Chapter 1: The Dead Don't Leave Fingerprints |
The piercing shriek of an alarm tore through the dead silence of the city bureau's morgue at two in the morning.
Auntie Chen, on duty, felt her heart skip a beat. The murky fog of sleep was instantly scattered by an icy dread.
She snatched her reading glasses and scrambled trembling to the surveillance monitors.
The camera feeds switched frame by frame, finally settling on cold storage unit number three in the mortuary section.
The heavy stainless steel door was ajar at a bizarre angle, as if pushed open by an invisible hand.
On the screen, the body stored within, Zhou Zhenguo, a retired fingerprint expert who had died suddenly from an acute heart attack three days prior was slowly, with an unnatural, joint-locking stiffness, sitting up.
Auntie Chen’s breath caught in her throat.
She watched as the corpse, which should have been cold and rigid, pressed its ten fingers heavily onto the stainless steel autopsy table.
Its fingertips scraped across the metal surface, creating a teeth-grinding "screech" as they carved seven twisted, worm-like symbols of varying depths.
A blood-curdling scream cut through the night. Auntie Chen fumbled for the phone, incoherently reporting to the command center.
However, when the fully-armed criminal investigation captain, Lin Zhiyuan, rushed into the morgue with his team, everything was back to normal.
The door to cold storage unit number three was shut tight. Inside, Zhou Zhenguo lay peacefully, his ashen face devoid of life.
If it weren't for Auntie Chen's deathly pale face and the seven distinct carvings left on the cold autopsy table, Lin Zhiyuan would have almost dismissed it as a crude prank.
By the time forensic examiner Shen Mo arrived, the scene had been sealed off.
He ignored Lin Zhiyuan's theory about an "internal prank," silently donning his white coat, each movement as precise as the meshing gears of a clock.
The air was thick with the mixed smell of formalin and fear, but he seemed completely oblivious.
"The deceased's hands," Shen Mo's voice was calm, without a ripple, as if the object before him wasn't a panic-inducing corpse, but a precision instrument waiting to be disassembled.
He pulled on latex gloves, picked up a magnifying glass, and leaned over to examine Zhou Zhenguo's hands.
Lin Zhiyuan moved closer, watching with confusion.
Under the bright light, a strange scene unfolded, the fingerprints on all ten of the deceased's fingers, every whorl, loop, and arch from pad to joint, had completely vanished.
The surface of the skin was as smooth as a newborn baby's, unbelievably delicate, yet there were no signs of chemical corrosion, physical abrasion, or even the bleeding points or scabs left by surgery.
"This..." Lin Zhiyuan sucked in a cold breath. "How is that possible? It's like they were erased."
Shen Mo didn't answer.
He took a portable microscope from his assistant and aimed it at the skin of the deceased's fingertips.
Under the eyepiece, a scene that defied all biological common sense was playing out: keratinocytes were dividing and multiplying at high speed in an abnormal spiral pattern, as if an invisible craftsman was sculpting a brand-new set of identity papers for this corpse on a microscopic level.
The newly formed patterns were complex and arcane, completely different from any fingerprint in any known database.
"Pull the morgue's surveillance footage, from two to four in the morning," Shen Mo straightened up, his tone leaving no room for argument.
In the conference room, the morgue's surveillance video was played back in slow motion on a massive screen.
The time was frozen at 3:17 AM.
In the frame, Zhou Zhenguo's body sat up ramrod straight, with no external force applied.
Lin Zhiyuan frowned. "Maybe someone was underneath, using ropes or something..."
"Look here." Shen Mo pressed pause and used a laser pointer to draw an auxiliary line on the screen, extending from the apex of the corpse's shoulder joint to its torso.
"I've created a preliminary model based on the degree of rigor mortis, muscle atrophy data, and the internal dimensions of the cold storage unit." He picked up a protractor from the table, measured it against the screen, and coldly stated a number. "The angle of shoulder joint rotation is one hundred and forty-seven degrees."
He turned to the bewildered Lin Zhiyuan and explained, "The maximum active range of motion for a healthy, professionally trained contortionist's scapula is 120 degrees. And this is a corpse that has already entered rigor mortis. To complete this movement without a fracture-dislocation of the cervical spine, its skeletal and muscular tissues would have to no longer obey the laws of physics."
Shen Mo paused, his words hammering into everyone's heart. "This isn't a disguise, nor is it human manipulation—it was 'lifted' up by some external force we cannot comprehend."
"Are you saying... a ghost moved the body?" Lin Zhiyuan's voice was hoarse. For the first time in his twenty years as a police officer, he felt the foundations of his experience being challenged.
Shen Mo shook his head, his deep gaze seeming to pierce through the screen to the truth behind it.
"No," he said slowly. "I'm saying our definition of a 'corpse' might be wrong."
Back in the autopsy room, Shen Mo made a decision that baffled everyone.
He didn't continue examining the deceased's vital organs like the heart and brain. Instead, he re-incised the deceased's palm and carefully extracted a micro-sample of tissue from the dermal layer.
He placed the tissue sample into a high-speed centrifuge and a cell growth analyzer, creating a complex growth rate model.
On the computer screen, data scrolled rapidly, finally reaching a startling conclusion: the stripping and regeneration of the fingerprints began at least six hours after the deceased's death—meaning, it all happened after the body was sent to the morgue.
This conclusion completely overturned the possibility of "pre-mortem abuse" or "some rare disease."
To perform such a precise "skin surgery" on a corpse inside a tightly monitored morgue, leaving no bloodstains or traces, and even inducing cell regeneration, was beyond the scope of modern medicine and any known technology.
Just as the investigation hit a dead end, the forensics department made a new discovery.
In the evidence bag containing the deceased's personal effects was a pair of seemingly ordinary brass cufflinks.
The cufflinks were on the shirt Zhou Zhenguo was wearing when he was found dead.
Their surface was smooth, with no special features. But under high-intensity ultraviolet light, the inside of one cufflink revealed three extremely faint, dark red characters.
The writing looked as if it had been done with long-dried blood, the strokes slender, carrying a desperate force.
—You are traceless.
Lin Zhiyuan immediately sent people to conduct a handwriting comparison.
The preliminary results came back quickly, sending a chill through everyone.
The handwriting of these three words had a similarity of up to ninety-three percent with the signature of the defendant in a twenty-year-old, unresolved wrongful death penalty case—a defendant who had already been executed.
Night fell, and the only light still on in the city bureau building was in Shen Mo's lab.
He stood alone before a large whiteboard, covered in various clues written in black marker, connected by arrows into a complex web.
Sudden death by heart attack → fingerprint stripping in the morgue → new fingerprints regenerating on the epidermis → sitting up against the laws of physics → carving mysterious symbols → blood words appearing inside a cufflink → connection to a twenty-year-old case.
Every link was filled with contradiction and illogic, yet they were all strung together by an invisible thread.
Shen Mo picked up a pen and, at the very bottom of all the clues, wrote down his earth-shattering final conclusion:
"An unknown, non-physical information carrier exists. It can use a specific object (the cufflinks) as a medium to trigger a temporary failure of the 'rules of reality' in a localized area. It forcibly executed a ritual of 'identity erasure,' stripping and reshaping the fingerprints. The deceased, Zhou Zhenguo, did not die of a natural heart attack. He was chosen by 'something' to become the executor of an obsession."
Shen Mo stared at the word "obsession" on the whiteboard, unable to look away for a long time.
His system of thought, one he had always been proud of, built on logic and evidence, showed its first clear crack.
If corpses were no longer silent, if the dead could use loopholes in the rules to pass on information, then how much of what was called truth could still be believed?
He rubbed his throbbing temples and sent the high-definition photos of the seven mysterious symbols from the autopsy table to Technician Wang in the forensics department, who specialized in image analysis, via the internal system. He attached a note: Urgent, conduct analysis of structure, handwriting dynamics, and symbology.
The notification sound for a successful send chimed. Shen Mo turned off the computer, and the lab was once again enveloped in darkness.
He stood at the window, looking at the scattered lights of the city below, but a coldness he had never felt before rose in his heart.
Those seven symbols were like seven open eyes, quietly staring at this world through the screen.
The corpse had spoken its first word, but perhaps that word was not a final testament, but a... curse, waiting for the next listener to come and interpret it.
(End of Chapter)