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

A middle-aged man's mumbled reply came from the other end: "Feed?"

Lu Yuan spoke.

Jiang Yan stopped breathing.

That voice was completely different from the one that had been chewing an apple three minutes earlier. The tone had dropped by at least an octave, the speech had slowed down, and each word was compressed into a sharp, jagged sound.

"I'm asking you, can this data be passed off as plausible?"

Jiang Yan almost dropped the pen from her hand.

She sat up abruptly, reached for the record button on the side of the receiver with her left hand, and pressed it. The red light came on.

The fox's tail has finally been revealed!

"I've checked the bottom line three times—" Lu Yuan's voice in the earphone was like a precision instrument filled with coolant, without temperature or fluctuation, "The error in the loss rate is above 0.2%. This clumsy accounting method constitutes a serious breach of contract and fraud."

Jiang Yan's pen slid rapidly across the surveying notebook.

"Statement Baseline" - Settlement and Reconciliation Statement?

"Loss rate" - the hidden commission charged when bridging funds?

"Balancing accounts" - two sets of account books?

"Fraud"

Her brain was rapidly reorganizing these words. Money laundering. Cross-border Ponzi schemes. Illegal settlement channels. Every keyword matched the core evidence chain in major economic crime cases.

This was a phone call with an operator of an overseas funding channel.

Jiang Yan's heart rate spiked to ninety per minute. The nib of her pen left an indentation on the paper. She noted the timestamp, marked the direction of the call, and prepared to compare the base station signal—

Lu Yuan's voice sounded even colder in the earphones.

"The shared electricity bill from last month."

Jiang Yan stopped writing.

"Why are you charging me an extra 35 cents?"

The pen tip poked a dot of ink onto the paper.

"The hallway light on the third floor has been broken for a full twenty days. I've been climbing up the stairs in the dark every day, do you even know that? And you're still calculating the cost of keeping the light on for me?"

The middle-aged man's voice on the other end of the phone changed, from indistinct to panicked. "Mr. Lu, please don't worry, let me check—"

"Investigate now." Lu Yuan's tone remained firm.

"If you don't return this 35 cents today, I'll call the mayor's hotline. Look up Article 41 of the Property Management Regulations yourself: During periods when public area lighting facilities are not operating normally, the corresponding wear and tear cannot be apportioned to the owners' shared expenses. If you don't believe me, I'll read the original text to you."

I heard the sounds of frantically rummaging through things, chairs being moved, and keyboards being typed from across the way.

"Mr. Lu, Mr. Lu—um, we found it, we found it, it was indeed a problem with our system. I'll fix it for you right now, and I'll refund you, I'll refund you 50 cents, okay? 35 cents for the error plus 15 cents for emotional compensation—"

"OK."

"Transfer immediately! Would you like to transfer it to WeChat or—"

"WeChat."

The call has ended.

Jiang Yan sat on a folding chair.

The headphones hung around my neck, and the indicator light on the monitor was still flashing green.

The surveying notebook lay open on my lap, and on the paper were written—

"Table bottom", "loss rate 0.2%", "balanced accounts", "fraud".

Following that—

"Shared electricity cost", "35 cents", "Hallway lights", "Mayor's hotline".

Between these two lines of text, the hole pierced through the paper by the pen tip looks like a wide-open eye, staring intently at her.

Jiang Yan held the pen and sat there for a long time.

---

In her downtown studio, Su Qinghan stared at the three screens in front of her workstation.

When Zhou Ming rushed over from the end of the corridor, he knocked over the potted plants by the door, scattering soil all over the ground.

The tablet was shoved in front of Su Qinghan, and the numbers on the screen were jumping.

"First day—over 500 million!"

Zhou Ming's voice cracked.

"Theatrical releases increased screenings overnight, directly halving the box office of two Hollywood blockbusters released in the same period. The ratings on ticketing platforms are already out: 9.2. Director Su—9.2!"

Su Qinghan held the mug; the coffee had gone completely cold.

Zhou Ming switched the large screen to the social media trending list. The top three most discussed topics were all related to the same name.

"Lu Yuan's cold-blooded villain Shen Yibai" - a character discussion from the movie.

"Lu Yuan's pig-killing voice doing the splits" - from various memes related to egg-grabbing and movie premieres.

"Just who is Lu Yuan?" - This question has been the subject of speculation across the internet for three months.

These three lines are intertwined, forming an extremely rare public opinion environment:

Viewers were simultaneously terrified by the cold-blooded villains on screen and laughing uproariously at the goji berry-themed warriors in the behind-the-scenes footage. This schizophrenic contrast in discussion made everyone who clicked on the topic want to drag someone else into it as well.

Fission-like propagation.

Zhou Ming pulled out the individual contribution report from the backstage, and Lu Yuan alone accounted for 60% of the buzz surrounding the entire movie.

"The first-week box office forecast model needs to be scrapped and rebuilt." Zhou Ming wiped the sweat from his forehead, his hands trembling. "Based on the current curve, the total box office—a conservative estimate—"

He didn't reveal the numbers, afraid that even he himself wouldn't believe them.

Su Qinghan put down her mug.

The data on the screen kept jumping up. She stared at the rising red curves, the images that flashed through her mind having nothing to do with box office numbers.

At the premiere, a glass bottle shattered on the carpet, and as white smoke billowed out, my back slammed against the wall.

It's not a wall.

He was a man wearing a suit and holding an A4 sheet of paper in his hand.

---

An old residential area in the south of the city, third floor.

Lu Yuan's phone screen lit up. A WeChat Wallet notification: 50 cents had been deposited.

He stared at the "+0.50" for two seconds, and the corners of his mouth turned up slightly.

I got up, went to the kitchen, and opened the cupboard.

My fingers scanned the rows of cat food cans, finally pulling out a meat flavor can I'd stocked up on during a sale. I snapped the tab, and a delicious aroma wafted out.

The sixth dog came running from the living room, its hind legs slipping, and it drifted ten centimeters across the tiles before coming to a stop. It put its front paws on Lu Yuan's calf and meowed.

"That's generous of you. I won't make two meals today, I'll give you the whole can."

Lu Yuan put the canned food into the cat's bowl and squatted down to watch Lao Liu devour it.

Outside the window, the plane tree leaves were turned over by the evening breeze, revealing their pale undersides. From next door, I heard the soft sound of a clothes hanger hitting a metal rod.

Lu Yuan hummed something out of tune, and Lao Liu ate too fast and burped.

......

On the morning that "Black Gold" grossed over 2 billion yuan in its opening week, Lu Yuan was woken up by Lao Liu stepping on him.

The cat's paw stepped across his temple, then it leaped onto the coffee table to reach the can of food. Lu Yuan rolled over, facing the back of the sofa, and his phone slid off his stomach and fell into the seam of the cushion.

The Weibo notifications had been coming in non-stop since 3 a.m. He reached out and pulled his phone out from under the crack, squinting as he swiped it a couple of times.

Su Qinghan's WeChat account is pinned to the top.

Five screenshots. The first shows the theater scheduling rate, the real-time box office figures, the rating trend chart of ticketing platforms, the word cloud of short reviews on Douban, and the last is the total box office prediction curve from Maoyan Professional Edition.

The bottom line read, "Shen Yibai, well done."

Lu Yuan selected a yellow, round-faced emoji wearing sunglasses and giving a thumbs-up from the emoji collection, and added four words after it: Director Su is awesome.

After finishing, she got up, shuffling into the kitchen in her slippers, and poured half a bowl of cooled boiled water for Lao Liu. Lao Liu moved away from the can, put his mouth into the bowl, and the sound of his tongue rolling over the water was particularly crisp in the quiet living room.

The Douban rating has risen to 9.3.

Lu Yuan sat back on the sofa, glanced at the number again, and flipped his phone over to place it face down on his lap.

The leaves of the plane trees outside the window were lifted up by the wind and then covered back up, casting shadows on the floor.

pretty good.