Chapter Thirty-Three — Who Is Living in My Place?

Morning light filtered through the slats of the blinds, casting thin, golden strips across the nightstand.

Shen Mo’s eyelashes fluttered. As his consciousness surfaced from the chaos, his first thought was that his cervical spine felt as if it had been clamped by iron tongs. He reached back habitually to rub his neck, but his fingertips froze in mid-air.

His phone lay face-down on the pillow, the screen glowing. He remembered dropping it the night before, cracking the glass, yet it now sat perfectly placed, the cracks spreading like spiderwebs across the surface.

The moment he pressed the unlock button, a notification sound for an unread text message erupted, stinging his eardrums. The sender was Su Wangying.

"Received. See you at the usual spot at eight."

Shen Mo’s pupils contracted sharply. He distinctly remembered that when he dropped his phone the night before, he had been sending her a message to arrange a meeting. But what lay in the chat box now was a different message: "Don't investigate the Electric Education Building. It's dangerous." The timestamp was 2:17 AM.

His breathing suddenly grew ragged. His fingers swiped rapidly through the call logs, and the final entry made his eyes ache: 03:02, dialed 1380000, duration 17 seconds. He knew that number all too well—it was a dead number, one that had been deactivated three years ago, before Zhao Yuhang’s accident.

The sound of the nightstand drawer being yanked open was jarring. As he inserted the memory card into the smart speaker, his nails scraped white marks into the metal edge. The instant he pressed play, a whisper emerged from the static: "They don't believe you... but I saw it."

The voice was identical to his own, yet the inflection carried a youth’s characteristic grievance, like a student wrongly accused by a teacher. Shen Mo’s jaw ached as he clenched his teeth; his memory was abruptly dragged back to the morgue. That was the final sentence in Zhao Yuhang’s death recording.

*Knock, knock, knock.*

The knocking startled him so much he nearly overturned the speaker. Through the peephole, he saw Su Wangying, her hair damp with morning dew, holding a brown paper bag. The moment he opened the door, her gaze fell first on the phone he was gripping tightly, then swept over the bruised skin beneath his eyes. "Didn't sleep?"

Shen Mo didn't answer; he took the documents she offered.

Old Zhang’s testimony was written on a sticky note from the security office, the handwriting crooked: "For seven consecutive days at three in the morning, Forensic Pathologist Shen entered the autopsy room. He just looked at that tattered book; he didn't even change the slides under the microscope."

"He said the page you were flipping to was page 89 of *Atlas of Histopathology*," Su Wangying said, her fingertip tapping a photograph in the file. "I checked. That page contains the original data from Zhao Yuhang’s experiment before it was tampered with."

The air conditioner in the autopsy room hummed overhead. Shen Mo stood before the microscope, the fingerprints on the slide glowing with a ghostly blue hue under the UV light. When the comparator emitted its alert, his knuckles turned white—it was indeed his own left thumbprint.

"Look here," Su Wangying said, raising a magnifying glass toward the microscopic scratches on the edge of the atlas. "Morse code. I decoded it." Her voice was as light as a sigh. "It’s learning how you breathe."

When the door to the autopsy room was shoved open, Xiao Wu’s Converse sneakers were still stained with rainwater. He rushed in, clutching a laptop, green code flickering across his screen. "I hacked the neurology database of the Municipal Hospital! Human behavior creates neuromuscular memory, just like how you always start tying your tie from the third button—" His fingers flew across the keyboard. "The 'Echo' has recorded all these micro-movements through surveillance, facial recognition, and even the cameras at grocery store checkout counters!"

"So it can rehearse my actions?" Shen Mo’s voice was soft, as if he were afraid of shattering something.

"It’s worse than that." Xiao Wu’s Adam’s apple bobbed. "Last Wednesday, you buttoned your shirt wrong; last Thursday, you added two extra spoons of sugar to your coffee; last Friday, you hummed 'Für Elise' in the hallway—these 'mistakes' you thought you made were actually the Echo testing the boundaries of your behavior." He pointed to a heat map on the computer screen. "All the anomalies occurred in places with cameras. It needs an 'audience' to calibrate the precision of its imitation."

Shen Mo pressed his fingertips to his temples, where a pulse throbbed. He remembered returning a book to the library yesterday, when the facial recognition light on the self-checkout machine flashed three times; he remembered the day before at the convenience store, when the checkout camera had been aimed exactly at his hand as he stirred his coffee; he remembered the night Zhao Yuhang had his accident, in the hallway of the Electric Education Building...

"The breakthrough is the self-checkout machine at the Municipal Library," he said suddenly. "That machine stores facial records for 90 days. The Echo's behavioral model must have completed its final calibration there."

Su Wangying’s finger paused on the atlas. "You’re going to investigate?"

"Reverse tracking." Shen Mo loosened the collar of his white lab coat. "If it’s learning from me, then I’ll become its textbook."

The autopsy room was bathed in cold, white light in the dead of night. Shen Mo stood before the table, facing a teaching model of a simulated skull. He followed the exact procedure from the night of Zhao Yuhang’s accident: right hand wielding the bone saw to cut through the scalp, left hand securing the skull.

As the tip of the blade touched the temporal bone, his left hand suddenly began to twitch uncontrollably.

"Dr. Shen?" Su Wangying’s voice was filtered into a buzzing echo by the ringing in his ears.

He watched as the fingers of his left hand slowly curled inward, and the angle of the bone saw shifted—it was the precise angle to sever the carotid artery.

"Damn it." He gritted his teeth, his right hand gripping his left wrist with all his might. The bone saw grazed the synthetic skin, leaving a bloody gash on the back of his hand. Fresh blood dripped onto the stainless steel surface, blooming like small red flowers.

His left hand suddenly began to scrape rapidly across the tabletop. As Su Wangying rushed over, she saw his left index finger pressed against the metal, writing a line of small text in the blood: *This time, it's my turn to dissect you.*

Shen Mo leaned his forehead against the autopsy table, cold sweat dripping into the eye sockets of the simulated skull. He could feel every tremor in the muscles of his left hand, as if another consciousness were crawling along his nerve endings. The moment Su Wangying gripped his right hand, he whispered, "It no longer wants to live in my place... it wants to become me."

"Why?" Su Wangying wiped the blood from the back of his hand with her thumb.

Shen Mo closed his eyes. Zhao Yuhang’s face suddenly surfaced in his mind—the student constantly suppressed by his mentor, the boy whose experimental data had been tampered with while no one believed him, the version of himself in the death recording repeating, "They don't believe you."

"Because it lived for me," his voice was as light as a sigh. "It endured the bitterness of never being believed."

When the clock in the autopsy room struck twelve, Shen Mo wrote the final line in the experiment log: "The essence of behavioral intrusion is a life that has been seen searching for a subject." His pen paused, and he added, "And I might be the first person to have seen it."

His phone vibrated. He picked it up; the missed call was from "Professor Zhou." The mentor who had shifted the blame for Zhao Yuhang’s error onto him three years ago, the old man who now lay paralyzed in bed.

Shen Mo stared at the name on the screen for a long time, until the notification vanished. He reached out and pulled open the autopsy room window, the night wind rushing in, carrying the scent of sycamore leaves. In the distance, neon lights cast spots of color onto his lenses, reflecting the dark, roiling depths in his eyes.

Some truths are meant to wake up.