"Case closed."
The two words left Chen Ke's lips with a formulaic calmness, landing on the confirmation window of the electronic case file. A tap of his finger, and the file was categorized, encrypted, and flowed into the depths of the Police Department's vast database, like a speck of dust falling into a silent abyss.
The office lights were a constant, cold white, reflecting off the uniformly focused profiles of his colleagues. The air held only the faint hum of data processing and energy core operation. Everything was normal.
Except for the cold touch of the stone in his pocket and the searing afterimage of the flickering screen burned into his retina.
He pulled up the log of the city's public display system. As expected, the record for that specific time and location was pristine, containing only a single system-generated line: [Routine data stream verification. No anomalies.]
It wasn't an illusion.
It was a warning.Or perhaps... a confirmation.
He closed the log, his fingers hovering over the terminal for a moment before he called up a file completely unrelated to the "Triangle Stone Case" – an incident from three months ago, filed under 'Emotional Overload Leading to Self-Destructive Behavior.' A top structural engineer, after completing a major project, had inexplicably broken down during the celebration banquet, raving incoherently before ultimately jumping from the apex of the very sky-piercing tower he had designed.
Case record: Engineer Li Ming, ample soul reserves, excellent social contribution rate. No signs of external force at the scene, no logical motive. Conclusion: Accident.
Back then, Chen Ke had believed it.
Now, he reopened the list of evidence from the scene. The list was long, mostly personal effects. His eyes scanned it quickly, finally settling on an inconspicuous entry at the very end:
[Item ID CT-73]: Private storage chip (mildly damaged). Content: Unparseable redundant data. Assessment: No evidentiary value. Not archived.
'Not archived'...
Chen Ke's fingers flew across the terminal, using his Senior Inspector authority to bypass several routine data barriers. He wasn't requesting the evidence itself, but the initial 'on-site rapid scan spectrum' for this item.
The spectrum loaded. Amidst the chaotic signal noise, an extremely faint but unusually stable frequency band was marked in gray by the system as 'background interference.'
Chen Ke placed the stone from his pocket against the miniature scanner of his personal terminal. A second later, the spectral analysis was complete.
The two frequency bands overlapped almost perfectly.
It wasn't material consistency. It was something... cognitively homologous.
Engineer Li Ming's chip contained the same 'thing' as this stone.
At that moment, his personal comm channel – a rarely triggered, highest-level encrypted private line – suddenly flashed red. No number. No identifier.
Just a single line of text, coldly projected onto his retina:
[Stand down.]