The Traces Are Disappearing

Lin Shen thought the war began the day he got his hands on the diary. But the real start was the next morning—when he opened the diary and saw that every single word she had written had turned blank. Only then did he realize: the Correctors weren't chasing him. They were counting down.

Lin Shen was on the subway when he called Jiang Fei at 10:43 p.m. The signal cut out three times in the tunnel, and each time it reconnected, he heard Jiang Fei start with the same word—"Hello"—then listen to him say a sentence, before replying with one of her own. The last call ended just before the train pulled into the station.

"Tomorrow morning I'll bring you the diary. We'll analyze it from the beginning—she might have written clues about the passage in there."

"Okay." Jiang Fei added one more sentence before hanging up, "Don't sleep too soundly."

That night, he got back to his apartment after eleven. Before entering, he stood at the door for about five seconds—took a deep breath—then inserted the key. The sound of the lock turning was the same as always. He pushed the door open, locked it from the inside, and shoved the sofa against the door as a barricade. He wasn't afraid of anything specific—he was afraid that if he fell asleep, he wouldn't have time to react.

He put the diary under his pillow, along with the Polaroid and the watercolor painting. He placed the pencil on the bedside table, its tip pointing toward the door. Then he lay down, crossed his hands over his chest, and stared at the ceiling.

He didn't know when he fell asleep.

The next morning at seven, sunlight streamed through the blinds, cutting a row of stripes across his face. The first thing he did upon waking was reach under the pillow—something hard was there, the diary was still there. He took it out and opened to the first page.

White.

Not blank paper. The paper itself hadn't changed, but every trace of Su Wan—the black ink pen, the blue ballpoint, the pencil sketches—was gone. The paper was impossibly clean, as if those words had never existed. He flipped to the second page, the third, the fourth—page after page, all the same. Nothing but blankness. Not even a single page survived.

He turned to the last page of the diary—a small section of the spine tape had been peeled back, revealing a gap between the fabric cover and the pages.

On the inside of the cover, five sets of coordinates were written.

It wasn't that the Correctors hadn't found them—it was that the Correctors' erasure mechanism only removed traces of Su Wan. The indentation of the pencil marks was hers, the writing was hers, the little sun was hers—but the lines on the inside of the cover weren't written by her. The handwriting wasn't Su Wan's—it was Xiao You's.

When Xiao You helped him keep the envelope, he might have written these coordinates on the backing paper, and after Su Wan received the envelope, she cut out the backing paper and pasted it inside the cover. The Correctors erased all of Su Wan's handwriting, but Xiao You's handwriting wasn't recognized.

Lin Shen stared at the five sets of coordinates—next to each one was a brief label. Next to the first set was written "hydropower station," next to the second was "entrance," and next to the third was an illegible symbol. He pulled out his phone and took photos of the coordinates.

Then he drove to Donghe Street.

The warehouse district looked completely different during the day than at night. Sunlight beat directly against the brick walls of the row of bungalows, exposing everything that had hidden in the cracks at night—moss along the base of the walls, weeds sprouting from cracks in the concrete slabs, two dents kicked into the aluminum door panel. He followed last night's route around to the back door of the third warehouse. The flowerpot was still there, tilted. He stepped around it and stood at the door, already mentally prepared.

The camphor chest was gone.

Not moved—the entire chest had vanished. On the wall where the chest had sat, there was now only clean dust, not even the rectangular impression the chest had left on the floor. As if nothing had ever been placed there.

He crouched down and pressed his palm against the floor. Gray concrete, very cold. His fingers traced the baseboard—no green oxide residue from the lock, no wood fragments, nothing related to the camphor chest at all. In less than twelve hours, the Correctors had replaced a thigh-high camphor chest with empty space.

He stood up and wiped his hands on the seams of his pants. He forced himself not to think about the chest—then pulled out his phone to call Jiang Fei.

The call went through. One ring. Then it dropped automatically.

He looked down at the screen—the name "Jiang Fei" was still in his contacts, but the profile picture had already turned into a default gray silhouette. He tapped on it. The phone number field read: "This number does not exist."

He flipped his phone over, then back. He dialed again—still automatically disconnected.

He tried to recall the address of Jiang Fei's apartment—that old apartment building in the west part of the city, seventh floor, unit 703. He remembered how to get there; his memory of running down that fire escape was still vivid. But he couldn't recall the building number anymore.

Not the kind of "I forgot the building number" kind of forgetting—it was the "I remember there was a building number, but that number has been replaced by a blank" kind of forgetting. He could see the blue doorplate on the unit door in his memory, but the number on the doorplate looked like it had been gouged out.

He sat in the car, placed his phone on the dashboard, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath.

Then he remembered that phone number—the one Jiang Fei had entered into his phone before they parted. He scrolled to his message list—the text messages were still there, the number was still there. He dialed.

Ring. Ring. Ring.

On the fifth ring, someone picked up.

"Who the hell is this." Jiang Fei's voice was hoarse, like she'd just woken up, or maybe like she'd been bitten.

"Lin Shen."

"—How can you still reach this number." She was silent on the other end for a moment; there was the sound of keyboard clacking, then the metallic noise of a backpack zipper being pulled. "My original number went dead ten minutes ago. Contacts, WeChat, email—all gone. They're moving fast this time. Is your diary still there?"

"The diary turned blank."

Jiang Fei cursed a short swear word, followed by a longer stream of them.

"The chest and the painting are gone too," Lin Shen said. His tone was calm, but his hand on the steering wheel had pressed a dent into the leather cover.

Jiang Fei didn't respond. The length and rhythm of her silence felt like she was calculating something.

"Listen," she finally spoke. "Where are you going now? Home or—"

"Home. I still have some things to check."

"Be careful."

Lin Shen drove back into his neighborhood and noticed something off about the parking spots in the open area downstairs. The white van that was usually parked next to the绿化带 had moved—from the west side to the east side, at the entrance to the fire lane, with its front facing outward. That van had been parked there for years without moving, bird droppings caked on its roof. As he drove into the garage, he glanced at the driver's seat—empty. No driver.

As he rode the elevator upstairs, he pulled up the photos he'd taken of Su Wan's diary on his phone. There were five sets of coordinates; he read them four times, memorizing the numbers by rote. He scrolled past a few work drawings taken earlier in the photo album, then came across last year's photos—the seaside. He was standing on the beach, with the deep blue sea behind him. He remembered Su Wan had taken this photo. He remembered saying "You tilted it" as she took it, and Su Wan said "No I didn't, you were standing crooked." He remembered this exact exchange.

But in the photo, there was only the ocean. No him. Not that he'd been cropped out—the spot where he'd been standing was now empty sand. The entire photo had turned into an empty landscape shot taken while he was playing at the beach.

He scrolled through a few more. The New Year's Eve countdown photo from last year—now just a bunch of strangers smiling at the camera. A photo from some firm's team-building event—there had been two rows of glasses on the table, now only one row remained. A photo of a cat at the convenience store downstairs—the cat was still there, but on the step where the cat had been crouching, there was now an empty space where a person should have been.

In every photo, Su Wan had been replaced by background. Not cropped out, not pixelated over—she had been identified by image recognition and removed, with the background automatically filled in. The ocean, the sand, the wine glasses, the steps—these backgrounds had been seamlessly extended into the pixels she had once occupied, as if by AI.

When he stepped out of the elevator, the hallway was silent. He walked to his front door, pulled out his keys—then stopped.

The door was unlocked. There were no scratch marks on the keyhole, but the latch bolt was retracted.

He gripped the pencil tightly and pushed the door open.

A man was sitting on the living room sofa.

The man was wearing a dark suit, with silver-gray hair, seated right in the center of the sofa. On the coffee table sat a cup of tea that hadn't been touched. He was sitting with his back to the light; sunlight filtered through the gaps in the blinds and shone on the back of his head, leaving his entire face in shadow.

"Mr. Lin Shen."

His voice was calm, neither too loud nor too soft, neither too fast nor too slow. Like a notarized document being read at a moderate speed.

"My name is Lu Yan."

Lin Shen stood at the door and didn't move forward. He left the door ajar behind him, not locking it.

Lu Yan extended a hand, pointing to the chair across from the coffee table. "Sit." He said the word without any change in intonation—not an invitation, nor a command.

Lin Shen did not sit.

Lu Yan withdrew his hand and folded both hands on his knees. Even from this darker angle, there was no expression on his face; the corners of his mouth stayed still, the muscles around his eyes relaxed.

"I'm here today with a proposal," he said.

Lin Shen looked at the cup of tea on the coffee table. The hot water had stopped steaming. A layer of fine condensation had formed on the cup's surface.

"I don't think my answer is going to be what you're expecting."

Lu Yan showed no reaction to this response. He continued speaking at his own pace: "You've been through a lot these past few days. Your worldview has been turned upside down. You got your hands on a diary, but now the diary has turned into blank pages. Your friend Jiang Fei—can you still get in touch with her?"

Lin Shen didn't answer.

"You can't reach her." Lu Yan answered for himself. "But that's not important. What's important is—you spent four days confirming one fact: there is a mechanism in this world that is actively erasing Su Wan. Today, I'm here to offer an answer to your obsession."

He lifted his hands from his knees. On the back of his right hand was an old burn scar, running from the tiger's mouth all the way to the second joint of his index finger. He placed that hand on the coffee table, next to the teacup.

"I can give you five million. Plus a complete memory treatment."

Lin Shen's hand remained on the door handle. "Memory treatment."

"To make you forget all of this. Forget Su Wan. Forget the Correctors. Forget why you haven't been going to work these past few days." Lu Yan's tone was no different from when he quoted an engineering estimate. "You'll go back to being an architectural designer. Your colleagues will find that you've suddenly returned to normal. Your doctor will tell you it's the effect of the medication. You'll sleep well through the next night, and when you wake up the next morning, you won't remember making any decision tonight at all."

Lin Shen lowered his hand from the door handle.

"What if I say no?"

The muscles on Lu Yan's face finally moved—the corners of his eyes tightened by half a millimeter, not a smile, but a barely perceptible wince of pain. "Then I will be very sorry."

He stood up. He was about five centimeters taller than Lin Shen.

"Open your phone and look at your photo album."

Lin Shen pulled out his phone and opened his photo album. Not only had Su Wan been removed from all the photos—the photos themselves were now disappearing. One after another, as if someone had poured a bottle of sodium hypochlorite into the album's root directory: the image began turning white from the edges, white like a gaping mouth, swallowing color inward from the borders.

He watched helplessly as the seaside photo turned into a field of pure white pixels. Then the New Year's Eve countdown turned pure white too. Team building, the cat, the convenience store—one by one they turned white. Even the last photo, the one of him standing alone by the steps—it also turned white.

"The Correctors aren't incapable of erasing your memory." Lu Yan walked up to Lin Shen, his throat moving slightly, as if swallowing something unsaid. "They simply don't want to. So far, every move they've made has had my approval. But I'm busy. I don't have time to keep signing off on you."

He reached out and slipped a folded white piece of paper into Lin Shen's shirt pocket. The thickness and texture of the paper felt like high-end hotel stationery.

"Tomorrow at three in the afternoon, come to my office. If you still give me the same answer then—"

He paused.

"We'll talk about it then."

Lu Yan walked past Lin Shen, pushed the door open, and stepped into the hallway. His footsteps echoed down the corridor for about eleven steps, then the elevator opened, and then closed. Lin Shen looked down through the gap in the blinds—a minute later, Lu Yan walked over to the flower bed downstairs. The side door of the white van slid open. He bent down and climbed in, the door closed, and the vehicle drove off.

Lin Shen locked the door.He walked back to the living room and sat down where Lu Yan had been sitting. The warmth of that person still lingered on the cushion of the sofa. The cup of tea on the coffee table had long gone cold, the surface perfectly still, reflecting the white fluorescent light overhead.

He took out the folded piece of paper from his pocket and opened it.

An address was written on it. Below the address were four characters, written in pen, in the exact same handwriting as the back of Jiang Fei's business card—heavy strokes, straight horizontal and vertical lines, but every vertical hook tilted slightly to the left.

"Don't bring anyone."

Lin Shen flipped the paper over. The back was blank.

He placed the paper on the coffee table, next to the cold tea. Then he took out his phone and sent Jiang Fei a text message:

"Lu Yan came. He wants to see me at three tomorrow afternoon."

Three seconds later, Jiang Fei replied.

"Go. I'll be waiting outside."

Lin Shen put the phone beside the paper. Outside the window, a garbage truck drove by, playing that electronic jingle that hadn't changed in twenty years. Sunlight cut through the narrow slits of the blinds into many parallel bright lines, casting onto the coffee table, the teacup, the white paper.

He raised the pencil and tapped it on the corner of the coffee table.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.