Chapter 2: A File with No Witnesses

The next morning, Fu Jingze took all of File 23 back to his private investigation room.

The file was only a few dozen pages long, but the most important part was missing exactly one page.

Ning Chulan noticed that the pages were numbered continuously from 22 to 24, with no sign that anything had been torn out.

“Someone renumbered the entire file.”

Fu Jingze looked at the old writing and recognized his father’s handwriting.

Beneath one of the notes was a small triangle.

He remembered that symbol clearly.

When he was a boy, Fu Tingchuan had told him it marked documents that could not be included in the official record.

Ning Chulan immediately went looking for a digital copy.

After cross-checking again and again, she found that File 23 had once been backed up to an old server at the city data center.

The problem was that the server had been shut down years ago.

Fu Jingze decided to go anyway.

The old building stood on a narrow street near the harbor, long abandoned.

Inside, there was still a storage room filled with hundreds of old machines.

Ning Chulan found a drive labeled 23-A.

When she opened it, the screen displayed a list of twenty-three names.

The last name stopped Fu Jingze cold.

Ye Siyan.

Ye Siyan was a well-known investigative journalist who had chased many cases involving corporate data.

According to public records, she had left Shanghai eight years ago.

But the latest data showed she had accessed the city system less than three days ago.

Fu Jingze called her.

No one answered.

At that very moment, Ning Chulan found another video.

In it, Ye Siyan stood in front of an old house in the suburbs.

She turned, looked straight into the camera, and said one sentence.

“Don’t trust whoever leads you to Room 23.”

The video ended.

Fu Jingze noticed something wrong immediately.

The camera in the video wasn’t part of any ordinary security system.

It had been installed inside a hidden room.

The two of them traced the location data to an old warehouse.

No one was inside.

On the wall hung a single clock, stopped at 2:17.

Beneath it, a line was written in black ink.

“Twenty-three people are only the beginning.”

Ning Chulan checked the floor and found a metal hatch hidden under a layer of dust.

Beneath it, a tunnel led to a small room directly under the warehouse.

Inside that room were dozens of monitors showing the city’s camera feeds.

Every one of them was live.

The most frightening was a screen showing a live view of Fu Jingze’s own office.

He spun around.

No one was behind him.

But on the desk in his office, a new envelope had appeared.

Inside was a single photograph.

It showed Fu Tingchuan standing beside a man Fu Jingze had never seen before.

On the back was a line of writing.

“Your father found this room too. But he never made it out of File 23.”

Fu Jingze clenched the photo in his hand.

Ning Chulan looked at him and spoke very slowly.

“Someone is leading us down a path that was laid out eight years ago.”

Fu Jingze replied,

“Then all we have to do is find out who wrote that path.”