The memorial hall door creaks open at dawn to a sight that turns the first mourners to stone: Dr. Liang’s tablet has shifted overnight, now tilted toward Yu Meng Long’s smaller plaque like a head bowed in apology. Fresh incense burns in front of both, smoke curling into the shape of a question mark no one placed there.
That same morning, every phone in the city pings with the same anonymous file: a thirty-second audio clip. The operating room. Alarms. Dr. Liang’s voice, hoarse and pleading: “He’s still conscious… he’s asking for her… we have to tell someone.” A woman’s sharp reply: “Take the picture and delete the rest, or you join him.” A camera shutter clicks. Yu’s ragged whisper, barely audible: “Don’t let them win.” Then flatline.
The clip vanishes from clouds, drives, even offline backups, but not before half the country hears it. Riots spark outside the hospital gates. Fans in Yu Meng Long masks hurl white lilies at riot shields. Someone projects the forbidden photo onto the hospital facade in blood-red light. The building’s power dies the instant the image appears.
Investigators arrive to find Dr. Liang’s apartment sealed from the inside, windows painted black, walls covered in printouts of the same deathbed photo repeated hundreds of times like a curse wallpapered into reality. In the center sits his phone, screen cracked, looping a single unsent message: “The woman in the jade dress paid me to make sure he never woke up long enough to see her face one last time.”
Detectives trace the payment: an offshore account linked to a production company that financed every drama Yu and Song Yi Ren ever shared. The CEO is missing. The servers are wiped. The only thing left is a locked editing suite containing raw footage from Yu’s last project, the final scene never aired: Yu’s character dies in Song Yi Ren’s arms while she whispers the exact seven syllables that killed him in real life.
At midnight the hospital lights flicker back on. Security cameras catch a lone figure in pale jade slipping past locked doors, laying a single white envelope on the reception. Inside: the original memory card from the operating room and a note in elegant handwriting: “He begged me to finish the story. Consider it done.”
The envelope self-destructs in acid the moment forensics touches it. The memory card is blank.
But every screen in the building flashes the same frozen frame: Yu Meng Long’s eyes wide open on the table, looking straight into the lens, mouthing two silent words that every lip-reader agrees on.
“Thank you.”
The story doesn’t end.
It just changes directors.
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