Chapter 43:
Who Would’ve Thought That the Truth Would Be like This?
XIE QINGCHENG STOOD SILENTLY with his back to the light. In the darkness of the night, He Yu couldn’t decipher his expression; he only felt the hand supporting him tremble slightly.
He Yu asked another question. “Xie Qingcheng, why did you have to leave?” Even in his current state, he could still remain calm. It was as though the more terrifying and critical the situation was, the less concerned he became.
Xie Qingcheng didn’t answer him.
“You lied to me, didn’t you? The reason you left wasn’t just because your contract was up, right?”
The look in that child’s eyes.
The look in this young man’s eyes.
Both were calm, childish, stubborn, but they also seemed…indifferent. They gazed at him unflinchingly, digging deeper and deeper but still unable to find the answer they sought.
Xie Qingcheng abruptly felt that he couldn’t face that persistent stare. He closed his eyes. “Let me get you out of here first.”
There wasn’t much time left, so he redoubled his efforts and continued running toward the exit of the archives with He Yu in tow. When at last they ran out of the silent, unlit building into the noisy hubbub outside of whirling police lights and wailing sirens, it felt for a moment as if they had been dropped into a kaleidoscope.
Zheng Jingfeng had also uncovered the true meaning behind the letter L at this point. With the location deduced, the red and blue flashing police lights descended on the target like the tide coming in from every direction at once.
When Xie Qingcheng brought the still-bleeding He Yu down the steps, half supporting, half carrying him, Zheng Jingfeng pulled his car door open with a bang and stepped out of the vehicle.
This time, the criminal investigation unit’s captain’s expression was frosty. Concern and anger shone from his panther-like eyes, the two contradictory emotions flitting over his face like a shadow play, their steely blades flashing brilliantly as they glanced off each other. “Xie Qingcheng…”
“The archives are about to explode,” said Xie Qingcheng as soon as he neared Zheng Jingfeng. “Don’t let anyone else go in.”
Zheng Jingfeng looked like he very much wanted to grab the two of them by their necks and slap handcuffs on their wrists—but then he met Xie Qingcheng’s eyes… They resembled Zhou Muying’s eyes so much that he found himself looking away at the last moment, unable to maintain eye contact.
There was blood on Xie Qingcheng’s face. Zheng Jingfeng didn’t know whose blood it was, but it made him feel incomparably guilty.
It was a fact that he couldn’t allow Xie Qingcheng to get too close to the case—Xie Qingcheng wasn’t a police officer, and he didn’t have the qualifications to be too deeply involved. Even if everything happening now was related to the unsolved case of his parents’ deaths from nineteen years ago, the only thing he could tell Xie Qingcheng was: This is classified, you must hand the matter over to us.
However, an individual was bound to be more flexible than an organization; the more regulated the organization, the more this held true. That was to say nothing of how there was likely a dirty cop amongst the police, or how these criminals seemed to be part of an international crime syndicate with an excellent grasp of cutting-edge technology. Although Xie Qingcheng had entrusted this case to them for nineteen years, they still couldn’t give him a satisfactory answer. Even when it came to this riddle involving the archives, all kinds of obstacles ensured that the police were still slower to get here than Xie Qingcheng.
Zheng Jingfeng didn’t have time to express his shock or ask any more questions. “Fall back immediately,” he said into his two-way radio. “The archives are going to explode. Everyone, fall back!”
He then ushered Xie Qingcheng and He Yu into the police car and closed the door with a thunk. Everyone else in the car stared at Xie Qingcheng with a very strange look in their eyes.
As Xie Qingcheng glanced at the broadcasting tower not too far in the distance, it seemed to have already returned to its usual, brightly lit appearance. That scarlet “drop the hanky” game of death video had disappeared, and in its place, a person’s silhouette flickered across the tower. It might have been an advertisement; Xie Qingcheng didn’t get a good look at it before the police car’s engine rumbled to life.
By now, the main roads of the campus were nearly deserted. The police car sped off lightning fast with its flashing red and blue lights for a few hundred meters, before—
Bang!
A shuddering sound like muffled thunder came from behind them. Followed closely by—
Ka-booom!
An earth-shattering noise, accompanied by the shrieks of all the people who had witnessed this spectacle. Sure enough, the archives had exploded. Like a landslide, shards of brick and tile buried the past in an instant.
Leaning back in the car, Xie Qingcheng would have only needed to look through the car’s rear windows to see the roiling flames leaping into the air from the direction of the archives like a swirling tempest sweeping up crime and punishment in its wake. Grinding them into dust, shattering them into ruined fragments that could never be reassembled.
But Xie Qingcheng never looked back. Instead, he closed his eyes.
The clues had all disintegrated… He couldn’t look back.
It was a long time before the deafening explosions subsided.
Inside the car, it was very quiet, as everyone’s attention was focused on the scene of the crime. After the car came to a stop, the police officers got out one by one. There was the rustling wind blowing outside, the crackling fire in the distance, and also…
“Are you dissatisfied with something?”
It was a man’s voice. It was quite loud, as it came simultaneously from several of the cell phones in the car.
“If you’re dissatisfied with anything, you should take it up with the hospital.”
Xie Qingcheng paused and opened his eyes—was he so shaken that he was hearing things? And his own voice, at that?
“Don’t argue with me here.”
No, he wasn’t just hearing things. His eyes flew wide open as realization dawned. It was that video! The hackers had never stopped their video hijacking!
The moment Xie Qingcheng recognized the video that was being projected onto the broadcasting tower—as well as all the phones in the vicinity of Huzhou University—he immediately understood why those police officers had eyed him with such odd expressions. The video must have already been playing for a while—by the time He Yu and Xie Qingcheng had made it out of the building, the broadcasting tower had already been taken over by this scene.
Xie Qingcheng’s phone was still powered off, but when he turned it back on, it was immediately hijacked by the hackers’ signal, and he received the video synced to the one that was playing out on the tower.
It showed him, from quite a few years ago.
He was wearing the uniform of Huzhou First Hospital: a pure white coat with the hospital’s pale-blue crest stitched onto it and a laminated name tag and two pens clipped to his chest. His surroundings were chaotic—he was encircled by the hospital’s patients, who watched as he stood before the door of his unit facing a disheveled, unkempt woman.
Xie Qingcheng knew immediately what this was, and when it had happened. But…
His expression shifting subtly, he looked at He Yu.
He Yu was frowning, not yet fully cognizant of what was going on. However, he had already realized that this video was the same one that hacker had wanted him to open before—the video he was supposed to watch to see “if it was worth it.”
His shoulder was still bleeding. The doctor from the police unit who was administering first aid said to him, “I’m going to help you clean the wound and stop the bleeding, but it will hurt—try to bear it.”
He Yu said indifferently, “Thank you.”
Pain, blood, even death—to him, they meant little. He was entirely focused on the tower and its ever-changing illumination.
The scene was still playing out.
The unkempt woman in the video was howling, “Why do you need me to show relevant ID? Why do you need the security guards to question me? Do you think it’s easy for me to come see the doctor? It’s so hard to register with your hospital’s specialists! Scalpers have snatched up all the spots! I need to pay five hundred yuan just to get an appointment! Why does it have to be like this?8 Apparently poor people don’t just deserve to die, we also deserve to be shafted by you doctors and discriminated against, is that right? Do you think I want to be filthy and reeking like this? As soon as I closed my stand at four in the morning, I came to wait in line outside the hospital for you to open. Do you think I have time to be all squeaky clean and neat like you? I’m really not a bad person!”
But that young Xie Qingcheng in the video stood with his hands in the pockets of his white coat, looking coldly at the sobbing woman who was hugging her knees in front of him. He said indifferently, “You come and sit in front of my consulting room even though you’re not my patient—how do I know what you’re planning to do after what happened with Yi Beihai?”
“I just want to see a doctor!” the woman cried.
His face devoid of expression, Xie Qingcheng said, “You want to be treated, but I want to be safe. I’ll have to trouble you not to sit in front of my consulting room. Go where you’re supposed to go, whether that’s internal medicine or neurosurgery. My unit isn’t related to the registration number you have.”