Chapter 67: Farewell

Su Wanying's fingertips paused lightly against the doorframe.

She gazed at the sheet of paper bearing faint blue ink marks, her throat moving as if she wanted to say something, but she swallowed the words back.

The scent of disinfectant in the autopsy room, mingling with the fragrance of locust blossoms drifting in from the outside window, settled into a heavy silence between the two of them.

"Teacher Lin is downstairs," she finally said, placing her bag on the table with a crisp click of the metal clasp. "He brought a magnifying glass and a chronological ruler, saying he wants to examine your mother's letters first."

Shen Mo’s fingers unconsciously stroked the edge of the draft paper.

The handwriting on the paper still carried a damp chill, as though it had just been fished from the morning dew.

He heard his own throat tighten: "Have him come up."

Teacher Lin brought a faint scent of old book stacks with him as he pushed the door open.

The old man's temples were graying, the arms of his glasses bound with fine thread. Upon seeing Shen Mo, he smiled first: "Xiao Shen, when your mother submitted articles to the school journal back then, I was her very first editor." He laid out the contents of a kraft paper bag one by one—rough-edged paper, a carbon-14 test report, and a wolf-hair brush wrapped in red cloth. "Wanying said the strange things you've been encountering are related to text?"

Five rejection letters were spread out in succession under the old man's fingertips.

First, he swept his magnifying glass over the postmarks, then pinched the thinnest letter, holding it up to the light to examine the grain of the fibers: "A letter from 2008, written on Hero brand squared manuscript paper with a line spacing of 0.8 centimeters—the exact same habit your mother had when writing essays for the school journal." His fingertips moved to the letter from 2012. "Right here, 'deep autumn, heavy dew' was written as 'deep autumn, heavy road.' She used to be extremely particular about tonal patterns." Finally, he stopped at the letter from 2017. "Look at this sentence—'Xiao Mo ate two steamed buns today.' The subject-predicate-object structure is complete, but it lacks the 'I heard Aunt Wang say' that she always insisted on adding in the past."

A chill crept up the back of Shen Mo's neck.

He dug out his mother's diary. The handwriting from 2008 was in delicate, slender script, but by 2017 it had twisted into something resembling a child's scribble. "She isn't just getting old," Teacher Lin said, taking off his glasses and pressing his knuckles against the bridge of his nose. "She has given up on expressing herself.

When a person knows their words will never reach a destination, language regresses to its most primitive form—talking to oneself."

The white lab coat hanging over the back of the chair swayed gently in the draft from the air conditioner.

Shen Mo suddenly rushed to his workbench, yanking a drawer open with a loud clatter.

He pulled out a stack of recent autopsy reports and spread them out before Teacher Lin. "Take a look at this."

The old man leaned in close.

The first report read, "The deceased's rib fractures exhibited a radial distribution, consistent with characteristics of a fall from a height," the sentence structure rigorous and precise. The third report had changed to, "If it were a fall, the ribs should be broken; if pushed down, it might be different." And the latest one simply read, "If, if, if..."

"Repeated hypothetical sentences, decreasing use of complex clauses." Teacher Lin's voice was as light as a sigh. "The grammatical frequency overlaps completely with your mother's later letters."

Shen Mo's nails dug into his palms.

He remembered working overtime in the autopsy room last night, when the words "According to Chapter 12 of Forensic Pathology" under his pen suddenly transformed into, "If Dad were here, how would he write this?"

It turned out not to be a slip of the pen. Something far more terrifying was tampering with the logic of his expression.

"I need to run an experiment." He suddenly turned around, his gaze sweeping over Su Wanying and Director Lin—the latter poking his head through the doorway with a camera hoisted on his shoulder. "I need volunteers."

Three days later, in the laboratory, six college students sat around a long table.

Shen Mo stood behind the one-way glass, staring at the sheets of paper beneath their pens.

One group had been told, "This is a suicide note left by a mother to her deceased husband." The another group had been told, "This is an unmailed love letter from a girl to her secret crush."

"Xiao Zhang in the third group—her pen pressure is starting to lighten," Su Wanying pointed at the surveillance screen, her voice taut. "Look at her wrist, it's trembling."

When the data from seven days later was laid out, Shen Mo's fingers carved deep marks into the report.

The three individuals who had been told it was a "suicide note" experienced an average writing delay of 2.3 seconds, with pen pressure reduced by 40 percent. The other group showed no abnormalities. "It's not the letter that is infecting people." When he looked up, the light of solving medical mysteries flashed in the depths of his eyes. "It is we who have been feeding the letter with 'sorrow.'

When we define the letter as a 'final wish,' we are essentially giving it the soil it needs to keep growing."

Midnight found the study shrouded in the deep blue glow of monitoring lights.

Xiao Zhou crouched on the floor, her fingertips holding a vial of pale gold sensory powder—powder she had stolen from the deaf school laboratory, rumored to capture "unseen movements."

The moment the powder scattered, she made a "quiet" gesture, and the translator app emitted a mechanical voice: "Don't speak."

Shen Mo held his breath.

As the wall clock struck twelve, ripples suddenly stirred across the powder on the floor.

A set of footprints extended from the desk to the iron pan used for burning letters; the footprints matched the cloth shoes his mother frequently wore. Another set of footprints retraced the path backward, the soles dusted with unburned paper ash.

"She doesn't want a reply," Xiao Zhou signed very slowly, the translator barely managing to keep up. "She wants the act of 'still writing' itself.

As long as you don't stop, she won't die."

When the morning light spilled into the study once more, Director Lin's camera was already in position.

Dual camera angles were trained on the desk and the iron letter-burning pan, the lenses flashing with cold, hard light.

Shen Mo gripped the final sheet of draft paper, a thin layer of sweat slicking the barrel of his pen in his palm.

He remembered his mother gripping his hand before she died, whispering, "Don't burn the letters." He remembered how, beneath the autopsy microscope, the vibration frequency of the ash matched the rhythm of his mother's heartbeat. He remembered the handwriting that had abruptly appeared on the draft paper last night—written in his father's fountain pen ink.

"Dad, I burned the letters for Mom," he paused as the pen tip touched the paper. "She said she's not waiting anymore."

The moment the flame licked across the paper, he did not look away.

The sparks crackled, sounding hauntingly like the clicking of knitting needles when his mother used to knit sweaters. "I won't write a reply anymore," he whispered softly to the flames. "But I know you heard."

The alarm of the monitoring equipment sounded at three in the morning.

Shen Mo stared at the flat 1.3-second line on the EEG monitor—for the first time in his memory, his mind had gone completely blank.

The next morning, a single line of text lay across a blank page of the diary: "This time, I didn't write." The handwriting was his own, yet at the hooked stroke of the character for "didn't," there appeared the rounded curve characteristic of his mother.

As Shen Mo closed the notebook, his fingertips brushed across the paper, as if touching a warmth that was finally dissipating.

"Mail the rejection envelopes to my dad's grave," he told Director Lin over the phone, sunlight creeping across his desk outside. "Address the recipient as 'Read, No Reply.'"

That empty envelope lay quietly in its original spot, its flap parted slightly, resembling a mouth that had finally closed.

Shen Mo looked at it, suddenly recalling the final entry in his mother's nursing log: "Patient did not mention 'Old Shen' today, smiled while holding an empty envelope, and said, 'He received it.'"

He reached out and picked up the envelope.

The paper still retained the warmth from his mother's fondling years ago, and the glue marks at the opening had grown brittle.

The glass box from the autopsy room waited inside the drawer, a blank label sticker affixed to its lid—in a moment, he would write "Processed" upon it in the neatest block letters.

But for now, he simply held the envelope, sitting in the morning light for a very long time.

It wasn't until the sound of the postman's bicycle bell drifted up from downstairs that he startled, realizing he had been humming his father's favorite song, *Farewell*.