brand, exactly the same as the one his mother used during her lifetime.

Yet he hadn't even entered the study last night, let alone touched paper and pen.

The digital clock on the bedside table showed 2:17 AM, matching precisely the time his mother stopped writing every day during her lifetime.

"Teacher Shen?"

When Su Wangying's voice came from the entrance of the autopsy room, Shen Mo was staring blankly into the microscope.

She was holding a stack of autopsy reports, her hair tips dusted with morning dew: "The reports you wrote these past three days..." She pulled out the topmost one and flipped to the signature page. "Look at the hook on this character 'wang' [death/perish]; it's different from your usual brushstroke."

Shen Mo leaned in to look.

The black gel pen dragged out a counterclockwise arc at the end of the character "wang," resembling a willow leaf rolled up by the wind.

He remembered his mother's diary, where every instance of the character "si" [death] had been carefully altered to "zou le" [left], and even the indentations pressed by the fountain-pen tip into the back of the paper shared that exact same arc.

"I checked your recent handwritten drafts," Su Wangying handed over a tablet, the screen displaying a comparison chart. "All instances of 'death' were written as 'left,' which completely matches the avoidance mechanism in your mother's 2013 diary." Her fingertip tapped lightly on the screen. "What's even stranger is the line spacing of these characters..."

The door of the autopsy room was pushed open, and Xiaozhou leaned against the door frame, panting.

Her fingers gestured rapidly, the corners of her eyes flushed red: "The paper is crying." The translator emitted a mechanical voice. "It feels like the person writing is no longer the person who writes."

Director Lin had brought his laptop along.

On the surveillance footage, at two in the morning, Shen Mo sat facing away from the camera.

His left hand pressed the paper, his right hand held the pen, and the speed at which the pen tip moved was completely synchronized with the recording of his mother writing during her lifetime—every seven lines written, a pause of 0.7 seconds, raising his hand to touch his earlobe.

After finishing a page, he gently blew on the letter paper, just as his mother used to do to soothe the wet ink during her lifetime.

"He isn't possessed," Su Wangying stared at the screen and whispered. "He is being 'farmed' back.

Just as an old sweater remembers your body temperature after being worn for a long time, these sheets of letter paper have memorized her writing rhythm, and now they are transforming him into a new writer."

Shen Mo's scalpel sliced open a piece of old letter paper.

This had been found inside his mother's desk, pressed at the very bottom of the drawer for seven years.

Under the microscope, within the gaps of the paper fibers, extremely fine protein deposits were arranged into a miniature heartbeat waveform—identical to the electrocardiogram of his mother during her lifetime.

"Seal all my handwritten records immediately!" he roared into his phone, Director Lin's gasp leaking through the earpiece. "It doesn't want me to mail a letter; it wants to turn me into her—a writer who will never receive a reply."

The rain outside the window had stopped at some unknown point.

The light in the autopsy room shone upon the desk, and the edges of that yellowish envelope curled upward slightly, resembling a pair of breathing lips.

Shen Mo stared at it, suddenly recalling the words in his father's letter: "If one day you see this, it means you are a step closer to the truth."

He pulled out his phone and dialed Su Wangying's number. "Can you do me a favor?" He heard his own voice trembling. "I need to borrow from your museum... my father's diary from before he died."