Chapter 17: Who is Breathing for Me |
Shen Mo cut off all public appearances, buying himself precious breathing room with a temporary sick leave slip.
He moved into the evidence archive room in the third basement level of the city bureau. This place, once used for storing old case files, was cold, silent, and had now been transformed by him into a fortress against "sight."
The four walls were completely covered with heavy, matte black cloth, absorbing every ray of light that could possibly form a reflection.
The lighting system was replaced with low-frequency, flickering deep-red safety lights. Under this intermittent and eerie red light, the outlines of all objects became blurry and indistinct, unable to form a stable, clear image on the retina.
The miniature spectrometer he carried with him was his only eye. Three times a day—morning, noon, and night—he would meticulously check the air for any abnormal reflective waves, like a soldier clearing mines on an invisible battlefield.
Su Wanying was the sole supply line to this secret room.
She would place food and water outside the door on time every day. The only connection between them was an old-fashioned two-way walkie-talkie, the hiss of static serving as the background noise for their communication.
Shen Mo adamantly refused any form of video connection; he could not take any risks.
Su Wanying understood his paranoia, having realized the core of the problem even earlier than he did.
However, absolute isolation was impossible.
This afternoon, a report suddenly came through the walkie-talkie from the gate guard. Lin Xiaoya, the sister of the mirror repairman, insisted on seeing him, claiming to have a life-or-death clue.
"No," Shen Mo's voice came through the walkie-talkie, carrying a metallic coldness. "Have her write the clue down."
He could not open the door. He absolutely could not let anyone "see" him directly.
A moment later, a pen and a folded note were pushed through the narrow gap under the heavy iron door.
Shen Mo crouched down, picked up the paper and pen with tweezers, and retreated to the depths of the room.
A few minutes later, the note was pushed back out.
He unfolded the paper. On it was Lin Xiaoya's neat but slightly trembling handwriting: "Before my brother repaired that mirror, he had a dream. He dreamt of a person in the mirror who looked exactly like him. That person said to him, 'As long as someone still remembers me, I am not the murderer.'"
Shen Mo's heart sank.
He grabbed the walkie-talkie, his voice urgent, "Is there more? Did he say anything else in the dream?"
He could hear Lin Xiaoya sniffling from outside the door; she seemed to be trying hard to remember.
Soon, a new note was passed under the door again.
Shen Mo unfolded it. There was only one additional sentence, but it made the blood in his veins almost freeze.
"That person also said, 'The more people who see me, the more real I become.'"
His pupils contracted sharply.
Shen Mo leaned against the cold wall, two previously parallel lines of thought crashing together in his mind.
Cognition is sustenance, gazing is acknowledgment!
The transmission logic of the "Echo" finally revealed its hideous full picture before him.
It didn't just passively exist in the mirror; it was actively seeking to be "recognized." Every gaze, every memory, was adding a brick to the foundation of its existence.
He immediately rushed to the terminal and accessed the city bureau's internal surveillance system.
He needed to confirm one thing: whether the contamination had already begun to spread.
He pulled up the video footage of everyone he had had face-to-face contact with in the past week, from colleagues in the serious crimes unit to the auntie serving food in the cafeteria, leaving no one out.
He analyzed it frame by frame, repeatedly comparing, searching for any trace of disharmony.
Finally, in a recording from the interrogation room, he found it.
In the footage, a young auxiliary police officer was taking interrogation notes for him.
During the fifteen-minute recording, the auxiliary officer's posture gradually changed from initially upright to a slight recline, identical to Shen Mo's.
What startled him even more was that during breaks in note-taking, the auxiliary officer would subconsciously tap the desk with his knuckles, the rhythm and frequency exactly the same as his own habitual action when thinking.
And the most crucial piece of evidence was in the last few seconds of the video. The auxiliary officer looked up, and his right eyebrow twitched, a very slight but definitely abnormal movement.
Shen Mo unhesitatingly submitted an anonymous request for a psychological evaluation of the auxiliary officer.
Two days later, the encrypted evaluation report was sent to his terminal.
The report showed that the auxiliary officer had recently experienced severe insomnia and was frequently troubled by the same nightmare—in the dream, he was surrounded by a raging fire, and in the center of the flames stood the back of a man. That back was identical to Shen Mo's.
The contamination had begun.
It was no longer confined to Shen Mo himself but had started to spread horizontally through a more insidious and less noticeable method: "behavioral imitation."
He had to act immediately.
A bold plan formed in his mind—the "Cognitive Cloaking" protocol.
He wanted to design a set of clothing that could physically interfere with visual recognition.
Using police software, he designed a unique visual interference pattern: based on the black and gray tones of urban ruins, it incorporated irregular, block-like patterns similar to digital camouflage.
More importantly, he added irregular reflective strips made of special material to the key contour lines of the clothing, such as the shoulders, arms, and sides of the torso.
These reflective strips would produce disordered, fragmented diffuse reflections under any light source, enough to disrupt facial recognition systems and even the human eye's ability to capture body contours.
He encrypted the design and sent it to Su Wanying. She was the only one who could help him realize this plan.
A few days later, in a simulation test, he had a volunteer wear the first prototype and stand ten meters away.
He asked three other observers to look directly at the target for ten seconds, then immediately turn their backs and recall and describe its facial and physical features.
The results were encouraging. The accuracy of the three observers' descriptions dropped to an average of thirty-one percent.
The plan was feasible. He immediately asked Su Wanying to rush the production of several spare sets.
That night, Su Wanying placed the newly made clothes on the iron rack outside the archive room door.
After repeatedly confirming through the peephole that the corridor was empty, Shen Mo quickly opened the door and retrieved the package.
The fabric of the clothing had a strange texture, tougher than he had imagined.
He eagerly unfolded it, ready to change immediately.
The moment he shook out the clothes, a small note fluttered out from the inner pocket.
He bent down to pick it up. When he saw the handwriting on it, a chill shot from the soles of his feet to the top of his head.
The handwriting, every pause, every connecting stroke, was identical to his own.
The note read: "The moment you put it on, I become more like you."
Shen Mo's breath caught for a moment.
He violently grabbed the clothing, rushed to the workbench, and turned on the high-intensity ultraviolet lamp.
Under the purple light, the fabric of the clothing revealed a completely different side.
Embedded between the seemingly ordinary fibers were countless metal wires, thinner than spider silk. These metal wires were arranged in an incredibly precise manner, forming countless miniature mirror arrays.
They couldn't form a complete reflection, but they could reflect the wearer's own image back into his own eyes in a fragmented form, countless times, from countless angles.
This was not a piece of clothing for "cloaking"; it was a mirror worn on the body, composed of countless fragments.
He stared intently at the note, then at the meticulously designed "skin," a very low, self-muttering whisper escaping his throat.
"It didn't learn to write... it learned how to make me personally weave and put on its skin for it."
He slowly raised his head, his gaze moving past the deadly clothing to the cold two-way walkie-talkie on the wall.
In an instant, he understood.
This piece of clothing, and the supplies delivered on time every day, were two ends of the same trap.
And Su Wanying, the maintainer of his last line of defense, had become the one handing him the knife, whether she was aware of it or not.
This realization was more bone-chilling to him than any phantom.
He was not isolated from danger, but from the truth.
The entire defense system he had built was, from the very beginning, built on a sandbox defined for him by the enemy.
(End of Chapter)