Chapter 124: Photo Truth·1953 Conspiracy

The match's light flared for just an instant before Zhao Jianguo snuffed it out. Outside the hole in the roof there was nothing; the mechanical arm seemed to have been scared off, or perhaps it had never existed at all. But he knew what he had just seen was real—not a hallucination, nor a mouse knocking over a tile.

He crouched beside the lectern, still holding the wrench. Jia Dongxu stood at the doorway, panting, his lips pale.

"Don't just stand there foolishly," Zhao Jianguo said quietly. "Help Chen Jianguo onto the west room's kang, then bring a thick blanket."

"What about you?"

"I need to find out who's watching us."

Jia Dongxu didn't ask further, turned and left. Zhao Jianguo took the terminal from his tool kit; the black box's surface was slightly warm, as if it had just finished a long-distance current. He touched the back of his neck, which felt a little numb, as if a fine needle were lightly pricking it.

He reconnected the metal sheet, winding the copper wire a few turns and fixing it to the coil interface. The electromagnetic field from last night's activation still lingered in the gaps between the blue bricks; his fingertip felt a slight tingling when he touched it. He pressed the switch, and the blue light climbed up again, steadier than before, as if it had found a familiar path.

The screen flickered a few times, and a line of text appeared: 【Cache log released】.

Zhao Jianguo let out a breath of relief and quickly called up the old photo from the camphor wood box. The system automatically recognized the image and began enhancing it frame by frame. The picture gradually grew clearer: Jia Wu stood at the factory gate, beside him a man in dark work clothes, his sleeve rolled up to reveal half of a pattern embroidered in silver thread.

He zoomed in, then zoomed in again.

It was a badge, its lines simple yet so familiar that his heart sank—almost identical to the emblem at the bottom of his own system interface, lying still on the agent's cuff.

"Spacetime Management Bureau..." he murmured, the sound low enough to startle himself.

That name shouldn't exist. His system had never mentioned it, nor said where he came from. Yet now, the emblem not only appeared in a photo from sixty years ago, but was exactly the same as what he saw every day when he opened his eyes.

He jerked his head up toward the west room. Chen Jianguo was still there, wrapped in a cotton jacket, coughing intermittently. Zhao Jianguo rose and walked over, pushing open the door.

"Have you seen this?" he said, handing over the terminal.

Chen Jianguo narrowed his eyes for a few seconds, then gave a sudden chuckle: "I've said... they altered the system."

"Who altered it?"

"Not a person." He coughed twice. "The system itself did it. Someone tampered with it, hiding the source. You think you were chosen? No, you were marked."

Zhao Jianguo said nothing, his mind a tangled mess. If the system wasn't there to help him but to monitor him... then were all his actions—checking in, studying, lecturing, repairing machinery—being recorded?

He returned to the central courtyard, saved a screenshot of the photo, then opened the handwriting comparison function. He pulled up the scanned copy of Yi Zhonghai's confession and placed it alongside the 1953 meeting minutes from the night school's archives. The two signatures overlapped gradually, and the system prompted: 【Similarity 98.6%】.

"Really the same person wrote it." he muttered.

At that moment, He Yushui pushed the door open, carrying a stack of old documents.

"I found what you were looking for." She set the documents on the table. "They were tucked behind the third volume of the Safety Operating Procedures; if I hadn't looked carefully, I wouldn't have seen them."

Zhao Jianguo opened it, and a yellowed page came into view:

【April 7, 1953, Steel Rolling Factory Technical Section Meeting Room

Attendees: Jia Wu (factory technician), Shanghai-dispatched technical advisor (codename "Mr. Lin")

Topic: Future technology risk assessment

Note: The discussion lasted three hours; the content is confidential and not to be disclosed.

"Future technology risk assessment?" Zhao Jianguo scoffed. "They were discussing the 'future' sixty years ago?"

He Yushui nodded. "And look at the time—that afternoon, Jia Wu suffered a workplace injury, his right hand crushed by a press. Yet this record says the meeting ran from ten in the morning to one in the afternoon. In other words, he met this person before the injury."

Zhao Jianguo tapped his fingers on the tabletop: "So it wasn't an accident. He was dealt with because he knew something."

The two fell silent for a moment. Outside, the wind died down, the banners stopped flapping, and the whole siheyuan grew so quiet that the sound of water dripping from the eaves could be heard.

Zhao Jianguo was about to speak when suddenly he heard crying from inside the house.

It was the twins.

He hurried into the main hall; Su Qing was already awake, gently patting the babies' backs as she held them.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"I don't know; they were sleeping fine, then suddenly started crying together." Su Qing frowned. "They've never done that before."

Zhao Jianguo approached the crib; the two babies turned their heads simultaneously, stared at him, and mumbled, "Daddy…behind…there's light…"

He startled, immediately took off his coat, and had Su Qing check his back for any abnormality. There was none.

But he still took out the system terminal, switched to thermal imaging mode. The screen flashed, and a faint blue halo appeared around his spine, its frequency steady, exactly matching the signal emitted by the mechanical arm the previous night.

"They're using me as a beacon," he said softly.

"What?"

"Don't ask." He quickly shut off the terminal, unplugged all the cables, and said, "Hide this thing."

He walked to the cradle, lifted the soft cloth, and slipped the terminal into the interlayer. This was the area the system had marked as a dense zone of emotional fluctuations, where, theoretically, remote detection would fail.

"Are you still going to investigate?" He Yushui followed in, her voice kept low.

"We must." He said, "Now it's not just me being watched; the children are starting to sense it too. They don't fear our resistance—they fear that we don't realize we're being manipulated."

"But how can we investigate? The system can't be used, and the files are only these fragmented pages."

Zhao Jianguo thought for a moment, then suddenly asked: "Do you remember whether any outsiders came to the factory the day Jia Wu got hurt? Someone especially well‑dressed?"

"I wasn't there, but my mother mentioned it," He Yushui recalled. "They said there was a man wearing glasses who stayed in the office and didn't come out, then a car picked him up; its license plate began with Hu."

"Shanghai technical advisor..." Zhao Jianguo repeated. "They weren't ad‑hoc; they'd been arranged in advance."

He sat down, his thoughts racing. If this organization had been active sixty years ago, then their target was never a particular worker but a kind of 'existence' itself. And he—a sudden arrival who understood technology, could give lectures, and could fix all sorts of machinery—clearly did not fit the logic of that era.

So he had been marked. From the moment he crossed over, he had been labeled an 'anomaly'.

"What they want to erase isn't me," he lifted his head, "but the traces of my having been here. If no one remembers what I did, then it's as if I never came."

No sooner had he spoken than the terminal vibrated once inside its interlayer.

Zhao Jianguo reached in, pulled it out; the screen lit up on its own, and a new message popped up:

【Check-in Successful】

【Reward: Surveillance footage fragment from the Steel Rolling Factory on April 7, 1953】

He froze. This wasn't a manual check‑in; the system had triggered it automatically.

"Looks like it still has a bit of its own temperament," he said with a wry smile.

The video was brief, only a dozen or so seconds. In the black‑and‑white footage, a man in gray work clothes walked through the factory gate, his profile flashing past. Zhao Jianguo paused, then zoomed in.

On that person's left wrist, he wore a watch, the edge of the strap embroidered with an extremely fine silver wire pattern—exactly the same as in the photo.

He was about to continue his analysis when he suddenly heard a dull thud coming from the west room.

It was Chen Jianguo sliding off the kang, kneeling on the floor with his hands braced against the boards, muttering incessantly: "Don't trust the interface… don't trust the interface… they've changed the login entrance…"

Zhao Jianguo rushed over and helped him up, discovering his forehead was ice-cold and his lips were purplish.

"Speak clearly—what do you mean by changed the entrance?"

Chen Jianguo lifted his gaze, his eyes unfocused: "Your system… isn't the original. The genuine sign-in interface… should have a red border… what you're using now is a camouflage layer…"

Having said that, he tilted his head and passed out.

Zhao Jianguo stood where he was, his heart pounding. If even the connection system is fake, then everything he's relied on these years—could it all be deceiving him?

He slowly walked back to the central courtyard, spreading all the clues on the table: photos, meeting minutes, thermal images, video screenshots. They lay scattered like puzzle pieces, but a piece was missing in the middle.

That missing piece should be hidden on some day in 1953 inside a file box that nobody dares to open.

He lifted his head to look at the sky; dawn was approaching, a dull gray. The twins were still crying, and Su Qing paced back and forth in the room holding them.

He walked over and took one of the children into his arms. The little one pressed against his chest, suddenly grew quiet, his tiny hand gripping his collar, eyes fixed unblinkingly on what lay behind him.

Zhao Jianguo slowly turned his head.

The empty room held nothing.

But the child's finger kept pointing in that direction.