"Lin, you really need to see a doctor."
Old Zhang watched Lin Mo gesture at empty air, his brow furrowed deep enough to crack. From where Old Zhang stood, Lin Mo was crouched over a bare patch of floor, staring at absolutely nothing.
Lin Mo ignored him. His fingertips were locked around the label on the dead man's jacket — the rough nylon texture, the faint residual warmth — every sensation confirming that Chen Tuo existed, right here, right now, inside this locked room.
But the world was correcting him out of it.
Lin Mo noticed that the blood welling from the victim's chest — that steady, relentless flow — had stopped. No. Not stopped. It was fading. Like red wine diluted by an endless pour of water, the color thinned from deep crimson to pale pink, and then, impossibly, dissolved into a faint haze of particles that vanished into the air.
The Correction of public memory had reached the physical surface of things.
"Old Zhang." Lin Mo snapped to his feet and fixed the detective with a hard stare. "Chen Tuo's parents — where do they live?"
"Why are you asking about them? They moved away years ago." Old Zhang flinched at the red threading through Lin Mo's eyes and took a half-step back. "After the accident ten years ago, the whole family relocated down south. Word was Chen's mother couldn't handle it — had some kind of breakdown. Look, Lin, something is seriously off with you today. Let me drive you to—"
Lin Mo was already gone.
He burst out of the apartment building onto the street, and the July heat swallowed him whole. He ran, digging into his bag with one hand, pulling out the leather-bound notebook his grandfather had left him.
He flipped to page forty-two. The dark red handwriting there was fading too.
*Victim: Chen Tuo (age 26). Cause of death: locked-room murder.* Beneath those words, bleeding up through the paper like a watermark surfacing from old pulp, a second line was materializing: *National Freeway 3 mass-casualty accident — fatalities and injured: Chen Tuo (age 16).*
Two completely contradictory histories, tearing each other apart on a single page.
"Damn it — the Correction is moving faster than I thought."
Lin Mo clenched his jaw. If the leather-bound notebook was fully overwritten, he would become the only person on earth who remembered any of this. He had to find something before the last trace of Chen Tuo's existence was erased.
The Correction had a lag. Whoever had done this had erased Chen Tuo's social connections — but they couldn't instantly unmake every physical object Chen Tuo had touched in twenty-six years of living.
Lin Mo didn't go to Chen Tuo's parents. He threw a leg over his scooter, twisted the throttle hard, and tore toward the nearest convenience store — the one at the mouth of the alley outside Chen Tuo's building.
The door chimed as he shoved through it.
"Welcome in—" The young clerk behind the counter startled.
"Pull your receipt records from the last thirty minutes." Lin Mo planted both hands on the counter, breathing hard. "Did a man come in — around five-ten, blue windbreaker?"
The clerk blinked. "A windbreaker? It's July. Who wears a windbreaker in this heat? And we barely had any customers in the last half hour, so—"
"Check the system." Lin Mo's voice dropped to a growl.
The clerk's hands trembled as they hit the keyboard. The checkout log from twenty minutes ago came up on screen.
"Uh… there's only one transaction in that window." The clerk pointed at the monitor, voice going strange. "But it's weird. The system shows someone bought an iced Americano. The register is sixty dollars up. Except—"
"Except what?"
"Except on the security footage—" The clerk swallowed. "—the automatic door opened by itself. The coffee floated off the shelf. The money dropped into the machine on its own. The manager thinks it's a system glitch. He's about to call for repairs."
On the monitor beside them, the security loop played on repeat.
An empty store. A bottle of coffee drifting through the air.
Lin Mo stared at it, and the hair on his arms stood up. The world had already corrected the clerk's memory. It had corrected the optical data captured by the digital camera. But it hadn't gotten around to correcting a *completed transaction* — or the gap on the shelf where the coffee used to be.
That was the causal collision anomaly. The physical debris the killer had left behind when they reached across time to commit murder.
Lin Mo spun and ran for the trash can by the entrance. If Chen Tuo had bought a coffee twenty minutes ago, he would have finished it on the walk back to his apartment and tossed the cup somewhere nearby.
He dug through the bin, ignoring the sour smell, and near the top he found it — a plastic cup still beaded with condensation.
The receipt sticker on the side read: *10:02 AM.*
Lin Mo gripped the cup until his knuckles whitened. This was proof. Chen Tuo had been alive and drinking coffee at 10:02 this morning. He could not have died in a highway accident ten years ago.
Then something cold dripped onto the back of Lin Mo's hand.
He froze. Looked up. Clear sky, no clouds, no rain.
He looked down.
The drop hadn't fallen from above. It had seeped through the cup itself. The hard plastic was going soft — turning translucent, losing its shape, melting the way ice does when you hold it too long — until it was nothing but a small pool of clean water running silently between his fingers and into the pavement.
Even matter was being corrected now. The last hard proof that Chen Tuo had been alive in 2026 evaporated in front of his eyes.
His phone went off — violent, insistent buzzing. Unknown number.
He answered. No voice on the other end. Just slow, heavy breathing, and beneath it, steady and rhythmic and deeply wrong: the soft *shhhk shhhk shhhk* of scissors cutting through paper.