The person hiding in the dark was even more patient than Fang Yongnian had expected.

After that failed report, he tried sending another report email, but found that the computer had already been installed with monitoring software. Any email he sent would be diverted to some trash mailbox, never reaching its intended destination.

He also tried using other computers to send it the same way, but they were blocked too.

The Food and Drug Administration’s report inbox had been fitted with a filtering program. Anything related to the “Kang Mo Project” was all automatically redirected into that messy trash mailbox—one unread email after another, as if mocking him.

The other party probably hadn’t yet figured out who was sending the emails, so they could only deal with them this way—blocking each one as it came.

What was supposed to be a swift operation turned into a tug-of-war. Because Fang Yongnian was still, in a sense, keeping nineteen experts under soft confinement, he had since fallen into a passive position.

Lu Boyuan, after all, had never experienced anything this nerve-racking. He counted the days trembling, terrified something might happen to the experts still trapped in the mountains, his nerves stretched taut.

When he got nervous, he liked to distract himself by checking Lu Yixin’s homework. As a result, Lu Yixin was tormented to the point of crying and wailing every day. In the cadre ward, scenes often occurred where a father drove his daughter to tears, and the daughter in turn drove her father insane.

Even Liu Miqing, who was at the Meteorological Bureau, had to make daily video calls to mediate the father–daughter relationship.

They say a daughter is her father’s sweet little cotton-padded jacket, his little lover from a past life.

Driven mad, Lu Boyuan felt that Lu Yixin was a cotton-padded jacket lined with thorns—his sworn enemy from a previous life.

In all this chaos, Fang Yongnian remained calm.

Behind Lu Boyuan’s back, he made another call to Yu Hanfeng. Lu Yixin, who had recently developed a fondness for eavesdropping, happened to be crouched against the wall and caught a general idea. Though she didn’t understand most of it, the one thing she did grasp was that Fang Yongnian was going to “intensify” his efforts.

By pretending to be ghosts to intensify them…

So absurd that Lu Yixin almost doubted whether she had heard wrong.

“Maybe it’s because the people they’re targeting have ghosts in their hearts,” Zheng Ranran said, her face as dark as the bottom of a pot while marking the Demon King’s exercise book.

Lu Yixin lay sprawled on her desk, sighing. “Adults are so complicated.”

“You’re an adult.” Zheng Ranran snapped the workbook shut with a loud pa, and cursed.

Lu Yixin turned her head. “Got a lot wrong?”

“None right.” Zheng Ranran, fuming, directly drew a turtle on the Demon King’s workbook.

Her drawing skills were top-tier, the turtle was vivid and lifelike. Not the cartoon kind of vivid, but the real, biological kind.

It was a bit scary.

Lu Yixin felt a moment of sympathy for the Demon King.

“What do you think we’ll become when we grow up?” Lu Yixin rested her chin on the desk, watching Zheng Ranran, who, after finishing the turtle, still had nowhere to vent her anger and simply took out her math homework to relieve stress by solving problems.

Yes, her best friend liked to de-stress with Olympiad math problems.

Yes, everyone around her was a weirdo.

“I don’t know.” The all-knowing Zheng Ranran twirled her pen and shook her head this time.

“I saw Yu Hanfeng.” Maintaining her lazy posture, Lu Yixin said with reluctant honesty, “Perfect.”

Zheng Ranran glanced at her.

“I feel like no matter how hard I try, I can’t become someone like her.” That kind of perfection, from the inside out. “I’m just not that kind of material.”

Those words sounded a bit deflated, yet carried no trace of dejection.

“Don’t think that far ahead yet.” Zheng Ranran didn’t deny it. Given Lu Yixin’s personality, for her to become a strong woman like Yu Hanfeng, she might need to be reborn once more. Not everyone could become a Yu Hanfeng, and not everyone could become a Lu Yixin either. “Didn’t you already decide to take the meteorology exam?”

With her current grades, if she could keep steady through senior year, getting into her first-choice university shouldn’t be a problem.

“Fang Yongnian scolded me,” Lu Yixin sighed.

She held grudges. She still remembered that sentence of his—‘I can’t take responsibility for it, and I don’t want to.’

His mouth was vicious.

She liked that.

“Don’t want to take the exam anymore?” Zheng Ranran tilted her head, not particularly surprised, but still feeling it would be a pity.

“Not exactly.” Lu Yixin lowered her head, burying her face in her desk. “I still want to.”

She still wanted to be able to tell Fang Yongnian ahead of time, ‘It’s going to thunder today.’

Or—if it really thundered that day—she would have an excuse to stay by his side and take care of him.

She had imagined such a scene many times, and every time, it made her laugh foolishly.

But somehow, it didn’t feel like enough.

She didn’t know why, but ever since that night when the perfect Yu Hanfeng had eaten bear biscuits with her in competition, she had been wondering what kind of person she herself would become in the future.

Her path in love would not be smooth. At eighteen, she didn’t even have to be that smart to guess that much.

She had sworn in her heart that she would never again allow anyone to look at Fang Yongnian with the judgmental eyes of those neighborhood aunties. But to truly make that happen, she had to become strong.

Not necessarily as perfect as Yu Hanfeng, but she had to be strong.

Would studying meteorology make her strong? Would it give her the strength to love Fang Yongnian? Would it let her, like her mother, speak of her work with eyes that shone with light?

Troubled, she sighed softly on the desk. “Growing up is really annoying.”

Having just finished an Olympiad math problem, Zheng Ranran was in a slightly better mood, and nodded in agreement. “Yeah…”

Growing up is really annoying.

Without the excuse of “you’re still young,” they now had to act like adults, donning armor in this strange world.

Before they had even truly grown up, they already had people and things they wanted to protect. They were in a hurry to grow up, afraid to grow up, and also… longing to grow up.

୨୧ ⏔⏔⏔⏔♡⏔⏔⏔⏔ ୨୧

Fang Yongnian’s “intensified efforts” were indeed, as Lu Yixin had overheard—pretending to be ghosts.

In modern technological society, pretending to be ghosts was actually quite convenient.

With 3D projection and surround sound effects, combined with the naturally swaying shadows of the mountaintop trees, Fang Yongnian took apart and reassembled the otherwise useless recording he had obtained from Ge Wenyao, creating what was practically the perfect version of a vengeful spirit seeking justice.

While editing the audio, he even felt that perhaps it truly was a vengeful spirit demanding justice.

Otherwise, how could it be that, by a strange twist of fate, he had come upon this recording after seven years? And how could it be that, right after obtaining it, he had immediately gotten his hands on that list of names?

The brother who had died still had grievances unfulfilled.

And the one still alive—perhaps, in the unseen order of things, had found the place he was meant to go.

The group of experts who had been trapped in the mountains for nearly two weeks, their sanity long gone, fell neatly into the trap this time.

One of them had once been very close to Ge Wenyao. On a night when shadows danced like ghosts, he woke up crying, crawled out of bed, and under the flickering, weeping mountain wind outside his door, set fire to the paper he had brought to the mountain for academic exchange.

He was performing a memorial. A confession.

Brokenly, haltingly, he spoke of that long-buried past, that past buried with the dead.

“I know you died unjustly.” The audio that was sent down from the mountain came out clearly—one could still hear the mountain wind in the background, and the crackle of flames devouring the papers.

“He already knew the document had been leaked early on. The first person he questioned was me.” The man’s voice trembled; in the stillness of the night, it even carried a ghostly air.

“I…” The man seemed to have burned himself, gasped in pain, and his voice trembled even more. “I told him it might have been you.”

“That document was always with Fang Yongnian. He and Lu Boyuan exchanged the compiled keys every day. In our group, the only person who could decrypt that key was you.” His voice rose from trembling to sharpness, ending with sobbing and resentment.

“I really didn’t think he’d be that deranged.” He began to evade, to defend himself.

“I really didn’t think…” he repeated, “I didn’t think he’d crash even when there were so many people in the car.”

“Wenyao…” He drew a breath. “Every injustice has its cause, every debt its debtor…”

“I really did wrong you…”

“But the one who killed you wasn’t me…”

“I even warned you…”

The middle-aged man’s sobs tangled with the mountain wind in the silence of the night, and somehow, there was a trace of venom in them.

“We were all just trying to make a living—you know that—we were all just in it for the money…”

“You were timid when you were alive, don’t be the same as a ghost…”

“If you have the ability, go after him!” His voice grew shrill. “What’s the point of coming for us?”

“Even if you take all of us down, we won’t go with you.”

“Our crimes aren’t worth dying for, do you understand?”

The sound in the recording crackled softly, continuing to spin on faithfully.

In the end, the crackle of the fire quieted, leaving only the man’s near-hysterical sobbing and the increasingly piercing mountain wind.

In the hospital room that smelled faintly of disinfectant, sunlight was kept out by the drawn curtains.

Three men sat in silence. No one moved to stop the recording. They simply let that eerie crying sound rise and fall, until it faded away completely.

“Even if you drag me down with you…” the man’s voice finally broke into hatred amid his ritual and repentance, “even if you drag me down, you still won’t get your revenge.”

“We’re all ants. If we don’t alter the project data, there will always be others who will.”

“Not everyone’s as gifted as Fang Yongnian. Not everyone’s as stubborn as Lu Boyuan.”

“We don’t have wives as good as Lu Boyuan’s. I’ve got old folks above, children below—so many mouths to feed. Even if he asked me again, I’d still tell him you were the one who leaked the file.”

“What else could I do?”

“You think I’d confess for you?”

“He’s already gone insane like this. If I die, who will support my parents? Who will feed my wife and children?”

“You can go now…”

“Every injustice has its cause, every debt its debtor…”

“You can go now…”

The voice, almost a murmured lament, gradually softened. After a few more seconds of static, the recorder finally clicked and stopped on its own.

But the hospital room remained silent.

The truth, buried for years, had at last come to light. It turned out that in that car crash, the person they had wanted to kill from the start was Ge Wenyao.

And the reason Ge Wenyao was killed was because someone believed he had leaked that document.

Lu Boyuan collapsed where he sat, as though he had aged ten years in a single night.

Zheng Fei, suppressing the urge to smoke, turned to look at Fang Yongnian who had yet to say a word.

Fang Yongnian, missing a leg now, thinner than before, a completely different man from who he once was.

He sat there like a statue, half hidden in the shadows, motionless.

“Yongnian?” Zheng Fei’s voice carried a hint of unease.

For a moment, he had the illusion that Fang Yongnian was about to sink entirely into darkness—for the sake of this absurd, cruel truth.

“At last, there’s evidence,” Fang Yongnian said, and actually smiled.

He could finally let them reap what they had sown.

At first, his only goal had been to use the falsified data from the Kang Mo Project to reach the regulatory authorities, then trace the thread back to uncover the truth behind that car crash years ago.

But through this long tug-of-war, he had, in the end, reaped what he had sown.

Three days later, the nineteen experts trapped in the mountains were escorted down by eight police cars. Once down, they were all detained for various crimes.

The car accident from four years ago was finally reopened—

Under the charge of intentional homicide.