Chapter One: The Dead Leave No Fingerprints

A shrill alarm shattered the dead silence of the city bureau’s central morgue at two in the morning.

Aunt Chen, on duty that night, felt her heart skip a beat, the sluggish remnants of sleep instantly swept away by a cold spike of terror. She snatched up her reading glasses, trembling as she lunged toward the surveillance monitors.

The images flipped through one by one, finally freezing on Cold Storage Unit Three in the mortuary. The heavy stainless steel door now hung ajar at an unnatural angle, as if pushed by an invisible hand.

On the screen, the corpse stored inside—Zhou Zhenguo, a retired fingerprint expert who had died suddenly of acute cardiac arrest three days prior—was slowly, unnaturally, sitting up, his joints bending in rigid, inhuman directions.

Aunt Chen’s breath caught in her throat.

She saw the body, which should have been cold and stiff, press all ten fingers forcefully onto the stainless steel autopsy table. The fingertips scraped across the metal surface with a teeth-grating screech, carving seven distorted, worm-like arched symbols of varying depths.

“Aaah—!”

A piercing scream ripped through the night. In a panic, Aunt Chen grabbed the phone, stumbling over her words as she called the command center for help.

But by the time the heavily armed homicide squad, led by Captain Lin Zhiyuan, burst into the morgue, everything had returned to normal.

The door of Unit Three was tightly shut. Zhou Zhenguo lay quietly inside, his ashen face utterly lifeless.

If not for Aunt Chen’s ghastly pallor and the seven unmistakable gouges on the icy autopsy table, Lin Zhiyuan might have dismissed the entire episode as a clumsy prank.

Forensic pathologist Shen Mo arrived as the scene was cordoned off. He ignored Lin Zhiyuan’s theory of an “inside job,” instead donning his lab coat with the precision of clockwork gears meshing.

Formaldehyde and fear mingled in the air, but he seemed oblivious.

“The victim’s hands,” Shen Mo said, his voice so calm it seemed devoid of emotion, as if the corpse before him were not an object of terror, but a precision instrument awaiting disassembly.

He put on latex gloves, picked up a magnifying glass, and bent over to examine Zhou Zhenguo’s hands.

Lin Zhiyuan leaned in, puzzled.

Under the harsh light, a bizarre scene emerged: the dead man’s ten fingers were utterly devoid of fingerprints—every whorl, loop, and arch from fingertip to knuckle had vanished.

The skin was as smooth as that of a newborn, impossibly delicate, yet there was no sign of chemical erosion, physical abrasion, or even the tiniest trace of surgical intervention.

“How…?” Lin Zhiyuan gasped. “It’s like they were erased with an eraser.”

Shen Mo did not answer.

He took a portable microscope from his assistant and focused it on the skin of the dead man’s fingertips.

Through the eyepiece, a scene that defied all biological logic played out: keratinocytes were dividing and proliferating at abnormal speed, spiraling in a direction nature never intended, as if an unseen craftsman were sculpting a brand new identity for the corpse at a microscopic level.

These new lines were intricate, mysterious—utterly unlike any fingerprint cataloged in known databases.

“Pull up the surveillance from the morgue, two to four in the morning,” Shen Mo said, straightening up, his tone brooking no argument.

In the conference room, the security footage looped in slow motion on a massive display.

The time froze at 3:17 a.m.

On-screen, Zhou Zhenguo’s corpse sat bolt upright, with no external force apparent.

“Maybe someone was underneath, using ropes or something…” Lin Zhiyuan ventured, frowning.

“Look here.” Shen Mo paused the video and drew a guideline on the screen with a laser pointer, extending from the shoulder joint to the torso.

“I did a preliminary model based on the degree of rigor mortis, muscle atrophy, and the dimensions of the cold storage unit,” he said, picking up a protractor and making precise measurements. His voice was icy as he announced the number, “Shoulder joint rotation: one hundred forty-seven degrees.”

He turned to Lin Zhiyuan, whose face was blank with confusion, and explained, “A trained contortionist in perfect health can manage, at most, a 120-degree rotation of the scapula. But this is a corpse already in rigor mortis. To perform that movement—without a broken cervical spine—the bones and muscles would have to defy the laws of physics.”

Shen Mo paused, letting each word strike home: “This isn’t a disguise. It’s not human manipulation. It was lifted, forcibly, by some external force we cannot comprehend.”

“You mean… a ghost raising the corpse?” Lin Zhiyuan’s voice was parched. In his twenty years on the force, never had his experience been so utterly challenged.

Shen Mo shook his head, his gaze deep as if trying to pierce the screen and glimpse the truth behind it.

“No,” he said slowly. “What I mean is, our definition of ‘corpse’ may be wrong.”

Back in the autopsy room, Shen Mo made a baffling decision. He did not examine the usual fatal organs, but instead reopened the victim’s palm, carefully extracting a minute sample of the dermis.

He placed the tissue in a high-speed centrifuge and a cell growth analyzer, constructing a complex model of growth rates.

Data streamed across the computer screen, finally yielding a shocking conclusion: the removal and regeneration of fingerprints had begun at least six hours after the victim’s death—in other words, everything had happened after the body was brought to the morgue.

This finding completely ruled out “pre-mortem abuse” or any rare disease.

To perform such an intricate “skin operation” on a corpse under strict surveillance, leaving no blood or trace, even inducing cellular regeneration—this was beyond the reach of modern medicine, or any known technology.

Just as the investigation stalled, the evidence lab reported a new discovery.

Among the deceased’s belongings, sealed in an evidence bag, was a pair of unremarkable brass cufflinks.

The cufflinks had been on Zhou Zhenguo’s shirt at the moment of his death.

Their surfaces were smooth, unadorned, but under intense ultraviolet light, faint dark red script emerged on the inside of one. The writing seemed etched in long-dried blood, the strokes fine yet imbued with desperate force.

—You are without trace.

Lin Zhiyuan immediately ordered a handwriting comparison.

The preliminary results came back quickly, sending a chill through everyone present.

The handwriting on those three words bore a 93% match to the signature of a defendant executed in a controversial death penalty case left unresolved twenty years ago.

Night deepened. In the city bureau’s building, only the lights in Shen Mo’s lab remained aglow.

He stood alone before a vast whiteboard, black marker linking clues into a tangled web.

Cardiac arrest → fingerprints stripped in the morgue → new epidermal patterns formed → corpse sits up against physical law → mysterious symbols carved → blood script appears inside cufflink → linked to an old case from twenty years ago.

Every link bristled with contradiction and impossibility, yet some invisible thread bound them tight.

At the bottom of the board, Shen Mo wrote the conclusion that shattered all certainty:

“There exists an unknown, immaterial carrier of information which, through a specific object (the cufflink), can serve as a medium to temporarily suspend the rules of reality within a localized area. It forcibly enacted a ritual of ‘identity erasure,’ stripping and reshaping fingerprints. Zhou Zhenguo did not die of natural cardiac arrest—he was chosen by ‘something’ and made the vessel of an unyielding obsession.”

Shen Mo stared at the word “obsession” on the board, unable to look away.

The logical, empirical framework he had always prided himself on was, for the first time, showing unmistakable cracks.

If corpses are no longer silent, if the dead can exploit loopholes in the rules to communicate, how much of what we call truth remains trustworthy?

He massaged his throbbing temples, then sent high-resolution photos of the seven mysterious symbols from the autopsy table to Technician Xiao Wang in the evidence lab, specializing in image analysis, with an urgent note: Priority—compare structure, handwriting dynamics, and semiotics.

The confirmation tone sounded. Shen Mo shut down the computer, and darkness reclaimed the laboratory.

He stood by the window, gazing down at the scattered city lights, while a chill unlike any he’d known crept through his heart.

Those seven symbols, like seven open eyes, seemed to gaze out through the screen, silently watching the world.

The corpse had spoken its first word, but perhaps this word was not a final testament at all, but a curse—waiting for its next listener to come and decipher it.