Chapter 5: The Absolute Moral Law
Philosophical Case Files — Hegel was only the opening move. Now the killer is quoting Kant—and turning philosophy into a knife.
The air inside the car seemed to freeze in an instant.
I turned my head and stared hard at Xu Fei's profile—calm, almost unnervingly so.
"Are you sure it was murder?" I asked.
"Yes." Xu Fei gripped the steering wheel with both hands, brows tightly knit. "The method was clean and precise. A single fatal stab."
He was silent for a few seconds, as if suddenly recalling a contradiction he couldn't get around.
"But if your deduction is right—that Lin Yaozong had no childhood trauma at all, and that even the split personality may have been fabricated—then how do we explain that Hegel note left at the first crime scene?"
He glanced at me.
"Are you saying the killer went to all that trouble just to mislead the police?"
"Misdirecting the police is a trivial byproduct."
I turned to look out the window, my tone cooling.
"If the killer were just a madman who enjoyed playing ghost, he could certainly toss out a few philosophical quotations to frighten people. But if he isn't a madman, then the Hegel note isn't smoke and mirrors."
I paused.
"It's a declaration."
"He was simply telling the world, in his own way: Lin Yaozong—this man shaped into a 'perfect positive'—has finally met his antithesis."
The car started moving again as the light turned green. Only the low hum of the engine remained in the cabin. After a long while, Xu Fei let the car glide to a stop at the next red light.
He looked at the dashboard and suddenly said:
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"Sounds like Hegel's dialectic isn't that different from our Chinese idea of yin and yang?"
He thought for a moment, then added: "Synthesis is balance. Anything unbalanced is abnormal?"
I turned my head and looked at him the way I'd look at a student desperately gambling on the edge of a final exam.
"Detective Xu, if my graduate student wrote that on an exam paper, I would not hesitate to make him retake the course next year."
Xu Fei blinked, then pushed his glasses up somewhat awkwardly.
I couldn't help but let out a soft sigh.
"Yin-yang thought is about harmony, cyclical movement, and mutual transformation. It emphasizes a dynamic, holistic relationship."
"Hegel's dialectical movement is not a simple 'one side has too much, so the other side compensates.'"
I extended a finger and tapped lightly on the car window.
"For Hegel, a thing may inherently breed the contradiction that negates itself. That contradiction is not simply eliminated—it is sublated through conflict and negation, entering a new stage of development."
"So in the killer's eyes, Lin Yaozong's death was never about restoring some cosmic balance."
I turned to look at Xu Fei.
"It was about completing a kind of 'progress' that only he recognizes."
Xu Fei's expression slowly darkened.
"In other words, to him, Lin Yaozong isn't a person."
"He's a proposition that must be negated."
I didn't answer.
Because that thought sent a chill through me as well.
"And now the doctor is dead too." Xu Fei pressed the accelerator, his voice dropping a few degrees. "What kind of 'progress' is that supposed to be?"
"That depends on..." I looked at him, "whether the underground psychiatrist left any new 'oracle' at the scene of his death."
