4:05 p.m. Fifteen minutes left before Gao Zheng vanished completely.
Lin Mo tore the yellow sticky note off the picture frame with a sharp wrench. The instant his fingertips left the glass, the photograph behind it — already half-transparent — flared white as if blasted by overexposed light, and with a flat *snap*, it became nothing but a blank sheet of paper.
The smell of developer solution in the air grew stronger.
"2016… the photo-studio arson…"
Lin Mo muttered the words under his breath as he stumbled out of the precinct. Gao Zheng's name was being pulled from every mind around him. Checking the department's digital database was pointless now — the Correction would have already scrubbed it clean.
The world was changing. The leather-bound notebook wouldn't.
Lin Mo threw a leg over his motorcycle and flipped the notebook open one-handed, tearing through the pages. Ten years ago — 2016 — his grandfather had still been alive. If a fire connected to a photo studio had actually happened that year, there was no way the notebook didn't record it.
His fingers swept across the yellowed pages until they stopped at the entry dated October 12, 2016.
The handwriting was chaotic, the strokes trembling in a way his grandfather almost never allowed:
*Great fire today. Timeless Photo Studio on Xizhi Old Street burned to the ground. A charred body recovered at the scene. The tragedy is done, yet the causal chain is not broken. I sense, dimly, that something escaped the fire — something that does not belong to this world's logic.*
Timeless Photo Studio.
Lin Mo's chest tightened. He knew that name. It was a film-developing shop on the Old Street, one of those places that had been there for decades. Was the killer connected to that fire? Or had the arson itself been a historical rewrite — the killer burying some secret under ash and smoke?
He gunned the throttle. The motorcycle screamed through Xizhi's narrow lanes, its engine *roaring* between the old red-brick walls.
The closer he got to the Old Street, the harder the causal collision anomaly hit him.
It was July 4, 2026, 4:12 p.m., the height of summer. But when Lin Mo swung onto the Old Street's original block, he locked the brakes so hard the tires shrieked against the pavement.
The street had changed.
Where a row of modern townhouses should have stood, the entire left side of the block had become a blackened ruin. Smoke still curled from the broken walls. The air reeked of char. Embers drifted like orange snow.
This wasn't the Old Street of 2026.
This was the scene of the arson — the day it happened, in 2016.
The killer was rewriting the past, and the historical cut was bleeding into the present, two timelines grinding against each other in a catastrophic causal overlap.
"Uncle Gao!"
Lin Mo didn't stop to process the half-supernatural, half-impossible sight in front of him. He yanked off his helmet and ran straight into the still-warm wreckage.
At the center of the ruins stood what remained of Timeless Photo Studio. The scorched sign dangled from one corner, barely hanging on. The wooden front door had burned away entirely. Lin Mo stepped over shattered brick and charcoal, and when his foot hit a puddle, the water was still hot enough to make him hiss through his teeth.
Deep inside the gutted studio, in the space where the darkroom used to be, a strange, thick red glow pulsed through the dark.
Not firelight. A safelight.
Lin Mo moved quietly, threading through a hallway hung with burned film negatives, and pushed open the darkroom door. The wood had nearly carbonized under his hand.
The red light swayed.
The darkroom was empty — but the safelight in the corner glowed steadily. A few photographs hung from metal clips, still drying. Below them, three plastic trays held dark red developer solution to the brim.
Lin Mo stepped forward and looked into the first tray.
A photograph floated in the liquid, halfway through developing. The image showed a middle-aged man in a detective's uniform, his features coming in sharp and clear.
Gao Zheng.
A pair of scissors lay on the edge of the tray, perfectly still.
Lin Mo understood now. The killer was using this space — where past and present overlapped — to develop a photograph of Gao Zheng from ten years ago. The moment the image fully resolved, the killer would pick up those scissors and cut it apart.
And when that happened, Gao Zheng's lifeline from 2016 onward would collapse. The Gao Zheng of 2026 would cease to exist.
*Tick. Tick.*
The old wall clock marked the seconds. 4:18.
The dark ink was spreading fast through the solution. Gao Zheng's outline was almost fully formed.
Lin Mo's heart hammered. He reached out, ready to pull the photograph from the tray before it finished developing.
"I would advise you not to touch that."
A low, hoarse voice — muffled, as if filtered through layers of fog — rose from the shadows behind him.
Lin Mo spun around.
In the deepest corner of the darkroom, half-swallowed by red shadow, sat a hunched figure Lin Mo hadn't heard enter. The man wore a heavy gas mask that covered his entire face. His eyes, drained of all color under the safelight, were fixed on Lin Mo without blinking.
In his hands, he held a camera Lin Mo recognized instantly — had seen countless times in his grandfather's study.
A Leica camera. Old. Analog.
A muffled laugh came from behind the gas mask. "Lin Mo. Didn't your grandfather ever tell you? Touch someone else's film negative without permission, and there's a price to pay."