Wu Tao’s unexpected appearance made many things clear.

The name that Fang Yongnian and Lu Boyuan had both suspected but never spoken aloud was finally brought into the open after Wu Tao showed up.

That old professor who had led Fang Yongnian step by step into the pharmaceutical field, that mentor who had paved the way for Lu Boyuan’s current status, that elder whose students filled the world and who held great authority in the institute. Finally, because of his son, fell from the altar.

He arrived in Hecheng the day after Wu Tao appeared.

His arrival was within everyone’s expectations. What was unexpected was that the seventy-year-old man came wearing a suit, with his hair dyed black and his leather shoes polished to a shine.

“I still have official matters later, but before that, I felt I had to come see you.” No matter how neat his attire, Professor Wu was still old; nothing could hide the gray weariness beneath his eyes.

Lu Boyuan, in the hospital suite, handed him a chair and poured him a glass of water.

Fang Yongnian did not move. From the moment Professor Wu entered, he had remained seated on the sofa, not once standing up.

Zheng Fei had already withdrawn, leaving only the three of them in the room.

They had shared many scenes like this before—three people together—but they could never return to four years ago. Back then, Fang Yongnian still had all four limbs intact, and Professor Wu had not looked as old as he did now.

“I was very persistent about the Alzheimer’s project.” Professor Wu sat down. Without any preamble, he went straight to the point.

Fang Yongnian lit a cigarette; the old professor leaned over to borrow the flame.

“My mentor died of Alzheimer’s. He spent his whole life studying neurodegenerative diseases, yet he died of one himself. When he passed, he could no longer speak, could no longer swallow, and had no dignity left.”

“You all know that version of the story. What you don’t know is that my mentor back then disliked me very much.” Professor Wu gave a self-mocking smile. “He thought my personality was ill-suited for research, especially for such a difficult field.”

“Looking back now, maybe I just wanted to prove him wrong. Who could have known that, over time, that stubbornness would turn into a heart demon.”

When a seventy-year-old man speaks of his youth, there is always a trace of melancholy and yearning. His remaining years were few, and even the old obsessions of the past, when recalled now, carried a faint tenderness.

“Before the Kang Mo project was approved, I received an email. It contained all the target data needed for the early phase of the project. Every piece of data had a source, and at the end there was even the seal of an authentication institute.”

Professor Wu took a drag from his cigarette.

“The data was so detailed that even if I had announced the project immediately that day, it would have passed approval. So, I was tempted.”

He was tempted, and thus opened the Pandora’s box designed for him.

“The preparatory phase of the project went exceptionally smoothly. I had someone privately verify the authenticity of that data and also sounded out opinions within the institute. I learned that there was still one slot open that year for a major original drug project.”

“It should have been around April, right? You know, before the deadline for the next year’s submissions.”

“So I suppressed the other proposals and submitted this one.”

“The approval process went unusually well. Because it was a popular target, the project even attracted international attention. The institute gave me the best resources. After forming the team, I secured a sizable initial investment. Nearly one hundred million US dollars.”

A hundred million US dollars seven years ago.

Lu Boyuan and Fang Yongnian both looked up, shocked—they had never known.

Professor Wu gave another weary, mocking smile.

“You two were my direct disciples. I always believed the two of you would achieve something in this field. So when I assembled the project team, I didn’t hesitate to include you both.”

“Before the project was publicly approved, I received another email. This time, it contained a list of names. The sender said that the previous set of target data had been given to me for free, and the price was that these people had to be included in the team.”

“Twenty-six in total—among them, Ge Wenyao.” Professor Wu glanced at Fang Yongnian and smiled. “Exactly the same list as the one you received, not a single word different.”

The cigarette in Fang Yongnian’s hand had already burned halfway down, yet he hadn’t taken a single drag. The stump of his right leg began to tingle and itch again—he knew the feeling well.

It was coming back.

That sickening, nauseating sense of collapse.

“I didn’t realize until two years after the project began that the source of the project’s approval data might not have been as simple as I thought.” The old professor leaned back in his chair and took a sip of the warm water Lu Boyuan had poured for him earlier.

“The first problem came from the accountant on that list.”

“I discovered that Wu Tao and that accountant were old acquaintances. You both know, at that time, Wu Tao was working at a venture capital firm. It wasn’t strange for him to know someone from accounting. What was strange was hearing that accountant call my son ‘President Wu.’”

“Wu Tao was two years younger than Yongnian, only twenty-five then. How could a man nearing forty bow and scrape, calling him ‘President Wu’…” Professor Wu gave a cold laugh.

“It wasn’t hard to investigate my own son. I barely had to put in any effort before I found that Wu Tao had actually founded his own venture capital company, with a registered capital of sixty million.”

“I also found out that the person who sent me that email with the target data was Wu Tao.”

Professor Wu fell silent.

The two proudest students of his life, sitting across from him, were also silent.

“He gave his own father fake data, tricked me into the trap, had the accountant slowly siphon away the Antimo project’s investment funds. When I finally found out, he only said, ‘This is what you owed me in the first place.’”

“I truly didn’t know I had raised such a genius, but this genius didn’t use his brilliance for study, only for crime.”

“He built a team—people from all walks of life—and each one of them had something he could hold over their heads.”

“He was generous with money and treated them well. Every time he got money, he would split the spoils openly, without hiding anything.”

Professor Wu laughed. The emotions in his dull gray pupils were so complex that they could not be read.

“He was a good leader, so good that many were even willing to die for him.”

“The target data in that email had indeed been the research focus of the biopharmaceutical field that year. The data was produced by real experts, and the forgery was so sophisticated that, combined with the authoritative seals, it didn’t just fool me—it fooled many other specialists in the field as well.”

“Wu Tao used my reputation in the industry to secure the initial funding for the project, and he intended to use those twenty-six people inserted into the team to keep generating fake data.”

“He understood the process of original drug development very well. He knew that over such a long timeline, he could quietly and invisibly extract a great deal of money through this method.”

“I tried to persuade him. I told him I didn’t care how the project started—if he stopped now, while the funding discrepancies were still small, no one would ever find out.”

“I urged him to take the right path, not to live by such crooked means.”

“He wept in front of me, swore that he would turn over a new leaf, and I… I softened.”

The old professor took out another cigarette and lit it himself.

“But when the project began the compound screening phase, Ge Wenyao came to me and told me that Wu Tao hadn’t stopped at all.”

Professor Wu’s voice gradually softened.

Though four years had passed, he still remembered everything from back then vividly.

Ge Wenyao was a man who looked simple and honest. His Mandarin carried an accent, his clothing was always plain, and he got along well with everyone in the project team.

No one knew he had a criminal record. When he was a minor, he had once killed a man—because that man had tried to molest his younger sister. In a fit of rage, Ge Wenyao had grabbed a chair and struck the man on the back of the head, killing him instantly.

He was not yet sixteen at the time. According to the principle of leniency for minors, he bore no criminal responsibility—but that became the leverage Wu Tao used to control and threaten him.

He was the only breadwinner of his family. Wu Tao gave him a lot of money, and gradually, he sank deeper and deeper. Until one day, because of a single data report, he finally snapped.

“This data cannot be falsified—it will kill people!” Professor Wu could still remember how agitated Ge Wenyao had been at that time. “I’ve already killed once. I can’t kill a second time.”

He had handed Professor Wu a USB drive. Inside were all the recordings of him leaking project materials for the sake of that project.

“I was really furious back then.” Professor Wu looked at Lu Boyuan. “Boyuan should know as well—back then, because of issues with the project’s target data, we adjusted the research direction twice after approval. We’d invested so much effort, thinking we had finally found the problem. And yet, we were told that everything was still fake. The person who deceived me—was my own beloved son.”

“So, I did something.” Professor Wu’s speech began to slow.

He did something—he thought it would stop his son. Instead, it dragged everyone into the abyss.

“You leaked the documents,” Fang Yongnian said, his voice hoarse, like that of an old man.

Professor Wu gave a bitter smile.

In the project team, only Lu Boyuan and Fang Yongnian had document access, but he himself had permission to read all project documents under that research division at the institute.

Lu Boyuan and Fang Yongnian had never suspected him. How could they, when at the very beginning of everything, it was he who had sown the seed of doubt—implying that one of them had leaked the documents?

At the time, Fang Yongnian had been lying in the hospital as the only survivor of the accident. Lu Boyuan, exhausted and sleepless for days, was buried in chaos over the project and the crash. And he—knowing his students too well—had only needed a few words to plant that suspicion in their hearts.

“Once that document was leaked, the project was doomed to fail. Once the project failed, all subsequent investment would disappear.”

“So Wu Tao went mad.”

He had gone to Wang Dagang, ordering him to ram directly into the car where Ge Wenyao was. Under the weight of the construction truck, the sedan had crumpled like paper. The man he wanted dead was killed instantly, and the others—innocent lives buried with him—died with their eyes open.

“I’ve done a lot of wrong things.” The old man’s face was filled with complex emotions.

“The first time I found out what Wu Tao was doing, I should have called the police.”

“The second time, when I gave him another chance and he still went through with it, I should have called the police even more—not tried to teach him a lesson in such a way.”

Or perhaps, he thought, he should have simply spent more time raising that son he’d had so late in life, at forty, instead of devoting all his time to the institute.

Fang Yongnian suddenly let out a short, cold laugh.

“You were wrong for insisting on the project when you already knew the origin of the target data was unclear. You were wrong for knowing the project’s finances had already sprung leaks, for knowing the data could never be verified through experimentation—and still keeping seventy of us working ourselves to exhaustion on it.”

He looked at Professor Wu, the man who had long been both father and teacher to him.

The man who had come to see him in the hospital and told him that if he ever faced hardship again, he could always come to him.

After his discharge, he hadn’t gone to him. And when he went to the institute to resign, the man hadn’t appeared either.

Fang Yongnian’s lips twisted into a faint, crooked smile. “You were wrong for knowing you couldn’t stop your son, and still, four years later, giving me Ge Wenyao’s recording and that list.”

“He tried to kill me again. If he had succeeded, would that have meant this whole matter could finally be buried—never to be mentioned again?”