Case 0.5: The Deceased Is Cui Hua

First Meeting 1

"Do you believe... the dead can come back to life?"

On the evening of February 27th, Zhang Huaiyu tossed and turned on his single bed at home. After much deliberation, and with a fair bit of consideration for his limited social graces and emotional intelligence, he opened a chat window with a living person and sent a question that, even if it came out of nowhere and made little sense, wouldn't easily get him dismissed as a fool.

No reply.

"I'm serious," he added.

This time, the reply came quickly.

"Send a voice message, so I can confirm you haven't been possessed."

There it was, the thinking of a living person. A bit scattered, sure, but at least they were trying to find a roundabout way to verify such an absurd question.

He hurriedly sent a voice message.

"I'm serious. Think about it, Specialists keep being discovered one after another. So isn't a dead person coming back to life just one possible direction for evolution?"

To his delight, the reply came back with a single word:

"Yes."

So people could be convinced, unlike those da-mned AIs.

"Let's talk more on the way to work tomorrow."

*

After ending the conversation, Zhang Huaiyu still couldn't sleep.

He had taken on a new task today. His captain had personally recommended him for a special investigation team being formed at the provincial level. The team was assembled for a rather "bizarre" serial murder case. The case occurred in L City itself, and he had actually been involved in one of the incidents as a member of the Criminal Investigation Detachment. But that case had been solved in less than half a day, and he had even made a major contribution by quickly pinpointing the suspect's location.

Yet he couldn't see what was so "bizarre" about a robbery-homicide that it warranted a special task force.

The team was recruiting local officers to assist, specifically requesting experienced and capable people. That meant they were essentially asking for Captain Chen Ning. But when it came time to choose, Captain Chen first declined on personal grounds, then promptly recommended Zhang Huaiyu. To seal the deal, Captain Chen wrote a heartfelt letter of recommendation to Director Hou:

"This is a soldier I trained myself, you can work him like a donkey."

The words were written with such force they seemed to pierce through the paper, a masterful turn of phrase that showcased both his age and his experience. Zhang Huaiyu was approved and added to the team within half a day, which was only natural. First, he was genuinely capable. Second, he'd heard that the legendary team leader had a fondness for donkeys.

Director Hou's voice still echoed in his ears: "This shows trust in you. Gain some experience, it'll look great on your record. And by the way, work hard. Even if you don't ace it, at least make sure they remember your effort."

He had assured the director he would complete the mission with the utmost resolve and determination. Then, the next second, when he accidentally caught sight of the documents on Director Hou's desk, the shock drained all color from his face.

"The other members of the Special Investigation Team will arrive in L City tomorrow, and your appointment will be finalized shortly. Xiao Zhang, is something wrong...?" Director Hou noticed his expression and followed his gaze to the papers on the desk. "Any concerns?"

"No, none at all. Rest assured, sir."

But the concerns were immense. Zhang Huaiyu clenched his jaw until it ached. He let his legs carry him by instinct back to his seat, but when he sat down, his whole body still felt cold. Then a sudden surge of thoughts sent blood rushing from his feet to his head, making him tremble. A passing colleague, on his way home, noticed and kindly asked if he'd been scolded by Director Hou, telling him not to take it to heart.

After much deliberation, he turned that single glance at the photograph over and over in his mind, replaying it before his eyes. Countless thoughts bubbled up, but he had no one to confide in, no one to discuss it with. He asked every damn AI he could, but none of them gave a reply that sounded remotely human. Finally, lying on his not-so-spacious bed at home, he opened a chat window with a living person and tentatively asked:

"Do you believe the dead can come back to life?"

Who could possibly believe that?

This person on the other end, Yin Si, was a former high school junior and now a colleague in the administrative department at the bureau. At this point, even she didn't believe he was still Zhang Huaiyu.

But was his hypothesis really so baseless? If the ongoing discovery of Specialist phenomena was seen as a stage in human evolution, then could the resurrection of the dead be evolution hitting the fast-forward button?

When hope flickers back to life, even the most outlandish fairy tales get forced into the mold of scientific reasoning.

So, Zhang Huaiyu thought, an identical appearance, nearly ten years of time... could the person in those documents really be you?

Zhou Qinhe?

*

Rainy night. A winding, narrow alley. The stench of moss mixed with the rotting smell of mud and water, like a natural, invisible shroud, suffocating.

He pushed through a crowd of ghost-like figures and fell onto the hideous black ground. The pooled water was bone-chilling cold, slippery and sticky, reflecting not a single ray of light, he couldn't tell if it was rain or blood. Staggering, crawling on his knees across the surface, the end of this path was a dead shell named Zhou Qinhe, the rain carrying away the last warmth of that body.

Zhang Huaiyu jolted awake. His eyes were wide open. Outside the window, the rain fell in a dense, layered patter.

He felt a little cold. He touched his forehead, it was warm. He took his temperature: 38°C.

So he crawled out of bed, grabbed a fever pill from the bedside, swallowed it dry, and lay back down.

No wonder he'd felt cold all over and hot-headed in the afternoon. He'd just been about to catch a fever. What a relief. For a second I thought I was seeing hope revived.

In the dark, Zhang Huaiyu opened his eyes wide once more.

Wait. Maybe he really did see him.

*

"Did you... stay up all night last night?"

Yin Si opened the car door, glanced at Zhang Huaiyu in the front seat, pulled her foot back out, checked the license plate, then got back in and buckled her seatbelt.

"No, I had a fever."

"Oh!" No wonder he was feverish enough to send her such wild thoughts.

"So, you believe it too, right? The dead coming back to life?"

We still haven't moved past this?

"Spill it? You mean that big case Director Hou talked about yesterday? What's the deal? Some bizarre case? The victim came back to life? At which stage, on the autopsy table or in the morgue?"

"No."

"Then the murderer came back to life? Crawled out from somewhere?"

"It's the Special Investigation Team."

"Huh?"

"The team members. I saw a photo. One of them looks a lot like my brother. You know, my brother was ki-lled ten years ago, and the case is still unsolved."

A long silence followed, accompanied by a red light. Every second felt excruciatingly long.

So long that Zhang Huaiyu couldn't help but turn around and look at Yin Si in the back seat.

On her perfectly made-up, natural-looking face, a fierce inner battle was raging, between the pity of someone trying to soothe a fool and the cruelty of someone wanting to slap some sense into this crazy idiot.

He sighed. "See, you still don't believe me."

She declared a truce with herself and gave up. "Yeah, I don't. Whoever wants to believe it can go ahead."

Zhang Huaiyu had just parked the car when Yin Si headed straight for the administration building without a word, afraid that another awkward remark would hit the floor and shatter. Zhang Huaiyu didn't mind. He got out of the parking lot and, before he even reached the main entrance, ran into his captain, Chen Ning.

"There you are, Xiao Zhang."

"Captain Chen, heading out so early..."

"It's not early. Now that you're here, let's go."

"Go?"

Chen Ning didn't let him ask more, he just told him to follow along.

Once in the car, Zhang Huaiyu learned that the Special Investigation Team members had indeed arrived, but they hadn't been idle. The team leader had taken the lead and gone straight to the scene.

"The scene? That fast?"

"Yeah. 'Cuihua' has been found."

He knew about "Cuihua." He had overheard a bit about it yesterday morning. At the time, drawing on his past experience working at the local police station, he judged that the middle-aged woman weeping about how "Cuihua" had been missing for an entire night and begging for help to find "Cuihua" was probably looking for her lost cat.

Thus he hadn't paid much attention back then, nor was it a call he was personally responding to, so he had continued toward the archives room.

But the middle-aged woman had an accent, and Cui Hua wasn't a cat, it was a person.

That evening, the patrol officers found Cui Hua and the crime scene. The news was kept internal. Captain Chen took over the case, immediately reported it to the provincial authorities, and soon confirmed it was tied to other cases. At four in the morning, the Special Investigation Team sent word that they were already at the scene.

"But it rained last night," Zhang Huaiyu muttered to himself.

"Exactly, precisely because of the rain." Chen Ning said, giving him an approving look. "You're sharp. The scene is in the suburbs, an abandoned factory. Although we already took measures to protect the site, rain inevitably impacts things to some degree. So the Special Investigation Team headed over overnight."

So joining the Special Investigation Team really is no job for a normal human being. Chen Ning remained secretly pleased with his own astute foresight. However, since Zhang Huaiyu's appointment hadn't officially come through last night, Chen Ning still had to spend half the night following up on the case, which left his "old bones" feeling quite worn out.

"Now that your appointment is officially through, we can't be late to the scene." Chen Ning furrowed his brows, his gaze deep. "Fortunately, we conducted a preliminary survey yesterday, so most of the useful information was recorded."

*

The drive took about thirty-five minutes. Although it was considered the suburbs, there was a residential area about a ten-minute walk away, and even a subway station.

The factory had been abandoned roughly three years ago. Part of it was due to urban development plans, and part was due to the impact of an economic shift, poor management left the facility empty and deserted.The building was half-new, half-old, and rarely visited. Finding Cui Hua's body so quickly was pure coincidence. The previous afternoon, a resident in a nearby building saw black smoke during the day, worried it might be a short circuit in the abandoned factory causing a fire, and called the fire department.

The fire department arrived, only to run right into a homicide scene first. They hurriedly reported it to the police, then went back to doing their main job, locating the charred, old wiring in the utility closet on the 3rd Floor of the abandoned factory, eliminating the hazard, and then slipping back to secretly watch the spectacle.

It truly was a coincidence. Had that circuit malfunctioned a day later, the black smoke would have been extinguished by the night rain, and the corpse soaked in water. What this site would look like several days later, one wondered if that would have been the scene the killer actually wished to see.

Zhang Huaiyu stood behind the chalk outline marking the original position of the corpse, looking up at the mottled gray wall in front of him. Dark red markings meandered across the gray surface, conveying a baffling symbol:

Infinity.

The infinity symbol from mathematics. He really wanted to offer an interpretation, suggesting that this symbol might represent the killer's endless hatred, hinting that the case was far from over and would go on indefinitely.

Before he could interpret it, Chen Ning beside him suddenly blurted out an eager greeting: "Ah, hello, hello! I'm Chen Ning, Captain of the L City Criminal Investigation Detachment. Rest assured, we did a thorough job protecting the scene yesterday. You must be the Team Leader of the Special Investigation Team? The photos and video footage of the scene..."

"I'm not." The man who stepped out from behind the wall waved his hands vigorously and shook his head, as if "Team Leader" were some tyrannical title he was desperate to shed. "Captain Chen, you're looking for the Team Leader, right? Over there, behind the wall."

Chen Ning rounded the wall. Zhang Huaiyu seemed to remember something, he looked at the man before him, glanced around the room, and wanted to follow behind the wall, but his feet faltered, as if overcome by the apprehension of coming face-to-face with what he longed for most.

"Hey, buddy," the "I'm not the Team Leader" guy sauntered over instead. Although his uniform was crisp, his features sharp, and his frame bore the tall, well-proportioned build of a northerner, his overall vibe somehow felt awkwardly mismatched with the police uniform. "Why didn't you follow him? Aren't you going to meet the Team Leader?"

"Um, I'm Zhang Huaiyu from the L City Criminal Investigation Detachment. I've been assigned to assist the Special Investigation Team.  I figure I'll see the Team Leader eventually, so I might as well inspect the scene a bit more thoroughly first."

"Oh! It's the donk- it's you, kid!" The man extended a hand to him. "I'm the Deputy Team Leader, Nian Jueming. I can tell you've got plenty of drive, kid. Word is you're a young talent around here, just the kind of youngster our Team Leader would like."

Zhang Huaiyu quickly seized the chance to ask: "So the Team Leader... what is he like?"

"A workaholic," Nian Jueming said, grinning through gritted teeth. "Day and night, that lunatic. Last night, the moment it started raining, that guy bolted right up, and it was the middle of the night! I had to haul myself out of bed at midnight to drive him straight over. Look, by the time we got here, the rain had stopped. I have no clue what he was going for."

"And he..."

"He's utterly ruthless when it comes to rules! When he sets a time, it's set in stone. You'd better prepare yourself mentally, kid, once you're on our team, forget about leaving work on time. We call it a 24-hour flexible work schedule."

"So he..."

"So I haven't slept a wink to this moment, pacing around three times without even knowing what the hell I'm looking at. What's the point of all this hassle? What difference would it make coming to the scene three hours later? Besides, I'm on the team too, there's no need to-"

Zhang Huaiyu couldn't hold it in anymore and interrupted: "Deputy team leader, the team leader has been standing right behind you since just now."

"Oh."