The video recordings and audio clips changed from just one or two at the beginning to full segments.

The contents of the recordings also evolved—from tentative mutual accusations at the start, to finally turning into genuine, blade-to-blade, evidence-backed revelations.

It was no longer only about the Kang Mo project. As their fighting grew more vicious, they almost exposed every disgraceful stain in each person’s professional career.

The evil of human nature was displayed to its fullest in those few days. Those so-called scholars who usually wore glasses and looked decent revealed their ferocious faces in this closed space. Once it began, it could not be stopped.

Meanwhile, in the hospital, Fang Yongnian held onto those recordings—reporting whatever could be reported, and continuing to dig into whatever couldn’t, until there was solid evidence to report.

Lu Boyuan was dumbfounded by such a crude and direct method of handling things.

He had always known Fang Yongnian lacked humanity, but he had never imagined that he would obtain clues in such an indescribable way.

“You should’ve done this long ago,” said his friend Zheng Fei, praising him instead. “Saves a lot of trouble.”

“This could easily break the law,” Lu Boyuan raised his voice slightly, then quickly lowered it, afraid the patients in the next ward would hear. “Let them out immediately!”

“If I let them out, they might end up like me.” Fang Yongnian lifted his right leg with implied meaning.

Lu Boyuan: “……”

“There’s already pressure coming from the reports.” Fang Yongnian took off his glasses and rubbed his brow.

Before he started all this, he had first used the car accident to conveniently remove suspicion from himself, then had Lu Boyuan return home from the airport so he could keep him under his nose. Even Lu Yixin—he had asked Yu Hanfeng to arrange for someone to watch and protect her at all times.

After confirming that everyone he cared about was within a protected range, he still made two backup plans. If the person who caused the car accident years ago was among those nineteen people, then even if they hadn’t received any footage related to the crash during these three days, they shouldn’t have been able to interfere with the reporting. Those nineteen experts couldn’t access the internet, their phones were monitored and restricted to limited outgoing calls, and no one could possibly stop him.

If it really was just those nineteen people, that would be the best possible outcome.

But clearly, it wasn’t.

There was still someone else—someone they didn’t know, or perhaps didn’t want to know—lurking in the dark, waiting for the right moment to act.

Because the report he sent today about falsified funding sources in the project proposal from seven years ago had been deleted.

The anonymous report mailbox had been hacked, and all the data on that computer was erased.

Fortunately, he had always liked making double preparations. The laptop used for sending those reports restored its system daily, used multiple random proxy layers at login, and all the data was transferred through a clean USB drive. Even if deleted or hacked, the materials would not be lost, and the traced random IP addresses were not real.

However, since he had already been traced, being precisely located was now only a matter of time.

The opponent had started to act like a cornered dog. What he was waiting for now was the moment when that person would completely collapse.

After wrecking an expensive disabled-adapted car, the elaborate game within a game that lasted nearly half a month was finally coming to an end.

He felt a little nervous—and also a strange, indescribable excitement.

That dark shadow that had appeared in his dreams every night for the past four years was getting closer and closer. The shadow he had once stubbornly believed to be Lu Boyuan’s finally gave him a chance to see its true face.

His tribulation—his first half of life—could finally reach a full stop.

To console the dead souls, and to console that right leg of his, the one that had always been trapped in the twisted car door.

୨୧ ⏔⏔⏔⏔♡⏔⏔⏔⏔ ୨୧ 

Recently, Lu Yixin had stopped letting her father drive her to and from school. She knew Fang Yongnian had arranged for two particularly strong-looking bodyguards for her. She hadn’t expected that someone as ordinary as her would ever need bodyguards, and the thought made her feel quite elated.

At lunchtime in the cafeteria, she would get three portions of food—two of which were triple servings—specifically to feed the two tireless, all-weather bodyguards.

She couldn’t bring them into the school grounds, so every day Lu Yixin had Zheng Ranran save her a seat in the cafeteria, while she carried two meal trays piled high like mountains, ran across the playground, and handed them to the two bodyguard uncles waiting by the school gate.

Those two rather seasoned bodyguards had probably never encountered such a cheerful person under their protection before. Lu Yixin actually had nothing to do with any of this—Fang Yongnian had found those two people purely to put both himself and Lu Boyuan at ease. The bodyguards, delighted by the easy task, grinned wide enough to show their big molars every time they saw her.

Lu Yixin was very happy.

These days, she had been sleeping at the hospital. Yu Hanfeng had booked three cadre wards as if reserving rooms at a hotel. Lu Boyuan was a firm materialist; he didn’t particularly mind that his daughter slept alone every night on a hospital bed in the inpatient wing. Since he had no objection, Lu Yixin had even less.

She could see Fang Yongnian every day.

The sight of him in only a shirt and trousers, his hair a mess every morning as he stood expressionless in line to brush his teeth in the ward’s suite; and at night, the sight of him wearing glasses, whispering with her father over the table outside the suite.

He had once again become someone within reach. Every morning she could say good morning to him in person, and every night she could say good night to him face to face.

After school each day, she could also bring back a pile of food from Aunt Li’s place, and have the two bodyguard uncles help her carry it upstairs. Three men and one girl, lively and full of noise.

୨୧ ⏔⏔⏔⏔♡⏔⏔⏔⏔ ୨୧ 

That day was Friday.

The school’s monthly exam had just ended again. Lu Yixin’s grades remained steadily within the top thirty of her year. With a lollipop Zheng Ranran had rewarded her with dangling from her mouth, she hugged her report card and hopped all the way into Fang Yongnian’s hospital room.

Lu Boyuan wasn’t there, and neither was Fang Yongnian outside the suite.

She peeked in, sneaky and curious. The ward, having been turned into an office, was cluttered with open laptops and messy stacks of papers. Zheng Fei was asleep, sprawled across the desk, and Fang Yongnian was half-lying on the bed with a folder covering his face, motionless.

They were both asleep.

Lu Yixin smacked her lips; the strawberry-flavored lollipop in her mouth swayed between her lips and tongue, its sweet-and-sour taste giving her courage.

She tiptoed closer.

Fang Yongnian was wearing a white shirt, buttoned all the way up to the last disciplinary button at his collar. The shirt’s edge framed his slightly pale, slender neck—and his Adam’s apple.

Lu Yixin swallowed. Even if her feelings for him had not yet become as complicated as they would later, she had always liked looking at Fang Yongnian’s body. That kind of thinness that bordered on the sickly, the sort that made her stop breathing just from looking.

She stepped closer again.

It was at that moment that Fang Yongnian removed the document covering his face. He had just woken up, with a trace of lingering sorrow from his dream still on his features.

Perhaps because this drawn-out investigation was finally nearing its end, he had lately been dreaming of that car crash more and more even when he only dozed lightly.

The endless rain, the construction truck speeding from the opposite lane, and on that truck, the middle-aged man glaring and gritting his teeth as he turned the steering wheel.

Then came the deafening crash, and silence.

A complete silence. Nothing. A blank void.

When he saw the psychiatrist, he had been told that deep within him lay a desire to stay in that emptiness forever and never wake again.

Because he knew exactly how painful it was to wake. Even the rainwater dripping on his face made him tremble uncontrollably. His entire body was like a string pulled taut to its breaking point—boundless pain, and around him only the sound of rain, nothing else, not a trace of life.

That was the most terrifying moment of all—feeling his life ebbing away, realizing there was no other living being beside him, the metallic taste of blood churning constantly in his mouth, his eyes unable to open, his attempts to speak reduced to a broken, unrecognizable groan.

His dream always ended there. When he opened his eyes, what he saw was a world of white beneath a sheet of white paper. He removed that paper—and above him was the white ceiling, the kind that belonged to a hospital.

For a brief moment, he panicked—dazed, thinking he was still the man from four years ago, the one lying in the ICU with tubes inserted all over his body after the car accident.

He bolted upright and saw the girl at the doorway, startled by his sudden movement.

Lu Yixin.

Because of the heat, she had long since taken off her school uniform jacket and tossed it on the sofa outside. Underneath, she wore a white T-shirt with a cartoon print, casually tucked into her dark blue school pants, sweat stains still showing.

Her cheeks were puffed out, her lips sticky with pink lollipop sugar, her eyes wide open, frozen in the shock he had just given her.

Fang Yongnian wiped a hand across his face.

This wasn’t a dream. Back then, Lu Yixin had only been a little tag-along with pigtails and swollen red eyes from crying. Not like now—she had clearly grown into a young lady, yet somehow managed to be even more troublesome than before.

“You…” The troublesome Lu Yixin finally snapped out of it and pulled the lollipop from her mouth. “Did you dream of a ghost?”

The look on his face when he woke up just now, he had looked absolutely terrified.

So, her Fang Yongnian could actually show such a human expression. She even felt a sudden urge to put on ghost makeup next time just to scare him again.

Fang Yongnian: “……”

“I’ve got more candy,” she said, fishing another lollipop out of the pocket of her dark blue pants. It was pink again, printed with a cute cartoon strawberry. “Want one? To calm your nerves?”

Fang Yongnian swung his legs off the bed, groping for the jacket hanging by the bedframe. “I’m going out for a smoke.”

He didn’t even want to respond.

Lu Yixin followed behind him cheerfully, hands clasped behind her back.

“I said, I’m going out for a smoke.” He repeated himself.

His intention to send her away couldn’t be clearer.

“Oh.” The girl chewing her lollipop didn’t change expression at all, her face bright as if she could bloom into a flower the next second.

Fang Yongnian: “……”

When she was fourteen, she’d been much more obedient—the kind who did whatever she was told.

“Actually, eating candy is the same thing.” She reached into the other pocket of her school pants. “I’ve got ones that aren’t pink.”

She held out a handful of mint candies.

Deprived of his smoke, Fang Yongnian could only resign himself to unwrapping one and putting it into his mouth.

“So picky,” the little girl muttered righteously. “Even candy color matters to you.”

Fang Yongnian: “……”

“I ranked thirtieth again in the monthly exam today!” Before Fang Yongnian could completely lose his patience, Lu Yixin quickly pulled out the report card she had been hiding behind her back.

Her face bloomed into a radiant smile, full of pride, as if she had just gotten into Peking University or Tsinghua.

Fang Yongnian suddenly didn’t feel like arguing with her anymore.

Sneaking around his bedroom, peeking everywhere, shoving candy at him and talking nonsense—he didn’t feel like taking issue with any of it.

She just wanted praise, that was all. Just like the first time they met eight years ago. She only looked carefree on the surface.

But she always hid her most delicate, sensitive thoughts behind her smile—behind her mischief and playfulness.

“Only thirtieth,” he snorted, handing the report card back to her.

He succeeded in making her puff up like an angry little pufferfish, turning immediately to complain noisily to Lu Boyuan, who happened to be walking in through the door just then.

The cool rush of mint still lingered in his mouth as he put on his glasses.

Four years.

Aside from in his dreams, he truly no longer had to relive that blood-soaked night.

Because the little girl with pigtails from back then—had already grown tall, already become the kind that made both people and dogs roll their eyes.

Author’s Note:

Yu Hanfeng is a staunch singleist, and there’s absolutely no romantic entanglement between her and Uncle Fang. (whispers Uncle Fang’s such an awkward man—only Lu Yixin would treasure him like that~)