Chapter Two - The Deadly Handprint of the Living

Three days later, at two in the morning, the municipal bureau building still blazed with lights, yet the evidence room’s corner lay shrouded in deathly silence.

A young technician lay face down on his desk, his posture suggesting mere fatigue and a brief rest.

But his cold skin and stiff limbs silently proclaimed the arrival of death.

The preliminary forensic examination made Lin Zhiyuan, who had rushed over, draw a sharp breath.

Cause of death: sudden cardiac arrest. Yet peculiarly, the victim’s pupils were dilated to an unbelievable extent, far beyond any normal heart attack’s physiological limits, as if he had glimpsed the most terrifying sight in the world before his final breath.

More chilling still were his outstretched palms.

Clear fingerprints adorned each palm, their whorls and loops intertwining in patterns belonging neither to the deceased nor to anyone in the database—identical to the unknown pattern that had mysteriously appeared on Zhou Zhenguo’s corpse three days prior.

Lin Zhiyuan’s face tightened as he met the hurried arrival of Shen Mo, lowering his voice to a whisper: “The victim is Wang Bin, on night duty last night. I checked—he was the technician responsible for cataloging Zhou Zhenguo’s belongings and personally handled that copper cufflink.”

Shen Mo’s gaze swept the scene.

Wang Bin’s right index finger joint was unnaturally twisted, showing slight bone displacement, as if forcibly bent backward to its limit by tremendous force.

He refrained from touching the body immediately and instead went straight to Wang Bin’s computer.

The screen was still on, displaying an unsent email draft.

The subject line read: “Urgent Report on Abnormal Condition of Evidence Locker No. 3.”

The body of the message contained only two hurried lines, like delirious mutterings: “Last night I dreamt I was scraping my own skin, like peeling off old wallpaper... When I woke, I found flakes of skin under my nails. I tested it—it wasn’t mine.”

Shen Mo’s heart plummeted.

Peeling off one’s own skin... newly formed fingerprints.

In an instant, these two facts connected in his mind.

He spun around and ordered Lin Zhiyuan, “Immediately retrieve all access records for the evidence room. I want to know every movement of that cufflink before the incident, down to the minute.”

The records were quickly obtained.

They showed that just yesterday afternoon, a day before the incident, evidence item A074—the copper cufflink of Zhou Zhenguo—had been briefly removed by Wang Bin to “supplement high-definition photos for archival purposes.”

It was borrowed for an hour and returned directly to storage.

The trail once again pointed to that tiny cufflink.

Without hesitation, Shen Mo drove back to the city morgue’s mortuary.

The cold air persisted, and the formalin’s pungent scent seemed even stronger than before.

When Aunt Chen heard he intended to inspect Zhou Zhenguo’s belongings again, her face instantly drained of color, her eyes darting nervously, a palpable fear lingering in her expression.

“Officer Shen...” she stammered, voice trembling, “after that day... I felt that thing was cursed. I... I didn’t dare keep it with the corpse anymore. I put it in a sealed bag and locked it away in that old, unused metal evidence locker in the back room.”

Shen Mo followed her to the deepest corner of the mortuary.

That old metal cabinet was rusted and decrepit, a relic from another era.

Aunt Chen used a ring of rusty keys to unlock it, releasing a wave of stale coldness.

Inside, quietly resting, was a transparent sealed evidence bag.

The cufflink was still inside.

But Shen Mo’s pupils contracted sharply.

He remembered clearly that when he last placed the cufflink back in the bag, the interior was dry.

Now, the inside of the sealed bag bore a thin layer of fine mist, as if something inside had intensely heated in the closed environment before slowly cooling.

Donning sterile gloves, Shen Mo carefully extracted the cufflink.

Its metallic touch was colder than expected, as if just taken from an ice cellar.

He turned on his portable inspection lamp, switching to ultraviolet mode.

Under the purple light, lettering on the cufflink’s surface became vividly apparent.

The three words “You Leave No Trace” were inscribed in ink deeper and darker than three days ago, as if the ink had fully seeped into the metal’s grain.

Even more unsettling was the fine web-like cracking appearing along the edges of the letters, spreading outward from the ends of each stroke.

This object... seemed almost alive, “growing.”

Back at the police laboratory, Shen Mo discarded all superstitious thoughts of “curses” and embarked on a bold simulation experiment.

He procured an ordinary metal button similar in material and weight to the cufflink, placing it inside a temperature-controlled chamber connected to a faint bioelectric signal, simulating the most basic human contact.

Twenty-four hours passed without change.

Had the experiment failed? No—perhaps a key “trigger” was missing.

He requested a sealed biological sample from the forensic team: a strand of Zhou Zhenguo’s hair, complete with intact follicles.

Carefully affixing this hair to the back of the ordinary metal button, he reactivated the bioelectric signal simulation.

Then a miracle occurred.

At the thirteenth hour, the high-precision microscope monitor revealed faint scratches beginning to surface on the button’s smooth surface.

They were shallow and nearly invisible to the naked eye, but over time, these scratches deepened and connected, eventually outlining a pattern strikingly similar to the mysterious fingerprint whorls found on Wang Bin’s palm and Zhou Zhenguo’s body.

Shen Mo’s realization was immediate.

This was not a curse. It was a phenomenon he had never seen before—“information replication”!

The extreme emotions of Zhou Zhenguo’s final moments—his resentment, fear, and remorse—had been imprinted into the cufflink by some unknown principle.

The cufflink had become a medium.

And to activate and “read” this information required a biological “key”—the DNA of the person touching it.

Once someone touched the cufflink, their biological data acted as a trigger, initiating the “obsession program” stored within.

This obsession would invade the contactee in reverse, inducing hallucinations (the dream of scraping skin) and physically forcing the replication of the “judgment” fingerprint pattern.

Wang Bin’s death resulted from his body’s inability to withstand this forced rewrite of information, leading to systemic collapse; cardiac arrest was merely the final outcome.

His broken finger might have been self-inflicted in the dream, an unconscious act of self-mutilation as he tried to scrape off his skin.

“Judgment”... but whose judgment?

Shen Mo immediately retrieved all files on a bank robbery miscarriage of justice from twenty years ago.

The yellowed pages smelled musty, pulling him back to an era when lives were treated carelessly.

Among the victims was Zhou Wenhai.

The files recorded that Zhou Zhenguo, as a key eyewitness, had adamantly identified Zhou Wenhai as the robber and provided fabricated “key evidence,” which led to Zhou Wenhai’s death sentence and swift execution.

Shen Mo leafed through the documents to the last page.

There was a photograph taken at the moment a close relative of Zhou Wenhai signed the death notification.

In it, a haggard woman signed the paper, while behind her stood a boy about ten years old.

The boy did not cry but stared fixedly at the camera, his eyes devoid of childish innocence, filled instead with a cold, age-defying hatred.

Shen Mo enlarged this old photograph, isolating the boy’s facial features and comparing them with images of a suspicious man caught on surveillance near the morgue in recent days.

They matched perfectly. The boy had grown into a taciturn young man.

The footage showed that the man never entered the morgue to report a case, nor approached Zhou Zhenguo’s memorial, nor spoke to anyone.

Every evening at dusk, he would appear precisely at the street corner opposite the morgue, standing silently like a statue, his gaze passing over the wall to fixate long upon the towering crematorium chimney until the last wisp of smoke dissolved into the twilight.

Shen Mo slowly closed the file, his fingers lightly tracing the photograph of the icy cufflink.

He murmured softly, as if questioning himself, or the avenger lurking in the shadows: “Who will be the next to touch the cufflink?”

Yet, following this question, a deeper, broader fear arose within him.

The “information replication” theory he had uncovered perfectly explained the current case, but this theory itself was like Pandora’s box.

Could this phenomenon—using “objects” as vessels and “thoughts” as carving tools—exist only in this tiny cufflink?

Perhaps countless precedents lay buried in the long river of history, their language lost to all but the unknown.