Three days after the hospital visit, Lu Chenyuan woke to find that autumn had finally broken. A cold wind was blowing down from the northern mountains, rattling the loose window frame and carrying the smell of charcoal smoke and wet leaves. He pulled his thin coat tighter around his shoulders and made his way down to the dining area, where the thermos of hot water was already half empty and the other residents were huddled over their cups like survivors of some quiet disaster.
He had not slept well. Ji Minghao's words had lodged in his mind like splinters, working their way deeper every time he tried to pull them out. The secret trial had not been about his altered character. It had been about protecting the entire edifice of the Xindu Tribunal, preserving the legacy of a historic reckoning by sacrificing a single insignificant life. His life. The mathematics of it were almost elegant in their brutality.
He poured himself a cup of tea and sat at his usual corner table, watching the morning light crawl across the linoleum floor. Shen Wei had called the previous evening to say that she had secured another research visit to the Nanshan warehouse, this time for the following week. But waiting felt impossible now. Every day that passed was a day stolen from the diminishing store of days he had left.
He thought about the fourth man. The name Ji Minghao had spoken: Fang Zhiyuan.
The collaborator interrogator who had provided the false testimony that corroborated the prosecution's narrative. Fang had been the linchpin, the external voice that had given credibility to the internal accusations. Without his testimony, the case against Lu Chenyuan would have been merely circumstantial—a misplaced document, a cryptic note, the word of men who had reason to lie. Fang Zhiyuan had made it real.
And now, according to the fragmented information Lu Chenyuan had gathered over the years, Fang Zhiyuan was still alive. A retired professor of criminology, living in a comfortable apartment near the university district, respected and honored for his contributions to the field of forensic psychology.
Lu Chenyuan finished his tea and made a decision.
——
The Longyuan University campus occupied a sprawling plot of land in the northern part of the city, a mix of old brick buildings and new glass structures connected by tree-lined walkways. The criminology department was housed in a modernist building near the law school, its lobby decorated with photographs of distinguished faculty and display cases filled with academic publications.
Lu Chenyuan had called ahead, using the hostel phone and a voice that he had practiced until it sounded casual and unhurried. He had identified himself as a freelance researcher compiling an oral history of the post-war tribunals, a project funded by a private historical foundation. The department secretary had been polite but skeptical, transferring his call to Professor Fang's personal assistant. After a brief negotiation, he had been granted a thirty-minute appointment at three o'clock that afternoon.
He arrived early and sat on a bench outside the building, watching the students hurry past with their backpacks and their bright, unworried faces. They were the same age he had been when his life had ended. Twenty-eight. Old enough to believe they understood the world, young enough to be wrong about everything.
At precisely three o'clock, he entered the building and took the elevator to the fourth floor. Professor Fang's office was at the end of a quiet corridor, its door marked with a brass nameplate: "Professor Fang Zhiyuan, Department of Criminology."
He knocked, and a voice called for him to enter.
The office was large and well-appointed, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a mahogany desk, and a window that overlooked the campus quadrangle. Professor Fang Zhiyuan sat behind the desk, a man in his early seventies with white hair, gold-rimmed glasses, and the carefully composed expression of someone who had spent decades cultivating an image of scholarly detachment.
He did not recognize Lu Chenyuan. Of course he didn't. Forty years had passed, and the young prosecutor who had once sat across from him in an interrogation room had been replaced by a gaunt old man with cracked spectacles and a stooped posture.
"Please, sit down," Fang Zhiyuan said, gesturing to a leather chair facing the desk. "My assistant said you're working on an oral history of the tribunals. That's a fascinating subject. There hasn't been enough scholarly attention paid to the legal frameworks that were developed during that period."
Lu Chenyuan sat. The chair was soft and enveloping, the kind of chair designed to put visitors at ease. He did not feel at ease.
"I'm particularly interested in the Xindu trials," he said. "The 1956 proceedings."
"Of course. The major war crimes cases." Fang Zhiyuan nodded, his expression unchanging. "I was involved in those trials, though in a peripheral capacity. I served as a forensic consultant, providing psychological assessments of the defendants and verifying the reliability of witness testimony."
"I know," Lu Chenyuan said.
Something flickered in Fang Zhiyuan's eyes, a micro-expression that came and went before it could be named. "You seem well-informed. May I ask which historical foundation is funding your research?"
"It's a private foundation. I'm not at liberty to disclose the name." Lu Chenyuan reached into his coat and withdrew a small notebook and a pen. "I was hoping you could tell me about your work on the Takeda Jun case. That was one of the most significant prosecutions, wasn't it?"
Fang Zhiyuan leaned back in his chair, his posture relaxing slightly. "Yes, Takeda Jun. A complex case. The defendant was a senior officer who had overseen operations in the occupied territories. The evidence against him was substantial, but there were challenges. Witness memories were inconsistent. Documents had been lost or destroyed during the war. My role was to help the tribunal assess the credibility of the testimony and ensure that the proceedings met the highest standards of judicial rigor."
"Highest standards," Lu Chenyuan repeated. "That's interesting."
"I'm sorry?"
"Because there are records that suggest otherwise."
Fang Zhiyuan's face did not change, but his hands, resting on the desk, went very still. "What kind of records?"
Lu Chenyuan opened his notebook, though he did not need to consult it. The words were burned into his memory. "Records of illegal interrogations. Enhanced techniques, as they were called at the time. Systematic coercion of defendants and witnesses. Methods that would have invalidated the entire trial if they had been exposed."
"Those are serious allegations," Fang Zhiyuan said. His voice was calm, but there was a tension beneath the calm, a wire drawn tight. "Do you have evidence to support them?"
"I've seen the memorandum. The one that Zuo Kun and Wei Zhengxian compiled. File 4-C, I believe it's called." Lu Chenyuan watched Fang Zhiyuan's face carefully as he spoke. "It documents the interrogation methods that were used against Takeda Jun and other defendants. Methods that you would have been in a position to observe. Or participate in."
The color drained from Fang Zhiyuan's face. It was not guilt, or at least not only guilt. It was recognition. The recognition of a man who had spent forty years believing that a particular door was locked, only to hear a key turning in the latch.
"Who are you?" he asked quietly.
"My name is Lu Chenyuan."
The silence that followed was absolute. Fang Zhiyuan stared at him, and Lu Chenyuan could see the calculations racing behind the old professor's eyes. The name was a ghost, a revenant from a past that should have been dead and buried. But the ghost was sitting in his office, in his leather chair, looking at him with eyes that had seen forty years of prison walls.
"You're supposed to be dead," Fang Zhiyuan whispered.
"I was supposed to be a lot of things." Lu Chenyuan closed his notebook. "I was supposed to be a traitor. A spy. A compromised element. That's what your testimony said, wasn't it? That I had approached you with an offer to sell classified documents. That I was working for foreign interests."
Fang Zhiyuan said nothing. His hands were trembling now, a fine tremor that he tried to hide by pressing them flat against the desk.
"It wasn't true," Lu Chenyuan said. "None of it was true. You knew that then, and you know it now. You lied under oath to protect a conspiracy that had nothing to do with national security and everything to do with covering up torture."
"It wasn't that simple." Fang Zhiyuan's voice was barely audible. "You don't understand the pressure we were under. The entire tribunal was at risk. If the interrogation methods had come out, every conviction would have been challenged. Every war criminal would have walked free. The political consequences would have been catastrophic."
"So you sacrificed me instead."
"It wasn't personal. It was a calculation. The needs of the many—"
"Don't." Lu Chenyuan's voice sharpened, cutting through the professorial calm. "Don't quote philosophy at me. I've had forty years to think about the ethics of what was done. I don't need a lecture from the man who lied to put me in a cell."
Fang Zhiyuan flinched. For a moment, the mask slipped, and Lu Chenyuan saw the man beneath the professor: old, frightened, hollowed out by decades of living with what he had done.
"What do you want?" Fang Zhiyuan asked. "Money? An apology? Revenge?"
"I want the truth. All of it. Not the version you told the tribunal. Not the version you've been telling yourself for forty years. The real truth. Who gave the order to use illegal interrogations? Who decided that I would be the scapegoat? And who else was involved?"
Fang Zhiyuan closed his eyes. His breathing was shallow, and his face had taken on a grayish pallor. When he spoke again, his voice was steady, but it was the steadiness of a man who had reached the end of a long pretense.
"There was a meeting," he said. "In late July of 1956. After the verdicts had been handed down but before the tribunal was formally dissolved. Zuo Kun called it. Ji Minghao was there. Wei Zhengxian. And a few others from the security apparatus. They had learned that one of the defense attorneys, a man named Ma Zhicheng, was preparing to file an appeal that would expose the interrogation methods. Ma had obtained copies of the original interrogation logs, the ones that documented the techniques that had been used."
"Ma Zhicheng," Lu Chenyuan repeated. "I don't know that name."
"He was a minor figure. A court-appointed defense counsel assigned to one of the lower-ranking defendants. He wasn't supposed to have access to the original logs, but someone in the records office had given them to him by mistake. When Zuo Kun found out, he panicked. The entire case against Takeda Jun and the other defendants was built on those interrogations. If the methods were exposed, the convictions would collapse."
"So they decided to eliminate the threat."
"Not Ma Zhicheng. He was neutralized in other ways. Sent to a labor camp on a separate charge. But the threat didn't end with him. There were others who knew about the interrogations. Translators, clerks, junior prosecutors. Anyone who had seen the original logs was a potential leak."
"And I was one of them."
"Yes. You had access to all the documentary evidence. You had reviewed the interrogation transcripts. And you had made that alteration—changing a single character in the translation. That gave them the pretext they needed. If you could be framed as a spy, no one would believe anything you said about the interrogations. You would be discredited, and the secret would be safe."
Lu Chenyuan sat motionless. The pieces were falling into place now, clicking together with terrible precision. The altered character had not been the cause of his destruction; it had been the opportunity. He had been marked for sacrifice long before he ever picked up his pen.
"And your role?" he asked. "Why did you agree to lie?"
Fang Zhiyuan opened his eyes. There were tears in them, though whether they were tears of shame or self-pity, Lu Chenyuan could not tell.
"I was vulnerable," Fang Zhiyuan said. "During the war, before I became a forensic consultant, I had worked as an interrogator for the collaborationist administration. I had done things that could have been used against me. Wei Zhengxian knew about my past. He told me that if I cooperated, my record would be expunged. If I refused, I would be prosecuted alongside you."
"So you chose to save yourself."
"Yes. I chose to save myself. I told myself it was the right decision, that one man's sacrifice was better than the collapse of an entire tribunal. I told myself that you would be imprisoned for a few years, that eventually the truth would come out and you would be rehabilitated. I told myself a lot of things." He looked down at his hands. "None of them were true."
The office was very quiet. Outside the window, the afternoon light was fading, casting long shadows across the quadrangle. A group of students walked past, laughing at something, their voices bright and distant.
Lu Chenyuan stood up. His joints ached from sitting too long, and his head was pounding with the accumulated weight of revelation. But there was one more question he needed to ask.
"Ma Zhicheng," he said. "The defense attorney who was sent to the labor camp. Is he still alive?"
Fang Zhiyuan looked up, surprised by the question. "I don't know. It's been decades. I heard rumors that he was released in the amnesties of the late 1970s, but I never confirmed it. He would be very old now, if he's still alive. Older than me."
"Where was he sent?"
"To the camps in Nanfeng Province. The northern mountains. It was a hard sentence for a minor charge. He wasn't supposed to survive." Fang Zhiyuan paused. "If he's still alive, he would know everything. He had the original interrogation logs. He was the one who tried to expose them."
Lu Chenyuan walked to the door. His hand was on the handle when Fang Zhiyuan spoke again.
"Mr. Lu." The old professor's voice was strained. "For what it's worth—I'm sorry. I've been sorry for forty years. Not that it matters."
Lu Chenyuan did not turn around. "No," he said. "It doesn't matter."
He opened the door and walked out of the office, leaving Fang Zhiyuan alone with his bookshelves and his honors and the ghosts that would never stop haunting him.
——
Shen Wei was waiting for him at a café near the university, a small place with steamed windows and the smell of fresh coffee. She had ordered two cups, and she pushed one toward him as he sat down, his face drawn and pale.
"You were in there for two hours," she said. "I was starting to worry."
"He talked."
"Everything?"
"Enough." Lu Chenyuan wrapped his hands around the coffee cup, letting the warmth seep into his fingers. "The conspiracy wasn't about my altered character. It was about covering up the systematic use of illegal interrogations during the Xindu Trials. My alteration was just the pretext they used to discredit me."
Shen Wei's eyes widened. "Illegal interrogations? The whole trial was built on coerced testimony?"
"Parts of it. The prosecution team, led by Zuo Kun, used enhanced techniques against several defendants. Wei Zhengxian documented everything. File 4-C is the record of those interrogations."
"And when they realized the documentation might be exposed, they needed someone to take the blame."
"Yes." Lu Chenyuan took a sip of the coffee, but it was bitter and did nothing to warm the coldness inside him. "There was a defense attorney named Ma Zhicheng who obtained the original interrogation logs and planned to file an appeal. They sent him to a labor camp in Nanfeng Province. And they framed me to make sure no one would listen to anything I said about what I had seen."
"Ma Zhicheng." Shen Wei pulled out her notebook, already flipping through pages. "Do you know when he was arrested? What camp he was sent to?"
"Fang Zhiyuan didn't know the details. He said the camps were in Nanfeng Province, in the northern mountains. Ma would be in his late eighties now, if he survived."
Shen Wei was writing rapidly. "I can search the prison records. If he was released in the amnesties, there should be documentation. It might take a few days, but I can find him."
Lu Chenyuan looked at her. She was young, ambitious, and already in too deep. Helping him was a risk that could destroy her career, her future, everything she had worked for. He should tell her to stop, to walk away while she still could.
But he didn't. He needed her.
"Find him," he said. "If Ma Zhicheng is still alive, he has the original interrogation logs. The ones that prove what Zuo Kun and Wei Zhengxian did. That's the evidence I need."
"And if he's dead?"
"Then I'll find another way. There's always another way."
——
That night, alone in his room at the Peaceful Rest Hostel, Lu Chenyuan wrote until his hand cramped. Page after page, filling the notebook with everything Fang Zhiyuan had told him. The meeting in late July. The panic when the defense attorney obtained the original logs. The cold calculation that had selected him as the sacrificial lamb.
He wrote about the fourth man, too. Fang Zhiyuan had been a tool, a coerced collaborator. The real architects were Zuo Kun and Wei Zhengxian, with Ji Minghao as their willing accomplice. But there were others, Fang Zhiyuan had said. Clerks, translators, junior staff who had been silenced or discredited or simply terrified into compliance. The conspiracy was not a single act of malice. It was a web, stretching across decades and institutions, binding everyone who had touched the secret.
Lu Chenyuan closed the notebook and looked at the photograph Shen Wei had printed from her digital camera. The cardboard box in the Nanshan warehouse, with its faded label: "CRRO: Sensitive Case Files, 1956-1963."
Somewhere in that box was File 4-C. The original documentation of the illegal interrogations. The proof that the Xindu Trials had been built on a foundation of torture and lies. And somewhere in the mountains of Nanfeng Province, if he was still alive, Ma Zhicheng was waiting to be found.
The rain had stopped. Through the window, Lu Chenyuan could see the sky clearing, a few stars visible through the veil of clouds. He had spent forty years in darkness, and now, for the first time, he could see the faint outlines of the truth.
It was not a comforting sight. But it was enough.
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