Chapter 1: The Dividing Note

This year’s Golden Sound Awards had taken over an entire stretch of central Shanghai.

In front of the Jinhuang Hotel, cars crawled in like a slow river of black metal. Every time a door opened, hundreds of flashes fired at once, so white that for an instant no one could see anyone’s face. On the red carpet, the stars passed through that blaze of light at a carefully calculated pace: not so fast that they lost the good shots, not so slow that it looked deliberate.

The name called out most that night was still Chen Muyang, the leading male singer of the younger generation. Beside him, as every year, was Lin Kaixin, with a smile trained so perfectly it never slipped by a single degree.

The two of them had said publicly that they were just close friends of many years. The media had long since decided to call them the golden couple, and no one bothered to correct it.

What no one mentioned that night was that three years ago, there had been one more person behind them both.

That girl wrote almost every song that carried Muyang to the top. That girl was also the one who pulled Kaixin through her crisis, back when the charts had begun to forget her name. For a while, the three names always appeared side by side on the same line of credits.

Her name was Li Ruoyu.

Three years ago, she vanished from the industry after an accident. The press release said she had lost concentration while driving. The papers managed three more days of coverage, called it a tragic accident, and moved on.

Muyang had posted a long tribute to her. Kaixin had cried on camera at the memorial. Both of them said they would never forget her.

And tonight, no one knew that she was standing exactly twelve meters from the stage, behind the black curtain.

Ruoyu wore a plain black suit, no logo, no brand notable enough to earn a second look. Her long hair was tied low, revealing a face that had lost all the softness of three years ago. In her hand was a tablet holding the show’s entire technical file.

No one recognized her. Three years is enough for a person to change, especially when that person is no longer the girl who stayed up all night adjusting every harmony in the studio, and no longer the woman willing to trade her whole career for a promise.

Now she was the production director of Yucheng Entertainment, a company less than six months old that had already made the market turn its head. On paper, its founder was a foreign legal entity. In the press, there wasn’t a single photograph. Ruoyu had never given an interview, and that was a choice, not modesty.

She hadn’t come back to reclaim her fame. Fame is something other people give you, and whatever others can give, they can also take away.

She had come back to reclaim what had been taken from her hands.

On the backstage monitor, Muyang was smiling at thousands of fans. Three years ago, she had loved that smile so much she lost the last of her good sense. Now, looking at it, she saw only a chess piece standing on exactly the square she had planned.

A staff member came over and lowered his voice. “Director Li, Chen Muyang’s performance is about to start.”

Ruoyu glanced at her watch. “Has the sound system been run fully according to plan?”

He handed over his tablet. “Everything checked, exactly as you asked.”

She scrolled through the technical checklist and stopped at the last line.

“No backup tracks are to be used under any circumstances.”

The staff member hesitated, glancing quickly toward the wings. “But Mr. Chen’s company asked for the backup track during the chorus.”

Ruoyu kept looking at the monitor, her voice no louder than the backstage noise.

“If he really sings, the backup won’t be needed. And if he doesn’t, the audience deserves to know.”

He didn’t dare ask anything more.

Out front, the stage lights turned deep blue. Chen Muyang walked out, receiving the roar as if it already belonged to him, and lifted the microphone.

“This next song is my gift to all of you.”

The first notes rang out. The whole hall cheered.

Ruoyu stood still behind the curtain, one hand resting lightly on the back of the control chair.

This song had once been hers. Three years ago she wrote it in a seventeen-square-meter room whose window faced the wall of the building next door. She finished it at four in the morning and called him right away. He had said it was the melody he loved most.

Then he took it from her. The songwriter credit was changed to another name. And she was pushed out of the company with a contract she still kept exactly as it was, down to the ink blot in the corner of page three.

The opening went perfectly, just as she knew it would.

Then came the chorus.

There was no technical glitch. No one touched the mixing desk. It was simply his voice, stripped of its studio padding, beginning to run out of breath in exactly the places where, for three years, the machines had been singing for him. One flat note. Then another, thin and cracked, falling into the middle of the hall like glass.

The front rows began to stir. Muyang kept smiling, holding the microphone out to the audience as if asking for rescue.

Ruoyu watched him and said very softly, only to herself:

“This is only the first note.”

The performance ended to polite applause, which was worse than silence.

Muyang had barely stepped off the stage when the phone in his pocket vibrated. A message from a hidden number:

“Do you still remember who wrote that song?”

He stood frozen in the middle of the backstage corridor, people brushing past his shoulders without his noticing. He read the line four times and didn’t dare reply. Because only one person in the world had ever asked him a question in exactly that voice.

And that person had disappeared three years ago.

At the same moment, in a dressing room downstairs, Lin Kaixin’s phone lit up too. The message was completely different:

“Don’t sing tomorrow’s song, if you still want to keep your secret.”

She deleted it in three seconds. But when she set the phone down on the makeup table, the glass gave a tiny rattle, because her hand wouldn’t stay still.

Two people, two different warnings, and neither told the other.

Neither of them knew the sender was the same person.

Ruoyu didn’t need them to be afraid right away. Fear makes people find each other, plot together, rebuild a united front. She needed them to suspect first, because people who have betrayed each other once always destroy each other faster than any outside enemy could.

Three days later, a strange new music account appeared. No profile picture. A name of just one letter.

S.

The first track S posted climbed the charts within four hours. Major producers took turns sending offers. S answered no one, except one person.

Chen Muyang.

“If you want to get back to the top, sing this.”

He opened the file, listened all the way through, then started it over immediately. By the third time, he had forgotten what he had meant to be suspicious of.

He didn’t know the song was written as a trap with a roof over it.

No poison. No trick that could touch anyone’s body. Just a musical structure designed so that it couldn’t be faked: transitions that forced the singer to take real breaths, long sustained notes that couldn’t be spliced, a climax where any post-production trick would leave a trace if anyone tampered with it.

To sing it, Muyang would have to prove to himself how much he really had left.

He began practicing day and night. Ruoyu followed the whole process through the most public data in the world: studio schedules, the behind-the-scenes clips he posted himself, even videos fans filmed on the sly. Every time he pushed past his limit, she recorded it. Not to hurt him, but to know exactly where that limit would be on the day he stood in front of millions.

Meanwhile, S sent Kaixin a different song.

It was full of layered vocal runs, the kind that in the studio could be stitched together from twelve different takes, but on a live stage could not.

That was Kaixin’s greatest weakness, and she knew it.

She signed anyway.

Because for seven years, every time she faced something she couldn’t handle, she had managed with fame, with connections, with midnight phone calls. She saw no reason this time would be different.

Ruoyu read the signed contract, folded it, and placed it on the right side of her desk, the pile for things that were finished.

She had been waiting for exactly that decision.

Two weeks later, a nationwide live program announced two special performances: Chen Muyang and Lin Kaixin would appear together on the same night. The media immediately called it the golden couple’s reunion.

Ruoyu read the announcement, then called her legal department.

“Prepare every copyright file. The originals, not copies.”

But before the final battle, there was one more person she had to find.

Su Man.

Three years ago, Su Man had been her closest assistant: the one who knew her computer password, knew how much sugar she took in her coffee, and the one who had changed her schedule on the night of the accident.

For a long time, Ruoyu believed she had only been forced into it.

Then three years of investigation turned up a number: the money transferred to Su Man had been sent eleven days before that night.

The sender wasn’t Muyang. It wasn’t Kaixin either.

It was a media investment fund, and the man in control of it was Gu Chengyuan, the former strategy director of her old company, the same man who had fiercely opposed letting a twenty-four-year-old girl hold full copyright to her own songs.

Ruoyu read the whole file, then slowly closed her laptop. She wasn’t in a hurry to touch him.

Yank one link out of a chain and the rest of it only slides back into the dark faster.

That night, her phone rang. An unknown number. The man’s voice on the other end had been processed until it sounded like someone speaking underwater.

“You should stop, before things get worse.”

Ruoyu leaned back in her chair, still looking out the glass window.

“Three years ago, the person who called me said exactly the same thing.”

The line went silent. She could hear breathing.

“That person is currently the fourth line on my list of suspects.”

The call cut off.

She set the phone down, and for the first time that evening, the corner of her mouth lifted.

Three years ago, they used an accident to erase her from the stage. Three years later, she would use that very stage to drag them down.

She reopened the accident file and turned to the scene report, a page she had read at least two hundred times, so familiar that her eyes automatically slid past the irrelevant lines. Tonight was no different. She skimmed past the note about the passenger-side airbag having deployed without pausing for even a second, and turned to the last page.

There was a signature there.

Ruoyu stared at it for a long time, and for the first time in three years, she felt the floor beneath her feet was no longer solid.

The signature was her father’s.