Chapter 66 - Illusion

The overhead light of the autopsy room was still blazing at three in the morning. Shen Mo’s knuckle pressed against the edge of the desk, his phone held to his ear as he listened to the faint, crisp sound of a key ring being flipped through on Su Wanying’s end.

He could easily picture what she looked like at this moment—probably wearing the moon-white cotton-linen shirt she usually wore at the museum, the ends of her hair still dusted with the grime from the archives room, rushing over to him without even bothering to change out of her pajamas.

"I'm in the underground parking garage," Su Wanying’s voice carried the slight pant of someone who had been running. "Your father's diary is at the very bottom of the safe. I’ve sealed it in a moisture-proof bag."

Shen Mo wedged his phone between his shoulder and ear, quickly tearing off his latex gloves.

He swiveled the desk lamp by the autopsy table toward the wall, casting a slender, elongated shadow of its cold, white light across the tiled floor.

He felt around the third tier of the experimental cabinet for a pad of alcohol wipes, then scrubbed his palms hard—not to sanitize them, but to rid himself of the illusion, left over from touching the sheets of letter paper just moments before, that countless fine fibers were still tangling around his fingertips.

When the door was pushed open, he was adjusting the objective lens of the microscope.

Su Wanying’s shadow fell across the room first, carrying with her the distinct sandalwood scent unique to old book pages.

Clutched in her arms was a deep brown kraft paper bag, its opening sealed with the museum’s exclusive red sealing wax, stamped with the characters "Handle with Care."

"When your father was a researcher at the museum, all his private notes were kept here." She placed the bag on the table, her fingertips gently brushing over the sealing wax. "When we were organizing the old archives last time, I specifically applied for a review permit."

Shen Mo’s Adam’s apple bobbed.

He remembered the last time his father had hugged him, his clothes carrying that exact same scent mixed with printer's ink and turpentine.

He grabbed the wax-seal knife. The blade made a crisp snap against the wax seal, sounding precisely like his father opening letters—back then, his mother used to say that old Shen opened envelopes with more solemnity than performing an autopsy.

The cover of the diary was made of a deep green corduroy, its edges frayed and fuzzy.

When he opened to the first page, the fountain pen ink had bled through the paper: "March 12, 1998. Wanying is born. The first stroke I write outside the delivery room." Shen Mo’s fingertips paused—this was the first time he had seen his father write the name "Wanying." Unlike the crooked, wavering "Xiao Wan" in his mother’s diary, every single stroke was firmly reined in, as if he were carving an inscription into a stele.

When the comparison reached the seventh page, his breathing suddenly grew shallow and rapid.

Su Wanying leaned in to look, noticing that he had inserted a sheet of transparent tracing paper between two pages: above was his father’s "I’m here" from the diary, and below was his mother’s "Come back" from the end of a letter.

"Look at the vertical hook on this character for 'here'." His fingernail tapped against the paper surface. "Whenever my father expressed his existence, he never used 'come back,' he only ever said 'I’m here' or 'I haven’t gone'." He flipped to his mother’s letter, where the phrase "If only you had come back" at the end of the most recent one had been circled in red. "She was always waiting for a 'return,' but my whole life, even when saying 'goodbye,' my father would only say, 'I'm waiting for you downstairs'."

Su Wanying’s eyelashes fluttered. "So you're going to..."

"Forge a reply." Shen Mo retrieved his father’s old Hero fountain pen from the drawer; the inner cap still bore the engraved characters "Shen Xueqian 1985."

He unscrewed the ink bottle, the deep blue ink rippling inside the glass tube. "Using his tone, writing that he was never waiting on 'the other side,' that the moment she burned her letters, he had already let go."

"And the signature?"

"The final stroke flicks upward lightly, left unclosed." Shen Mo’s fountain pen hovered over the letter paper. "The last stroke of my father’s signature always liked to flick upward, just like he told me when teaching me to write the character for 'human' as a child—leave room to breathe, don't seal it off entirely."

The iron tray was set in the center of the autopsy table, biting cold to the touch.

Shen Mo lined the two letters up side by side. The edges of his mother's letter were already curled and warped, while the ink on his father’s "reply" was still fresh, shimmering with a faint dampness.

He pulled out a windproof lighter. As the flame flared up, the electrode pads of an electroencephalograph were pressed against his temples—Director Lin had rushed them over overnight, claiming he wanted to record the brainwave fluctuations during "reverberation" interference.

"Begin," he said to the empty air, as if making a proclamation to some unseen audience.

The instant the flame licked the edges of the letter paper, the monitor emitted a single, sharp beep.

Shen Mo stared at the screen. The previously flat and gentle curve of his alpha waves suddenly spiked with two sharp peaks, resembling a brainwave resonance between two people conversing.

He counted the seconds: 1.2 seconds, 1.3 seconds. The twin peaks vanished, and the monitor flattened out into stability once more.

The ashes rose.

There was no wind in the autopsy room, yet those black fragments drifted upward against gravity, halting thirty centimeters above the table and slowly piecing themselves together into two words—"Thank you."

Su Wanying covered her mouth, her eyelashes glistening with moisture.

Shen Mo’s fingers dug into the rim of the iron tray, and only after the words "Thank you" dissipated into stardust did he dare let out his breath.

"Is it over?" Su Wanying’s voice carried a tremor.

"Should be..."

"Ding—"

His phone vibrated on the desk; it was a video sent by Director Lin.

Shen Mo tapped it open. The footage showed the surveillance recording of him burning the letter just moments ago.

In slow motion, the exact moment the ashes coalesced into "Thank you," his right hand had lifted uncontrollably, his index and middle fingers slightly curled, as if reaching out to catch something.

"Probably just muscle memory." He closed the video, his voice softer than before.

He did not sleep that night.

Piled on the long sofa in the autopsy room were his mother’s medical records. He flipped to the final page: "November 7, 2016. Patient reports 'He replied to my letter today, said he's waiting for me downstairs.' Emotional state stable." Tucked inside the nursing logs was a sticky note: "The old lady is always smiling at the empty air, saying 'Old Shen's handwriting is still as rigid as ever,' but none of us have ever seen a letter."

At five in the morning, he turned on the faucet in the bathroom.

A layer of white mist quickly clouded the mirror surface. Just as he was about to wipe it away with his sleeve, he saw a line of words slowly emerge from the steam: "I burned it this time, are you satisfied now?"

The handwriting was his mother’s, every hook on the character for "le" bearing its own distinctive curve.

A chill ran down the back of Shen Mo's neck. He reached out to touch it, but the words in the steam seemed to dodge away with a life of their own, drifting along the edge of the mirror and finally coming to rest in the bottom left corner, overlapping with a marginal note he had seen seven years ago on a page in his mother’s diary—back then, when he had just entered forensic school, his mother had written in her diary: "Xiao Mo's autopsy knife is steadier than my pen, but he doesn't know that some letters are only truly sent when they are burned."

"Tap, tap."

Old Zhang’s voice came from outside the door, carrying the hoarseness typical of a retired postal worker. "Xiao Shen, I brought you something."

The iron box in the old man's hands was wrapped in blue cloth, the corner of the cloth embroidered with the words "Heping Road Post Office."

He lifted the cloth. The red paint on the iron box had peeled away, revealing the rust underneath. "Your mother used to come mail letters all the time, but every time she walked up to the mailbox, she'd turn back. She'd say, 'Once it's sent, the connection is truly broken,' so I kept them for her."

Five returned envelopes lay at the bottom of the box, the postmark dates all matching his father’s death anniversary: March 21.

Shen Mo opened the topmost envelope. There was no letter paper inside, only a folded, blank sheet.

He poured some developing fluid over it, and the blank page gradually revealed densely packed indentations—all reverse impressions of "If only you had come back," as if someone had pressed down with all their might on the back side, tearing right through the paper from the front.

"She wasn't writing letters."

Xiaozhou’s voice came through the translation device, tinged with a mechanical distortion.

She was standing at the doorway, nobody knew when she had arrived, her fingertips pressed against the envelope, her whole body trembling like a leaf.

Her sign language was so fast that the translator stuttering behind her could barely keep up: "She, she was listening... listening for the echo. Ev-every blank letter was a... 'reply' she pretended to receive."

Shen Mo’s breathing abruptly stalled.

He flipped open his mother’s nursing records. All the contents of the "hallucinatory conversations" matched up—"Old Shen says the temperature is dropping, need to add a sweater" corresponded to what she had written in her letter, "I knitted a sweater for you today"; "He says don't grip the autopsy knife too tight" corresponded to her letter, "Xiao Mo has been staying up late lately, you should talk to him."

"A closed loop," he heard himself say, his voice seeming to drift from a great distance away. "She was both the letter writer and the letter receiver. She used blank letters to pretend she received a reply, and used 'hallucinations' to sustain the conversation. And I..." He looked toward the stack of autopsy reports on the desk influenced by the "reverberation"—"I am turning into the new letter writer."

Under the microscope in the autopsy room, the ashes of the burned letters arranged themselves into a spiral structure on the glass slide.

Shen Mo turned up the magnification. The vibration frequency of those carbonized particles was an exact match for the heartbeat waveform of protein deposition found on his mother's letter paper.

He slammed the sample box shut, snatched up his phone, and dialed Director Lin: "It hasn't vanished. It's just changed its medium. Right now..." His gaze swept across the medical records spread out on the table, where his mother's handwriting overlapped with the autopsy report he had just written—"It's writing letters inside my brain."

The night wind crept in through the crack in the window, rustling the draft papers on the desk as they flipped over.

Shen Mo instinctively pressed down on them, only to find that a new line of words had somehow appeared on the back of the paper, the ink still carrying a damp sheen: "This time, it's your turn to receive a letter."

"Tap—"

The door was pushed open. Su Wanying’s voice held a hurried edge: "Director Lin says he can come this afternoon, he's studied similar—" Her words cut off as she followed Shen Mo’s gaze to that sheet of draft paper.

The paper trembled gently in the wind, the newly written words glowing a pale blue in the morning light, as if written with a Hero fountain pen—the exact same color as the one his father used in life.