The soft *shhhk* of scissors cutting paper crept through a cheap phone speaker, impossibly cold beneath the blazing July sun.
"Who are you?" Lin Mo snarled into the phone, his palm slick with sweat.
No answer came from the other end — only a crisp *click*, the unmistakable sound of a film camera's shutter. Then the line went dead.
Lin Mo stared at the silent phone. A wave of vertigo slammed into him without warning. The street around him began to warp at the edges: the convenience store's sign bled from blue to green, and the row of scooters parked along the curb vanished, replaced in an instant by a single black sedan.
The Correction was spreading. Chen Tuo's erasure was triggering a cascade — ten years of chain reactions rippling outward through everyone who had ever touched his life.
*I have to get out of here.*
Lin Mo swallowed back the nausea and swung onto his scooter. Some instinct told him he needed to find a place where history hadn't fully hardened yet.
He thought of his grandfather's notebook. Chen Tuo's name was fading on the page, but it was still there — still legible. He gunned the engine and tore across town to the Xizhi Precinct, New Taipei City Police Department. He needed one person: Gao Zheng, deputy captain of the detective unit.
Gao Zheng had been his grandfather's closest friend across the generation gap, and the only other person who knew the old man had kept that mysterious notebook.
Lin Mo burst through the precinct lobby, ignoring the startled looks, and shoved open the deputy captain's office door.
"Uncle Gao! Something's wrong with the Chen Tuo case — the world is being rewritten —"
The words died in his throat.
A heavyset, middle-aged officer he had never seen before sat behind the desk, eyeing him with flat suspicion. "Who are you looking for? There's no deputy captain named Gao here. I'm the officer in charge of this office. Name's Chen."
Lin Mo stood frozen in the doorway, his skull ringing like a struck bell.
Gao Zheng was gone.
Not gone — being *erased*. History was scrubbing him out of existence.
His hands trembling, Lin Mo tore open his bag and yanked out the leather-bound notebook. He flipped to page forty-two. Just below the dark-red line about Chen Tuo, a new line of text was seeping through the paper — faint, almost ghostly, as though written in disappearing ink:
*Same day. 4:20 p.m. Next target: Gao Zheng, age 45.*
Lin Mo's head snapped up to the clock on the wall. 3:45 p.m.
Thirty-five minutes before Gao Zheng was wiped from the record entirely.
Gao had been investigating certain causal collision anomalies from years past. That was enough to put him in the crosshairs of whoever was hiding in that darkroom — someone now preparing to cut his past to pieces.
"Gao Zheng — where is he?" Lin Mo grabbed the officer named Chen by the shoulder, eyes bloodshot, voice dropping to a growl.
"Are you out of your mind? There has never been anyone at this precinct named Gao Zheng!" The officer shoved him back and reached for the intercom to call security.
*Matter persists.* Something always survives.
Lin Mo forced himself still. Gao Zheng had lived forty-five years. His service weapon, his badge number, his desk — none of that could vanish without leaving a seam.
His gaze swept the office in a frantic arc. Then it stopped.
Along the wall beside the desk hung a row of framed commendation photos — every decorated officer the precinct had ever honored. Lin Mo crossed the room in three strides and scanned the frames one by one. In the second-to-last position, the figure inside the frame was translucent, half-dissolved into the background. That face. It was Gao Zheng — his features blurring and running like a candle left too close to a flame.
"There."
Stuck to the glass of the frame was a small yellow sticky note, written in ballpoint pen:
*Lin — if I'm gone, look into the 2016 photo-studio arson.*
Gao had left it. Before the tide of the Correction swallowed him whole, he had used the most primitive tools available — paper and ink — to wedge one last clue into the shrinking gap between timelines.
What made it stranger still: the edge of the sticky note was stained with a smear of dark red liquid.
Lin Mo leaned in and breathed it in.
Developer solution. The kind used in old-fashioned photo studios.
Whoever was running that darkroom had left their mark inside the very past they were rewriting.