Iron Fist and Loyal Heart

Chapter 21 Following the Clues

Su Xinpei's first task at the Special Bureau was to find a dead person from a stack of dusty files.

It wasn't a real dead person. It was someone who lived on paper but disappeared in reality six years ago. The file number was NK-2134-09, with a blue "Cancellation" stamp on the cover, and the cancellation date was July 2141 (United Calendar). The reason for cancellation was only four words: Termination of Identity. There was no death certificate number, no body receiving unit, and no cremation record. When Su Xinpei pulled this file out from the bottom of the iron cabinet, the dust on the cover made him cough twice. The dust settled on his cuffs, mixing with the ring of white salt stains from the infrared lamp during the skin-tempering at the Iron Bone Hall last night, a gray and white mingled together, impossible to wipe clean.

He had been reporting to the Special Affairs Bureau for two weeks. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon from 2 PM to 6 PM, he worked in the office of the external consultant on the east side of the third floor of the branch office. The office was small, with two desks, an intranet terminal, and a metal filing cabinet. Outside the window, one could see the gray-white sky of the Xiacheng District and the chimneys of several old factory buildings in the distance. Ye Xinghe's first task for him was to re-screen the low-priority abnormal files that had accumulated in the branch office over the past five years—the so-called "low-priority" simply means cases that were half-investigated back then and had not been touched since. For the Special Affairs Bureau, these files were a backlog of "technically unresolved cases but resource-resolved cases"; for Su Xinpei, this was the work he was most familiar with: going through old files, finding overlooked details, and piecing together scattered information into a complete picture. He had worked in the street office for three and a half years sorting out low-income assistance files, and his specialty was finding things that people needed from piles of papers that no one looked at.

NK-2134-09 was discovered when he was sifting through the fourteenth file. The original case record for this file was simple: In June of the year 2141 (United Calendar), an "unnatural death" occurred in a residential building in the old Beihe district. The identity of the deceased was unconfirmed, and the body was "lost" en route for examination. Attached to the file was a handwritten description of the scene, the handwriting messy but the details clear—the deceased was approximately 1.75 meters tall, weighed approximately 65 kilograms, was male, estimated to be around thirty years old, had no obvious external injuries, and his facial expression at the time of death was "abnormally peaceful." The most puzzling part was the last note: the deceased was not carrying any identification, but a half-filled SAARC temporary residence application form was found in the inside pocket of his jacket. The name field on the form contained only one character: Jiang. The strokes after that were broken, as if the pen ran out of ink halfway through writing, or as if the fingers lost their grip halfway through.

Su Xinpei read the scene description three times. He was particularly sensitive to the detail of the "half-filled form"—he processed various forms daily at the street office: applications for minimum living allowance, low-rent housing, and temporary residence registration. Every form required complete completion; missing even one item meant being sent back to be filled out again. The fact that someone was filling out a form before dying indicated that they were doing something very ordinary when they died, without any premonition or struggle, and then suddenly died. The "unusually peaceful" facial expression—not fear, not pain, but rather an abnormally calm state—had a subtle resemblance to the descriptions of victims of "whispering in someone's ear" he had seen in the abnormal complaint files last year: the victims had also described a feeling of being drained, extreme drowsiness, and an inability to open their eyes, but it wasn't ordinary fatigue. He kept this in mind, but didn't draw any conclusions yet.

He meticulously entered all the information from the file into his notebook—the case filing date, the abandonment address, the detention record number, and the original memo signed by the coroner. Then, he created a blank query window on the remote terminal of the neighborhood office's resident information management system and began searching for all neighboring files that might be related to NK-2134-09. The Special Affairs Bureau's intranet and the neighborhood office's resident system were physically isolated, so he could only switch back and forth between the two computers, checking household registration change records while comparing them with the case filing number. Each time he found a cross-cutting clue, he would write it down in pencil on a sticky notepad and then draw a line between the two pieces of information with a red pen. By 5 p.m., a preliminary relationship network consisting of seven related files had been drawn on the sticky notepad—there were temporal connections, neighboring addresses, and the same highly indicative detail appeared in the corroborating testimonies of two suspects: a tenant who was usually very low-key, only maintained contact with two regular waste collectors, but never appeared in neighborhood social activities. Those two people were labeled "Guide A" and "Guide B" in his notes.

In one of the supporting documents marked "Accident Handling Records," he saw a familiar name: Beihe Old District. The original address where the deceased was found had been vaguely written as "end of an unnamed alley" in the first case filing note, but in another environmental impact assessment report hidden in the construction project compensation file, this address was remarked as an abandoned tenement building unit included in the old city renovation area—less than 400 meters away from the crack in the Beihe factory area. Su Xinpei marked these two coordinates on the street office's administrative division map, drew a line between the two points with a pencil, and put a question mark next to it.

That evening, he went to Tiegutang with a summary of the file. It wasn't the original; it was a few pages of key information he had handwritten in a notepad—the deceased's characteristics, timeline, address, and the surname that was only written with one character. Old Tietou sat in a wicker chair, the evening news playing on the radio. He held Su Xinpei's notepad up to the light bulb and looked at it for a while, his brows furrowing deeper and deeper.

"Jiang." He handed the notepad back to Su Xinpei. "There are several old surnames in the Northern Alliance, and Jiang is one of them. It's not a surname from the Southern Alliance. There are very few people with the surname Jiang in the Southern Alliance. Most of them are descendants of overseas Chinese who evacuated from the Northern Alliance, or intelligence personnel who crossed the border in the early years." He paused and added, "Across from the Glacier Fortress, the commander of the Third Division of the Northern Alliance Border Defense Army has the surname Jiang."

"You mean this person might be from the Northern Alliance?" Su Xinpei asked.

"I was referring to his last name." Old Ironhead leaned back in his rattan chair, picked up his enamel mug, took a sip, and said, "The rest is your problem."

Su Xinpei put the notepad back into his coat pocket. He understood what Lao Tie Tou meant—a surname couldn't be used as evidence, but it could be a clue. The Northern Alliance's methods of infiltrating the Southern Alliance's border cities were never overt—they used false identities, legal documents, and hiding in system loopholes. A temporary residence application form that was interrupted halfway through filling out could mean that the person was suddenly stopped by some external force while filling it out, or it could be that they stopped themselves because they realized at the last moment that the form would expose their identity. The word left on the document after the interruption was more intriguing than all the content they had filled out.

Over the next few days, Su Xinpei devoted all his spare time to this file. During the day, he handled routine affairs at the subdistrict office, and during his lunch break, he meticulously compared population flow data in the resident information system—not to check suspects, but ordinary residents. He retrieved all household registration records for the past seven years in the old Beihe district, first filtering out normal changes with clear reasons such as family migration, marriage migration, and job transfers, and then comparing each of the remaining few "other reasons" migration records to see if the migration time coincided with the active period of the fissure, and whether the migration direction pointed to the abnormal hotspot areas recorded by the Special Bureau. The subdistrict office system could not see the confidential data of the Special Bureau, but it could see the most basic traces of population flow—and the population flow of the grassroots administrative district does not lie; which family moved away, when they moved, and where they moved to are all recorded in the system. If someone tried to establish a long-term monitoring point around the fissure, the mobility of such people would be more regular and more covert than that of ordinary residents.

On the evening of the fourth day, he discovered a noteworthy individual in the system. This person lived alone, was unemployed, had consistent payment records, and always used the same type of account for monthly payments; the electricity bill for the top-floor apartment was constantly running, while downstairs residents reported "rarely seeing him"—Su Xinpei found a noise complaint in the system from three years ago, in which the complainant described "occasionally a low-frequency buzzing sound from upstairs, continuously disturbing sleep at night, with no results from communication." He didn't have permission to access this person's expense details, nor did he know what the person was doing now. He traced the municipal registration records for this address, comparing the "Beihe Foreign Trade Company" that popped up in the search results with what he remembered—no response.

He copied the name and corresponding address into his work log without marking them with any special symbols. Then, under the guise of "year-end migrant population statistics," he submitted a perfectly normal statistical verification application for these records in the street office system. The wording of the application was impeccable—every year at the end of the year, the street office had to compile statistics on the changing trends of the migrant population in its jurisdiction, and he was simply doing his job. Even if someone saw him staring blankly at population data in front of the computer for several days in a row, they would only think that Xiao Su was compiling some year-end report again. He wanted to use this broken computer, which could only check water and electricity bills and household registration changes, to find all the hidden clues in the system, one by one.

Meanwhile, the skin-refining training continued as usual every night.

The ice shards in the basin of ice water grew thicker and thicker—the winter nights in Ironthorn City had dropped to near zero degrees Celsius. Old Ironhead had added coarse salt to the ice water, lowering the temperature even further, and a thin layer of ice formed on the surface. When you stepped into the water, the ice shards scraped against your ankles, causing a fine, stinging sensation. Su Xinpei stood in the ice water for half an hour, his skin turning from deathly pale to deep red, then sat in front of the infrared lamp for another half hour. The alternating hot and cold tempering gradually allowed his dermis to adapt to the repeated impacts of extreme temperatures, and the speed at which his pores opened and closed increased—after coming out of the ice water and sitting in front of the infrared lamp, his skin could completely open from a contracted state in less than five breaths, and beads of sweat gathered into thin streams between his shoulder blades, trickling down his spine. The skin-refining progress bar on the panel steadily advanced, having already passed the first turning point of the beginner level.

After finishing his practice for the evening, Old Tie Tou handed him a dry towel. "Move the leg weights I gave you up half an inch. After the skin-strengthening, the capillaries open and close faster, and the venous return in the lower limbs is interfered with by changes in skin temperature. Tying the weights up a little will help maintain the rhythm of the blood pump in your calves." Su Xinpei took the towel, wiped his sweat, and untied the weights from his ankles, retying them to the middle of his calves. Old Tie Tou sat back in his rattan chair, picked up his enamel mug, and asked again, "How far have things progressed with the Special Elephant Bureau?"

"A possible Northern Alliance undercover agent died mysteriously six years ago, and his body disappeared. The files left clues, fragmented, but pieced together they point to a very narrow line—someone is using the subspace rift between the old Beihe district and the factory area to conduct some kind of long-term transaction. Not information, but items. Fragments of contained objects." Su Xinpei leaned against the pool, warming his hands with an enamel mug. "Last time, we were able to break through the Fa Cult's line by focusing on one point because their goal was money, and the transaction model was simple and straightforward. This time is different—this time, the opponent might be someone from the Northern Alliance intelligence network, trained to exploit blind spots in the identity management system, to forge payment account chains, and to disguise their actions as normal personnel movement. The perception radius of such a person is much farther than that of a Fa Cult sorcerer. We might have just touched the tail of their offline account when they are already preparing the next forged identity."

Old Ironhead paused for a moment, then placed the enamel mug on his lap. "Do you know why the Northern Alliance warlocks were always able to find our outposts during those years at Glacier Fortress? It wasn't that they had clairvoyance; it was that they had a complete network of infiltration within the Southern Alliance, with each infiltration point equipped with encrypted warp communication equipment. The 'unusually peaceful' face on your corpse was probably a terminal reaction from close-range exposure to some kind of warp containment material radiation. If this person was silenced while filling out the form, it proves that the person who found him was very close."

"So close that I could sense his intention to escape even before a form was finished." Su Xinpei suddenly straightened out the thread that had been swirling in his mind for days.

Old Tie nodded. "Then go ahead and investigate. But remember—the Special Affairs Bureau only gives you the authority to check files, not living people. Leave the living people to Ye Xinghe."

Su Xinpei placed the enamel mug on the edge of the sink, the bottom of which made a crisp sound as it hit the tiles. The evening news on the radio had finished, and the announcer began the weather forecast, saying that there might be sleet in the lower part of Tieji City tomorrow. Old Tie Tou poured out the cold tea from his enamel mug, leaned back in his wicker chair, and didn't say another word.

It was late at night when he returned to his apartment. Su Xinpei sat on the edge of the bed and spread out all the documents he had copied from the Special Affairs Bureau, the abnormal movement records he had exported from the population system, and the on-site description from the NK-2134-09 file on the blanket, reviewing them page by page. His eyes jumped from one piece of information to another—first the surname with only one character written on it, then the short-term tenants who changed every year in the same area, and then the company that paid his top-floor electricity bill. He drew a timeline on his notepad with a pencil, marking each key node—July of 2141 in the Union Calendar, the deceased was discovered; a month later, all tenants on the fourth floor and below of the building were re-registered; half a month later, he found an inconspicuous note in the remarks column of another secret abnormal item transfer list: an old-fashioned watch had been taken away from the vicinity of the deceased's belongings by a suspicious scavenger before the transfer; the following year, two crack-like warning tremors occurred in the vicinity of the same coordinates.

He put down his pencil and leaned against the headboard. He didn't want to play the hero. He just knew he had found a thread—Xiao Su, who sat behind the street office window reviewing applications for minimum living allowances, had found, through the clumsy effort of sorting through expired files, the name of a deceased person buried in the system for six years, a top-floor apartment unit that had been repeatedly rented but showed almost no signs of life, a foreign trade company that existed in name only with a business registration certificate, an unusual fragment of an item that had been repeatedly sold on the periphery of the crack, and a surname that was forever stuck on the second stroke of a character. All these threads were now in his hands, heavy on the blanket, like an invisible force pulling him in the same direction—the clues had crossed the boundaries of the paper and were extending towards the living.

He had to tell Ye Xinghe. It wasn't an anonymous letter. It was a formal report, signed Su Xinpei.