The transition wasn't a fade this time. It was a seizure.
Lightning-bolt pain lanced through Tiehan's frontal lobe, a white-hot spike of pure data being forced into his skull. The bus, Old Zhou's sorrowful face, the sound of rain—all were ripped away, replaced by a screaming torrent of sensation, emotion, and image that wasn't his own.
Silk, rough against my cheek.
The cloying sweetness of lilies, too many lilies.
A heartbeat, not mine, frantic as a bird's against a cage.
A man's laugh, low and warm, turning sharp at the edge.
Cold metal. A key. My key. He promised.
Lin Weiwei's memories. They weren't being shown to him. They were being installed.
[System Preparation: Memory Scaffolding Active.]
[Subject: Lin Weiwei (Deceased). Memory Node: 'The Wedding Day.']
[Constructing Avatar Link… Stabilizing Emotional Filters…]
[Warning: Memory is S-Category: Traumatic Cluster. Coherency 41%. Contamination risk: High.]
[Objective: Locate Memory Anomaly. Identify Cause of Death.]
[Failure Penalty: Neural Feedback. Psychological Assimilation.]
The words scrolled past his internal vision, clinical and horrific. Psychological Assimilation. Was that the System's polite term for going insane, for becoming a permanent part of Lin Weiwei's broken psyche?
The flood of foreign experience began to sort itself, not into a scene, but into layers. He could feel his own mind—the baseline of Chen Tiehan, the faded cop instincts, the cold fear of the maze—as a thin film on top of a deep, churning ocean of another woman's life. Her hopes were his hopes. Her dread was a cold stone in his stomach.
He opened his eyes. He was no longer on the bus.
He was in a bridal suite, standing before a full-length mirror.
The reflection was not his own.
It was Lin Weiwei.
She was beautiful in a way that hurt to look at—delicate, with intelligent, anxious eyes currently wide with a fear she was trying desperately to suppress. Her hair was intricately styled, threaded with pearls. She wore a traditional qipao wedding dress of brilliant red silk, embroidered with gold phoenixes. A dress for a celebration. It felt like a shroud.
Tiehan tried to move his hand. The reflection's slender, trembling hand—adorned with a simple but elegant gold band—rose to touch her throat.
He was inside her. Not just observing. Piloting. This was "Memory Scaffolding." He was her avatar in this re-enactment. Her thoughts whispered at the periphery of his consciousness, a running, terrified commentary.
It's too quiet. Where is Auntie? She promised she'd be here to help.
The flowers… he changed the order. Why did he change the order? He knows I love peonies.
This necklace… it's too tight. It feels like a hand.
Tiehan (as Weiwei) turned from the mirror, the heavy silk of the dress whispering. The suite was opulent, hotel-luxurious, but sterile. Empty. A bouquet of white lilies—not the requested peonies—sat on a table, their scent overwhelming. A single envelope, ivory and thick, lay beside it.
Her/Their hand reached for it. The paper was expensive. Inside, a card in elegant script:
"To my beautiful dawn. Meet me in the old garden before the ceremony. I have your real gift. – Your Jian."
Jian. Xu Jian. The groom. The memory supplied his face: handsome, charming, with a smile that didn't always reach his eyes. A rising star in his family's import business. Weiwei's thoughts swirled with a dizzying mix of love, doubt, and a creeping, formless anxiety she'd been dismissing for months.
"Don't be foolish," she whispered to her reflection, her voice Lin Weiwei's, soft and melodic. "It's wedding nerves. Everyone has them."
But Tiehan, anchored within her, felt the lie. This wasn't nerves. This was the quiet, systematic dismantling of a person's certainty. The changed flowers. The absent family. The cryptic note. It was control. Isolation.
The door to the suite opened. Not Auntie, but a young, efficient-looking wedding planner with a headset. "Miss Lin? It's time. The car is ready to take you to the church garden. Mr. Xu's request."
Weiwei's heart did a painful somersault. He arranged the car too? Why not walk? It's just across the plaza…
"Of course," she heard herself say, the good, compliant fiancée. The part of Tiehan that was still a cop screamed. Red flag. Don't get in the isolated car.
But he had no agency. He was a passenger in her body, forced to walk the path of her memory. He could only watch, feel, and record.
The "old garden" was a walled private space behind the historic stone church, a place of gnarled plum trees and a moss-covered fountain. The car, a silent black sedan, dropped her/them at a side gate and slipped away.
It was quieter here. The muffled sounds of the gathering guests from the church felt miles away. The air was cool, damp.
Jian stood by the dry fountain, his back to her. He wore his traditional groom's dress, a dark changshan, looking every bit the perfect picture. When he turned, his smile was brilliant, practiced.
"My love. You look… breathtaking." He stepped forward, took her hands. His were warm, dry. Too dry. "Nervous?"
"A little," Weiwei/Tiehan admitted.
"Don't be. Everything is perfect." Jian's eyes scanned her face, her dress, with a possessiveness that made her skin prickle. "Today, you become a Xu. Everything will be taken care of. You'll want for nothing."
The words were a promise. They felt like a sentence.
"You said you had a gift?" she prompted, wanting to break the intensity of his gaze.
His smile widened. "Ah, yes. The final piece." He reached into his sleeve and produced not a jewelry box, but a long, old-fashioned skeleton key. It was tarnished silver, intricately carved with patterns that looked less decorative and more like circuitry or runes. It hummed with a faint, almost sub-audible vibration.
"This," he said, placing it in her palm. It was shockingly cold. "Is the key to your new life. To our future vault. Where all our most precious things will be kept." He closed her fingers around it. "Keep it safe. Always. No one else must ever have it."
Weiwei's thoughts were a confused whirl. A key? Not a necklace? A vault? What vault? He never mentioned…
But Tiehan's consciousness, detached from her emotions, went icy cold. He'd seen that key. In the memory-fragment preview on the bus. Lying in a pool of blood.
This was the catalyst.
"Jian, I… I don't understand," Weiwei stammered.
Before he could answer, a side door to the garden creaked open. A man stepped out. He wasn't a guest. He wore a simple worker's jacket, but his posture was all wrong—too alert, too still. His face was utterly, unnervingly blank. No features. Just smooth skin.
Weiwei gasped, taking a step back. Jian's grip on her hand tightened, vice-like.
The blank-faced man didn't speak. He simply raised an arm, pointing at the key in Weiwei's fist.
"It seems," Jian said, his voice dropping its charming pretense, turning smooth and cold as the key itself, "there's been a small change of plans. Give him the key, Weiwei."
The world seemed to tilt. "What? Who is he? Jian, what's happening?"
"The key," Jian repeated, his eyes now flat, businesslike. "It doesn't belong to you. It never did. You were just the… most convenient carrier."
Betrayal. It washed through Weiwei, and through Tiehan, a tsunami of nausea and horror. The wedding, the romance, it was all a set-up. A complex, cruel delivery mechanism.
"You… used me?" The words were a shattered whisper.
"Don't be dramatic," Jian sighed, as if she were a child not understanding a simple math problem. "It's business. A transaction. Now, the key. Or this becomes unpleasant."
The blank-faced man took a step forward.
Weiwei's survival instinct, honed by a life that was softer than Tiehan's but just as real, finally kicked in. She spun, the heavy red dress tangling around her legs, and ran for the garden gate.
"Stop her," Jian's voice ordered, no longer warm, no longer anything.
She didn't get far.
A hand—not the blank-faced man's, but another's, from the shadows of the plum trees—clamped over her mouth from behind, smelling of chemicals and leather. Another arm locked around her waist, lifting her off her feet.
She struggled, silently, desperately. The key, clutched so tightly its edges bit into her palm.
Through her terror, Tiehan saw it—the garden bled at the edges. Reality glitched. For a fraction of a second, the picturesque garden was overlaid with a different scene: a sterile, white room. Metal tables. The blank-faced men weren't just thugs; they wore lab coats over their clothes. And Jian, standing apart, was talking to someone reflected in a one-way mirror—a man with the weary, intelligent eyes of a researcher.
Zhang Qiming.
The vision vanished, replaced by the garden, the struggle.
The man holding her—his face was also featureless—dragged her towards the fountain. Jian approached, his hand outstretched. "The key, Weiwei. Don't make this ugly on our wedding day."
With a final, furious surge of will, Weiwei did the only thing she could. She hurled the key. Not at him. Over his head, towards the church's stained-glass window.
It clattered against the stone wall and fell into a dense bed of ferns near the garden wall.
Jian's face contorted in rage. "Foolish girl!"
He backhanded her across the face. The world exploded in white pain. Tiehan felt it as his own. The metallic taste of blood filled her/their mouth.
"Find it," Jian snarled to the blank-faced men. He then looked down at Weiwei, his eyes devoid of any humanity. "As for you… the transaction is void. Clean-up protocol."
He nodded to the man holding her.
Something sharp and cold pricked the side of her neck.
Not a knife.
A needle.
Weiwei's struggles weakened instantly. A wave of paralyzing cold spread from the injection site, locking her muscles, silencing her screams. Her vision tunneled. The last thing she saw was Jian turning away, already barking orders about searching the ferns, and the blank, indifferent faces of her killers leaning over her.
The last thing she felt was the cold seeping into her heart.
The last thing Tiehan understood was that this wasn't just a murder.
It was a liquidation.
An experiment concluded.
The memory didn't end with her death. It fractured.
Tiehan was thrown from Weiwei's dying body, his consciousness rebounding like a snapped rubber band. He was an observer again, hovering above the garden scene, but it was breaking apart into jagged shards.
Shard 1: The blank-faced men retrieving the silver key from the ferns, placing it in a sealed case.
Shard 2: Jian, on a phone, saying, "Asset terminated. Package recovered. Minimal complication."
Shard 3: Weiwei's body, in its brilliant red qipao, being wrapped in a grey tarp by the featureless men, the wedding dress becoming a bloody shroud.
Shard 4: The same two dark-coated figures from Zhou's crash site, materializing at the edge of the garden. One pointed a device. A green beam lanced out, latching onto a faint, shimmering shape rising from Weiwei's body—her confused, terrified soul. Harvested.
Shard 5: A glimpse of the sterile white room. Zhang Qiming, his father, watching a monitor displaying the garden feed. He looked… dissatisfied. Not horrified. Disappointed. He made a note.
The memory world collapsed into a howling vortex of Weiwei's final emotions: betrayal, terror, and a profound, unanswered why.
[Memory Scaffolding Complete.]
[Subject: Lin Weiwei. Cause of Death: Neural Toxin Injection (Targeted). Motive: Asset Recovery / Containment Breach Prevention.]
[Traumatic Memory Cluster Archived. Emotional Contamination: 18%. Purge Recommended.]
[Primary Objective Updated: Investigate 'Project Mnemosyne.' Identify 'Harvesters.']
[Returning to Primary Transport…]
The vertigo was worse than any physical blow. Tiehan retched, but there was nothing in his stomach. He found himself back in seat 3B of the midnight bus, his body trembling violently, cold sweat soaking through the cheap fabric of his shirt.
He could still feel the phantom silk of the dress on his skin. The taste of blood in his mouth. The cold of the key. The colder sting of the needle.
It was several minutes before he could breathe normally. Before the panic attack, half his, half Weiwei's, subsided.
He looked around. The bus was unchanged. Old Zhou drove on, a monument to grief. The faceless passengers sat in their silent rows.
But something was different.
In the seat beside him, 3A, where before there had been only a blur, a small, shimmering object now rested on the empty fabric.
A memory-bubble. But unlike the others he'd seen—the pale, gray ones—this one was deep, pulsating crimson. The color of the wedding dress. The color of blood.
It hovered, fragile and shining, containing the entire shattered nightmare of Lin Weiwei.
And within its blood-red surface, he could see a faint, faint reflection. Not Weiwei's face.
His own.
Staring back, haunted, with knowledge that felt like a terminal disease.
The System's bland notification hung in the air:
[New Memory Available for Integration: 'The Bloody Wedding' (S-Class). Integration may provide Key Intelligence. Risk: High.]
It was another choice. Another hook. Dive into the traumatic heart of a murdered woman's memory, risk his own sanity, for clues.
He looked at the crimson bubble. He looked at his shaking hands.
The bus's interior lights flickered once, twice, as if in invitation.
The maze wasn't just showing him deaths.
It was offering him their ghosts as weapons.
The question wasn't whether he would take them.
Was how many he could carry before he drowned in red.