Ning City Health Hospital Death Certificate
Patient: Qian Xingfa
ID Number: 35070219660728XXXX
Permanent Address: Ning City, Tianxi Community, 2#701
Cause of Death: Late-stage liver cancer, treatment ineffective
Date of Death: 1996.10.27
Physician’s Signature: Zheng Guofang
October 27, 1996
A copy of this death certificate from twenty years ago was in Yuan Yue’s hands.
The DNA comparison results from the crime scene were out. The other major suspect in the murder of Tang Zhixue was Qian Xingfa, who had supposedly died of liver cancer twenty years ago!
“We can pretty much close the case, right?” Hu Yuan swiveled in her chair. She took a slender cigarette from the pack, expertly tapped the filter on the box twice, and asked Yuan Yue, “Do you mind?”
“It’s fine, go ahead.” Yuan Yue was still looking down at the case file. “But the case can’t be closed yet. There are still suspicious points.”
“These last few days have been too exhausting; I need a cigarette to wake myself up,” Hu Yuan said, lighting it with a lighter and taking a deep drag. She continued, “The ‘lucky money’ in Zhao Yuanliang’s bag had Tang Zhixue’s saliva on it; the DNA extracted from biological evidence at the crime scene matches Qian Xingfa’s. Even by the book, with evidence collected to this point, we could submit it to the public prosecutor. Why can’t it be closed?”
“We are going by the book right now,” Yuan Yue corrected.
“Yeah, right. Working on a case where all the suspects are dead—a case the court won’t try, a case that can’t result in a conviction,” Hu Yuan slowly exhaled the smoke from her lungs. The thick smoke swirled around her face, her delicate, beautiful features appearing and disappearing within it, tinged with a hint of sarcasm. “When a person dies, all their troubles disappear. That’s what they say, right? I wonder if Xin Yongchu will be satisfied with this answer.”
In criminal law, if a suspect dies, they are exempt from prosecution for their crimes.
The police stop investigating, the court stops trying the case, and the victim—of course—gets nothing, neither an apology nor compensation.
“Captain Yuan,” Hu Yuan said, “I know the suspicious point you’re referring to. There’s no doubt these two were the murderers—but we still haven’t figured out how they managed to get an alibi back then and fool the investigators.”
“Correct. That missing piece has never been filled in.”
“Is there any point?” Hu Yuan said.
Yuan Yue looked up.
“We’ve found the truth. We’ve done what we were supposed to do. Figuring out all the minor details, aside from wasting time and money, won’t get us anything more. I know you’re a stickler for details, Captain Yuan,” Hu Yuan teased, “but be a little flexible while you’re at it. No matter how clearly you investigate it, the bureau won’t commend you, and the court won’t hold a trial for you. We might as well wrap this up, go back to Ning City, and reassign the manpower to where it’s needed more, like the milk candy poisoning case that’s causing such a stir right now.”
“Captain Huo is in charge of the poisoning case. I trust he can handle everything,” Yuan Yue smiled, not getting angry.
What Hu Yuan said was actually quite reasonable, but everyone has their own way of thinking, their own way of investigating.
He just corrected another small mistake of Hu Yuan’s:
“We haven’t found the truth yet. We have only found the result.”
“Only when the full picture of a case is completely clear, without a single missing piece, can it be called finding the truth. Finding the truth is my responsibility; it’s the closure I must give the victim. I can’t be vague or unclear.”
He was always so gentle, so steady.
“I’m a very mediocre person. I can’t do too much, so I can only do the things in front of me well, one by one.”
After leaving the police station, Ji Xun contacted Feng Qisi.
But Feng Qisi was unenthusiastic about cooperating with the police, making one excuse after another, saying he had no time. It wasn’t until Ji Xun stated his purpose clearly—that he wanted to know the story of Lian Dazhang’s “white-eyed wolf” incident in university—that he suddenly perked up and arranged to meet Ji Xun at the coffee shop below Zhongqi Law Firm.
The two met.
Ji Xun found Feng Qisi to be a tall, very thin middle-aged man.
He held the coffee cup handle with his thumb and forefinger, the other three fingers curled up, and got straight to the point with Ji Xun: “Regarding that incident at school, it was a long time ago, so I don’t remember it very clearly, but I can still give you a general idea. After all, it was quite a sensational event on campus at the time.”
He pondered for a few seconds, and an old, yellowed story unfolded before Ji Xun’s eyes.
The Lian Dazhang of today was a well-known lawyer, owning both a house and commercial property, a successful man who had achieved initial financial freedom.
But back then, Lian Dazhang, who had just been admitted to a prestigious domestic university of political science and law, was just a poor boy.
He was truly poor.
He always wore the same two sets of clothes; if the weather was bad, he’d have to wear damp clothes to class. When he ate at the cafeteria, it was always steamed buns with pickles; he couldn’t even bear to order an extra vegetable dish.
But in contrast to this was his intelligence and diligent study.
Perhaps the extreme material deprivation pushed him to focus all his energy on his studies, allowing him to fight his way through university and claim the top rank.
“It’s just being number one in your major; one is produced every year whether you like it or not.” Feng Qisi was clearly drinking coffee, but his words were like a sip of thick plum soup, overflowing with sourness. “I often got first place when I was in school, but I wasn’t as lucky as Lian Dazhang to be noticed by Dean Wang. It seems good grades aren’t enough; you always need a bit of formalism to make a deep impression on people.”
Dean Wang was the dean of their law school at the time. He had been deeply rooted in the legal and political world for a long time, with friends all over the country and students throughout academia. For Lian Dazhang to be noticed by him and taken on as a disciple was tantamount to a carp leaping over the dragon gate, and it caused quite a stir on campus.
But this talk was all private, never brought out into the open.
From then on, Dean Wang kept Lian Dazhang by his side to cultivate him.
Lian Dazhang ate at Dean Wang’s house; his clothes, the books he read, even the fountain pen in his hand, were all paid for by Dean Wang. At this time, Lian Dazhang was still studying diligently and maintained his first-place ranking. He even got a campus belle as a girlfriend.
“In just one year, he completed the transformation from a poor village boy to a future elite of the big city’s legal world. Dean Wang treated him well enough. At that time, he still seemed like a student of good character and academic excellence,” Feng Qisi commented. “But a person can’t pretend for a lifetime. Lian Dazhang’s pretense was especially short, only one year, and then his ugly, utilitarian true face was exposed.”
More than anything else, Ji Xun was concerned about the timing Feng Qisi mentioned.
“Did his change happen at the beginning of his third year?”
Interrupted in the middle of his emotional buildup, Feng Qisi seemed a bit disappointed and tried to recall for a while. “…Not that early. It should have been at the end of the year, around Christmas. Dean Wang hosted a gathering that time.”
Dean Wang was a great senior in the legal world. The friends he knew included nationally renowned lawyers, high court judges, and chief prosecutors. He was also a sociable person and would often hold book clubs to maintain connections.
That was the first time Dean Wang brought Lian Dazhang to a book club.
And that trip was what caused the trouble.
“The fledgling’s wings had just sprouted feathers, and he was already trying to fly to the highest branch. At the book club, Lian Dazhang fawned over figures like judges and prosecutors to the extreme. So many people saw it. When the prosecutor who attended the book club was leaving, Lian Dazhang was bowing and scraping, tugging at his sleeve. The man was so embarrassed he tried to pull his sleeve away several times but couldn’t get it out of Lian Dazhang’s grasp.”
“He was so enthusiastic,” Feng Qisi stirred his coffee and sneered contemptuously. “Even a dog seeing its master isn’t that eager. It’s a good thing Mengmeng broke up with him in time.”
After meeting with Feng Qisi, Ji Xun went to the household registration office.
The story Feng Qisi provided was one heavily colored by his own emotions.
From their chat, it was also clear that Feng Qisi had wanted to become Dean Wang’s disciple—but Lian Dazhang got there first; Feng Qisi liked the campus belle Mengmeng—but Lian Dazhang got her first; many years later they competed again for the senior partner position at Zhongqi Law Firm—and Lian Dazhang still won.
Feng Qisi’s entire life seemed to be at odds with Lian Dazhang. To Feng Qisi, Lian Dazhang was a walking sour plum tree; smelling him was sour, looking at him was sour, and talking about him was still sour.
To find out what really happened back then, it would probably be better to find the Dean Wang from the story.
He sent a message to Huo Ranyin: “Get me authorization. I need to look up someone’s information at the household registration office.”
Huo Ranyin: “Who are you looking up? What have you found?”
Ji Xun: “Wang Tongfang, the dean of the law school Lian Dazhang attended in university. I’m currently in the most boring phase of a detective novel: finding witnesses and collecting testimony. But the timeline matches up. I’ll tell you more after I verify it. How about you? Have you reached the scene?”
This time, Huo Ranyin took a while to reply.
When he did, he also sent the authorization to Ji Xun.
“Arrived. The husband is at the scene. He came home from work and found his wife and child with cerebral palsy poisoned. He reported it immediately. The child has now been declared dead, and the wife is still being rescued at the hospital. This husband was in the process of discussing divorce with his wife a few days ago. The preliminary thought is that the stress of life led the wife to despair and she committed suicide with her child.”
“Even for a ripple effect, this is too frequent,” Ji Xun said.
The ripple effect is a phenomenon in public opinion where, when a certain negative event is widely circulated among the masses, similar phenomena will occur one after another, endlessly, hence the name.
“Yeah,” Huo Ranyin said. “Three silver nitrate poisoning incidents. The case in Shanghai didn’t use milk candy as a medium; only the two cases in Ning City used milk candy. The initial reports didn’t specify that the poisoning was only local to Ning City. With the same news coverage, why are the copycat cases so frequent only in Ning City?”
“So you suspect there are other factors.”
“For public opinion to incite people, it must be disseminated to the eyes of the beholder,” Huo Ranyin’s voice came through the phone. “I plan to compare the information sources they were exposed to, to see if I can find any similarities.”
“Good idea,” Ji Xun praised, and was about to chat a bit more, but a loud noise suddenly came from the other end, drowning out Huo Ranyin’s voice. Ji Xun vaguely heard the doctor announcing that the wife’s rescue had also failed and she was dead, and the husband’s wailing.
At this time, he had also arrived at the household registration office.
He temporarily hung up the phone and showed the authorization from Huo Ranyin to the household registration police officer. After the officer verified it was correct, he prepared to pull up Wang Tongfang’s records for him. Just then, a police officer from the traffic management bureau next door came over, also asking to look up records.
They chatted casually:
“Over on Jian’an Road, a large truck was driving along and just flattened a small car.”
“Is the person inside still alive?”
“The car is flattened, how could there be a person? The person is stuck to the car; you can’t even tell them apart.”
“Drunk driving?”
“Not drunk driving. The driver said he was listening to a broadcast about the milk candy poisoning case and got engrossed, wasn’t paying attention to the road conditions. In just a moment, he ran over the small car. Check the car owner’s relatives and friends, contact them to come identify the body and discuss compensation.”
“Wait a moment, I’ll help him check the car owner’s information first,” the police officer said to Ji Xun.
“Okay,” Ji Xun replied.
“Name, Qian Shumao; address, Jian’an Community on Jian’an Road… He was hit just after driving out of his community?”
“Looks like it.”
“There’s no record of relatives or friends here, only his place of work: Fuxing Education.”
Ji Xun, who had been listening idly on the side, raised an eyebrow.
“Fuxing Education?”
The sky was dark, and the only light in the room came from the computer screen.
Cai Yan sat in his computer chair looking at the screen. He hadn’t turned off new message notifications, so the “ding ding ding” sound was incessant, like ten alarm clocks in the room, each ringing in his head.
Cai Yan ran his hands through his hair in frustration.
When did the public opinion start to turn against him?
It seemed to be around noon. When the news of the elderly person dying from poisoning in the nursing home broke, everyone was in an uproar, starting to blame his previous video, saying he shouldn’t have made a popular science video about silver nitrate, shouldn’t have told netizens how to easily obtain it.
Heaven knows.
If someone wants to kill, wants to break the law, what does it have to do with silver nitrate?
Can’t a car kill someone? Can’t a kitchen knife kill someone? Even if you use poison, silver nitrate isn’t the fastest-acting or most toxic one! He made that video for pure science popularization, purely to do a good deed, purely to—ride the wave of a hot topic.
Who the hell knew that one person after another would get fixated on silver nitrate, as if they couldn’t get over it?
And so many other people also made videos about silver nitrate, how come no one went to harass them?
Cai Yan actually knew in his heart why no one went to harass the others.
His silver nitrate video wasn’t outstanding; no one should have remembered him.
But he then made another video—”An In-depth Look at a 22-Year-Old Cold Case.” This video was very outstanding, so much so that it made him famous. In the past few days, all sorts of commercial promotions and video collaborations had come looking for him, until today.
The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.
He cursed again. After a moment of hesitation, he clicked on his video. The bullet comments on the video had all changed.
The netizens who were originally shouting “666” had suddenly become sarcastic, mean, angry, and irritable, as if it was all his fault for making this video:
“Is the UP crazy? Can you just casually popularize a dangerous chemical like this?”
Can’t I popularize a chemical you can buy on Taobao? Why don’t you shake the water out of your brain and empty it? You’d die no matter what damn chemical you ate!
“They’re all profiting from tragedy.”
I recognize your ID. Weren’t you the one just a day ago shouting that the police are useless and the masters are among the people? A day later, the master investigator has become someone profiting from tragedy? You sure switch sides fast, buddy.
“UP should go watch Teacher Mingchao’s legal popularization video. That video is what truly cares about public opinion and how to solve problems, a valuable video.”
I f… I won’t swear, but we’re all just chasing clout. He’s even chasing the clout of the case in my “22-Year-Old Cold Case” video. All the legal issues are analyzed based on the details I provided. What, did he somehow gain a sense of nobility from it?
Cai Yan was about to vomit blood, his anger surging, but there were too many bullet comments and comments scolding him. Among these remarks, there were also curses aimed at Xin Yongchu. It was as if the world had turned upside down overnight. The lone wolf avenger, the heroic Xin Yongchu, had become the milk candy murderer, a criminal who deserved to be cut into a thousand pieces.
Amid his anger, he couldn’t help but wonder:
Did I really do something wrong with my video? …But I just wanted to move things forward. Besides, I wasn’t the only one who did it, why are they all coming after me! Shouldn’t we be working together right now, demanding the police solve the case quickly? Wasn’t everyone’s initial demand the same?
He felt truly aggrieved. After stewing for a long time, he suddenly saw a bullet comment scroll by:
“Doesn’t anyone think there are too many clues in his later video? A lot of them should be records only available to the police internally. How did he get them? Did a police officer violate regulations and give him the case clues?”
At that moment, a private message dinged.
Cai Yan glanced at it. A new account had left him a message:
“I know who you are. Huatian District, Building 2.”
When Cai Yan read this, the fingers holding the mouse stiffened.
He looked at the real-time news pop-up in the bottom right corner of his computer: “New Victims in Milk Candy Poisoning Case, Mother and Son with Cerebral Palsy Murdered in Locked Home”; then he looked at the ever-increasing number of bullet comments.
More and more.
More and more…
After a long while, he stood up from his seat, opened the door. Cai Hengmu was on the sofa outside reading the newspaper. He asked:
“Dad, have you… felt anything strange lately?”
“What strange things?” Cai Hengmu, wearing reading glasses on his nose, was bewildered. “What strange things could I possibly feel?”
“Nothing, I’m just a little worried,” Cai Yan said, distraught. “What’s the progress on Tang Zhixue’s case? Didn’t they say it was reopened?”
“I don’t know.”
“It was your case, how can you not know?”
“I haven’t been on that case for a long time. What would I know?” Cai Hengmu said, flipping through the newspaper indifferently.
“I don’t believe you don’t have any inside information.”
“Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you,” Cai Hengmu said.
“Dad!” Cai Yan shouted. “I’m your son, who would you tell if not me? Yuan Yue? Yuan Yue is a big shot now, he’s the captain of the criminal investigation team in charge of this case. He doesn’t need you to hold his hand and train him, or tell him stories about criminal investigation! What’s with your age? You’re still avoiding me to whisper secrets with Yuan Yue. Is there a need for that?”
“What does this have to do with Yuan Yue?” Cai Hengmu said impatiently. “I think you just haven’t had enough of the online gossip and want to get some more from me. Let me tell you, there’s no gossip.”
“Am I gossiping? I’m concerned about the case’s progress!” Cai Yan accused his father without restraint. “If you hadn’t failed to solve the case back then, would there be so many problems now? If you had spent any of the time and money you wasted on eating, drinking, womanizing, and traveling on the case all these years, it would have been solved long ago! Xin Yongchu, an ordinary person, persisted in hunting the killer for 22 years. You, a police officer, what have you done of value all these years!”
“What I’ve done is not for you to judge,” Cai Hengmu answered coldly. “You’re a shut-in, just manage yourself.”
“I’m not a shut-in!” Cai Yan was furious. “I’m a video creator, an UP. I’m making a living too, okay?”
“No formal job, at home in front of the computer all day. If that’s not a shut-in, what is?” Cai Hengmu stuck to his old tune.
Just as the father and son were about to have their usual conflict, the doorbell rang.
It rang only twice, then stopped.
Cai Yan thought of the private message, and his heart tightened. He rushed to open the door before his father could.
There was no one outside, only a bulging newspaper, as if something was wrapped inside.
Inside the newspaper…
He crouched down, opened the newspaper, and saw a dead cat. His stomach churned, and a wave of nausea rushed to his head, making his eyes sting.
“Another one of your packages?” Cai Hengmu’s voice sounded from inside the house.
“Yeah,” Cai Yan mumbled.
“Stop buying things online all the time. None of it is good stuff,” Cai Hengmu chided again.
“I know. It’s almost New Year’s, Dad, you should go out less too. If you do go out, remember to tell me.”
After saying this, Cai Yan closed the door, took the dead cat downstairs, and originally intended to throw it in the trash can. In the end, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He found a bush, dug a hole, and buried it.
