Shadow of District 7

Su Xinpei discovered the pattern while organizing the archives of the crack sealing operations. The day before, he had just archived the on-site records of the directional sonic tactics used in the Beihe Primary School operation. The Special Meteorological Bureau's official approval hadn't arrived yet, and he had no new tasks at the moment. So, he used this gap to review all the data from the previous crack sealing operations from beginning to end. In the temporary office at Resettlement Site No. 7, several stacks of file boxes were piled up. Outside the window, the emergency lights on the playground cast the shadows of the old poplar trees onto the blinds, the shadows shattering into fragments with every gust of wind.

He reviewed the sealing report for crack No. 12 in the abandoned industrial zone of Beihe, the subsequent monitoring data for cracks at the former agricultural machinery factory site, and the final assessment of cracks at the old water pump station. Then, he marked the coordinates of all the cracks chronologically on the same administrative map of Beihe District. The marking method was simple—red dots represented crack locations, blue dots represented secondary anomalies after sealing, and the discovery and sealing dates were noted next to each dot. After marking, he spread the map out on the table, with a half-cold cup of tea beside him. Then he noticed a phenomenon he had never noticed before: next to each red dot was a mark he had seen in another document—an address circled in yellow highlighter in the "List of Hazardous Structural Points in Old Buildings in Beihe District" issued by the street office last year. He thought he had misremembered, so he took out the list from the file box and compared it item by item. The red dots and yellow circles matched perfectly, down to the house number, without exception.

He put down the highlighter and leaned back in his chair.

The cracks didn't appear randomly. At least not entirely randomly. Someone knew the weak points before the cracks appeared—not through the monitoring equipment of the Special Bureau, but through an inconspicuous hazard checklist within the street office's administrative system. That checklist was compiled by him for Aunt He last year, with a building structure assessment report and repair recommendations attached to each hazard point. According to procedure, the Zhongcheng District Municipal Administration should have conducted unified bidding for repairs, but these hazard points were never repaired—not because the repair plan was delayed, but because the repair contract applications for each hazard point were rejected by the same person. The reason for rejection was exactly the same: unqualified.

Su Xinpei stared at the red dots and yellow circles on the map, quickly reviewing last year's administrative procedures in his mind. The repair proposals submitted by the subdistrict office first had to undergo preliminary review by the district municipal administration department, then be reviewed by the Zhongcheng District Construction Management Section, and finally be contracted out by the Zhongcheng District Bidding Office. Qualification verification was the final hurdle for the bidding office, and the authority to reject contractor qualifications rested with an approval group under the bidding office. He remembered the name of that approver—the head of the bidding approval group of the Zhongcheng District Construction Management Section, surnamed Liao, but he couldn't recall his given name. He only remembered that Aunt He had received that person's call in her office at the end of last year, and after hanging up, she was unusually silent for a while before stuffing a piece of paper into the fax machine, saying, "Let's talk about it next year."

He flipped to the last page of the inspection list and found the summary table of approved repair applications attached to it. All twelve repair applications for potential hazards had been rejected. The signatures of the rejectors were all in the same handwriting—an overly neat signature, each stroke ending with a procedural indifference.

This was no accident. This was no administrative inefficiency. Su Xinpei picked up a pencil and wrote two lines on his notepad: the first was "Contractor's qualification rejected," and the second was "The rejection stamp is in the same person's possession." He tore off the note and pressed it under the glass, deciding to check the approver's specific information. He searched the street office's electronic archive system and found a municipal bidding announcement from last year. The name appeared in the approval column at the end of the announcement. The name itself wasn't anything special, but Su Xinpei noticed that the name also appeared on another completely unrelated document—the property rights change registration form for the old factory area of ​​Tianheng Heavy Industry in the Xiacheng District. The date the approver signed the registration form was exactly the day after the No. 12 crack in the Beihe abandoned industrial area was first recorded by the Special Meteorological Bureau as an "unstable and active period."

He printed out the property transfer registration form and placed it next to the checklist. The signatures on both documents were the same person, as were the one who rejected the repair application and approved the property transfer. This person wasn't the decision-maker—a low-level approver had no power to decide the layout of the chaebol's land plots, but he had the power to stamp a document. A "reject" stamp could leave the weak point of the crack in place until it tore open on its own; a "approval" stamp could ensure that the chaebol's land plots were positioned precisely in their most vulnerable spot before the cracks appeared. This was a weak point pre-arranged by someone exploiting loopholes in the administrative system.

Su Xinpei put down the pencil, picked up the cold tea, and took a sip.

These marks on the papers required no soldiers, no runes, nothing from the other side of the rift; all they needed were a few sheets of paper, a stamp, and a repeatedly rejected repair proposal. And it was through these stamps that the distribution of the rifts throughout the lower city was precisely preserved. He remembered something Aunt He had said—files aren't for arresting people, they're for making it impossible for people to deny knowing. Now these files told him: someone knew, and had known for a long time, just waiting for the rift to open itself.

He closed the file box, stood up, and walked to the window. On the playground, Old Sun and Old Qi were reinforcing the temporary supports of the east wall. The two were carrying a steel pipe; Old Sun's back was bad, and he had to put it down and rest halfway up. Old Qi took one end of the pipe and carried it on his shoulder. Old Sun, supporting his back, said something, and they both laughed. Su Xinpei watched them, and suddenly felt a lump in his throat. These people were reinforcing the wall with steel pipes and wire, using crepe paper to create a grid pattern for earthquake protection, and manually moving the elderly and children to safety. Meanwhile, in another room, someone was precisely marking cracks above their heads with a pen.

He left Settlement Point No. 7 and rode his bicycle to the Special Elephant Bureau's archives. The cold wind whipped his coat through the air as he rode quickly, a thought swirling in his mind: if the weak points of the cracks could be preserved through administrative means, then the infiltration of the Northern Alliance wouldn't just be crawling in through the sewers; it would seep in through the cracks in the documents.

The Special Meteorological Bureau's archives room was empty except for the duty clerk, a bespectacled female clerk whom Su Xinpei had met before when he helped Ye Xinghe retrieve files. He presented his external consultant credentials and requested access to the cross-reference records of all crack discovery points and the list of hazardous buildings in the Xiacheng District over the past two years. The duty clerk searched for him, but there were no readily available cross-reference records in the system—however, he could export the crack records and the list of hazardous buildings separately and compare them manually. Su Xinpei sat down at a reading table in the corner of the archives room and checked the two lists item by item. The comparison took more than an hour. He marked all the overlapping points and redrawn the heat map in his notebook. After confirming it, he overlaid the new map on the previous red patches, and the two patterns fit together perfectly—the high-incidence areas of cracks were precisely the areas where the most repair applications were rejected.

He carefully put away the comparison results and was about to leave the archives when he suddenly remembered something Old Tie Tou had said that night when he took him to the factory area: "Cracks aren't geological hazards. If you leave them empty for a long time, they can slowly erode the surrounding area in the quietest of times." At the time, he thought Old Tie Tou was talking about natural laws, but now he understood that "leaving them empty for a long time" wasn't an ellipsis of the subject—the emptiness of the cracks was being artificially maintained. Someone was closing the repair doors around the cracks one by one, letting them slowly erode in the quietest place.

On his way back to resettlement site No. 7, he passed the row of tenement buildings on the east side of the old Beihe district. Uncle Zhang, who owned a dog, was still airing his quilts in the corridor, the quilts billowing like sails in the wind. He stopped downstairs and looked up at the star-shaped tape pasted on Uncle Zhang's window—it was something he and the social worker had put up the day before yesterday afternoon, and the tape hadn't even peeled off yet. He locked his bicycle downstairs, went upstairs, knocked on Uncle Zhang's door, and told him it was nothing, he was just passing by. Uncle Zhang's yellow dog lay down at his feet, squinted, and wagged its tail.