Z is one of the last people still working in the paranormal investigation agency. Partner A is her first-generation colleague. He is smart, intuitive, and always only leaves half a sentence in his words. Her boyfriend E is a professor in the Department of Physics. He is calm and restrained. He always hands her the keys from another way when she is desperate.
The organization has disappeared over the years, and the old people have scattered, gone, and gone crazy. Only P and Z are still standing in this position, filing every abnormal event as a file, like two tailors sewing holes back into place stitch by stitch.
Then C showed up.
The former editor-in-chief of the school magazine and the youngest lecturer in the School of Humanities, his white shirt is buttoned to the second button, his writing on the blackboard is neat and beautiful, and the rhythm of his left hand tapping on the table is always the same long, short, long, short, long. Clean, distant, always one step away.
I thought I was following the traces he left - the aroma of white tea in the old city, the water stains on the bottom of the enamel cup, and the direction of the six branches of moss at the foot of the wall. She walked for three years, from one clue to another, from a herbarium to an old banyan tree, stepping on the place she thought she had "discovered" every step of the way. Until she stood in a cavity three meters deep under the banyan tree. Under her feet were six cracks that had been laid for her eighteen years ago, and in her arms were the marking nets that had been implanted in her body eighteen years ago.
Z remembered what E said under the laboratory light: "When you finish walking, you will find that you were on the map he drew at the beginning."
Only then did she realize that the path she had been walking on was designed by C for her alone with twelve years, three intermediary sensory systems, countless cups of white tea and the marks of moss.
This is not hunting. This is a recall.
Intention: I was once someone's precisely designed recall target, but now I choose to stand outside that recall radius.