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墨書 Inktalez
A sudden chill ran down my neck, and I felt as if I had been thrown into a spinning washing machine.
When I opened my eyes, the blue light from the projector pierced my retina painfully, and I heard the familiar hoarse voice of Captain Zhang: "The core algorithm architecture of the Xing Huo Plan..."
A metallic taste filled my throat, and I gripped my thigh tightly. The scratches on the edge of the dark gray conference table were still there, and in the third drawer of my left hand, there should be half a pack of damp Su Yan cigarettes—these details matched perfectly with the last surveillance footage I had seen before the fall.
My palm bore crescent-shaped blood marks from my nails, and the real pain made my temples throb.
"Xiao Gu?"
Zhou Minghao, sitting diagonally across from me, tapped his thermos with a pen. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
He was wearing that ridiculous cartoon tie today, with sesame seeds from his breakfast rice ball still stuck to his collar.
I suddenly remembered that three months later, it would be this seemingly good-natured man who slipped forged financial documents into my drawer.
The automatic coffee machine in the break room buzzed with its familiar sound, and I used it as an excuse to refill my cup and escape.
In the mirror, I saw a face in its early twenties, with no fine lines at the corners of my eyes from late nights yet.
As cold water splashed on my face, I suddenly heard Zhang Yan's cheerful voice behind me: " Gu, hiding here to slack off?"
I turned around and accidentally knocked over her Americano, the brown liquid winding across the tiles into strange symbols.
This newly promoted young woman crouched down to pick up the shards, revealing a small butterfly-shaped birthmark on the back of her neck—on the original timeline, she was supposed to take leave in two weeks due to her father's serious illness.
"Be careful of the glass shards."
I handed her a paper towel, my fingertips brushing against her wrist where her Smartwatch sat. The cold light reflecting off its metal face reminded me of the neon signs I had seen while falling; my stomach reflexively twisted.
A faint scent of Sage perfume wafted from her, subtly overlapping with the memory of that night in the emergency exit.
When I returned to my workstation, the time in the bottom right corner of the Monitor changed to 15:23.
My hand trembled slightly as I opened the encrypted cloud drive; three months' worth of original data lay quietly in the depths of Drive D.
Suddenly, Zhou Minghao tapped me on the shoulder from behind: "Are we going to that new Hunan Restaurant for team building tonight?"
The warmth of his palm seeped through the fabric of my shirt, making me feel uneasy.
"I might have to work overtime to revise the architectural diagram."
I tugged at the corner of my mouth, catching a glimpse of three WeChat windows open on his computer screen. The avatar in the rightmost chat box looked familiar, featuring a pair of red lips grinning to the ears against a black background—that was the anonymous informant who later appeared in the hands of the Disciplinary Inspection Team.
At two in the morning, the only sound left on the floor was the hum of the central air conditioning. I crouched behind a fire hydrant, watching as the cleaning lady emptied the scraps from the shredder into a black garbage bag. Her hunched figure disappeared around the safety corridor, and I pulled out a miniature camera from the ventilation duct.
The last ten seconds on the storage card showed two hands clad in black leather gloves flipping through my project proposal. The ice tray in the break room was coated with a layer of white frost, and I held a piece of ice in my mouth. As the sharp chill slid down my throat, the emergency exit light at the end of the corridor suddenly flickered twice.
From thirty meters away, I could hear the sound of steel cables rubbing against each other in the elevator shaft, like some silent urging. In Zhou Minghao's third drawer, there was an unopened box of Longjing tea. I stared at the gold-embossed "Special Grade" on its green packaging and suddenly recalled his complaint last week about pests damaging his family's tea plantation.
As my fingertip brushed against a raised spot at the bottom of the tea canister, my heart raced so fast it felt like it would shatter my ribs—there lay a nail-sized locator, blinking with a faint red light. The sound of heavy rain pounding against the glass curtain wall startled me, causing my pen to pause. In the surveillance footage, I could see myself dozing off at my desk.
At that moment, the boundary between reality and illusion blurred; I couldn't tell if the sound of rain beside me came from reality or memory. That fateful rainy night had also been engulfed by such torrential downpours that suffocated the entire city.
As Zhang Yan passed by with a mug in hand, she suddenly leaned down and chuckled softly in my ear, " Gu has been wandering around the 17th floor lately?"
When her hair brushed against my neck, I caught a whiff of an almost imperceptible scent of gunpowder. At this hour, she should have known nothing about military projects unless...
I clutched my USB drive and dashed into the safety corridor, my footsteps echoing hollowly against the concrete steps. Rebirth isn't like reloading a game; every tiny change could trigger a butterfly effect.
The moment I pushed open the rooftop door, a fierce wind swept in with raindrops pelting down on me. The neon signs of the CBD blurred into distorted light spots through the rain curtain, perfectly overlapping with what I had seen on that fateful night when someone fell from a height.
Suddenly, someone pushed open the dark red emergency door; Zhou Minghao appeared at the stairwell holding an umbrella. A ginkgo leaf was stuck to his leather shoe—an indication of an ancient tree found only in military compounds.
In the shadow cast by the umbrella, something cold pressed against my lower back.
"Xiao Gu, what brings you here to enjoy the scenery?"
His voice mingled with the sound of the rain, slick and slippery like a serpent. I discreetly pressed the recording pen hidden behind my back, my fingertips brushing against a hard object in my shirt pocket—the miniature signal jammer I had pried from the gap of Zhang Yan's desk that morning.
The wind whipped up Black Umbrella in his hand, revealing a logo of a military-industrial company on the underside of the umbrella. This discovery sent a chill through my veins; it turned out that even before the Xing Huo Plan was initiated, the pieces on the chessboard had already been set in place. What I thought was a chance for rebirth might just be another carefully orchestrated hunt by unseen hands.
A sharp screech of brakes pierced through the rain curtain as three black sedans drove into the underground garage. The moment the front passenger window rolled down, I caught a glimpse of Zhang Yan in the back seat, cleaning a gun barrel. Her gaze, as she looked up, was reminiscent of someone observing a lab mouse—cold and detached, tinged with pity, evoking memories of the howling Wind Sound as I fell.
It dawned on me that rebirth was not a gift but rather manipulation from a higher dimension. I pulled out the Laser Pointer hidden in my sleeve and directed it at the surveillance camera across the street, signaling in Morse Code. Since everyone had come with their scripts in hand, I might as well turn this cycle of death into a mirror to reveal their true selves—at least before being torn apart, I wanted to see the fangs hidden beneath every false mask.
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