Official statement: Tongwei is dead! You chose Ruijin, didn't you?

Jingzhou Detention Center.

Zhao Donglai followed behind Zhou Zhengming, walking down the cold, dark corridor.

As the director of the Jingzhou Public Security Bureau, he shouldn't be here. Interrogating Gao Xiaoqin, the controller of the Shanshui Group, is, according to procedure, the job of the Anti-Corruption Bureau or the Provincial Commission for Discipline Inspection.

But now the rules in Handong are that the supervisory team has the final say.

Hou Liangping was placed under investigation, Sha Ruijin was suspended from his post, and Zhou Zhengming directly appointed Zhao Donglai as his deputy, which was a move that could be described as a "lower-dimensional attack".

Pushing open the door, Gao Xiaoqin was already sitting in the interrogation chair.

Gone is the expensive silk cheongsam she wore at the mountain and water manor, and gone is the exquisite makeup.

She was wearing a loose gray prison uniform, and her waist-length hair was casually tied back.

Even so, she kept her back ramrod straight, with her hands folded on her lap.

She still maintained the air of a beautiful female CEO, trying to preserve her last shred of dignity in this small space.

Hearing the noise, Gao Xiaoqin looked up.

Seeing that Zhao Donglai was the first to enter, she smiled and said:

"Director Zhao, what brings you here? And where is Director Hou?"

"Director Hou is in a bit of a 'special situation' lately, and he's in the detention room reflecting on his dream of being a lone hero." Zhao Donglai pulled out a chair, sat down, and casually threw out a joke, then stepped aside to reveal Zhou Zhengming behind him.

Gao Xiaoqin's gaze fell on Zhou Zhengming, and her pupils contracted slightly.

Although she had never met Zhou Zhengming, she had been in the Han Dong community for so many years and had a very keen eye for people.

The person in front of me was wearing an ordinary jacket and no identification, but he was definitely not an ordinary cadre.

"You are not from Handong."

Gao Xiaoqin's voice turned somber.

"Mr. Gao has a good eye." Zhou Zhengming walked behind the table and sat down, opening his notebook. He skipped the self-introduction and went straight to the point.

"In the play 'The Battle of Wits,' Sha Ruijin botched it, but Hou Liangping nailed it. You're a smart man; you should know what it means that we're here to listen to the play today."

Gao Xiaoqin's heart skipped a beat, but she still tried to remain calm on the surface:

"I don't understand what you mean. I've already told Director Hou everything I needed to say. There were indeed some irregularities at Shanshui Group, but that was all Zhao Ruilong's doing. I'm just an employee..."

"Alright, Gao Xiaoqin, don't try to use the same Tai Chi push hands tactics you used on Hou Liangping on me," Zhou Zhengming coldly interrupted her.

"You're not still hoping Qi Tongwei can get away, are you?"

Upon hearing the name "Qi Tongwei," Gao Xiaoqin clenched her hands tightly on her lap.

Zhou Zhengming looked at her, his eyes completely devoid of emotion, and said in an almost cruelly calm tone:

"Don't wait any longer. Right there at Lone Eagle Ridge, Qi Tongwei resisted arrest with a gun and committed suicide by swallowing a bullet. By now, his ashes have already been collected by his relatives in his hometown of Yantai."

"Bang!"

Something seemed to explode in Gao Xiaoqin's mind.

She stared intently at Zhou Zhengming, her lips trembling violently. She wanted to say "Impossible," she wanted to say "You're lying to me," but no sound came out of her throat.

She knows Qi Tongwei too well.

That man who values ​​his self-respect more than his life and would never bow his head even when driven to the brink of despair was actually capable of something as simple as swallowing a gun.

"Oh, right, there's one more thing." As if that first blow wasn't heavy enough, Zhou Zhengming immediately followed up with a second strike.

"His teacher, Gao Yuliang, the deputy secretary of the provincial party committee, after learning that Qi Tongwei had committed suicide, in order to avoid going to Qincheng Prison and also to sow discord among certain people,..."

In front of Sha Ruijin and Hou Liangping, he jumped from the rooftop of the sixth floor of the provincial party committee building, landing squarely on the roof of Sha Ruijin's car.

This sentence became the last straw that broke Gao Xiaoqin's back.

Her pitiful pretense and dignity crumbled in an instant.

She slid off the chair with a thud, the handcuffs hitting the metal panel with a jarring sound.

She slumped to the ground, her eyes vacant, like a soulless puppet, muttering nervously:

"They're all dead...they jumped off a building...it's all over..."

She wasn't afraid of going to jail. From the day she became Zhao Ruilong's front man, she knew that sooner or later she would end up in jail.

She just never imagined that the most important man in her life would give her the illusion of "fighting against fate."

In the end, she vanished into thin air in such a tragic way.

"Why..." Gao Xiaoqin suddenly raised her head as if she had gone mad, her eyes bloodshot, staring intently at Zhou Zhengming.

"Because Hou Liangping's unsharpened knife pressed too hard. And because he knew that if this game was ruined, suicide would be more useful than living a cowardly life." Zhou Zhengming looked down at her.

"Haha...hahahaha..."

Gao Xiaoqin suddenly burst into a shrill laugh, tears streaming down her face, completely unrecognizable as the beautiful CEO of Shanshui Group.

"Excellent! What a brilliant move, half a move ahead of fate!"

She turned her head sharply, stared intently at the white wall next to her, and rammed into it!

"Stop her!"

Before Zhou Zhengming could finish speaking, Zhao Donglai had already darted out like a cheetah.

He grabbed Gao Xiaoqin by the back of her collar and yanked her back, the force of which made them both stagger.

"Mr. Gao, give me a break!" Zhao Donglai pressed her back into the chair, panting heavily.

"The walls and table corners here are all padded with high-density foam! If you bump into them, you'll bounce back, but you won't even get a bump. Want to die? Your basic physics is terrible!"

Gao Xiaoqin struggled desperately, howling like a despairing mother beast: "Let me go! Let me die! You cannibalistic bastards!"

"Who will be happiest if you die?" Zhou Zhengming didn't move, but coldly threw out a question.

Gao Xiaoqin's struggle suddenly stopped.

"You think you died out of loyalty and righteousness? Your death is simply suicide out of fear of punishment; there's no way to prove it!"

Zhou Zhengming walked up to her, his gaze sharp as a knife. "Qi Tongwei is dead. His wife, Liang Lu, thinks he's bad luck and refuses to even go to the funeral home. She absolutely refuses to sign the body collection form and publicly distances herself from him in front of the entire Handong! And Gao Yuliang..."

Zhou Zhengming paused for a moment: "Gao Yuliang is lucky. The plaster cast on his body is thicker than this wall. He's lying in a special ward at the provincial hospital, trying every trick in the book to stir up trouble for the Liang family."

And you? Are you just going to commit suicide like this, and let Liang Qunfeng's two good sons step over your corpses and continue to live a life of debauchery outside?"

"Teacher Gao is still alive?!"

Gao Xiaoqin suddenly raised her head.

Liang Lu refused to sign the body collection form!

The Liang family kicked him when he was down!

These words were like sharp knives, completely digging out the deepest hatred in Gao Xiaoqin's heart.

Qi Tongwei hated the Liang family the most in his life; they were like a dog leash around his neck for the rest of his life!

Now that he's dead, the Liang family still wants to trample his dignity underfoot!

"Gao Xiaoqin," Zhou Zhengming said, sitting back down in his chair and tapping his fingers on the table.

"Sha Ruijin's anti-corruption campaign is just a change in name only. But the central supervisory team is coming to Handong to uproot it completely."

Are Liang Qunfeng's two sons, Liang Wentao and Liang Wenjie, doing well in Handong? Don't you want to settle this score for Qi Tongwei?

Gao Xiaoqin was panting heavily, her chest heaving violently.

She looked at Zhou Zhengming, then suddenly reached out and haphazardly swept her disheveled hair behind her head. The madness on her face gradually faded.

Instead, there is a chilling calmness and ruthlessness.

"Clean?" Gao Xiaoqin laughed, a laugh that looked more like a grimace.

"Team Leader Zhou, in Handong, even the stones in the latrines are cleaner than the Liang family! Zhao Ruilong has to respectfully call them 'Teacher' when he sees them, and he even learns from them how to launder money in a way that's both elegant and safe!"

Zhao Donglai immediately sat up straight and opened the notebook.

"They don't handle cash, they don't sign contracts, and they don't even come to eat at the Shanshui Manor." Gao Xiaoqin's voice became cold and clear.

"Liang Wentao is playing the 'art finance' game. Zhao Ruilong spends tens of millions to buy back a bunch of unwanted trashy oil paintings from overseas, and then donates them to the 'Handong Cultural Exchange Foundation' controlled by Liang Wentao under the guise of 'sponsorship'."

Once the foundation took over, this pile of garbage was transformed into hundreds of millions of legal, tax-exempt assets.

Liang Wenjie went even further, playing with "intellectual property rights"! His wife opened a consulting firm in Shanghai, specializing in "risk assessments" for Zhao Ruilong's real estate projects.

A PPT that's utterly nonsensical and worse than a Baidu Encyclopedia entry cost eight million yuan, and Zhao Ruilong still had to wait in line to pay!

Zhou Zhengming's eyes sharpened: "The company name, the foundation's account number, the path of every transfer—you have evidence?"

"It's all in my head," Gao Xiaoqin said, pointing to her temple.

"Back then, Zhao Ruilong was afraid that his father, Zhao Lichun, would find fault with him, so I handled all these dirty work myself. I knew better than his own father how every penny went out and how it was laundered."

She began rattling off a string of company names, offshore accounts, and personal names at breakneck speed.

Zhao Donglai's pen tip flew across the paper, and beads of sweat even appeared on his forehead.

This isn't a confession; it's a living map of corruption within the Handong political and legal system!

"Confessions can be recanted; this alone is not enough," Zhou Zhengming interrupted her.

"Your sister, Gao Xiaofeng, said that you have a backup of the core accounting books of the Shanshui Group."

Gao Xiaoqin paused for a moment, then gave a bitter smile:

"My silly sister is still too naive. Does she think Zhao Ruilong would leave such a big handle out there? Those original ledgers and servers were burned to ashes long before Zhao Ruilong was arrested."

Zhao Donglai paused, his brow furrowing.

"However," Gao Xiaoqin raised her head to meet Zhou Zhengming's gaze, "I had a backup plan."

"I know Zhao Ruilong all too well what kind of ungrateful person he is. When he was destroying the ledgers, I had him secretly use a mini scanner to scan every page of the core accounts and save it to an encrypted miniature TF memory card."

The meeting room fell into a deathly silence.

Zhao Donglai looked at the woman as if she were a monster.

"Where is it stuck?" Zhou Zhengming leaned forward, his voice low.

"I hid it inside a 'gift'." Gao Xiaoqin looked at Zhou Zhengming, a hint of vengeful pleasure in her eyes.

"I personally delivered that gift to Liang Wenjie, the second young master of the Liang family, in Zhao Ruilong's name."

Zhou Zhengming's mind raced: "He doesn't know?"

"Of course he didn't know. All he knew was that it was a limited-edition Patek Philippe tourbillon watch, worth over four million." Gao Xiaoqin laughed, a laugh escaping her lips.

"The watch came with a precious mahogany watch box, and the base had a hidden clasp compartment. The TF card that could send the entire Liang family to hell was embedded in that compartment!"

I was thinking then, what if one day I become a pawn? This watch would be my death warrant, a death warrant for us all!

"Team Leader Zhou," Gao Xiaoqin leaned forward slightly, whispering like a vengeful demon.

"Liang Wenjie treasured that watch terribly, keeping the mahogany watch box displayed in the safe in his study. Little did he know, he had long since donned a pair of handcuffs he could never remove!"