"This... I probably shouldn't be telling you this..."
"Please don't worry, Manager Hao. We won't reveal your identity when we write this up."
"Oh..."
"Go ahead."
"Mm... I heard it from people working under me. Construction began in '97, and our Second Bureau started preparing back in '95—from the project bidding to stockpiling all kinds of construction materials, organizing and assigning personnel, surveying the construction site... I'd been with the project from the beginning, but I wasn't in charge back then. I was just a lowly secretary—what you'd call an assistant now—running errands and doing odd jobs for the leaders. I did a bit of everything and had to know a little about it all. I went out to the site once to survey it. The place gave me a very strange feeling... The Old Iron Alley district was one of the earliest residential areas, right? Maybe the earliest in Minqing. I never looked into it. But those houses looked different from anywhere else. They weren't like modern apartment complexes, and they weren't quite like shantytowns either... The area had been converted from farmland into a residential district. Some of the people living there were farmers whose land had been requisitioned, and some were workers from the old factory next door. But that old factory had already shut down and gone bankrupt by then. The buildings sat empty. The factory was demolished later, too. Our Second Bureau handled that demolition, but I wasn't involved."
"Mm. Did anything happen while you were surveying the site? You said just now that the Old Iron Alley district felt strange?"
"Yeah, it was strange. It was... how should I put it... especially dark. Most of the buildings were three stories tall, with quite a few four-story ones and only a handful of five-story ones.