Before eleven o’clock, Lu Yixin had already arrived. Following the map her father had drawn for her, she carried Chinese food enough for three grown men, with Fang Yongnian’s notebook hanging from her neck. By the time she entered the ward, she was panting heavily from exhaustion.

“Why did you come alone?” Lu Boyuan frowned. “Where’s Auntie Li?”

“Yu Hanfeng… Auntie,” she almost choked on the word she hastily added, “said no one else should know.”

The fewer people who knew, the better. Auntie Li had quite a big mouth—she’d once overheard her chatting with the downstairs neighbor, even revealing her test scores.

Lu Boyuan took the heavy meals from her and was filled with mixed feelings. His daughter had really grown up. He owed her too much. Because of work, he had hardly been able to look after her. When he finally realized it, the little crybaby who used to run to him with a runny nose had already become so sensible.

“I took a taxi here! I even asked the driver uncle to help me carry the food upstairs. It cost a lot! Give me money!” The sensible little girl stretched out her hand, as if it were only natural.

Lu Boyuan wiped his face, the moment of emotion gone. “This month’s allowance I gave you is already twice what your mom gives.”

Lu Yixin sniffled, withdrawing her extortionist hand, and began peeking around the ward.

It was a double ward, a suite-type room.

Fang Yongnian and Zheng Fei were both in the inner room, looking perfectly fine.

So they really were okay.

Lu Yixin was completely relieved and slumped onto the sofa, sitting without any proper posture.

“That stir-fried pork is for Fang—” Lu Yixin straightened when she saw the farmhouse-style stir-fried pork her father placed in front of him.

She couldn’t bring herself to call him “Uncle Fang,” so she made a funny face inwardly and mumbled something vague as she carried it over.

“You’re taking herbal medicine; you can’t eat spicy food!” Dutifully, she placed the plate of white scallion tofu in front of her biological father.

Her father’s eyebrows twitched.

All three men’s eyebrows twitched, each thinking their own thoughts.

“The news about the car accident was released last night,” the one to break the awkwardness was still Fang Yongnian.

He almost pitied himself—what kind of mess was this.

“That fast?” Lu Boyuan, being fed a bite of tofu by his daughter, chewed twice and thought it tasted pretty good.

“It’s better to do it quickly. Fits the facts more,” Zheng Fei said, eating a big bite of stir-fried pork and glancing at Lu Yixin.

Sure enough, this girl was still grinding her teeth at him.

He was amused teasing her, but suddenly, Fang Yongnian—sitting beside him—reached out and directly moved the plate of stir-fried pork in front of himself.

Zheng Fei: “……”

Damn, this guy’s perversion was getting worse.

“Are you sure they won’t go completely mad and cause even bigger trouble?” It was Lu Boyuan’s first time encountering something like this, and he still wasn’t used to Fang Yongnian’s way of handling things.

He could just sit calmly in the hospital ward, not afraid at all that they might lash out and try to kill him again.

It really was a matter of life and death, so why did Fang Yongnian look so calm?

“Yu Hanfeng’s people are very trustworthy.” Fang Yongnian’s explanation was simple.

Although he was the one who brought up the topic, was it really appropriate to talk about it in such detail in front of Lu Yixin? The Lu family’s way of educating was truly strange.

Lu Boyuan took another bite of tofu.

He recalled the gossip that had been interrupted last night. “If Yu Hanfeng isn’t your girlfriend, why is she helping you so much? Can she really be trusted?”

Lu Yixin, who had been lying around rubbing her arm, instantly widened her eyes.

A piece of green pepper got stuck in Fang Yongnian’s throat, and he nearly choked to death.

“Trustworthy.” He used all his strength to hold back the cough and forced out a short, concise reply.

Fortunately, Lu Boyuan was already used to his few words, and his attention remained on safety concerns.

“I’ll be picking up and dropping off Yixin from school these days. When she’s free, she can just stay here with us at the hospital.” As a father, his first reaction was naturally to wonder if the other side would target Lu Yixin.

Fang Yongnian swallowed that fatal piece of green pepper inconspicuously and nodded.

Even if Lu Boyuan hadn’t said it, he had intended to bring it up.

That Auntie Li at their home wasn’t particularly reliable—once she fell asleep, it was hard to wake her up. Lu Yixin had complained about it to him privately many times.

This girl could be very sensible when she needed to be. She knew her parents couldn’t afford a better housekeeper, so her complaints were only ever verbal—afterward, she always acted like nothing happened.

He glanced at Lu Yixin.

The sensible girl’s eyes were shining so brightly they almost seemed to sparkle; if she had a tail, it would probably be wagging toward the ceiling.

He turned his face away again and silently took another mouthful of rice.

Ever since Lu Yixin had forcibly leaked secrets, he’d been eating hot meals much more often lately.

The chicken soup she brought back was rich with ingredients—such a big pot. It was impressive that she had managed to carry it all by herself.

He was actually a bit full already, but still ladled himself a bowl of soup and drank it slowly.

Beside him, Lu Boyuan and Lu Yixin were bickering like a comedy duo, while he and Zheng Fei silently exchanged glares several times over the last piece of pork belly with skin in the stir-fried pork.

On this morning when a storm was about to break, for some reason, Fang Yongnian’s heart was filled with calm.

୨୧ ⏔⏔⏔⏔♡⏔⏔⏔⏔ ୨୧ 

Fang Yongnian’s plan was not complicated. The other party wanted him dead, so he followed their script—he got into a car accident, entered the hospital, and even went into the ICU. Apart from not dying, he appeared to have completely lost mobility.

Meanwhile, Lu Boyuan, who was supposed to go provide project support, changed his itinerary at the airport the night of the accident. After returning to Hecheng, he turned off his phone and cut contact with everyone.

At last, the two of them sat down calmly together in the hospital ward and laid out everything they had each uncovered.

The timing of when their investigations had been interrupted was all connected to that same list.

He had been told to join a new project right after he began investigating the people on that list. As for Lu Boyuan, he had been asked to immediately depart for project support right after he used his connections to retrieve the archived project approval data from back then.

So the problem was clear.

The list Fang Yongnian found overlapped with the list of falsified project approval data from that year. All those people—with murky financial backgrounds—had participated in fabricating the data back then.

Among them was Ge Wenyao, who had died in the car accident.

Those people had tampered with the data to secure project funding. For reasons unknown, the documents were later leaked, leading to the orchestrated car crash.

And four years later, just as they were about to uncover the truth, another murder attempt was made.

Therefore, the now-disabled and thoroughly unrestrained Fang Yongnian did something once again thoroughly unrestrained.

He had Yu Hanfeng, under the name of a certain overseas research institute, send an electronic invitation to every person on that list, inviting them to attend an international symposium two days later. The symposium’s venue was set at a picturesque mountain-top resort.

That he dared to make such a request was one thing, but that Yu Hanfeng actually dared to agree to it was another.

She swiftly mobilized her connections, and that very night, the invitation emails were sent out.

There were twenty-six people on the list in total. Excluding the six who had already been arrested based on evidence he had collected, and Ge Wenyao, the one who had died in the car accident, the remaining nineteen people all received that beautifully designed, multilingual symposium invitation on the same night.

At this particular moment—

The only person who had been relentlessly pursuing them, Fang Yongnian, was in the ICU after a car accident. Lu Boyuan, who had just begun uncovering some clues, had rushed home because of the accident and was so frightened he didn’t even dare to call the institute.

All nineteen of them clicked “Accept” within a single day.

When it was time to depart, Yu Hanfeng even arranged nineteen luxury cars, each with its own chauffeur and interpreter, once again demonstrating what it meant to do whatever one pleased with money.

The nineteen “experts” sent to the resort were pampered with fine food and drinks for two days. Then, they were told that a heavy rainstorm two nights earlier had caused a landslide—some experts were trapped at the foot of the mountain and couldn’t come up, while they were trapped on the mountain and couldn’t go down.

The well-fed, well-entertained experts all waved their hands nonchalantly, saying they didn’t mind.

And from that very moment, the nightmare began.

The first was Expert A. While checking his email as usual, he discovered a message from an unfamiliar address. The subject line was the name of that Alzheimer’s drug development project from seven years ago: “Kang Mo.”

The name made his eyelids twitch. He clicked it open instinctively, only to find a single image: a partial bank transaction record showing him secretly transferring family assets to his mistress.

Only half of the record was shown.

He froze on the spot. His first reaction was that the only other person who knew—Expert B, who happened to be sharing the same room at the resort—must have done it.

But those kinds of emails began appearing one after another. Fifteen out of the nineteen experts, at different times, received the same “Kang Mo” email. Each message was a forwarded version, carrying the previous recipients’ scandals along with the new recipient’s own.

The chain of forwarded emails grew longer and longer, involving more and more people.

From inheritance theft, to falsified academic degrees, to plagiarism of research papers—

Everyone had a guilty conscience.

Everyone believed the leak must have been orchestrated by the few who knew their secrets.

The previously harmonious resort overnight became a living hell.

The virus-like email kept spreading, growing larger with each forward—every name, every attachment came with pictures, data, and evidence.

The four people who hadn’t received the email became the targets of collective suspicion.

Then, right at that moment, after a typical early-summer thunderstorm, the resort announced that the network was down.

The email chain had been progressing toward the project from seven years ago. Just as everyone was nervously waiting to see how much of their dirt had been exposed—

the network went out.

Not only the network, their phones also began losing signal intermittently.

Trapped on the mountain and completely cut off, the experts grew increasingly anxious. They didn’t know whether their scandals had already reached the outside world, nor whether the leaker was among the nineteen of them.

Then, while one of the experts was struggling to connect a call through the spotty signal, his blood pressure suddenly spiked, and his pupils dilated sharply.

“Ge Wenyao…” he stammered, trembling. “It was Ge Wenyao.”

“He answered my call.” He clutched the other experts’ hands. “He recited—word by word—the project data from the original approval back then.”

“He’s come for us…”

When faced with despair, the thing humans do most naturally is shift the blame.

The first to start deflecting were the four who hadn’t received the email. They began listing everyone else’s wrongdoings, repeatedly insisting that the matter had nothing to do with them.

That was merely the fuse.

In the luxurious resort, cut off from the world with no internet and no way down the mountain, the nineteen people tore away their masks of respectability—and began shouting, glaring, and accusing one another.

Every single accusation they made was recorded by the resort staff, and immediately sent to the man who was supposedly lying in the ICU—Fang Yongnian.