When the call came in, Lin Nuanqing was eating a boxed lunch.
The fluorescent lights in the precinct were painfully bright. Everyone was busy with their own work. Someone was filling out a statement, while someone else was on the phone with a reporting party, sounding impatient. The water cooler in the corner gave off a low hum, as if it were the only thing in the building still functioning normally. Nuanqing set down her chopsticks, picked up her jacket, told her Senior, “I’m going,” and headed out.
She had only eaten half the lunch. The pork chop was untouched.
The hospital was only seven minutes from the precinct by car. By the time she arrived, the emergency entrance had already been cordoned off. Several nurses stood at the end of the hallway, and someone was crying. A young nurse was crouched by the wall, hugging her own arms, her face pale. A colleague beside her was patting her back, but that hand was trembling too.
Nuanqing walked around to the side of the building.
Wind rushed through the gap between the buildings, carrying a smell of disinfectant mixed with earth. The ground was wet. She couldn't tell whether it had just been hosed down or had rained. She glanced at her shoes. Something sticky clung to the sole. She didn't look down.
She saw it.
A woman lay on the ground in an unnatural position, like a rag doll someone had tossed aside. Her left arm was bent at an angle no human arm should go. Several colleagues were already taking pictures and stringing up tape around the scene. The flashes lit up again and again, burning that pose into Nuanqing's eyes.
Nuanqing walked closer and crouched down.
The victim was very young. There were injuries on her face, but they weren't from the fall. They had been there before. A scar at her temple was still healing, its edges tinged pale pink, as if new skin had only just begun to grow over it. Her arm was in a cast. A strip of bandage showed from the sleeve of her hospital gown, its edges already frayed. It had been there for more than a day or two.
She had jumped from the tenth floor. Someone at the nurses' station said she had still been in bed ten minutes ago, her phone lit up beside her. When the nurse went to make rounds, the window was open and she was gone. The curtains billowed outward in the wind, as if saying goodbye to something.
Nuanqing stood and took a step back.
She stared at the face and felt that it looked familiar.
“Senior, um... I think she's that actress.” The rookie beside her spoke quietly. He held up his phone, showing her a still from a movie. In it, the woman wore a white dress and stood by the sea, her hair blowing in the wind, her smile beautiful.
Nuanqing glanced at it. It was her.
Fang Zhiyu. Twenty-six years old. Three years ago, she had won the Best Actress award at the Xinghe Film Award as a newcomer, making her the youngest winner in history. At the ceremony, she had cried as she thanked Director Chen for giving her a chance and promised she would keep working hard.
Nuanqing had seen that clip. Not because she was a fan, but because her younger sister had forwarded it to her that night with a message: “Sis, she's amazing.”
Nuanqing remembered that night. Her sister had sent the message while Nuanqing was on duty. She had replied with a smiling emoji. Her sister never responded. It was the last time her sister had voluntarily shared anything with her.
The facts at the scene slowly came together. A month earlier, Fang Zhiyu had been in a car accident, crashing into a tree by the roadside. Her injuries had been severe, and she had remained in a coma for an entire month. She had only woken up three days ago.
The report listed the cause of the accident as: “The driver was suspected of being in an impaired mental state and failed to notice the road ahead.”
But Nuanqing knew that wasn't the whole story. Everyone did.
In the months before Fang Zhiyu's accident, her name had flooded the internet. Not because of her work, but because of a rumor. People said she was dating director Chen Jiaheng. They said she had slept her way to the award. They said she couldn't act at all, that she was nothing but eye candy.
The director had come forward to clarify things. Her agency had issued a statement. None of it helped.
People online didn't need proof. They only needed a story—a story that made them feel like they were standing on the side of justice. “An actress who slept her way to the top” was a story that worked too well. It worked so well that no one wanted to let it go.
Fang Zhiyu's social media accounts were flooded with comments. The private messages were even worse. Nuanqing later saw the manager's description in the statement: “She read those messages every day. I told her not to, but she said she couldn't help it. She said she wanted to know why they hated her.”
Nuanqing went through the comments. Most were emotional abuse, crude and vicious, saying whatever they could think of to hurt her. But a few were different. Their wording was remarkably similar, as if the same person were speaking through different profile pictures. The posting times were orderly too, one after another between two and three in the morning, never more than two minutes apart. Something about them felt wrong when Nuanqing skimmed through them, but she didn't stop to think about it. This wasn't her case. She was only there to handle the scene.
The agency's final decision was to have her step away from acting for a while. “Until the backlash blows over.”
The backlash never blew over. Fang Zhiyu had suffered an emotional breakdown while driving home.
Then she had fallen into a coma for a month.
Then she had woken up and opened her phone.
Nuanqing imagined the scene. A young woman who had spent a month lying in a hospital bed, still wearing a cast, her fingers perhaps still trembling, opening her phone. The instant the screen lit up, notifications surged in like a flood.
One. Two. Ten. A hundred.
During that month while she was unconscious, those people had never stopped. They didn't know she was in the hospital. They didn't care. They just kept typing.
“Feeling guilty, huh? Serves you right.” “Quit pretending to be a victim. The accident was your own damn fault.” “How come you didn't die?”
Nuanqing closed her eyes for a moment.
Before forensics placed the victim's phone in an evidence bag, Nuanqing saw what was on the screen.
A message window was open. One line had been typed, and the cursor was still blinking.
“I really didn't...”
It had never been sent.
Nuanqing stared at those five words for a long time.
She didn't know who Fang Zhiyu had wanted to send them to. The people who had cursed her? Her friends? Her family? Or the boyfriend she had been with for seven years?
It didn't matter anymore.
She hadn't sent it. She had chosen another way to answer.
Nuanqing closed her notebook.
She didn't say a word on the drive back to the precinct. The rookie sat in the passenger seat. Maybe the silence felt too heavy, because he spoke up. “Senior, that actress... Is what people said online true? Was she really with the director...?”
“What do you think?” Nuanqing's tone didn't change. It remained flat.
The rookie froze for a moment. “I... don't know.”
“Then why are you asking?”
Silence settled over the car. The rookie turned to look out the window and said nothing else. Nuanqing heard him scrolling on his phone, his fingertip tapping lightly against the screen. She didn't look at what he was viewing. She didn't want to know.
Nuanqing watched the road ahead. When the light turned red, she hit the brakes. An LED advertisement for the building across the street reflected on the windshield, playing a trailer for a new movie. She recognized the director's name: Chen Jiaheng.
But a line of scrolling comments ran across the bottom of the screen: “Boycott Chen Jiaheng.” “Boycott directors who use casting couches.” “Give us back a clean film industry.”
Fang Zhiyu was dead. But those words were still alive. They didn't need her to be alive to keep moving.
Nuanqing looked away.
The light turned green. She pressed the gas.
Back at the precinct, she sat at her desk, opened her computer, and started writing the report.
Cause of death: fall from a height. Method: suicide. Remarks: The victim was suspected of having been subjected to long-term online backlash and having an unstable emotional state before her death.
When she typed the last word, her fingers stopped on the keyboard.
Suicide.
That word brought everything to an end. Fang Zhiyu was dead. She had jumped on her own. No one had pushed her. The case was closed. There was no suspect, no killer, and no one who needed to take responsibility.
The people who had typed those messages online would keep typing tomorrow. They would find the next target and use the same tone to say the same things. They wouldn't remember Fang Zhiyu. They might not even think they had done anything.
Nuanqing moved the cursor to the “Remarks” field and looked at what she had written: “suspected of having been subjected to long-term online backlash.” The sentence felt weightless. So weightless it was almost like saying nothing at all. But that was how the report was formatted. It didn't need you to write, “Someone killed her with a keyboard.” It only needed you to write, “Unstable emotional state.”
Nuanqing saved the file.
She leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling. The fluorescent lights were still painfully bright.
But the face that surfaced in her mind wasn't Fang Zhiyu's.
It was another face.
A younger girl sitting in a room with the curtains drawn tight, the glow of her phone lighting up her face. She was reading those messages too. One after another. She wanted to say, “I really didn't,” too, but she didn't know who she was supposed to say it to.
Nuanqing pushed the image out of her mind.
She shut down the computer, picked up her jacket, told her Senior, “I'm heading out,” and left the precinct.
It was raining outside. She didn't open an umbrella.
When she got home, the living room was dark. The entryway light was broken. She had said she'd replace it the week before, but still hadn't. She changed her shoes in the darkness and walked down the hall, stopping outside her sister's room.
The door was closed. A line of light showed beneath it.
Nuanqing stood there for a while. She heard a very faint sound from inside, like fingers tapping on a keyboard. Once, a pause, then once more. It wasn't the rhythm of chatting. It was the rhythm of someone thinking.
She raised her hand, wanting to knock.
Her hand stopped in midair.
She didn't know what she would say after knocking. How was your day? Did you eat? A girl died today. Like you, she was driven to the edge by those words?
She lowered her hand.
She went back to her own room and sat on the edge of the bed. Then she took out her phone.
On the screen was the message she'd sent her sister three hours earlier.
“Did you eat today?”
Read.
No reply.
Nuanqing set the phone on her nightstand and turned off the light.
She lay in the darkness, staring at the ceiling. There was nothing on it.
The keyboard in the room next door continued. Once. Once. Once.</n