Chapter 1: 碑文初现

Cologne’s rainy season carried a suffocating damp cold, the water dripping from the cathedral’s spires and pooling into the murky canal on the old city’s southern bank. I stood just outside the警戒 line of the demolition site at the old mill ruins, the rain soaking my badge and sending a bone-deep chill through me. The site supervisor was shouting into his radio, his voice laced with barely concealed frustration, but my gaze remained locked on a newly exposed concrete foundation in the sub-basement. Thick mud crusted over it, yet under the harsh glare of the searchlights, the edges of a deliberately smoothed stone surface were faintly visible. That space shouldn’t have been empty.

I dialed Friedrich Baumann. The appraiser, who had spent four decades in the old book auction houses, answered with the rigorous yet gentle cadence of an old-school scholar. “William, if you’re seeing smooth plaster, you’ve likely just dug through the foundation reinforcement layer. But if there are incisions—even if they’re just modern repairs meant to conceal older marks—then there’s a story here.”

I crouched down, raindrops trickling from my hair onto the weathered face of the stone slab. In that moment, the air seemed to solidify. This was not ordinary architectural rubble, but a fragment of a medieval stele. Its surface was coated in a rough layer of lime, yet beneath the mineral deposit, deep black patterns were faintly visible. I extended a finger and gently scraped away the surface weathering, revealing a dense cluster of symbols below. They were not standard Gothic script, nor were they the Latin abbreviations I was familiar with. They were an extremely obscure code. The crowd gathering on site began to murmur among themselves, the noise washing over me like a tide, but in my ears, the voices quickly receded, leaving only a near-primal shudder.

Greta Hartmann appeared behind me almost in the same instant. She still carried the distinct scent of paste and turpentine from the restoration room, a trace of her sleepless night spent racing the auction deadline to rescue several family archives. She clutched a freshly printed document index from the digital database in one hand, her eyes alert and sharp, like a hawk ready to strike. Seeing me crouched on the ground, she didn’t say a word; she simply reached into her backpack, pulled out a waterproof cover, and carefully draped it over the stele to prevent the rain from further eroding the fragile incisions.

“What is this?” she asked in a low voice, excitement suppressed within the words.

“I don’t know, Greta.” I pulled off my gloves, the rainwater running down my arm into my cuff, the cold keeping me clear-headed. “But this inscription isn’t Greek, and it isn’t some known cipher. It was carved later.”

Greta pushed up her glasses, her gaze lingering on the black patterns for a long time, her brow furrowed. “Later? You’re saying this is a forgery? Or some modern prank? Today’s counterfeiting techniques can easily fool the eye; even carbon-14 dating can be manipulated.”

“No,” I shook my head, tracing the trajectory of the symbols in the air with my finger. “Look at the starting stroke of this symbol. There’s a minute hook here. Medieval stonecutters, to prevent their chisels from slipping, had a habit of making a reverse abrupt stop at the end of strokes. This is a trace of muscle memory. A forger can mimic the shape, but it’s nearly impossible to replicate that kind of mechanical ‘error’.”

My voice was not loud, yet it cut clearly through the rain. A flicker of shock passed through Greta’s eyes as she re-examined the symbols, her tone becoming cautious. “You’re saying this is the real thing? Then what do these symbols represent? I checked at the archives department. In the 14th century, Cologne had a batch of lost municipal records mentioning a ‘wordless stele’ system used to track debt and the flow of supplies. But no physical artifacts have ever been excavated.”

“Precisely because none have ever been found, it’s dangerous.” I stood up, rain dripping from my chin. “Look at this symbol. It looks like an ‘R’, but in medieval Latin, ‘R’ stands for *Restitutio*—restoration. But when combined with this curve after it, it’s actually indicating a direction. Or more accurately, a coordinate. And that coordinate is not in Cologne.”

Just then, the red and blue lights of police cars pierced the rain curtain, and the shrill wail of sirens tore through the night sky. Karl Albrecht from the criminal investigation division strode over with two bailiffs in tow. His step was steady, his uniform crisp and unwrinkled, wearing that bottomless smile that suggested all the wind and rain surrounding him were of no concern to him. He was the department’s forensic consultant and, more importantly, the key figure pulling the strings behind the artifact transfer chain. No one dared to accuse him to his face, but everyone knew that in this city, some things were not to be disturbed—order, for instance, and those histories deliberately forgotten.

Karl stopped in front of me, his gaze passing over my shoulder to land on the stele. There was no surprise in his eyes, only scrutiny. “William, how long have you been digging here?” His voice was calm, bordering on cold, like he was asking about the weather.

“About twenty minutes, Karl. I found this stele. It has coded inscriptions on it, and it likely points to clues in an old case.” I tried to keep my voice steady, but I knew my heart was already pounding at one hundred and twenty beats per minute.

Karl let out a quiet sigh, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his hands with elegant, slow movements. “I understand your enthusiasm, Officer. But this is a demolition site. The priority is clearance and assessment, not personal academic speculation. Do you know what time it is? The cultural heritage assessment process begins tonight. Any unauthorized interpretations will interfere with the market valuation.”

“Market valuation?” I scoffed, rain splashing against my face. “Are you telling me that this stele, which may be linked to a seventeenth-century looting case, is to be priced like a lot at an auction house? Those plundered artifacts, those voices silenced in the dust of history—are they just a string of euro figures to you?”

Karl’s smile froze for a fraction of a second before he regained his composure, though the warmth in his eyes had dropped a few degrees. “William, I’m here to uphold the procedure, not to listen to your rants. According to protocol, the site must be sealed immediately and handed over to the forensic department. Your personal interest can remain, but it must not override the procedure. Now, step back and let the professionals do their job.”

Greta stood to the side, her body taut. She gripped the printed papers in her hand so tightly that her knuckles turned white. She looked at Karl, then at the stele, and finally her gaze settled on me. It was a silent question: *What are you going to do?*

I looked at Karl. There was no emotional fluctuation in those gray-blue eyes, only a mechanical coldness. I knew that if I complied now, this stele would be taped up tomorrow and hauled into some warehouse no one would ever care about, and the secrets hidden in its inscriptions would continue to sleep in the darkness. But I couldn’t be reckless. My role as a criminal investigator meant I had to stand on the side of evidence, not impulse.

“Karl,” I said, my voice low, “under Article Four of the Cultural Heritage Protection Law, if an ancient artifact is discovered that is suspected of being involved in a criminal case, the criminal investigation department has the right to conduct a preliminary inquiry. I am not venting my emotions at the scene; I am fulfilling my duty. The encoding on this stele, based on my initial assessment, points to an unsolved artifact theft case. And that case involves the transfer records under your jurisdiction.”

A flicker of disturbance finally passed through Karl’s gaze. He narrowed his eyes, the corner of his mouth curving into a mocking arc. “You’re accusing me? William, you need concrete evidence, not your ‘linguistic intuition.’ If you cannot provide a legal basis, I suggest you leave the scene immediately. Otherwise, I will document you for obstruction of official duties.”

The rain intensified. Lightning tore across the sky, illuminating the strange symbols on the stele. I took a deep breath; the rain rushed into my lungs, cold and stinging. I couldn’t argue with him here, nor could I prove anything on the spot. I needed time, I needed space, I needed those silent words to speak for themselves.

“I will retain my report,” I said, my voice low but exceptionally clear in the rain. “But before that, I will apply for an independent archaeological appraisal permit. As for you, Karl, I will be watching every transfer bill you sign. If even a single ancient coin has entered the system through illegal channels, I will find it.”

Karl didn’t say a word. He simply nodded, looking at me as if viewing an overconfident child. He turned and walked toward the police car, leaving Greta and me with his broad back. Greta stepped forward, the rain soaking her short hair. Her eyes were full of worry, but also a thread of determination.

“William, you’re in big trouble,” she whispered, her words heavy with significance. “Albrecht’s network is much deeper than you think. He isn’t just a forensic consultant; he’s the ‘gatekeeper’ behind the antiquities black market. If you go head-on against him, you won’t just fail to find the truth—you’ll drag yourself down with you.”

“I know.” I wiped the muddy water from my hands, my fingers trembling slightly in the cold. “But Greta, look at this symbol. The ‘S’ beneath the ‘R’—it’s not just ‘Restoration.’ In the Old High German dialects, it also means ‘Silence.’ This stele is saying that someone has silenced the truth. I cannot allow myself to be silenced as well.”

Greta was silent for a moment before finally pulling a small digital camera from her bag and handing it to me. “Photograph every detail. Multiple angles, with a scale bar. I’ll go to the library to pull the corpus for fourteenth-century Cologne dialects. If I am your ally, this is the best I can do.”

I took the camera and nodded. Rain streamed down our faces, indistinguishable from tears. We stood in the mud, engineering vehicles roaring behind us, a bottomless historical void ahead of us. I knew that from this moment on, I was no longer just a police officer executing orders. I was an excavator, trying to recover erased names from the ruins.

That night, I returned to my apartment on the banks of the Rhine. The room was dim; only the faint shadows of the distant cathedral’s lights fell from the window. I sat at my desk, enlarging the photograph of the stele. The pixels jumped in my eyes, as if the ancient symbols were breathing. I picked up my notebook and began comparing the symbols word for word with the stories passed down in our family. My mother had said on her deathbed that our ancestors were stonecutters in Cologne, tasked with recording the city-state’s secrets, and that in our blood flowed the ability to interpret silence. This was not superstition; it was a cognitive pattern inherited across generations, an intuitive reaction to specific symbolic structures.

I sketched out a rough diagram, overlaying the stone stele's core code with a map of Cologne's old town. The coordinates indicated by that "R" landed squarely in a hidden section of the cathedral's underground catacombs. It was said that a batch of Roman artifacts plundered during the Great Migration had once been stored there. My heart hammered against my ribs, blood rushing to my cheeks. If relics truly lay hidden there, just how much of Cologne's "history" was authentic? And how much of it was a carefully woven lie?

I stood up, walked to the window, and threw it open. A damp night wind slapped against my face, carrying the briny smell of the river. As I pulled the curtains closed, my gaze fixed on the corner of the windowsill. There, lying quietly, was an ancient coin.

It was a Roman aureus, its edge coated in a blood-dark layer of oxidation, as if it had just been pulled from someone’s pocket. In the dim light, the old coin shimmered with an eerie, dark red luster. The emperor’s profile stamped upon it flickered in and out of the shadows, a faint smirk seemingly playing at the corner of his mouth.

I held my breath, my fingers trembling as they reached for the coin. Outside, thunder rolled, a scream that seemed to echo from a thousand years ago. Who had placed this blood-rusted coin inside in the dead of night? Was it a warning, or an invitation?

I snatched the ancient coin, and its icy coldness pierced straight into my bones.