The Well Rope Sunk in Time

On a rainy spring night in 1992, top student Lin Hong vanished under mysterious circumstances after evening study at Nanjing Medical College. Three days later, her body was found stuffed headfirst into a campus drain, while her clothes lay scattered in another drain. Bloodstains in the entrance hall and blurry shoeprints were the only clues. A trace of Type B blood, a campus guard’s glimpse of a fleeing shadow, a missing iron bar used in the crime... The killer vanished into the rainy night like a ghost, leaving the case as a knot in criminal investigator Li Jianguo’s heart for twenty-eight years.

Time passed. The campus was renovated, the evidence gathered dust, but the vow made beside the well remained unchanged. In 2020, a partial DNA profile sparked a match in the genetic database, pointing to an unremarkable man in Pei County, Xuzhou. When the interrogation-room lights came on, behind Ma Mougang’s smile lay traces of a body dragged through the years, a scrap of clothing left behind while climbing a wall, and the long-overdue words: “You finally came.” Beneath the deep well, the echoes of evil had never stopped.