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

He walked to the wall in the living room, bent down, and pulled a folding bed out from the gap between the sofa and the wall. The metal smacked against the hinges, and the bed sprang open. On it was a faded old sheet, folded in two to serve as a mattress.

He turned around and looked at Su Qinghan.

"Shen Yibai is dead. There's only Lao Liu's cat's den here."

The vibration of the vocal cords drops to an extremely low frequency band, which just passes through the external auditory canal and acts directly on the emotional center of the thalamus without being processed by the semantic analysis system of the cerebral cortex.

"Now you can shut up."

The duration of each syllable in the seven words was precisely measured down to the millisecond level.

The rhythm of the first four words perfectly matched Su Qinghan's already lowered breathing rate, while the last three words entered at the end of the exhalation phase.

Su Qinghan's eyelids drooped, and her entire central nervous system received a low-level command that bypassed all firewalls: shut down.

Her body fell to the side and back, her back landing on the old sheets of the folding bed. The heel of her high heel hit the iron bed frame with a thud.

The tablet in my hand slid onto the bed, and in less than three minutes, my breathing rate dropped to eight times per minute.

Deep sleep.

Lu Yuan stood by the bed and looked down for two seconds.

Su Qinghan's sleeping posture is completely different from when she is awake.

The wrinkles between her brows softened, her lips parted slightly, and the contours of her jawline softened from sharp angles. Her eyelashes were long, casting two fan-shaped shadows on her cheekbones when her eyes were closed. The cool-toned white skin took on a warmer, porcelain-like hue under the sunlight.

beautiful!

A young woman in her twenties, when she's asleep, she just looks like she's asleep.

He sighed, pulled a thin, pilling blanket off the sofa cushions, shook it out, and covered it up.

The sixth cat jumped down from the cat tree, squatted at the foot of the folding bed, and tilted its head to look at the human. It put its front paws on the edge of the bed, but Lu Yuan flicked them back with a finger.

"Go away, don't disturb her."

He carried the sixth cat under his arm and went to the kitchen to pour out cat food.

---

Twelve hours later.

She opened her eyes as the setting sun peeked through the gaps in the iron bars of the security window.

The ceiling was white with a thin crack running down the middle, from the chandelier base to the corner. It wasn't the ceiling in her studio. Nor in her bedroom.

The bed beneath me creaked slightly.

She sat up. The blanket slipped off her shoulders. Her gaze moved from the rusty folding bed frame to the enamel basin, thermos, and orange on the opposite coffee table, then to the cardboard cat tree in the corner.

The memory reflow takes a few seconds.

She came, said a few words, and then—and that was it.

My mind is blank, my temples have stopped throbbing, the dull pain in the back of my head that had lasted for more than forty hours is gone, and my breathing is smooth.

Two years. She had been battling insomnia for two years. Various medications and treatments, but the best she ever slept was only a little over four hours before waking up.

Twelve hours.

She checked her phone. 6:17 PM.

A sound came from the direction of the kitchen.

Su Qinghan threw off the blanket and kicked off her high heels. Her bare feet touched the cold floor, and her toes curled slightly. She walked to the kitchen doorway and leaned against the doorframe.

Lu Yuan squatted on the ground with his back to her.

The sixth dog squatted in front of him, its two front paws resting on Lu Yuan's knees, its head reaching upwards. Lu Yuan held half a peeled Shuanghui sausage in his right hand, raising it to a height that the sixth dog couldn't reach.

"We agreed on one-third of each meal. Rules can't be broken."

The sixth brother meowed.

Lu Yuan lifted the sausage up two centimeters. "It's no use rubbing it. You can freeze the rest and eat them tomorrow."

The sixth brother changed tactics, using his head to nudge his wrist. A snoring sound came from under his throat.

Lu Yuan remained frozen for five seconds.

He glanced down at the remaining length of the sausage, then at the cat. He muttered something under his breath. Then he broke off a small piece and tossed it on the ground.

The sixth brother pounced on it, grabbed it, and ran away.

"Just this one extra piece, and don't let it happen again," he shouted at the cat's retreating figure.

Su Qinghan leaned against the door frame.

The setting sun streamed in through the small kitchen window, casting an orange glow. The light illuminated Lu Yuan's profile, a face devoid of any trace of Shen Yibai's presence. He wore a pilling T-shirt, baggy shorts, and flip-flops of different colors on each foot.

I was squatting on the ground, arguing with a cat about how to divide a third of a sausage.

Su Qinghan closed her eyes briefly, then opened them again.

She let out a deep breath, her shoulders slumping. She slid down a little along the door frame, her back against the wood.

The sixth dog ran past her feet with the piece of its trophy in its mouth, its paw pads stepping on the back of her foot.

"Awake?" Lu Yuan stood up and rubbed his knees, which had gone numb from squatting.

"Um."

"Are you hungry? There are some biscuits on the coffee table, have some to tide you over, I'll make myself a bowl of noodles if I'm hungry."

"Can I add an egg to the noodles?"

"Add one. Eggs are 80 cents each, no charge."

......

Three months later, Su Qinghan's studio.

The color temperature of all three screens was uniformly calibrated to the D65 standard light source, and the last color grading node on the timeline was locked. The first trailer for "Black Gold" is now in the output queue, awaiting simultaneous distribution across all platforms.

Su Qinghan held a mug and leaned back in her chair.

Editor Lao Fang put the mouse next to the keyboard and turned to look at her.

"Director, is it settled?"

"It's settled."

The trailer is one minute and forty-two seconds long. The first minute features Xu Changlin, with a fast pace and high information density, maximizing the urgency expected of a crime film. The last forty-two seconds are dedicated to Lu Yuan.

The last frame shows Lu Yuan sitting on the ground against the wall, his eyes looking out of the camera's view. The extremely subtle curve at the corner of his mouth is brought out by Da Vinci's curves, the graininess is preserved, the warm tones are suppressed, and the cool colors seep in from the background.

Su Qinghan watched this scene no less than two hundred times. Every time, her physiological reaction was the same: her neck tightened and her breathing became shallow.

"hair."

Countdown resets to zero. One-click launch across all platforms.

Su Qinghan took a sip of coffee and sank back in her chair. Three months later, she had lost weight, but her mental state was much better than when filming wrapped. Although her sleep quality was still unstable, at least she no longer needed to drive to the south of the city to find someone's folding bed.

The data monitoring panel is mounted on the secondary screen on the right. The playback volume curve has begun to climb.

---

When Zhou Ming, the publicity director, ran in from the other end of the corridor, the door was pushed against the wall, and his forehead was covered in sweat.

"Director Su—something has happened."

Su Qinghan's finger stopped on the touchpad.

Zhou Ming flipped his laptop over and shoved it in front of her. Within half an hour, four trending topics appeared on Weibo's hot search list, each tagged with the bright red word "boiling".

Who is Lu Yuan?

#The Black Gold Production Crew's Inside Story: Hiring with Funded Investment#

#The Truth Behind Zhao Xiujie's Fracture and Withdrawal from the Team#

#ResistBlackMoney#