Chapter 2: A Song with No Author

Li Mingcheng had died two years ago of a stroke, in his private office, at nine in the evening.

For three years, Ruoyu had kept a relatively peaceful place for him in her memory: a dry, often disapproving father, but disapproving in the way of someone who wanted to protect her.

The signature in the accident file pushed him out of that place.

Why had he signed an agreement connected to his own daughter’s accident? Why had he been the one to ask the police not to widen the investigation? How had he known that Su Man changed her schedule, when even she hadn’t found out until months later?

Those three questions kept her awake for nearly a week. But in meetings her voice stayed even, her hand didn’t shake when she signed, and no one at the company noticed anything unusual, because emotion that shows on the outside is the first thing an opponent picks up.

She hired a team of independent lawyers, not anyone from her own company.

The first result made everything worse: the signature was completely genuine. Examined three times, no sign of forgery.

But the date of signing was seven days before the accident.

Which meant he had known something was about to happen.

Ruoyu kept digging. In the archives of her old company, the lawyers found a contract misfiled among the tax records of a different year, a hiding place so clumsy it might have been deliberate.

The contract governed ownership of all her compositions. The recipient wasn’t the company.

The recipient was an investment fund called “Tianmu.”

She had heard that name once, long ago, at dinners where her father spent more time on the phone than talking to his daughter. Tianmu specialized in funding young artists. Its real owner had never been made public.

Three days later, the registration records arrived. Legal representative: Gu Chengyuan.

Ruoyu wasn’t surprised. He had stood at the edge of her life too long to surprise her anymore.

What she still didn’t understand was why an investment fund would need a few dozen songs by a twenty-four-year-old songwriter badly enough to trade a human life for them.

The answer was in the ninth file.

It was a copyright valuation, drawn up internally, unstamped. Her entire catalog, including unreleased songs, was valued higher than the total assets of her old company.

She read the figure twice, then laughed, the sound falling into the empty room without an echo.

“So three years ago I wasn’t their opponent. I was just an asset they hadn’t put on the books yet.”

That same week, on the other side of the city, Chen Muyang finished recording S’s eighth song.

Each one pulled him a little closer to the version of himself at twenty-five, the man who once sang for two hours straight in a smoke-filled bar without his voice dropping. But the more he sang, the stranger he felt. The melodies were familiar. Not familiar like something he had heard before, but familiar like something written for him.

One night, he pulled up the old arrangements to compare.

And he saw it.

At the end of the staff, before every passage that needed revision, there was a tiny mark: a dot and a backward slash. Not a standard notation. It was how one person, and only one, had marked her drafts, and she had once told him she’d learned it from a notebook of her father’s.

He called Kaixin at two in the morning.

“Do you think S is Ruoyu?”

The line was silent for so long he thought the call had dropped.

“I think we should stop this.”

“Why would you say that?”

Kaixin didn’t answer. Because there was something she had never told him: on the night of the accident, she had seen Ruoyu in the underground parking garage, and she had also seen Su Man hand Ruoyu a phone that wasn’t hers.

She had stood there, behind a concrete pillar, and she had said nothing.

Muyang hung up with a feeling that had never appeared in seven years of knowing her: suspicion.

It took him four days to get hold of the old bank statements. When he found it, he sat motionless in front of the screen for a long time. Three years ago, Lin Kaixin had received a large sum from Tianmu, transferred exactly ten days before the accident.

He went straight to her apartment, unannounced.

“Why was this money sent to you?”

Kaixin looked at the phone screen he held out, and the blood drained from her face so fast that her makeup stood out like a mask.

“You shouldn’t be digging into these things.”

“You knew. You knew all along, didn’t you?”

She didn’t answer.

“Were you involved in Ruoyu’s accident?”

Kaixin burst into tears, hugging her own elbows. “I didn’t want anything to happen to her.”

“But you still kept quiet.”

“Because I was afraid of losing everything.”

Muyang stepped back, then back again, until his shoulders hit the wall. He had just understood that the only person he still trusted had betrayed him too, the same way he had once betrayed someone else.

At that very moment, the phone in his hand lit up.

“Don’t trust the person crying in front of you.”

He looked up at Kaixin. She was looking at him too, and in her eyes was the exact question he was thinking: who just saw us?

From that night on, the two of them stopped calling each other.

That was exactly what Ruoyu needed.

While those two names came apart on their own, she went looking for Su Man.

It took five months and three false trails, but finally an address appeared: an old apartment on the northern outskirts, fifth floor, no elevator. Su Man lived there under a different name, keeping the books for a building-supplies shop.

Ruoyu didn’t call the police. She went herself, alone, in the afternoon.

The door opened. Su Man saw her and stood frozen, her hand still on the doorknob.

“That’s impossible.”

Ruoyu took off her glasses, folded them, and held them in her hand. “Three years, and you still haven’t learned how to read people.”

Su Man backed inside. “I thought you were dead.”

“It’s precisely because you thought so that I’ve lived this long.”

Su Man sank onto the edge of the sofa, her shoulders shaking. “I didn’t want to do it.”

“Then who made you?”

No answer.

Ruoyu set a phone on the table, the screen facing her, showing a transfer order and a date.

“I know Gu Chengyuan paid you.”

Su Man kept her head down.

“But I also know he wasn’t the first.”

It was a lie. Ruoyu didn’t know. She was only guessing, and she said it in the voice of someone who already had the proof in hand.

Su Man’s head jerked up, and that look told Ruoyu she had guessed right.

“Who is it?”

“That person… never shows up in person.”

Ruoyu took another step. “Then where did you meet him?”

Su Man looked at her for a long time, so long that Ruoyu could hear water dripping from the kitchen tap behind her.

“In your father’s office.”

The room went still.

“Three years ago, your father met him many times. Once I had to stand outside the door for nearly two hours.”

“Did he know what they wanted?”

“He knew. He knew they wanted all your copyrights.”

Ruoyu clenched her fists, her nails digging into her palms. “Then why did he still sign?”

Su Man looked up, and this time what was in her eyes wasn’t tears, but a fear that had lived inside her for three years.

“Because they told him that if he didn’t sign, you wouldn’t live through the month.”

No one said anything more. The tap kept dripping, steady and absurd.

Ruoyu stood there, and the entire structure of theories she had built over the past months began to tilt: the father who betrayed his daughter might turn out to be a father paying for his daughter.

Crash.

The apartment door was kicked in, the lock flying across the floor.

Su Man screamed. Ruoyu instinctively twisted to the left, her shoulder slamming into the corner of a cabinet. A man charged in, snatched the phone off the table, and ran straight for the back door.

Less than ten seconds. All that was left in the room was the sound of breathing.

“It’s him,” Su Man stammered, pointing at the door. “He was there the night of the accident.”

Ruoyu looked at the dark space where the figure had just vanished. She didn’t chase him.

Not because she was afraid. But because in the instant that hand grabbed the phone, she had caught sight of the ring on his ring finger: an eye carved inside a triangle.

The symbol of Tianmu.

And in a very deep drawer of her memory, a detail stirred. She had seen that ring somewhere before, long ago, on the hand of a man in a family photograph that hung in her father’s office.

She couldn’t remember who yet.

But she knew the war had just entered a phase where, from now on, people would no longer be using contracts.