Chapter 6: Before the Internet Came for Me, I Called the Police
Fu Jingchen seized my wrist with crushing force, as if he meant to snap the bones. His knuckles had gone a cold white, and the killing intent in his eyes nearly overpowered the sandalwood in the room.
"Su Nian, I'd say you're the one who values her life too lightly."
He ground his teeth and leaned in half an inch. The impeccably suited man now looked like a dog caught by the tail: "Put that thing down right now, or no one in this world can save you today."
I glanced down at his rigid arm and felt not the least bit of panic. If anything, it was funny.
President of the mighty Fu Group, a man with devotion carved into his public face—and the moment the mask came off, he looked exactly like a market vendor caught rigging his scale.
"Mr. Fu, have you forgotten what century this is?"
I raised my other hand and slowly waved the phone with its little red light.
"Three minutes after I walked through the gate of your family shrine, I activated a timed cloud upload. If I don't enter the decryption code within half an hour, the wax-sealed birth-post of yellow silk, the seven transactions that bled Su's Pharmacy dry, and the threat you just made will sync themselves automatically to the city police's economic crime division and the top twenty financial media outlets in the country."
Fu Jingchen's pupils blew wide. The fingers clamped around my wrist could not move.
"You're bluffing." He forced the words through his teeth, the muscles in his jaw jumping.
"Feel free to bet on it."
I smiled at him, harmless as a houseplant. "Let's see which comes first: me dying inside the Fu family estate, or Fu Group stock hitting limit-down with trading halted at tomorrow's open?"
He stared at me for three full seconds. Only when the faint wail of sirens rose from the distant highway did he reluctantly let go.
I used the opening to step back two paces, crossed the threshold of the shrine, and immediately saved a high-resolution scan of the birth-post to my private cloud drive.
Inside my mind, Su Nian let out a long breath. The inferiority she'd swallowed for years seemed to melt off her like ice in the sun.
She said quietly, to no one and to me: "So he gets scared too."
"Of course he does. Parasites are terrified of daylight."
I answered her in my head: "Until today you played the tragic heroine by his script. Today we show him what it looks like to legally demolish a man's rice bowl."
Once out of the Fu family's old mansion, I didn't go back to the side courtyard. I got straight into a ride-hailing car Su Nian had booked with her private savings and headed for a chain budget hotel in the city.
The moment things turned ugly, any roof the Fu family could reach became a target.
Somewhere along the drive, two faint glimmers lit up on the panel, and Zhao's voice got louder and louder in my ear until she was shouting:
"Ruan Ying, are you trying to get yourself killed? Do you know what's stamped on that birth-post? A high-tier forbidden seal from the Luck Harvesting Bureau! Go head-to-head like that, and if the target does something extreme on the spot, the task failure penalty comes out of MY performance review!"
"Relax, Zhao. Last life I died of being too polite. This life I specialize in curing exactly that."
While my fingers flew across the keyboard, I was thinking:
"Besides, Fu Jingchen is a thorough egotist. Between his public image and his stolen luck, he would never risk a murder charge without a guaranteed way out."
"Fine, your twisted logic wins." Zhao sniffed, and a row of numbers scrolled onto the screen.
"Not bad, though. The host's awakening value is up fifteen percent, and Fu Jingchen's Jinx Harm Rating has dropped to seventy-eight percent. But he's already activated his PR contingency. The paid trolls will flood in soon—brace yourself for the hate."
"Hate? That depends on who takes the high ground first."
I pushed open the hotel room door. Outside the window the sky was a gray haze, and the evening traffic crawled along like tiny ants.
On the desk I set up a secondhand laptop and slotted in the card reader with practiced ease.
Script View had already mapped Fu Jingchen's entire PR playbook.
In the original book, at eight tonight the Fu family would publish a long statement: Su Nian had "fled with the money, abandoned her sick mother, suffered a mental breakdown." Tens of thousands of paid trolls would then paint her as a greedy, shameless gold-digger, until she had no way out but to crawl back to the Fu house, kowtow, and beg forgiveness.
"You like striking first with a complaint? Then I'll deliver yours to the police station for you." I picked up the phone and dialed the police directly.
I reported, clearly and on the record, that the Fu Group was suspected of using shell companies to siphon off large amounts of assets from Su's Pharmacy, and of confining and threatening a pregnant woman.
Then I bundled twenty-four pages of bank statements with the timestamped audio recordings and uploaded the package through the real-name channel of the city's public reporting platform.
By the time I finished, it was seven thirty—half an hour before the Fu family's statement went live.
I opened a video editor and cut together every devoted line Fu Jingchen had delivered over three years of finance interviews and charity galas, then matched them, beat for beat, against the ritual ledger from the family shrine, the hospital's notice of suspended treatment, and Lawyer Chen's recorded coercion.
On the left, President Fu, impeccably dressed and deeply in love:
"Niannian is the only love of my life. I would give everything I have to keep her safe."
On the right, the cold ledger line: "March 7th: 8,000,000 yuan transferred out of Su's Pharmacy. Memo: old mansion renovations."
On the left, the media's fawning profile of his generosity to the less fortunate;
on the right, the overdue bill from the ICU where Su Nian's mother lay.
I kept the video title blunt and vicious:
[The Devoted CEO Pixiu's Complete Record of Devouring a Dead Man's Household: On Being Used as a Blood Bag After Marrying Into Money]
At eight o'clock sharp, the Fu family's official statement dropped, right on cue.
[Billionaire Heiress Vanishes With a Fortune]
The trending topic—who knows how much that cost—rocketed into the top three, and the comment section filled with bought-and-paid-for clickbait accounts screaming "ungrateful" and "a modern-day Pan Jinlian."
"The show is on."
With that thought, I published the contrast video from Su Nian's verified account and tagged the city police's official account and three anti-fraud platforms.
Faced with corporate bank records and crystal-clear audio, the whiplash hit like a tsunami.
Within ten minutes of upload the view count broke five million; the shares exploded with it, and the comments were wall-to-wall shock and fury.
"God. One minute he's confessing his love, the next he's cutting off her mother's medication?"
"And this is what they call an arranged marriage? This is targeted poverty relief run in reverse—a scam on the poor!"
"The contrast is terrifying. Sisters, pull up a chair, this melon is ripe—and the police have officially taken the case!"
The comment section was overrun by ordinary angry netizens within minutes, and the Fu family's hired trolls were trampled to pieces in the stampede.
Twenty minutes in, the Fu Group's official account had to shut off its comments, and the stock forums of its listed subsidiaries were a graveyard of red.
On the panel, the numbers roller-coastered wildly. Zhao's foghorn voice whooped inside my head:
"Beautiful! The Jinx Harm Rating is under seventy! And Su Nian's soul integrity has reached forty percent! Ruan Ying, pulling the firewood out from under his pot—savage! Right now Fu Jingchen is probably smashing every vase in his office."
I leaned back and took a sip of warm water, thinking that knowing him, "professional desk-clearing service" was a real possibility.
But winning the information war was only the beginning. Pulling out this man-eating nail—that was the real victory.
Just as I was about to shut everything down and rest, an anonymous message popped up.
The sender wasted no words: a razor-sharp diagram of the Fu Group's core asset flows, and a complete list of every managed account held in the name of "Meng Xin."
What chilled me most was the line at the very end:
[The incense in the shrine has been switched to gloomwood. Meng Xin cannot last seven days. At eleven tonight, go to the third cellar in the east courtyard of the old mansion and get her out.]
The intelligence was precise down to the Fu family's guard rotation schedule.
No ordinary netizen or righteous bystander could hold information like that. Which meant that somewhere beside Fu Jingchen there was still a hidden helper—one who knew exactly how the Luck Harvesting Bureau ran its operation.