Chapter 19: It's Still a Child |
The ripples of light did not originate from the sky, but from the earth.
The entire city was like an inverted sea of stars. Every window, every glass curtain wall, had become a prying pupil, reflecting the same blurry and distorted shadow.
However, under the gaze of these billions of eyes, Shen Mo's room was a pure, absolute darkness.
He sat silently in the center of the darkness, his eyes closed, like a solitary island, isolated from the surging tide of light from the outside world.
He did not look at the bizarre urban spectacle outside the window, nor did he even think about it.
His entire mind was focused on the battlefield beneath his eyelids, the place called the "retina."
That familiar reflection, the "Teacher" that had appeared in the mirror at the fire scene, was quietly suspended in his visual center, a faint smile on its lips, gazing at him.
This time, Shen Mo did not try to dispel it, nor did he shift his mental focus.
He chose to face it directly.
In his mind, in his clearest and steadiest voice, he silently recited the first anchoring phrase.
As the words fell, a concrete image began to form: a pair of hands in blue sterile gloves, precisely holding a scalpel. The blade scraped across a cold metal tray, making a crisp sound.
Those were his hands, on the autopsy table at the city bureau's forensic center.
"I was not at the fire."
The second anchoring phrase sounded.
The image in his mind switched accordingly.
On a tall white writing board, dense logical deduction formulas and molecular structures were scrawled, the ink still wet.
A black marker he had casually placed on the board's tray had rolled half a circle.
That was his laboratory, the battlefield where he had deduced the energy model of the stone tablet's echo.
"I have not been forgotten."
The third.
The image softened.
The old study in his childhood home, the air filled with the smell of old paper and mahogany.
Sunlight streamed through the blinds, casting mottled light and shadow on the huge wooden bookshelves.
He was still a child, standing on tiptoe, trying to reach an astronomy picture book on the highest shelf.
Again, and again.
The hand holding the scalpel at the autopsy table, the deduction formulas on the laboratory whiteboard, the wooden bookshelves in his childhood study.
Each image was a cornerstone of why he was "Shen Mo," a fortress of self he had built brick by brick with time and experience.
He finally understood completely. The battlefield against that thing was not in any corner of the outside world, not in any mirror, but in the right to define the concept of "I."
Whoever could define "I" would win this war.
The next morning, as the sky brightened, the city returned to its usual hustle and bustle.
The glass curtain walls seemed to have just had a bizarre dream.
But Shen Mo had not.
He spent the entire day completely transforming his residence.
All the mirrors were taken down, wrapped in thick cloth, and piled into the storage room.
The TV screen, computer monitor, and even the stainless steel kettle and smooth doorknobs were all covered with matte black sound-absorbing material.
The windows were sealed with heavy blackout curtains, leaving no gaps.
The entire home had become a huge black box that rejected any light and image.
An absolute cognitive safety zone.
He implemented a new routine and communication rules.
Every day, he would only have necessary communication with Su Wanying via voice calls, and strictly forbade any form of video calls or photo transmission.
He also made an almost paranoid request: daily supplies and information had to be handwritten by Su Wanying on a note and placed at the door.
And, the beginning of each note had to contain a "memory key" that only the two of them knew.
"You once said that copper can conduct thoughts." In the evening, when he pulled the first note from under the door, he saw this familiar handwriting.
This was a joke he had made to Su Wanying a long time ago when analyzing a case related to metal.
Only after seeing these words did he feel at ease to read the content below.
This was verification, filtration, a firewall to ensure the absolute purity of the information source.
In the darkness, he fumbled for a pen and wrote a new rule in his notebook: "Those who do not see me will not be contaminated; those who know me are the witnesses."
A few days later, Lin Xiaoya visited again.
This time, she did not cry. She was just pale, her eyes empty, as if all her strength had been drained.
She brought a sketch, the edges of the paper already slightly curled.
"This is my brother... the last painting he drew before he committed suicide," her voice trembled violently. "He said... he said, the person in the painting will walk the rest of the road for you."
Shen Mo took the drawing paper.
The surface felt rough, the charcoal marks heavy.
In the painting, a tall figure stood with its back to a towering fire. The silhouette was clearly his own.
However, in the shadow of that back, another completely different silhouette was faintly visible—broad-shouldered, slightly stooped, with the air of an old-fashioned scholar.
The two backs bizarrely overlapped and merged in front of the fire, as if in the next second, the hidden shadow would completely devour the former.
It completely coincided with the "Teacher" phantom he had seen in the mirror.
He did not react with anger or panic as Lin Xiaoya had expected, nor did he burn the drawing.
He simply laid the drawing paper flat on the only workbench and turned on a small ultraviolet lamp.
Under the eerie purple light, a miracle happened.
Deep within the rough fibers of the drawing paper, some extremely faint, wave-like fluorescent patterns slowly emerged.
The patterns were of the same origin as the "memory field" fluctuations he had seen in the stone tablet's echo.
"It's using her hand to continue painting me," Shen Mo's voice was as cold as iron, devoid of any emotion.
That thing, that source of contamination, not only existed in mirror reflections, it could also influence reality through the minds of the contaminated, and even... create.
This discovery sent a chill down his spine. The depth of the contamination was far beyond his imagination.
He immediately began to design a new experiment, which he called the "Cognitive Stripping Experiment."
Through encrypted voice calls, he asked Su Wanying, without revealing his recent situation at all, to separately call three city bureau police officers who had worked closely with him and ask them to describe "Inspector Shen Mo's typical behavioral characteristics" with a few keywords.
He needed an objective image of "Shen Mo" from the outside world.
Su Wanying was extremely efficient.
A few hours later, a list was delivered via a "memory key" note.
The list detailed the officers' impressions of him: tight logical chains, fast speech, a habit of tapping the desk with his knuckles, his eyes would lose focus when analyzing, his handwriting would slant slightly to the right...
Shen Mo sat in the darkness, comparing this list of "me in the eyes of others" with his own recent behavioral patterns, item by item.
He was like the strictest auditor, examining his every thought, every unconscious action.
Soon, he found three fatal deviations.
First, recently, when he was thinking, he would unconsciously pause at the doorframes of various rooms in his home, as if hesitating whether to push open an invisible door.
Second, the end of his speech would inadvertently drop slightly, taking on a quality similar to a sigh.
Third, and what horrified him the most, when he wrote his own name in his notebook, the last stroke of the character "Shen" began to uncontrollably flick upwards.
That was not his brushstroke; he had never had such a habit.
The conclusion was clear and cruel: the contamination had penetrated his subconscious and behavioral patterns. It was like a virus rewriting code, silently replacing the basic outline that constituted the person "Shen Mo."
Late at night, all was quiet.
Shen Mo sat in the only chair, slowly closing his eyes again.
This time, he did not construct any defensive memories.
He just waited.
As expected, the "reflection on the retina" clearly appeared.
It was still in the form of the "Teacher," the corners of its mouth curved even more than ever before, with a triumphant smugness, as if it were about to say something.
Shen Mo did not flinch. Instead, he actively met that gaze and, in the depths of his own consciousness, with an unprecedented calm and clarity, declared:
"You can imitate my actions, copy my memories, even tamper with my habits. But there is one thing you can never do. You cannot experience my thoughts, you cannot experience my confusion, you cannot reproduce all the mistakes I have made in search of the truth."
His thoughts were like a scalpel, precisely stabbing at the other's core.
"You are not me—because you, do not make mistakes."
The moment his voice fell, the reflection's pupils suddenly contracted. The smug smile froze on its face, as if instantly frozen.
In the next instant, a very soft, yet incredibly clear "creak" suddenly sounded in Shen Mo's left ear.
The sound was like a heavy wooden door that had been sealed for a long time, being pushed open from the outside by a barely perceptible crack.
He sat upright, but all the muscles in his body tensed instantly.
He did not try to find the source of the sound. He just slowly moved his hand to the recording pen on the table and pressed the record button.
Facing the empty darkness, he whispered in a volume only he could hear:
"It's not afraid of light... it's afraid of 'not being acknowledged'."
As soon as his voice fell, outside the window, all the light ripples on the city's glass curtain walls, which had once opened like billions of giant eyes, quietly receded at the same moment, returning to the silence of the deep night.
It was as if those billions of eyes, with his victory in consciousness, had simultaneously closed in exhaustion.
The room returned to absolute silence, with only a single red light on the recording pen flashing silently.
In this moment of peace, the specially configured encrypted phone on the table, which theoretically only Su Wanying could call, suddenly let out a rapid and monotonous buzz.
It was the unified ringtone issued by the city bureau, representing the highest level of emergency.
The silence was broken.
(End of Chapter)