Chapter 4: The Dead Man’s Secret

She didn’t sleep that night.

Near dawn, turning the watch under the lamp for the umpteenth time, she noticed a groove on the back thinner than a hair, running along the edge of the case. Not a scratch. A seam.

Inside was a memory card so thin it was almost transparent.

Her computer read it. A single folder appeared.

Final Note.

Inside were more than thirty audio files, numbered by date. The first had been created three years ago, twelve days before the accident.

She pressed play.

Her father’s voice filled the room, the overhead light still off. It was hoarser than she remembered, with the steady whir of a ceiling fan behind it.

“If you’re hearing this, it means you’ve come back. I had hoped you wouldn’t.”

Ruoyu sat frozen, her hand still on the mouse.

“I didn’t betray you. But I couldn’t save you the ordinary way, either.”

The files that followed rebuilt the whole picture, piece by piece.

Three years ago, Li Mingcheng discovered that Tianmu was running a complete system: using money to buy young artists before they knew how to read a contract, using vague clauses to gather up their copyrights, and using the media to wipe out anyone who refused to sign. Three years, eleven artists. Not one of them still worked in music.

Ruoyu had been the first to spot the pattern. Not because she was a good investigator, but because she was the only one who actually read every appendix of her own contract.

That was why she became a target.

Her father wanted to get her out of the industry quietly: abroad, a new career. She refused, and refused in words that, hearing them again now, she still recognized as her own twenty-four-year-old voice.

He knew that in a head-on fight, she would lose within a quarter.

So he signed a fake agreement, one that made the whole industry believe he had sold out his daughter’s copyrights. He accepted letting everyone, including her, hate him.

But the original copyrights never went to Tianmu. They were moved into an independent protection fund based abroad, with only one condition to unlock them: Li Ruoyu herself, alive, coming forward to claim them.

She read that line and laughed, a dry and bitter laugh.

For three years, she had fought to reclaim something that had been kept safe for her the whole time. Her father had planned every move except one: he never got to tell her, and her car went into the median seven days before his plan was complete.

The last file was shorter than all the others. In it, his voice dropped almost to a whisper.

“The man behind Tianmu isn’t Gu Chengyuan.”

Ruoyu’s head jerked up.

“It’s the man who founded the company with me all those years ago.”

A name appeared on the screen, typed, without punctuation.

Li Zhenghao.

Her father’s cousin.

The man who had disappeared ten years ago.

She remembered him. Very clearly. A well-known strategic advisor, a man who had held her on his lap when she was six, who had a habit of turning the ring on his finger whenever he was thinking. After a financial scandal, he vanished from China, and the whole family believed he had died somewhere beyond the border.

The ring.

Ruoyu opened the family photo she had scanned into her computer and zoomed in until the image dissolved into grain. And there, on the hand resting on her father’s shoulder, was a ring with an eye carved inside a triangle.

The same hand that had snatched the phone in the apartment on the outskirts.

The entire structure suddenly became clear, like an arrangement separated into its parts: Gu Chengyuan was the operator, Su Man the executor, Kaixin’s mother the one controlling the media. And the one who had written the whole arrangement, from the very first note, was Li Zhenghao.

The frightening part wasn’t that he was powerful. The frightening part was that he knew everything about this family: knew her father, knew the songs, knew the company’s structure, knew about the night of the accident, and knew for certain that sooner or later she would come back.

Ruoyu didn’t call the police.

A man who had stayed hidden for ten years wouldn’t leave any direct evidence. To catch him, she had to make him step into the light himself.

So she issued an announcement.

Yucheng Entertainment would hold its biggest international concert ever, called “The Final Note.” And on the night of the show, the complete copyright files for the old songs would be made public, along with their original edit histories.

The news spread through the market in a single morning.

Ruoyu knew he couldn’t sit still. Not out of fear of the law, but because all of Tianmu’s asset value lay in exactly those files.

Four days later, an international entertainment group sent an offer to buy the global broadcast rights, at nearly double the market price.

The legal representative who signed the last page: Li Zhenghao.

She looked at the name, then signed directly beneath it.

“You’ve finally stepped onto the stage yourself.”

Nine days before the show, Yucheng’s entire music archive was locked. Thousands of master recordings and hundreds of multi-track arrangement files vanished from the system in forty minutes.

In the server room, the whole technical team stood frozen in front of red screens.

Ruoyu opened her own laptop, typed a string of characters, and another folder appeared. Intact. Complete.

The head lawyer stared at the screen. “You backed everything up in advance?”

“From the very first day.” She closed the laptop. “I never keep all my assets in one place. I learned that lesson three years ago.”

That afternoon, Chen Muyang came to her office, unannounced, his jacket still wet at the shoulders.

He set a USB drive on her desk. “I found this in Gu Chengyuan’s office.”

Ruoyu looked at it, then at him. “How did you get it?”

“That’s my responsibility.”

She picked up the drive and turned it slowly between two fingers.

“You think doing this changes the past?”

Muyang shook his head. “I just want to be on the side of the truth, once in my life.”

She looked at him for a few seconds.

“Don’t be on my side.” She put the drive in her drawer. “Be on your own side. That’s what you really lost.”

He didn’t answer. He just nodded slightly and left.

She didn’t forgive him. But she no longer needed revenge on him either. For three years he had lived on studio tricks, and he was paying that price himself, one performance at a time.

On the night of the concert, the stadium was full. More than fifty thousand people in the stands, hundreds of millions of views online across six platforms.

Ruoyu walked onto the stage in a black dress with no accessories.

She didn’t sing.

She sat down at the piano, placed her hands on the keys, and the first piece rang out: the very song Muyang had run out of breath on at the Golden Sound Awards three months earlier.

After the first piece, the screen behind her lit up.

It wasn’t an effect. It was the original edit history of every arrangement: the date each file was created, each date it was revised, the machine name, and at the end of every staff, a tiny mark of a dot and a backward slash.

Beneath each work, the real songwriter’s name appeared. The names that had taken its place faded out one by one.

The stands began to understand that they hadn’t come to watch a concert.

They were sitting in a courtroom built of light and sound.

By the third piece, just as she set her hands on the keys, the giant screen went black.

Then it lit up again, and there was no longer any sheet music on it.

An aging face filled the screen. White hair, thin-rimmed glasses, and the composed smile of a man used to sitting in the back row.

Li Zhenghao.

The whole stadium rose to its feet. Fifty thousand phones went up at once.

“You really are just like your father,” he said, his voice booming through every speaker.

Ruoyu didn’t leave the piano bench. She only lifted her head to look at the screen.

“You’ve finally shown yourself.”

“You think you’ve won?”

She looked straight into the center camera, and when she answered, she spoke very slowly, so that every word had time to travel across six live-streaming platforms.

“I never said I’d won. I only needed you to confirm who you are, in front of hundreds of millions of people, on a connection with a logged IP address.”

The smile on the screen vanished.

He had just realized that to hijack this feed, his people had to connect directly into the show’s system, a system run by Yucheng and designed according to a technical plan she had written herself.

Down below, the police began moving in through the east corridor.

But he still had one card left, and he played it with the leisure of a man who had already anticipated this move.

“You don’t know what your father once did.”

Ruoyu stayed still. “Then say it. In front of millions of people.”

He was silent.

“The more you say, the more you prove you know far too much about something you were never supposed to know anything about.”

The stadium made no sound. Fifty thousand people holding their breath at once created a silence that had weight.

Finally Li Zhenghao laughed. “You really have grown up.”

“No.” Ruoyu placed her hands back on the keys. “I just don’t believe people like you anymore.”

The feed was cut. The screen went dark, then lit up again with the unfinished score.

He was arrested that same night, at an apartment nine kilometers from the stadium.

But as he was led down the corridor, he turned back and found exactly where she was standing.

“Do you know why your father never told the truth?”

Ruoyu didn’t answer.

He smiled, and that smile lingered long after they had taken him away.

“Because he was part of it too.”