Ming Han was a little surprised that Fan Weijia recognized him at a glance. Even Chen Zheng had failed to recognize him, yet this man, someone Ming Han had no impression of at all, knew who he was. Was it because Ming Han had drawn police attention toward Xue Chenwen back then, and Fan Weijia had watched him from the shadows and hated him for it?
“I’m a police officer now,” Ming Han said. Fan Weijia’s expression changed dramatically again. “Police?”
Ming Han said, “Since you know I’m that student, I won’t bother introducing myself any further. There were problems with Xue Chenwen’s case, and I’m reinvestigating it now.”
Fan Weijia stared at him as though he had turned to stone.
“The clues I have now suggest that you and Xue Chenwen may once have been together. I mean together romantically.” Ming Han watched Fan Weijia closely. “He went to Luocheng for his internship because, during the same period, your Fan family was expanding its business there. And when he returned to Nanshan City for no apparent reason, it was because your business venture had failed and you had no choice but to return. He decided to come back with you.”
Ming Han had not even finished when Fan Weijia staggered backward, slipped, and fell into a pile of cardboard boxes. He stared at Ming Han as if he had seen a ghost, panic written all over his face. “No! No! I don’t even know him! I didn’t!”
“You’re so panicked you’ve started telling lies like that?” Ming Han held out a hand. “You can deny that you dated him, but say you didn’t know him at all? Even your wife knows you two grew up together.”
Fan Weijia was breathing hard, trembling from head to toe. He did not dare take Ming Han’s hand. Ming Han pulled him up. Only after Fan had calmed slightly did Ming Han speak again. “My colleague has been to Jinghui Nunnery. You know what kind of place that is, don’t you?”
Fan Weijia’s breathing suddenly quickened.
“Xue Chenwen’s mother became a nun there to atone for him. She was his mother, so I can understand her. But you? You just denied even knowing Xue Chenwen. Why did you also go to Jinghui Nunnery and light lamps for those two children?” Ming Han said. “Did you believe you had something to feel guilty about?”
“I didn’t!” Fan Weijia suddenly knocked over the table. His eyes were wild. “Xue Chenwen was the one who killed them. It had nothing to do with me! What do you know? You were just a kid back then! The police already investigated me. Xue Chenwen and I had stopped keeping in touch long before that!”
Ming Han kept both hands in his coat pockets and looked at him in silence. Fan Weijia’s ragged breathing filled the room.
“Right. Back then I was just a child, and maybe I was even a child who gave the police the wrong lead. That’s exactly why I need to correct what went wrong.” Ming Han walked to Fan Weijia’s side and circled behind him once. “Do you know why this case has been pulled back out after so many years? Because there are signs the real culprit may still be alive and continuing to commit crimes.”
A hoarse, piercing sound escaped Fan Weijia’s throat. He stared blankly at Ming Han as though unable to understand what he had just heard.
“That’s why we’ve spoken to many people who knew Xue Chenwen. We’re determined to understand who he really was.” Ming Han continued, “Eventually we discovered that there was a very important man in his life. Someone he grew up with from childhood, one of the few friends he truly confided in. After they went to university, Xue Chenwen was in Tongzhou City while this friend was in Luocheng. In the latter half of university, this friend and his family began a new investment venture in Luocheng, and Xue Chenwen became determined to go there too. When his friend’s business failed and he returned to Nanshan City in defeat, Xue Chenwen gave up his work opportunity in Luocheng and came back to accompany him.”
The tendons in Fan Weijia’s neck and face stood out more and more sharply, and his hands clenched into fists.
Ming Han continued, “Xue Chenwen’s university teacher, the teachers at Xingning Middle School, even students he later taught after returning to Nanshan City all saw this friend of his at one time or another. Add in the complete absence of any romantic history with women, and I don’t believe this person was merely an ordinary friend. Do you?”
Fan Weijia ground his teeth. “Why do you think my business failed? And now you can stand there acting like it has nothing to do with you!”
Ming Han frowned slightly. Fan Weijia’s reaction was outside his expectations. “What?”
“Wasn’t it because of you!” Fan Weijia lunged at him like a madman, grabbing a stool as he came. Ming Han dodged quickly and knocked his wrist aside. Fan Weijia cried out, lost his grip, and the stool fell. Ming Han immediately restrained him. “What, with skills like that you still want to attack a police officer?”
Fan Weijia struggled furiously and shouted, “It was all because of you! Because of that insane father of yours! Our family ended up like this because Bu Yangyun destroyed us!”
Ming Han’s expression darkened. He seized Fan Weijia by the collar and hauled him upright. “What did you say?”
At that moment, Chen Zheng was going through records about the Fan family’s failed expansion into Luocheng years earlier.
In Fan Weijia’s grandfather’s generation, the Fan family had imported production lines from abroad and manufactured electronics for other companies. By keeping local labor costs low, they made a fortune. Over the next several decades, the Fan family followed trends and developed its own products. They manufactured VCD players, DVD players, home-theater systems, repeaters, electronic dictionaries, and other once-popular devices. Relying on the connections they had accumulated, they also acted as agents for other companies’ products.
When the internet era arrived, the Fan family first moved into web development, then into small games. Perhaps because they had been lucky for too long and had never truly failed, they entered this new field with enormous confidence. They poured in vast sums of money and even prepared to establish their headquarters in Luocheng, the economic and cultural center of Han Province.
Fan Weijia had studied game development himself and was rather arrogant. Had he not kept urging his family on and interpreting industry trends for them, the Fan family might not have suffered such a disastrous defeat.
The Fan family was far from the only company entering the internet industry. Large amounts of capital flooded into Luocheng, where plenty of local companies were already working in the same space. For a time, competition was vicious. Smaller companies without enough funding collapsed quickly, and companies lacking innovation could not survive either.
The Fan family had accumulated deep reserves over several decades. Although their Luocheng expansion struggled from the very beginning, they kept investing, then invested even more. At the time, many companies thought the same way: sacrifice some profit in the early stages, drive competitors out, then collect easy money afterward. But once much larger capital entered the field, the fate of companies that kept burning cash was easy to imagine.
A name caught Chen Zheng’s eye, and his brows suddenly tightened: Yunyang Tech. This was the company owned by Ming Han’s father, Bu Yangyun. At the time, Bu Yangyun had also been trying to expand in Luocheng.
Chen Zheng’s heartbeat quickened slightly as he kept reading.
Yunyang Tech entered the market much later than the Fan family. It was roughly during Fan Weijia’s senior year of university, the same year Xue Chenwen went to Luocheng for his internship. By then, the initial bloodletting had already driven out weaker small companies. Businesses around the Fan family’s size were gradually finding their footing and preparing for the next stage of growth. But once Yunyang Tech entered, the balance of the entire fight changed.
Bu Yangyun had technology, angel investment, and enough backing to batter many companies into retreat. And perhaps because Yunyang Tech itself came from Nanshan City, Bu Yangyun focused especially hard on Nanshan companies. The Fan family, one of the strongest Nanshan companies developing in Luocheng, became one of his main targets.
Under Yunyang Tech’s capital offensive, the Fan family collapsed and gradually withdrew from the Luocheng market. Yunyang Tech, meanwhile, grew rapidly, established partnerships with foreign technology companies, and Bu Yangyun later moved his business overseas.
Sweat slowly broke out across Chen Zheng’s back. So the Fan family and the Bu family had a history like this after all.
Commercial competition could be ruthless, but the Fan family’s case was unusual. They had more or less survived the brutal first stage of the market fight, only for Bu Yangyun to directly cause their defeat. If Bu Yangyun had simply happened to compete with them, that would have been one thing. But his strategy had been to prevent Nanshan-based companies from surviving in Luocheng at all, and among those companies, the Fan family had been doing the best.
The Fan family’s collapse led to Fan Weijia’s mother falling ill and dying, and his father later dying by suicide. It may also have caused Xue Chenwen to abandon his opportunity in Luocheng and return to Nanshan City, after which the old case occurred.
Chen Zheng drew in a deep breath. He could not help thinking that he and Ming Han had originally come to Nanshan City while pursuing Heaven-Measuring Ruler, as though an invisible thread had pulled them here. Now Bu Yangyun’s connection to the Fan family had emerged. Could that have anything to do with the thread that had drawn them here?
“You’re pretending not to know?” Fan Weijia roared, eyes red. “You’re Bu Yangyun’s son! Don’t think I won’t recognize you just because you changed your name and became a police officer! Your family destroyed mine! How do you have the nerve to sit there saying Xue Chenwen’s case has something to do with me?”
Ms. Qin finally could not hold back and rushed forward to stop Ming Han. “Whatever it is, talk it out!”
For a brief moment Ming Han was stunned. He remembered again the strange way Fan Weijia had looked at him years earlier. So that hatred had come from Bu Yangyun. Fan Weijia was a man whose life had been ruined, in his own eyes, by Ming Han’s father.
Ming Han quickly calmed down. He said to Fan Weijia, “Come with me and give a formal statement. Whatever you want to say, I’ll give you the chance to say all of it.”
At the municipal bureau interview room, Cheng Cu had not expected Ming Han to bring back someone like Fan Weijia. Seeing Ming Han’s expression, he asked, “What happened?”
Ming Han said, “Find someone to sit in with me.”
Cheng Cu had rarely seen Ming Han like this and was a little worried. He was just about to say, I’ll go with you, when footsteps suddenly sounded in the corridor. Ming Han turned. His eyes widened slightly. “Bro.”
Chen Zheng had returned. “I’ve basically figured out what Yunyang Tech did. I’ll do it.”
Only after seeing Chen Zheng did the tension between Ming Han’s brows ease a little. “Okay.”
Compared with how he had been upstairs at the cat shop, Fan Weijia was much calmer now, but his eyes still held unmistakable hatred toward Ming Han.
Chen Zheng said, “Was Yunyang Tech your direct competitor? What did Bu Yangyun do to you?”
From the corner of his eye, Ming Han glanced at Chen Zheng.
Fan Weijia’s voice trembled with agitation. “Bu Yangyun is the killer! If it weren’t for him, my whole family would never have ended up like this!”
As someone who had lived through it himself, Fan Weijia could describe the situation in far more detail than the records Chen Zheng had found.
Fan Weijia had once been full of ambition. He was also the person who persuaded his father to expand beyond Nanshan City. After the Fan family entered Luocheng, they were actually losing money the whole time, but that was common for internet companies. They did not retreat. Several of their projects were highly regarded, and they managed to attract substantial investment.
At the time, the companies competing in Luocheng were all local. The handful from Nanshan City privately cooperated with one another, all hoping to seize a share of the market first and divide the “spoils” later. When Bu Yangyun entered the market, their first reaction was to bring him into the fold. Fan Weijia’s father even considered forming a Nanshan Chamber of Commerce. But Bu Yangyun acted warm and brotherly on the surface while secretly planning to swallow every Nanshan company whole.
Neither the Fan family nor the other Nanshan companies expected Yunyang Tech to rise so quickly. Bu Yangyun had major capital operating behind him. Whatever another company launched, Yunyang Tech copied.
Yunyang Tech’s funding seemed bottomless. It kept using perks and giveaways to attract users, making meaningful competition impossible. If the other companies tried to compete in the same escalating arms race as Yunyang Tech, they were guaranteed to be exhausted by the spending, just as they themselves had previously exhausted smaller companies.
Before long, companies that had once allied themselves with the Fan family either withdrew from the Luocheng market in defeat or were absorbed into Yunyang Tech. Fan Weijia’s father, however, refused to accept it. They had once been doing so well. They had been so close, so close…
Desperate for funding, Fan Weijia’s father ran everywhere looking for money and even diverted capital from parts of the family’s older businesses that should never have been touched, yet it was still nowhere near enough. After half a year of directly confronting Yunyang Tech, the Fan family had no choice but to return to Nanshan City. Misfortune piled on top of misfortune. Fan Weijia’s mother fell ill as well, and did not have much time left.
After his mother died, Fan Weijia still refused to accept defeat. If they could no longer make it in Luocheng, surely there would still be a place for them back home. But failure came like an avalanche. The Fan family’s capital chain had already broken. In the internet industry, a small company either grew or died. There was almost no middle ground.
Year after year, the Fan family struggled to fill the holes in its finances and faced creditors every day. Eventually Fan Weijia’s father could no longer endure the pressure and killed himself. By the time Fan Weijia sold off family assets and finally paid the debts, he was already a middle-aged man whose edges had been worn flat by life.
His eyes shifted toward Ming Han, and he laughed coldly. “It’s really unfair. Why can a devil like Bu Yangyun destroy so many people and still live freely? Why can his son still become a police officer? And now that son can sit here and interrogate me, the son of one of his victims!”
Ming Han’s Adam’s apple moved slightly. Chen Zheng asked calmly, “Bu Yangyun killed people? What evidence do you have?”
“Does it only count as killing if you use a knife?” Fan Weijia snapped. “Does using capital to destroy people not count? Wasn’t my father driven to his death by him? There were others too! Go investigate! He attacked Nanshan companies everywhere. My father wasn’t the only one whose life ended because of it!”
“All right. I’ll look into it.” Chen Zheng said, “But right now I want to know more about your relationship with Xue Chenwen. What role did you play in the deaths of Ping Yiyi and Li Shuxing?”
Fan Weijia glared at him. “I already told you, it had nothing to do with me! By the time they died, Xue Chenwen and I hadn’t seen each other for years!”
“What about much earlier?” Chen Zheng said. “Were you and Xue Chenwen ever together? Did he go to Luocheng because of you, and return to Nanshan City because of you? After your business failed, did the two of you spend a relatively stable period together in Nanshan City once he had started working? What finally made you separate?”
Fan Weijia stared at Chen Zheng in disbelief and instinctively shook his head. “No. We didn’t!”
“If you were only ordinary friends, it’s difficult for me to understand why you would visit Xue Chenwen’s mother and light eternal lamps for those two children.” Chen Zheng said, “Why did you feel guilty toward them?”
“I didn’t!” Fan Weijia clutched his head and refused to answer anything else.
After leaving the interview room, Ming Han walked ahead in silence. Chen Zheng watched him for a moment, caught up, and rested a hand against Ming Han’s waist. Ming Han turned slightly, and their eyes met.
Chen Zheng said, “Are you wondering whether Bu Yangyun might have been involved in the case? Whether he might have something to do with why we were drawn to Nanshan City in the first place?”
Ming Han opened his mouth, but it took a moment before he spoke. “I suspect that when I noticed Xue Chenwen back then, someone may have nudged me toward him. That person…”
“You want to say it could have been Bu Yangyun?” Chen Zheng shook his head. “I don’t think it was him.”
Ming Han asked, “Why? I was only a middle-school student then. I liked playing detective, but I had no systematic ability to reason through a case. Someone using me to feed the police information isn’t impossible.”
“But that person wouldn’t have been Bu Yangyun.” Chen Zheng looked at Ming Han seriously. “Because you weren’t that stupid a kid.”
Ming Han looked startled. “I…”
“As far as I know, when Ping Yiyi and Li Shuxing died, Bu Yangyun had already been abroad for more than half a year. You’ve said yourself that once his business took off, he stopped relying on the Ming family and spent most of his time overseas. How could someone who wasn’t even in Nanshan City participate in the case or influence you?” Chen Zheng said. “And you may have been influenced by someone else, but not by him. You’ve said that once you were old enough to understand things, you hated him deeply. Your instinct would have been to reject anything coming from him.”
Ming Han slowly let out a breath. Chen Zheng patted his waist again. “I’m an outsider. I’m more objective. The moment you heard Bu Yangyun’s name, it was almost impossible not to pull yourself into it. The more you thought, the deeper you went down that path. Want to hear what this outsider came up with on the drive back?”
Chen Zheng closed the door to their temporary office and poured a cup of water for each of them. Ming Han’s mood had already improved. “You’re right. I did get stuck on it. Before Ping Yiyi and Li Shuxing died, Bu Yangyun had already been out of the country for more than half a year. I never paid attention to his business back then. But after hearing Fan Weijia talk, I remembered that he did spend a period in Luocheng, and that was also when he made a lot of money. Afterward, his business shifted overseas.”
Chen Zheng said, “From Fan Weijia’s position, of course Yunyang Tech looks unforgivable. But what I found is that competition around the internet industry in Luocheng was chaotic and companies used every tactic they could. Yunyang Tech was hardly the only company operating that way. Even the Fan family itself relied on large amounts of capital to crush smaller competitors. How Bu Yangyun obtained so much funding, and who stood behind him, are worth investigating. But think about it calmly. What direct connection would that commercial war have to the later case?”
Ming Han thought for a while. “Money and status are what Bu Yangyun has pursued his whole life. His decision to suppress Nanshan companies, especially the Fan family, may simply have been driven by profit. Who the opponents were might not have mattered to him.”
“Exactly.” Chen Zheng said, “Bu Yangyun built his business in Nanshan City. If an internet company wants to make money, it has to eat its competitors. Compared with rivals from elsewhere, he understood Nanshan companies better and could attack them more easily. He also needed a fallback. If he later lost against even bigger companies, Nanshan City would be that fallback. But if he hadn’t crushed the Nanshan competition early, those companies would have occupied his escape route. To Fan Weijia, Bu Yangyun is a devil who deliberately destroyed them. From Bu Yangyun’s perspective, he may simply have chosen the route that made the most sense for his own interests.”
Ming Han pressed a hand to his forehead as he thought. “But that decision changed Fan Weijia’s life, and other people’s lives too…”
Chen Zheng said, “Which brings me to my next line of thought. Fan Weijia refuses to admit he and Xue Chenwen were ever together, but his reactions and what he did afterward point strongly in that direction. So let’s assume they dated for many years. Xue Chenwen was someone who had never cared about business, yet he compromised enough to follow Fan Weijia to Luocheng. That shows how deeply attached he may have been. Before the family crisis, their relationship may have been very good. But after the Fan family collapsed?”
Ming Han pictured Ms. Qin cursing Fan Weijia. In her telling, he was a selfish, cowardly man who had married a woman despite not being attracted to women, simply to satisfy his family, and who still cycled through younger boyfriends. He was, by her account, a complete scumbag.
“He had no sense of responsibility. Things were fine when life was easy, but when adversity came, he couldn’t even pull himself out, let alone support someone beside him.” Ming Han spoke slowly, thinking as he went. “After the business failed, he was crushed. He had no room left for his relationship with Xue Chenwen. Xue Chenwen, being more idealistic, would cling to him and say he wanted to stay and get through it together. What Xue Chenwen wouldn’t understand was that his presence could make things even more painful for Fan Weijia. Fan wanted silence, but Xue Chenwen’s very existence kept reminding him: you’re not the rich young man you used to be anymore. You failed. And at the same time, Fan’s own father, who had also lost everything, started pressuring him to marry. There was no way Fan could say, Dad, I’m gay!”
Chen Zheng said, “So the conflict between them grew worse. Fan Weijia wanted to end the relationship, partly because of family pressure and partly because he could no longer stand Xue Chenwen. But Xue Chenwen couldn’t understand that. He would only feel abandoned and fall into despair. Despair can change a person, especially someone like Xue Chenwen, a favored child of life who had never really experienced failure.”
At that, Ming Han froze, then looked at Chen Zheng thoughtfully. Chen Zheng’s expression remained calm, as though he were only laying out an objective analysis.
“Bro,” Ming Han said. “Are you thinking about…”
Chen Zheng admitted it frankly. “Xue Chenwen and I may have been the same kind of person, so it’s easy for me to put myself in his position. That may make my inference closer to the truth. Xue Chenwen had extremely beautiful expectations of the world, of life, and of the person he loved. He believed he could stay beside Fan Weijia and help him survive the crisis. He was ready, like a fearless soldier. But the person he wanted to accompany suddenly rejected all that tenderness, pushed him away, said he wanted to break up and marry a woman. To Xue Chenwen, that would have been incomprehensible and unbearable, the one catastrophic failure in more than twenty smooth years of life.”
“I don’t think they broke cleanly. I think there was a long period of pulling back and forth, until Xue Chenwen was hurt badly enough that they truly separated. That would also explain why, when police investigated years later, Fan Weijia and Xue Chenwen appeared to be only ordinary friends.” Chen Zheng continued, “Fan Weijia finally got free of Xue Chenwen and began using marriage to satisfy his family. But what happened to Xue Chenwen? Faced with that enormous, singular setback, he fell apart.”
“Students he once liked may have started irritating him instead. And if they did something he couldn’t stand, he may have wanted to erase them.” Ming Han said, “If Xue Chenwen wanted revenge against society, students really would have been the easiest group for him to target.”
Chen Zheng fell silent, his fingers tapping aimlessly against the table. After a moment, he said, “Let’s go back a few steps. We can basically rule out a direct connection between Bu Yangyun and the case.”
Ming Han nodded. “Right. I got trapped in my own thinking. His role was only in bringing down the Fan family and other Nanshan internet companies.”
“So set Bu Yangyun aside for now,” Chen Zheng said. “If Xue Chenwen was devastated badly enough to lash out at society, that makes a certain kind of sense. Fan Weijia, knowing he was part of what pushed Xue Chenwen to that point, might then feel guilty after Xue died and light eternal lamps for Ping Yiyi and Li Shuxing. That also makes sense. But I still feel like something is missing.”
Chen Zheng still remembered what Xue Chenwen had looked like when he confessed. He had been very calm, as if pain and torment were finally about to end. Back then, Chen Zheng had encountered relatively few killers. More than ten years later, he had handled countless twisted offenders. If Xue Chenwen had acted purely out of revenge against society, he would have belonged among them. Yet the man Chen Zheng remembered looked utterly unlike those people. Those were not the eyes of someone consumed by vengeance toward the world.
Chen Zheng rubbed at his eyes. “When I put myself in Xue Chenwen’s place just now, I realized something. I think he would have been more likely to kill himself than to kill other people. He certainly shouldn’t have killed students he cared about.”