That man didn't die.
Before the ambulance took him away, I heard the paramedics say that his right lower leg was likely fractured, his nasal bone was injured, and he was still conscious.
Those words didn't reassure me.
"Likely fractured" was what I got in exchange for saying, "Save me."
He grabbed me, shoved me, and raised his fist. All of that was real. But when he lay on the ground looking at me and begging for help, it was also true that I wanted everyone to stop.
They only heard the first part.
The number on the white phone had stopped at 12,864.
Four hundred forty-seven more than before.
Lu Bo'an took a picture of the screen, then sealed it inside a signal-blocking bag. The pink glow disappeared, but the notifications sounding one after another nearby did not stop with it.
"I called them," I said.
No one answered.
"I called for them to save me."
Lu Bo'an crouched two steps away from me.
"Let's get your head checked first."
"I called them."
I needed him to say it wasn't my fault.
And I was afraid he really would.
That would be like Lin Xu's mother saying she had only loved me too much, wiping away everything she had done.
Lu Bo'an didn't wipe anything away for me.
"You were attacked. There was nothing wrong with asking for help," he said. "What they did afterward has to be handled separately, one thing at a time."
"If I hadn't shouted—"
"You might have been hurt even worse."
"But he—"
"The man's responsibility for attacking you and everyone else's responsibility for hurting him excessively don't become the same thing just because you were afraid."
I couldn't take it in.
The blood in the alley was slowly drying in the wind before the rain. The delivery driver sat by the roadside, repeatedly asking why he had hit someone after coming to his senses. The convenience store clerk hugged a mop and cried, saying she only remembered that someone needed help.
Every one of them had to bear the consequences of what they couldn't remember.
And Lin Xu had gained 447 new guardians.
The police questioned everyone at the scene one by one.
The delivery driver remembered me shouting for help and remembered knocking the man down, but he didn't remember grabbing the man's hair afterward. The clerk remembered taking the mop outside and insisted that she had only intended to keep the two of us apart. When she heard the sound of the wooden handle striking in the footage, she vomited right there by the roadside.
The woman in pajamas remembered everything.
Lin Xu's voice had not taken over her.
"I saw everyone trying to save him, so I thought that man had to be dangerous," she said. "If I didn't help, he might be the next one to get hurt."
She pointed at me.
That reason belonged entirely to her.
Lin Xu didn't even need to borrow every person's body. As long as the first person struck, everyone else could find their own reason to join in.
That was more frightening than twelve thousand dead people speaking at once.
I was sent back to the hospital.
There was no obvious bleeding at the back of my head, but the doctor wanted to keep me under observation. The strain in my right shoulder had worsened, my right knee was bruised and swollen, and there were several shallow cuts on my left palm. Before treating me, the nurse asked if she could touch me. I nodded, but the moment the alcohol pad touched my skin, my entire hand still jerked back.
She stopped.
It took me three breaths to hold my hand out again.
I miscounted all three times.
That afternoon, Lu Bo'an placed an offline laptop on the folding table in my hospital room.
It wasn't the white phone.
"The technicians only made a copy," he said. "The phone is still isolated. These are the local files and cached cloud data we can confirm."
The moment I saw the folder names, I began to go cold.
**Yanchuan Care Plan.**
**Guardian Responses.**
**If I'm Gone.**
"Do I have to look?"
Lu Bo'an nodded.
But I didn't tell him to take it away.
Last night, I was afraid Lin Xu would find out what the answers were, so I couldn't say it. Now this was something she already knew, something she had already handed to tens of thousands of strangers. Even if I closed my eyes, it wouldn't become a secret again.
Cheng Xiaoqing sat outside the door.
She didn't enter the room. She moved her chair somewhere I could see it, and she had no phone in her hands, only a paper magazine. Whenever someone passed by, she moved the chair closer to the wall, making sure the doorway wasn't blocked.
I looked at her three times.
The third time, she didn't look up.
Lu Bo'an opened the first file.
It was a long draft that had never been posted publicly.
Lin Xu had written:
**My partner isn't good at expressing what he needs. When he says he wants to be alone, it usually means he's in a dangerous emotional state. When he says he wants to leave, please first confirm whether someone has put him up to it. When he takes off the ring, it means he's giving up on the promise of safety we've built together.**
Attached below were photos of me, my company, the routes I commonly walked, and a map of the area around my home.
Some of the information had been covered up. Some of it hadn't.
My name and face were unobscured.
Neither was the outside of my office building.
The map of my home only blurred the last digit of my address. The nearby convenience store and bus stop were still clearly visible. She called these "necessary identifying information."
The article also included a checklist for identifying me.
A silver ring, a bag over my right shoulder, the dark jacket I wore often, and pulling on the door three times whenever I was nervous.
Even the things I did when I was afraid had become ways for strangers to find me.
She hadn't portrayed me as a violent person.
She had portrayed me as someone incapable of deciding whether he was being hurt.
"The man who attacked you had seen this," Lu Bo'an said. "There was a forwarded copy on his phone."
I stared at the date on the article.
Three months ago.
Lin Xu had still been alive then.
On the surface, we hadn't broken up. She sent me the weather every morning and asked whether I'd gotten home at night. I had even told my coworkers that she was just a little clingy.
But she had already been finding witnesses for my refusal.
Lu Bo'an opened the response data.
The screen showed a long list of accounts.
Every one of them had pressed a button.
**I am willing to help protect Gu Yanchuan when you are unavailable.**
Fifty people on the first page.
Fifty on the second.
The pages kept going.
Total: 12,417.
Exactly the same as the number of guardians displayed the first time "Together" appeared.
"They weren't taken over from the beginning," Lu Bo'an said. "At least according to the data, they only responded to this request for help."
"She lied to them."
"She gave them one-sided information."
"She said I couldn't make my own decisions."
Lu Bo'an didn't replace my words with something nicer.
"Yes."
I scrolled down.
Some people offered to go with me to the doctor. Some offered to keep an eye on whether I was showing up for work normally. Someone said that if they saw me riding alone, they could notify Lin Xu.
One account wrote:
**What if he says he doesn't need it?**
Lin Xu replied:
**Please believe the person who has cared for him over the long term. He's very good at hiding fear behind politeness.**
Another person asked whether they should call the police.
She said that unless I went missing, they shouldn't trigger me with formal procedures. They should notify her privately first.
Every seemingly cautious question was steered back to the same answer.
Don't ask Gu Yanchuan.
Ask Lin Xu.
More people only pressed "I am willing."
They might not even have finished reading it.
These people lived in different neighborhoods and had different jobs and families. One night, they had simply seen a crying woman's plea for help, pressed a button, and then forgotten about it.
Lin Xu hadn't forgotten.
After her death, she found every single person who had said they were willing.
"It's 12,864 now," I said.
"The 447 new ones don't have corresponding accounts in the data."
"Because I called for help."
"That's the most direct temporal connection we have so far."
Not proof.
But I knew.
That line—Thank you for admitting you need me—was clearer than any examination could have been.
"Delete these people."
"We can archive the accounts, ask the platform to take down the content, and contact the users we can identify."
"Delete them."
My voice rose, and someone in the hallway stopped.
I shut my mouth at once.
Lu Bo'an tilted the laptop screen down a little.
"The technicians have taken the original page offline," he said. "But even with the phone isolated, there are still people in the hospital speaking Lin Xu's words."
I knew what he meant.
Shutting down the program wouldn't make her disappear.
Technology was the way she knocked.
The door was already open.
The second folder contained scheduled posts.
Inside were dozens of prewritten emails, messages, and social media posts. They weren't set to go out on a single date. The triggers were Lin Xu's account remaining logged out for an extended period, her phone detecting no movement, and a death certificate being uploaded.
She had prepared switches for her own death.
The first was addressed to Lin Shufen:
**If I'm gone, first make sure Yanchuan is wearing the ring.**
The second was addressed to the company's anonymous inbox:
**Gu Yanchuan has been emotionally unstable lately. Please don't let him leave alone.**
The third was addressed to the guardians' group:
**He'll refuse everyone out of guilt. Treat his refusal as a cry for help.**
With every line I read, my fingers grew colder.
The forty-two people at the office looking up in unison hadn't been a coincidence.
My neighbors organizing my apartment hadn't been a spur-of-the-moment decision.
The call the police received in my voice couldn't be explained by the scheduled posts, but its contents were exactly the same as her instructions.
She had handed everyone their lines first.
After her death, she borrowed their mouths to recite them.
"There's a video," Lu Bo'an said.
My hand stopped beside the trackpad.
"Do I have to watch it?"
"Not necessarily."
"What if there's something in it I don't know?"
Lu Bo'an said, "Once you see it, you'll know. We don't know whether Lin Xu will gain new information from it too."
I pulled my hand back immediately.
Even watching what she had left behind might open another door for her.
But if I didn't watch it, everyone would keep telling me what had happened according to the version she had written. Lin Xu's mother would call it love. A stranger would say I had killed her. The guardians would say my refusal was only fear.
I needed at least one thing to see for myself.
Not to prove it to anyone.
I was only afraid that after one more night, I wouldn't even dare keep my own memories.
I looked toward the door.
Cheng Xiaoqing was still sitting there. She finally noticed my gaze. Without coming closer, she wrote something on the paper and held it up.
**Do you want me to leave?**
I shook my head.
She lowered the paper back onto her lap.
I nodded at Lu Bo'an.
The video had been recorded two hours before the accident, on the day Lin Xu died.
In it, she sat in her bedroom.
It was the same room from yesterday, with the air conditioner set to seventy-five degrees and filled with records of my life. She wore a white top, her hair tied back over one shoulder, and a delicate ring on her right hand.
The ring was still there.
A white phone sat on the table in front of her, while another device recorded her.
Lin Xu smiled at the camera.
"If you're watching this video, it means I may be temporarily unable to take care of Yanchuan."
Temporarily.
She didn't say death.
"Lately, he's often said he wants to move out, and he's started hiding his plans from me. I know he doesn't mean to. He's just easily influenced by other people, and he's not good at admitting when he's afraid."
She didn't cry as she spoke.
Every sentence had been carefully prepared.
"Please don't blame him, and don't believe him when he says I hurt him. That's just how he protects himself when he's under too much stress."
My breathing began to grow ragged.
The September 17 memo from last year, the washed-out backpack, the identification documents put back in the drawer—they all slammed into one another inside my head.
She knew I wanted to leave.
So she had told everyone first that I couldn't be believed when I said I wanted to leave.
In the video, Lin Xu picked up a sheet of paper.
It showed a photo of me and the invitation code for "Together."
"If I can't reach him, please help me confirm his location. Don't let him take off the ring, don't let him stop taking his medication, and don't let him be alone with Cheng Xiaoqing."
Outside the door, Cheng Xiaoqing heard her name and went completely rigid.
She didn't come in.
The video continued.
"If he cries, trembles, or says he's scared, it means the situation is already very serious. Take him back to a safe place immediately."
I pressed pause.
The image froze on her face, leaning slightly forward.
"She knew," I said.
Lu Bo'an asked, "Knew what?"
"That I would be afraid."
It wasn't a misunderstanding.
It wasn't that she thought controlling me would make me feel safe.
She had known in advance that I would tremble, cry, and beg people not to touch me.
She had written every one of those reactions down as proof that I needed even more control.
My fingernails dug into the gauze newly wrapped around my palm, and the wound began to sting again.
"There are twenty seconds left," Lu Bo'an said.
I didn't want to watch.
But Lin Xu remained frozen on the screen, as if she knew I would eventually press play.
I released the pause.
She held the sheet of paper closer to the camera.
A row of tiny numbers showed in the corner.
12,417.
The number of people who had made the promise was already complete when she recorded the video. She hadn't made a last-minute plea for help before dying. She had recorded her final instructions only after confirming that everyone was in the positions she had assigned them.
"Thank you for being willing to help me."
She paused for two seconds, then turned toward the bedroom door, as if someone were waiting outside.
When she turned back, her smile was softer than before.
"One last thing."
The first phone notification suddenly sounded in the hospital hallway.
Then a second.
Cheng Xiaoqing stood up from her chair and covered both ears with her hands.
People outside the hospital room stopped one after another.
In the video, Lin Xu looked at me.
Not at the camera.
At me, sitting after her death and finally understanding everything.
"If he wants to leave," she said, "bring him home for me."