I spent eight years training myself to be a dead man.
When he was sixteen, his father was taken away, and his younger brother was dragged away from the back door by two men with black candle badges on their chests. He turned around and called "Sister". That word stuck in my chest, grinding my lungs with every breath.
Eight years later, I walked into the Hengtong Major Crime Unit, wearing a dusty knitted cardigan. Everyone thought I was a useless intern who got in with a fake resume. Until I dug out a severed limb under a lily bush - the incision was smooth, using standard laboratory surgery, exactly the same as my dad used to process animal tissue. At that moment I confirmed: my father's "Return to Zero Project" was still running, and my brother Shen Che was the first living specimen in that project.
The drunkard group Chang Jiang Kuo pretended to be drunk for five years. His fiancée Song Wan's last text message before her death was sent to "Gui Ling" - she discovered Zhulong's conspiracy to use genetic technology to brainwash business rivals, and was silenced. We two "dead people" touched the same line while testing each other.
The tampered dye formula was spelled out in front of the incinerator, a seven-year intelligence network was dug out of the underground of the bookstore, and in a darkroom thirty floors above the ground, Shen Che carved the word "Run" on the inside of a ring. During the 30 seconds when the live broadcast of the press conference was cut off, I inserted the virus into the main console and projected Zhulong's eight-year incriminating evidence onto the giant screen.
On the day of the sentencing, Jiang Kuo handed me the old badge: "It's time to turn the page."
A year later we were drinking sweet-scented osmanthus wine in the courtyard of the bookstore. Shen Che scrawled four words on the old door panel - "Go home".
The lilies were planted in the clear water, clean and no longer hidden under anything.
