A real killer playing a villain; the guy surnamed Zhen in Detective, run!

Three screens were lit on the editing table, and Su Qinghan sat at her workstation. Four empty coffee cups and two unfinished packets of melatonin were scattered on the table.

On the right is an open bottle of prescription sleeping pills, with three pills left. They've been taken, so they didn't work.

For the first three days after filming wrapped, she was still in the high dopamine rush of the completed work.

On the fourth day, dopamine retreats abruptly, like an engine that has been running at high speed for many days suddenly having its fuel supply cut off. The piston is still spinning in inertia, but nothing in the cylinder can burn.

Insomnia wasn't a new symptom. She'd been battling it for over two years. This time, it was particularly fierce. Closing her eyes, she saw that timeline: six minutes and eleven seconds, Lu Yuan's gaze piercing through the lens into the void. That image was stuck in the cache of her visual cortex.

She tried drinking. She tried the treadmill. She tried lying on a yoga mat on the studio floor like a corpse.

None of it worked.

At the forty-seventh hour, Su Qinghan stood in front of the bathroom mirror. The face in the mirror had two layers of dark circles under her eyes, chapped lips, and a faint bluish vein above her collarbone, a result of subcutaneous fat loss caused by long-term high cortisol levels.

The person in the mirror doesn't look like a famous director who has just finished filming a big production. He looks more like a patient's family member who has been waiting for three days in the ICU family rest area.

Daylight broke, she patted the water off her face, and went back to her workstation.

I don't want to do anything, yet I can't stop doing anything.

My gaze fell on the USB drive on the corner of the table, which contained rough cut footage.

She grabbed the USB drive and stuffed it into her coat pocket.

Grab the car keys. Head out.

---

Su Qinghan couldn't explain why she had driven to this place so early in the morning.

The destination on the navigation was Lu Yuan's rented apartment address. She stared at the name of the old, run-down neighborhood on her phone screen, concocting a reason in her mind.

In the final shot, the curve of Shen Yibai's lips at the very end was handled differently by Lu Yuan than she had envisioned. She needed to confirm in person whether it could be salvaged through color grading in post-production.

She drove for forty minutes to say what could have been said via WeChat.

The old residential area didn't have an underground parking garage, so Su Qinghan parked the black Mercedes under the plane trees by the roadside, the car body being cut into fragmented spots of light by the shade of the trees.

Lock the car and go into the yard.

On the third floor, the aroma of breakfast wafted into my nostrils.

Su Qinghan's high heels clicked hard on the terrazzo steps.

She found the house number and rang the doorbell.

The door opened from the inside, and Lu Yuan stood in the doorway, wearing shorts and flip-flops, his hair sticking up, holding an enamel basin in his hand.

Su Qinghan's cognitive system experienced a processing delay of approximately one second.

Wearing a black suit and a narrow tie, his fingers deftly buttoning his cuffs like he was playing the piano, he sat on the iron chair in the interrogation room, the man who made over a hundred people forget to breathe.

He stood in front of her, wearing baggy shorts, holding an enamel basin with a chipped rim.

Su Qinghan's brain froze for a second, and anxiety surged back, shattering that brief moment of blankness.

She sidestepped Lu Yuan's arm and stepped into the entryway in her high heels. The living room wasn't large; the sofa was made of fabric, and the armrests were worn and frayed. In the corner was a cat tree made of cardboard and rope, which, judging from its craftsmanship, was probably assembled by Lu Yuan himself.

The sixth cat peeked half its head out from the top of the cat tree and sized up the newcomer.

Su Qinghan strode to the coffee table, took out a tablet, and slapped it onto the glass surface.

"The emotional connection between the 42nd and 63rd games was problematic during the rough editing."

She spoke much faster than usual. Her voice was dry, hoarse, and strained.

"In the chase sequence of scene 63, there's a shot of you looking back from the steel frame. I lowered the color temperature of that shot to 3200K, which is too different from the 5600K in scene 42 of the interrogation room. There's a lack of transition in between."

"The last movement of your mouth in the 42nd scene was too clean. In post-production, I wanted to add a subtle glow to simulate hesitation, but Da Vinci's noise reduction algorithm would eat up the pixelation of that expression. I tried three times—"

She swiped her fingers across the tablet screen quickly, her fingernails scraping against the glass with a sharp, short sound.

Lu Yuan placed the enamel basin on the shoe cabinet without replying.

He was looking at Su Qinghan's face.

The depth and size of those dark circles under my eyes are not something that can be caused by not sleeping all night. The degree of dilation of blood vessels in the whites of my eyes, the frequency of tension in the muscles near my jawline, the shortened interval between swallowing movements when speaking to less than two seconds, and the dehydration of the mucous membranes.

Cortisol levels are at least three to four times the normal value. The sympathetic nervous system is in a state of constant, aggressive activation. After another twelve hours, irreversible micro-damage begins to occur in the neurons of the hippocampus.

Su Qinghan was still talking.

"—And in the final, one-shot scene of the sixty-third scene, at the seventh minute, during your hand-to-hand combat with Xu Changlin, the camera movement from camera A and your positioning created a 0.3-second phase difference. Should I have the cinematographer do a new, more stable version?"

Lu Yuan walked to the coffee table.

He picked up the aluminum thermos from the corner with his right hand, placed the thermos on the coffee table, uncorked it, and poured hot water into the cup.

The water flowed onto the goji berries at the bottom of the cup, making a continuous, smooth sound.

Lu Yuan controlled the angle and speed of the tilting, and the volume of the water impact sound was just right to be heard by the human ear without triggering attention.

White noise!

Su Qinghan's brow twitched.

The water was enough. Lu Yuan screwed the stopper on the thermos and rested his left hand on the edge of the coffee table.

Place the second joint of your index finger on the glass surface and tap lightly.

knock.

knock.

knock.

The frequency is constant. Forty-five times per minute.

A normal adult's resting heart rate is between 60 and 100, dropping to 40 to 50 during sleep. 45 beats per minute is below the minimum heart rate for waking but above the threshold for deep sleep, representing a frequency range between wakefulness and sleep.

The human heart is a passive rhythmic organ. When an external rhythmic source appears that is continuous, stable, and lower than the current heart rate, the sinoatrial node will activate its frequency-following physiological mechanism to attempt to synchronize downwards.

In his previous life, when Lu Yuan was carrying out a social engineering mission in the Syndicate, he used this trick to put a target who had been continuously injected with adrenaline to stay awake into a deep hypnotic state within twenty minutes.

Su Qinghan's mouth was still open. The next word was on her tongue, but—

She noticed changes in her chest cavity.

The intervals between breaths are lengthening. Something deep within my body is adjusting itself. The breathing rate of twenty-two breaths per minute, just moments ago, has been gradually increased to sixteen, then fourteen, thanks to that damned knocking sound.

The alveolar ventilation is decreasing. The vocal cords no longer have enough airflow to support continuous high-speed output.

"I haven't confirmed the director of photography's schedule yet; it might...it might..."

Su Qinghan loosened her grip on the tablet slightly. She looked down at her hands.

The frequency of hand tremors became a slow, receding tide-like relaxation.

Lu Yuan stopped tapping.