第 014 Ch.| The Same Second

Day 35, morning.

Li Kaichen slipped the magazine's commission letter into his ID holder, tucked beside his press card. With that one sheet of paper, the sentence he used to introduce himself when he called the families of the missing got half as long. "I'm a reporter commissioned by the magazine, working on a series about missing persons." The other person's guard would drop a notch. No one trusted him over a single sentence like that, but once the words "there's an organization behind this" landed, the other person would feel the matter hadn't been let go of yet.

Over the last two days he had re-called the families of that batch of Bannan Line missing persons from 008. He'd originally turned up 7 of them; 2 who had hung up on him before were willing to meet this time.

The first was the wife of the one near Houshanpi.

---

Houshanpi, the 5th floor of an apartment block. The missing man's surname was Guo, age 42, a freight driver, who had entered the station in the small hours of Day 9 and never come out.

Mrs. Guo opened the door. Li Kaichen froze for half a second — he'd expected to see the kind of face Ms. Lin had, thin, eye sockets deep, not sleeping. But Mrs. Guo's color was normal. She invited him in, poured tea, sat down.

"Actually," she said. "My husband came back."

Li Kaichen's hand stopped on his teacup.

"Last Wednesday," Mrs. Guo said. "The small hours. He opened the door and walked in himself, just like coming home from work any other day. I was scared out of my wits — I'd even filed with the police. He said he didn't know what everyone was so worked up about. He'd just gone to work."

"And where is he… now?"

"Gone to work, of course," Mrs. Guo said. "Same as before."

---

Li Kaichen set down the tea. He asked, in the flattest tone he could manage:

"Mrs. Guo, may I ask a strange question? After your husband came back, was there anywhere — anywhere that made you feel 'something's not quite right'?"

Mrs. Guo thought for a moment. Then she smiled.

"You ask it just like that volunteer did."

"Which volunteer?"

"From the Homecoming," Mrs. Guo said. "A Ms. Zou, very polite. While my husband was missing, she came by a few times, kept me company, brought food. She said a lot of the missing come back, that the ones who came back are the complete ones, that we families shouldn't be afraid, that we should 'welcome' them. The day my husband really did come back, I called her, and she was even happier than I was."

"Did she… ask you for anything?"

"She didn't ask for anything," Mrs. Guo said. "She only said that the old phone my husband used before he went missing, the old IDs and so on, if I didn't want to keep them, I could hand them to the Homecoming for 'safekeeping.' She said those were 'the old him,' and keeping them around would only make 'the new him' uneasy."

Li Kaichen didn't move. But the hand holding his pen paused for a beat, the nib hanging over the paper, not writing anything down.

---

He asked Mrs. Guo: "The day your husband came back, what time on Wednesday was it?"

"Three-something in the small hours, I think. I was woken by the sound of the door, looked at the clock — three-something, as I remember it."

"Would you mind showing me what he looked like those few days he came back? Did anything get caught on camera — at home, or downstairs?"

Mrs. Guo pulled up the building's front-door CCTV app — the kind the management committee gives residents to view. She scrolled to last Wednesday.

03:18. Mr. Guo walks in through the building's front door. His steps don't hesitate; the one glance at the camera is no more than a casual flick of the eyes, no different from any person coming home from work.

Li Kaichen stared at that timestamp for 3 seconds. 03:18.

He said nothing. He asked Mrs. Guo to send him a copy of that clip. She sent it.

---

That afternoon, Ye Wenjia came to his place.

She said she'd finished checking the block characters she could check on her end; the rest would have to wait until he gave her more material. But she sat down, saw the things spread out on his desk, and didn't leave.

Three stacks on the desk.

First stack, the 1998–2003 handwritten cards Brother Han had given him. Second stack, the missing-persons interview transcripts Li Kaichen had made himself over the last two years. Third stack, the newest — the people who had "come back" this week: Mr. Guo, and two others he'd tracked down by phone, all of whom said a relative had "come back last week."

"You're laying out a timeline again," Ye Wenjia said. She'd watched him lay out a photo wall in 012.

"It's not a timeline," Li Kaichen said. "I'm looking for something I still can't put into words. You work with artifacts — you can tell better than I can whether a batch of things matches up. Take a look at these three stacks for me."

Ye Wenjia put on her reading glasses and began to read the transcripts.

---

She read very slowly. When she reached the third one, she took a pencil and drew a line on each of three different transcripts.

"Li Kaichen," she said. "These three families of yours live in different districts, don't know each other, and you interviewed them separately. Right?"

"Right. Spread out over nearly two years."

"Then why—" She pointed the three lines out to him. "Did they describe 'the one who came back' using the same sentence?"

Li Kaichen leaned over.

Mrs. Guo: "He said he didn't know what everyone was so worked up about."
Another family (Zhonghe, interviewed last year): "He said he didn't get what we were so worked up about."
The third (Luzhou, early this year): "She said, what are we so worked up about."

Three people, none of whom knew each other, interviewed nearly two years apart, and his own mood on each interview day had been different too — yet the first sentence they each reported "the relative who came back" as saying had an identical skeleton. So worked up about.

---

"People do use similar phrases," Ye Wenjia said. "Coincidences happen. But look at this—"

She turned to another place she'd marked in the transcripts. All three "ones who came back" ate only plain rice with no dishes at their first meal; all of them asked "where's my old phone" on the 2nd day after coming back; all of them, when asked about some childhood event, "had to think a moment before they could answer."

"Real people aren't this consistent," she said. "When I work with artifacts, the way I judge whether a batch of things came out of the same workshop is exactly this. It's not how much they resemble the genuine article — it's that they resemble each other to a degree that isn't natural. Between genuine pieces there's individual variation. A batch of things that resemble each other so closely there's no individual variation at all — that's a single mould."

Li Kaichen wrote in his notebook:

The ones who came back: across families, across time, across districts, first sentence has the same skeleton ("worked up about"), same behavior (plain rice / asking for old phone / childhood needs thinking).
Ye Wenjia (artifacts): genuine pieces have individual variation; resembling each other to the point of no individual variation = a single mould.

---

But this was all still just words. What Li Kaichen wanted was something he could verify.

He dumped the CCTV clips of all three "ones who came back," along with the earlier material he had on hand, into a single folder and ordered them by timestamp. The moment Mr. Guo came home was 03:18; last year's Zhonghe front-door CCTV was 03:17; the Luzhou one was also 03:18.

Three different people, the moment each came home, all pressed into that one minute between 03:17 and 03:18.

He dug further down. He laid these three clips side by side with the timestamps from the motorcycle shop in 004 and the second platform in 010. All of them around 03:17.

"Do you remember that time window I told you about?" he said. "03:17. I'd always thought that was the time 'the rift appears.'"

"And now?"

"Now I think," he said slowly. "It's also their 'homecoming' schedule."

---

Li Kaichen turned, dragged over the taped-up box from Brother Han off the floor. He wanted to know one thing: whether these "ones who came back" were only in this round, or had already been there in Brother Han's 1998–2003 batch.

He went through them one card at a time. Most of the cards had only the missing-person details, no follow-up. At the thirty-somethingth card, he stopped.

That card's missing-person field bore a man's name, and after it, in Brother Han's hand, in blue ink, added later:

Came back. Vanished again three weeks later. Family says it's him, the next-door neighbor says it doesn't look like him.

Further down, another one. The same kind of added note, the writing older, not Brother Han's — possibly left by Cai Jingwu back then:

Came back. Asked him about the old days, he had to think a long while. A month later, the man was gone.

Two cards, twenty-odd years apart. Written about two different people, yet that line after each of them spoke of the same kind of ending.

Li Kaichen photographed the two, printed them out, and clipped them to the very front of the "ones who came back" stack.

Ye Wenjia looked at the two old cards.

"So, it isn't just this round," she said.

"No," Li Kaichen said. "Come back, not quite right, vanish again — this loop has been running at least twenty-odd years. Cai Jingwu saw it, Brother Han saw it. Neither of them managed to bring it to light."

---

Ye Wenjia didn't answer. She stared at the three doorways on the screen, three people walking in, all normal.

"They look too normal," she said.

"Right," Li Kaichen said. "That's the thing I can't put into words. It isn't that anywhere is off. It's that it's too not-off. A man goes missing for three weeks, walks home by himself in the small hours, his family scared half to death, and he thinks everyone's making no sense — a person like that should have a hundred kinds of reaction, panicked, worn out, faking calm, any of them. But these three are like they were poured from the same mould. Calm in exactly the same way, down to the very reaction of 'the ones who feel worked up are other people' being exactly the same."

In his notebook, he wrote this rule into the form he could use:

Identification method (provisional): too consistent = abnormal.
Real groups: reactions, wording, times of return, each their own, scattered.
Those who came back: everything converges onto one point. Even the timing converges onto the same minute (03:17–03:18).
→ No need to see anything "off." Just compute "consistency." Consistency abnormally high = flag.
This rule runs on nothing but interviews + timestamps. Doesn't need to catch anything on camera.

This was the first time he could tell, just sitting at his desk, whether a person was right or not.

---

Ye Wenjia stood, about to leave. At the door, she turned back.

"That Homecoming," she said. "Be careful. An organization that goes around 'teaching families how to welcome the ones who came back' didn't spring up out of nowhere. It knows people are going to come back, and before these people come back, it goes and pre-arranges the families' side."

"I know," Li Kaichen said. "It's chasing the same list I am. The difference is — I want to know whether the one who came back is still the same person. It wants the families not to ask that question."

---

After Ye Wenjia left, Li Kaichen called Mrs. Guo to follow up on one more thing.

"Mrs. Guo, that Ms. Zou — has she still been in touch with you lately?"

"Yes," Mrs. Guo said. "She called just yesterday. Asked me whether any reporters had come around lately."

Li Kaichen gripped the phone and made no sound.

"I told her one had," Mrs. Guo's voice was perfectly natural. "She said that was good. She said you'll understand sooner or later. She wanted me to pass a message along to you—"

Mrs. Guo paused, as if recalling the exact words.

"She said: 'Tell him not to be in such a hurry to tell who's real. Once he's come back once himself, he won't want to tell anymore.'"

On the other end of the line, Mrs. Guo spoke this line very softly, as if relaying a blessing.

Li Kaichen looked at the three timestamps on the desk, all pressed into the same minute.

03:17.

He copied out Mr. Guo's front-door CCTV clip by itself and saved it into a new folder. For the folder name, he typed "Pending Verification."

【Ch. 014 End · Li Kaichen's home, Da'an → the Guo home, Houshanpi (phone/CCTV)】