Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Inquisitor in the Mirror

The sharp ringing of the phone sliced through the dead silence like a scalpel.

Shen Mo glanced at the anonymous number, swiped to answer without hesitation, and pressed the phone to his ear, listening in silence.

The voice on the other end was a processed electronic tone—cold, mechanical, and devoid of emotion: "Mr. Shen Mo? This is the Municipal Commission for Discipline Inspection. Please report to the designated location immediately to cooperate with an investigation."

Su Wangying’s heart sank. She opened her mouth to speak, but a soothing look from Shen Mo silenced her.

He hung up, his tone terrifyingly calm: "Go back first. Don't get involved in this. If anything happens, contact Officer Wu."

Half an hour later, Shen Mo sat in the Municipal Commission's infamous "Reflection Room." The room was small, its four walls lined with soft, beige sound-absorbing material. There was one table, two chairs, and a shadowless lamp overhead that left nothing hidden.

Sitting across from him was Director Chen of the Commission, a man in his fifties with eyes as sharp as a hawk’s.

"Forensic Doctor Shen, our time is precious, so let's get straight to the point." Director Chen skipped the pleasantries, opened a tablet on the table, and slid it toward Shen. "Please watch these three videos."

The first video was dimly lit, captured by a security camera outside the laboratory's back door. A man in a white lab coat, with a physique nearly identical to Shen Mo’s, was seen skillfully swiping his access card and slipping inside. The timestamp indicated that this was seventeen minutes before the fire broke out.

Shen Mo’s pupils contracted slightly. He recognized that back, or rather, he recognized every detail that the figure was attempting to mimic.

Director Chen didn't give him time to reflect. With a swipe of his finger, he switched to the second video. This was footage from the laboratory’s ventilation system maintenance hatch. As the fire began and thick smoke filled the air, the "Shen Mo" in the video reappeared. He held a stainless steel alcohol canister and, without hesitation, dumped its contents into the main ventilation shaft. Flames ignited instantly, roaring through the ducts to spread throughout the building in seconds. It was a professional act of arson.

"This is your office," Director Chen’s voice turned cold as he played the third video. "You were indeed in your office at the time of the incident. However, look here."

In the footage, Shen Mo, seated at his desk, suddenly stood up and walked out of the camera's frame.

Director Chen added, "We checked all the building’s access records. From the moment you stood up until the fire alarm sounded, there were no card swipes indicating you had left your office."

A perfect alibi, yet an inexplicable paradox. You were in the office, but another "you" was at the scene of the arson.

Shen Mo stared at the blurry version of himself on the screen for a long time, his face expressionless. The air in the interrogation room seemed to solidify, heavy and suffocating.

"I request to examine the raw frame data of these videos," he finally said, his voice hoarse but unnervingly steady.

Director Chen’s technicians quickly pulled the raw data stream and played it frame-by-frame on professional software. Shen Mo’s gaze was locked onto the close-up of the "self" who had entered through the back door.

"Zoom in here," he pointed at the screen. "Analyze his blink rate."

Data scrolled rapidly across the screen, finally settling on a value. The "Shen Mo" blinked on average every 3.2 seconds.

"My physiological habit," Shen Mo said, slowly looking up to meet the director’s eyes, "is to blink every 4.1 seconds on average. It’s a habit developed over years of autopsy work to maintain absolute visual stability during procedures. While the deviation is only 0.9 seconds, it is a consistent presence in the video, not a random error."

This was not a defense; it was another form of autopsy report—the dissection of a false image.

Before Director Chen could react, Shen Mo made a second request: "I am requesting authorization to review all police reports within the city from the past seven days involving a 'man in a white lab coat' acting suspiciously."

It was a request that overstepped, but after a moment of contemplation, Director Chen approved it.

When the system returned the results, even the seasoned director gasped. Twelve cases. In just seven days, there had been twelve! The locations spanned the city hospital morgue, several late-night pharmacies, and even a crematorium in the suburbs. The reporters were all night-shift security guards or staff, and they all mentioned a strange man in a white lab coat.

What made Shen Mo’s blood run cold was that the descriptions of the man’s behavioral patterns were alarmingly consistent: he always kept his head down as if avoiding something; his right hand was habitually tucked into his lab coat pocket; and when he walked, his left shoulder had an almost imperceptible tilt and slump.

It wasn't just mimicry; it was a memory etched into his own body. Three years ago, a severe car accident had nearly shattered his left clavicle. Even after the best rehabilitation, that posture had become his subconscious habit. An old injury he had almost forgotten himself had been perfectly replicated by the "shadow."

He realized then that this wasn't random mimicry, but a precise reproduction based on a specific "behavioral template." And the source of that template was inevitably linked to his past, publicly recorded activities.

Meanwhile, Su Wangying had used her credentials and some unconventional methods to infiltrate the Municipal Forensic Center’s electronic archives. Her brain, operating like a high-speed computer, frantically screened every public case Shen Mo had participated in that contained video footage. Her intuition told her the answer was hidden in that ocean of data.

Finally, in a 2019 news conference recording, she found an anomaly. It was a press conference regarding the resolution of a serial murder case, with Shen Mo attending as the lead forensic examiner. However, it wasn't Shen Mo on the podium that caught her eye, but the educational animation of autopsy procedures looping on the big screen behind him. The lead forensic doctor in the animation shared Shen Mo’s physique, profile, and even the way he held his scalpel.

Su Wangying’s heart began to race. She traced the source of the animation and found it had been provided by the Municipal Medical College’s audiovisual center. Following this lead, she dug deeper and eventually found the original material—not a polished CG, but a recording of a live teaching lecture!

When she opened the dusty footage, the title made her freeze: *Systemic Anatomy: Combined Thoracic and Abdominal Exploration.* The lecturer was Shen Mo.

The date of the live broadcast was the very last class taken by the gifted student who had eventually committed suicide in the lab. The camera had given several close-ups of Shen Mo, capturing his profile, his moments of contemplation, and his left shoulder, which tilted unconsciously due to his old injury.

Everything connected.

***

Having received the news, Shen Mo immediately returned to the abandoned medical college audiovisual building. In the central server room, thick with dust, he found the machine that had long been listed as scrapped assets. Chillingly, its power light was still on.

With remote assistance from the police department’s technical expert, Xiao Wu, Shen Mo accessed the host system. A bizarre process appeared in the task manager, its name like a gaze from the abyss: "OBSERVE_MODE."

Xiao Wu quickly exported and analyzed the process's data stream. The result was bone-chilling: this "ghost process" was not in sleep mode at all. Through unknown means, it was continuously accessing the city’s public camera network. It was constantly capturing targets from the massive stream of real-time footage that met the keywords "white lab coat + male + similar build," performing real-time facial matching and behavioral analysis.

Then, it overlaid, corrected, and optimized the real-time movement data of these countless strangers onto the "Shen Mo template" from the teaching footage, ultimately generating that seamless "arsonist" image.

In his work notebook, Shen Mo wrote with a trembling hand: "The echo is not just forging surveillance... it is feeding on reality to nurture the illusion."

That night, Shen Mo returned home, exhausted in body and soul. He walked into the bathroom and turned on the faucet, the cold water splashing against his palms. He looked up at himself in the mirror, his face pale, his eyes bloodshot. He subconsciously raised his right hand to wipe the steam off the glass.

At that moment, something horrific happened. The reflection in the mirror did not move.

His hand had already been raised, but the "Shen Mo" in the mirror remained in a slumped position. Time seemed to stretch and warp. Then, under Shen Mo’s horrified gaze, the reflection slowly, stiffly raised its head. Its eyes did not look at the Shen Mo in the mirror; instead, they pierced through the glass, staring straight, coldly, at him.

Shen Mo’s heart felt as though it were about to burst from his throat. But he forced down the surging terror, and with an instinctual, cold precision, he pulled out his phone, turned on the slow-motion recording, and aimed the lens at the mirror.

He slowly raised his right hand once more.

In the slow-motion footage on the phone, everything was crystal clear. After his real hand had been raised, there was a delay of exactly 0.5 seconds before the shadow in the mirror sluggishly followed the movement. Moreover, the order in which the shadow’s fingers curled was the exact opposite of his own, like some clumsy, grotesque imitation.

He stared fixedly at the chilling footage on his phone screen and whispered to Su Wangying behind him: "It’s learning faster... from only being able to copy fixed footage to now imitating in real-time. Next time, will it move before I do?"

Before he could finish, the bathroom light fixture gave a "buzz" of electrical interference and began to flicker. On the mirror, in the area clouded by steam, a line of distorted text slowly emerged, as if someone had written it with their finger from the other side:

"It’s your turn to be seen."