The silence in the interview room stretched until it became a physical presence, a fourth occupant pressing down on all of them. Detective Liu's hand hovered over his tablet, frozen mid-gesture. The young officer by the door had stopped breathing. Even Yan, who had spent sixteen years learning to absorb her daughter's shocks, looked as though the floor had dropped away beneath her.
Mei recovered first. It took her less than three seconds.
"I read the safety data sheet for hydrogen sulfide," she said, her voice smooth and untroubled. "For my independent project. The sheet lists exposure symptoms and timelines. Thirty-second loss of consciousness at concentrations above five hundred parts per million. Retrograde amnesia is a documented effect. Any chemistry student would know this."
It was a good recovery. Almost perfect. But Li Wei had spent his career studying the gaps between what people said and what they meant, and he heard the faintest tremor beneath his daughter's words—a hairline crack in the facade.
Detective Liu heard it too. "The safety data sheet. Of course." He made a note on his tablet that Li Wei suspected was less about recording information and more about buying time to think. "We'll need to verify that. In the meantime, Miss Li, I'd like you to stay here while we continue our investigation."
"For how long?"
"As long as it takes."
Mei's eyes flickered toward her parents. For the first time since they had entered the room, she looked less than certain. "Am I being detained?"
"At this point, you're being questioned. Whether that changes depends on what else we find." Detective Liu stood up and gestured for the young officer to follow him. "Professor Li, Mrs. Li—a word outside, please."
They stepped into the hallway. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting everything in a sickly pallor. Through the window, Li Wei could see Mei sitting alone at the table, her hands still folded, her posture still perfect. She looked like a painting of Buddhist serenity.
"She's lying," Detective Liu said flatly. "I don't know what about, exactly, but she's lying. The safety data sheet might explain the amnesia detail, but it doesn't explain why she was so certain about the concentration. She didn't hesitate. She didn't say 'if the concentration was high enough' or 'assuming the gas had built up.' She stated it as fact."
"Maybe she's just confident in her knowledge," Yan said, but her voice had no conviction.
"Mrs. Li, I've been doing this job for twenty-two years. I've interviewed murderers, fraudsters, and everything in between. Your daughter is not confident. She's calculating. Every answer she gives is calibrated." He paused. "The only reason she's not in a holding cell right now is that we don't have physical evidence. The lab was clean—no fingerprints, no DNA, nothing. Just the tampered ventilation system and the gas canister. Someone knew what they were doing."
Li Wei thought about the hydrogen sulfide. The precise concentration. The calculated exposure time. The retrograde amnesia. Mei hadn't just known what she was doing. She had studied it. She had planned it.
And she had almost gotten away with it.
"What happens now?" he asked.
"Now we wait for Wang Shu to wake up properly and give a full statement. We wait for the forensic team to finish analyzing the lab. We wait for the phone records from the blocked number in the Chen Fang case." Detective Liu looked at Li Wei with that same weary recognition he had shown before. "And I wait for you to tell me what you're not telling me."
Li Wei said nothing. The secrets pressed against his teeth—the box, the bird, the Liu family papers, the twelve centuries of cold hearts—but he held them in. He wasn't protecting Mei anymore, he realized. He was protecting himself. Protecting Yan. Protecting the life they had built on a foundation of chosen ignorance.
"We need to call a lawyer," he said. "A good one."
"I'll give you the name of someone," Detective Liu said. "Not because I want your daughter to walk away. Because I want this done properly. Whatever she did, whatever she is, she deserves a fair process. Everyone does."
He walked away, leaving Li Wei and Yan alone in the buzzing fluorescent light.
The lawyer arrived within the hour. Her name was Chen Xiaoling, and she was exactly what Li Wei had feared—sharp, expensive, and completely unintimidated by the police station. She wore a gray suit and carried a briefcase that had seen years of courtrooms. Her handshake was firm and brief.
"I've spoken to Detective Liu," she said, settling into a chair in the small consultation room the police had provided. "Your daughter is in a difficult position, but not an impossible one. The physical evidence is circumstantial. The witness testimony is unreliable due to the gas exposure. And the phone in the Chen Fang case can't be definitively linked to her."
"Can't it?" Li Wei asked.
"Not yet. The phone was purchased with cash. The signal pings place it within a two-kilometer radius of your apartment, but that radius includes roughly forty thousand other people. It's not precise enough for a conviction." Chen opened her briefcase and removed a legal pad. "What worries me is the pattern. Two incidents. Two girls who crossed your daughter. Two investigations that can't quite prove anything."
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying that if there's a third incident, the pattern becomes impossible to ignore. Juries don't like coincidences. Prosecutors even less." She looked at Li Wei with sharp, assessing eyes. "I need to know what else is out there. What else she's done that hasn't come to light yet."
Li Wei thought about the neighbor's dog. The classmate who had transferred schools. The other small cruelties that he had noticed and dismissed and buried.
"I don't know," he said honestly. "I don't think I want to know."
Chen regarded him for a long moment. Then she closed her legal pad and stood up. "I'll represent your daughter. But I'm going to give you some advice that's not strictly legal. You need to get her out of Beijing. Away from the school, away from the police investigation, away from the Network. Somewhere quiet, where she can't hurt anyone else and where the media can't find her."
"Run? You're telling us to run?"
"I'm telling you to protect your daughter from herself. The police don't have enough to arrest her now, but they will eventually. People like your daughter—" Chen hesitated, choosing her words carefully. "People with your daughter's particular psychology don't stop. They escalate. The next incident won't be hydrogen sulfide in a lab. It will be something irreversible. And when that happens, no lawyer in Beijing will be able to help her."
She left her card on the table and walked out. Li Wei stared at the small rectangle of embossed paper, feeling the world contract around him.
Yan had been sitting silently in the corner throughout the consultation. Now she spoke, her voice hollow. "Where would we go? We can't go to Shiyaogou. That's the first place people would look. The Network has our address, our names, everything. There's nowhere that's quiet anymore."
Li Wei's phone buzzed. Another notification from the Eternal Memory Network. He had stopped being surprised by the timing.
This one was a direct message from Qingming.
"Professor Li. I've been tracking the Daughter_of_Liu_Shi account. It's not your daughter. The linguistic patterns don't match. Whoever is running that account is older, more experienced, and has been active on the Network for at least five years. Your daughter's edits are amateur by comparison. She's being used as a figurehead while someone else runs the operation."
Li Wei's fingers trembled as he typed his reply. "Who?"
"I don't have a name yet. But I have a location. The account's most recent posts originated from an IP address in Shanxi province. A village called Shiyaogou."
The room spun. Shiyaogou. The village where Zhang Lihua had disappeared seventeen years ago. The village where the Liu family house still stood, filled with twelve centuries of testimony. The village where Guo had found the photograph and the jade seal.
"Someone is still there," Li Wei typed. "Someone who knows about the cold heart. Someone who's been in the village all along."
"Exactly. And I think that person is Zhang Lihua herself."
Li Wei stared at the screen. Zhang Lihua. Alive. Still in Shiyaogou after seventeen years. Running an anonymous account on the Eternal Memory Network. Systematically rewriting her ancestor's history while her daughter became the public face of the cold heart narrative.
"Why would she do that?" he asked.
"Because she's a Liu. Because the Liu women have been waiting twelve centuries for this moment. Your daughter isn't the mastermind, Professor Li. She's the weapon. And someone else is holding the trigger."
The message disappeared from the screen, replaced by a notification that Qingming had gone offline.
Li Wei lowered his phone. Yan was watching him, her eyes wide with fear.
"What is it?" she asked. "What's wrong?"
"Zhang Lihua," he said. "Mei's birth mother. She's alive. She's in Shiyaogou. And she's the one who's been editing the Network."
The door to the consultation room opened. Mei stood in the doorway, flanked by Chen the lawyer. She had been released—for now—into her parents' custody. Her expression was composed, but there was something new in her eyes. Something that looked almost like excitement.
"Did you say my birth mother is alive?" she asked.
Li Wei didn't answer.
"Because if she is," Mei continued, her voice soft and full of a feeling Li Wei couldn't name, "I think I need to meet her. Don't you, Baba? I think it's time I met the woman who made me what I am."
The fluorescent lights buzzed. The police station hummed with the sounds of other investigations, other tragedies. And in Li Wei's pocket, his phone buzzed one more time—a notification that the Eternal Memory Network's Tian Zhi entry had reached one hundred thousand views, and that the Daughter_of_Liu_Shi account had posted a new message.
"To my daughter, wherever you are: The village remembers. The mountain remembers. I remember. Come home."
The reckoning was no longer coming. It had already arrived.
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