Read Novel Full Chapter 255: Entry Fully Recorded
Chapter 255: Entry Fully Recorded
"Left one plays the original footage, right one plays the spliced version, middle one runs the timer." Tang Guo lined up three phones on the table, plugged in the livestream light at the corner, and angled it toward the wall. "Nobody touches this table."
Shen Zhixia pulled the curtain halfway shut. The A4 sheet still hung on the wall, where He Xiufen had drawn four horizontal lines with a ruler: Delete, Clarify, Compensate—and below them, a mirrored line. All three dates after them had check marks.
"The script."
Tang Guo slid over the seventh draft—four pages, corners curled. He Xiufen put on her reading glasses, and when she reached page three, she held out her hand for a pen.
"'The whole internet owes me an apology'—cross out 'the whole internet.'"
"Then it reads 'They owe me an apology.'"
"'They' goes too." He Xiufen set the pen down. "Whoever the judgment names is who you name. Anything the judgment doesn't name, you don't add a single word to."
The pen tip moved downward, then stopped again. "Cross out 'Please everyone, share this.'"
"I kept that line to grow my following."
"You ask for that one thing, and someday people will say you did all this for traffic." He Xiufen said, "Change it to 'Whoever wants to see it can see it.'"
Tang Guo stared at those five words for two seconds, then added them.
"Read it once before you post."
"From the top?"
"Read the last paragraph."
Tang Guo set up her phone, glancing first at Shen Zhixia. Shen Zhixia turned another phone sideways, lens pointed at the desk. "I'm recording this read-through too. One wrong word and we go again. No editing."
"Starting now." Tang Guo tapped the left phone.
That one played the raw replay of her June 5th livestream—one hour and forty minutes, scrubber parked at the forty-one-minute mark. She sat in her own room, that same livestream light standing at the desk corner.
"This is the replay from my own livestream that day, exported straight from the platform, untouched by a second." She said, "The usernames in the danmaku that day—I didn't keep a single one. They're all blurred."
She opened the forged version on the right phone, paused at the ten-second mark.
Two shots side by side. Same room, same clothes, same light. On the left, she said the whole sentence in one breath, then lowered her head to grab her water cup. On the right, mid-sentence, the frame gave a slight jump.
"The cut's right here." Tang Guo hit pause and pointed at the strand of hair by her ear in the right-hand frame. "On the left, that strand stays tucked behind my ear the whole time. On the right, after the jump, it's in front. Hair doesn't move by itself in the same second."
"The audio."
"They pulled it from my June 5th livestream, forty-one minutes eighteen seconds. What I actually said was, 'I never took a single cent for this case.' They sliced off the front and kept only three characters: 'took money.'" She scrubbed the original back to that segment, leaving two seconds on either side. "Listen to this part: after 'took,' the breath is gone."
In the forged version, the three characters at the ten-second mark flowed smoothly, no break for air. In the original, she only inhaled after the full sentence ended.
"People breathe when they talk." Tang Guo said. "They cut it too clean."
"The three lines from the appraisal opinion—read them."
She flattened out the printed page and read line by line: audio track and video show offset; traces of facial blending present; frame repetition at the splice point. Three lines done, she offered no interpretation.
"I can't tell you exactly what these three lines mean either." She faced the camera. "I'm only putting the original footage up. Judge for yourselves."
"My name is Tang Guo. In this case, I took not one cent. The rest—the court has already ruled."
The upload went live at 10:03.
Thud. This page no longer says "Related Videos."
Shen Zhixia glanced down, then flipped the screen over.
By 10:24, the view count hit twenty-one thousand. The comments ran the gamut: people asked how much she'd been paid, people said this was all staged too, people asked whether that hair was even hers. He Xiufen gave one instruction from the window. "The comments cursing you—not a single one gets deleted."
"They're ugly to leave up."
"Left up, they're other people's words. Delete them, and they become your hand."
Tang Guo set her phone on the table and replied to one: "You can keep cursing me. Just include the word 'forged' while you're at it."
At noon, a local lifestyle account left a line under its own repost: "We shared this before without checking. Deleted. Sorry." Tang Guo screenshotted it and replied with one line: "Thank you for writing the word 'deleted.'"
In the riders' group chat, Ma Jianjun forwarded the video with five words attached: This one's real. A string of "Received" followed. Shen Zhixia looked at it and replied one line: Don't say "won" in the group. Just say "ruled."
At two in the afternoon, she searched her own name. The top results had shifted: first was this clarification video, second was someone's repost, third was a photo of the judgment, with the headline reading "Court Determines Video Was Forged."
Thud. The name is back where it belongs.
Thud. Entry fully recorded.
Shen Zhixia placed her phone face-down on the desk and waited to see if any other words followed. None came.
"So it's fully recorded," Tang Guo asked.
"Yeah."
"What happens when it's fully recorded?"
"Nothing special." Shen Zhixia said. "The money's still in the escrow account; she has to go pick it up herself at 4:30. The case file still needs to be archived. The security ledger needs one more page."
"So are you happy?"
"I am." She said. "And after the happy part, I still have to go handle all of that."
He Xiufen came upstairs carrying a bowl, picked up the pen, and below the four horizontal lines, measured out another with the ruler and drew it.
"What does the fifth line say?" Tang Guo asked.
"A name." He Xiufen said. "September 19th—she read it out herself."
"No date on this line?"
"A name doesn't have an expiration date."
At 4:30, Tang Guo went to the Enforcement Bureau. She came back gripping a receipt in her hand, walked in without a word, pulled up her mobile banking and showed them, then counted the amount twice.
"I counted it right." She said.
"You counted it. Now put it away." He Xiufen said. "The money's not yours until it's in your own card."
At five in the afternoon, the sky hadn't darkened yet. The upstairs room faced south, and light slanted across the long table. Shen Zhixia switched on the desk lamp and took the Unsettled Ledger from the drawer.
She had flipped through this notebook just the day before yesterday. The last page, at the top, five characters: Baixi Village — Shen Qian. Below, two lines—one reading "Attachment — One Page, Missing," one reading "Two Water Samples, One Genuine, One Fake." Below that, blank space.
She spread the notebook under the lamp. The paper was yellowed, the line spacing generous. In that empty space, there was an extremely faint impression, pressed up from the back of the page.
She nudged the lamp in half an inch.
The impression settled, and the characters surfaced—four of them:
Sample Submitter, Lu.
Thud. This line—now it's here.
She pressed her finger over those four characters and rubbed. No ink on the paper; nothing to rub off. The characters were pressed into the page itself.
She sat still, running old lines through her mind. August 26th—in the Handler column, he'd written his own name. That same night he'd said he had signed another piece of paper nine years ago, and he could still recognize the handwriting as his own. Today, this line read: sample submitter.
Under the glass desk pad was a white sheet of paper, and across the very top, a line in her own writing: He owes my dad a statement.
She pulled out the pen and below that line wrote five more characters: The sample submitter's surname is Lu.
When she finished, she flipped the paper face-down and pressed it back under the glass pad, then pushed the lamp in a little further. Downstairs the sounds began—the exhaust fan, bowls knocking together, He Xiufen calling out.
She locked the notebook back in the drawer, tucked the key into her bag, and zipped it shut.
Guo Jianping came upstairs before seven, still in his jacket, holding a photocopy in his hand. He stood at the top of the stairs without sitting.
"Attorney Shen, my card."
"The original is in the court's file." Shen Zhixia pulled out a chair. "At the hearing, it was unsealed in open court and taken into court custody. Nobody can take it—we can't either."
"So all these days I've just been waiting."
"The return waits on the file being archived, and archiving takes time." He Xiufen came over from the metal cabinet and set a sheet of paper on the table. "This is the evidence custody receipt the court issued—a photocopy. It has your name, that serial number on the back of the card, the date it was received. Holding this is more reliable than holding the card."
Guo Jianping studied that paper for a long time, his finger rubbing over the reference number.
"The day I handed over that card, I never expected to get it back." He said. "I just wanted to ask—the stuff I filmed, did it count for anything?"
"Page four through page five of the judgment—your testimony and that serial number are in there." Shen Zhixia said. "It counted."
He folded the paper twice, tucked it into his inner pocket, and patted it.
"Work," He Xiufen asked. "Still no one reaching out?"
"No." He answered fast, like he'd rehearsed it. "After that Xingyao job fell through, nobody calls me. They all say wait a while longer."
"You can't just sit idle while you wait." Tang Guo poked her head over from the side. "Starting tomorrow, you shoot content for my account. Market rate, paid daily."
Guo Jianping blinked. "I only know how to shoot. Not edit."
"Then don't edit—that's exactly what I want." Tang Guo said. "Keep the raw footage for me. Don't delete a single file."
"I don't delete raw footage." He said. "That much I understand."
A September night falls earlier than an August one. By 7:15, half the stack of plastic stools by the door had been taken in. Guo Jianping went downstairs to wheel out his electric scooter. The lock had rusted; the key took two twists before it opened. Tang Guo followed him down and stood at the door explaining tomorrow's time and location.
Shen Zhixia waited on the steps. Lu Jibai returned from the mouth of the alley, a bag in his hand—paper he'd just picked up from the print shop at the corner.
"I made two copies of her refund receipt." He handed over the bag. "She signed her own name, pressed her own thumbprint. The money went into her own card."
"Good."
She didn't take the bag. She asked instead:
"The sample submitter's surname was Lu."
He looked up.
"It's not the day to lay it all out yet."
She didn't ask again.
"You wait." He pushed the bag into her arms. "Soon. The day I can lay it out in open court—yours will be the first name I read aloud."
Thud. Today he didn't give even so much as half a sentence.
She hugged the bag of paper, wanting to say more, when the phone in her pocket rang first. A local landline number.
"Hello?"
"Is this Shen Zhi'an's family? This is Chengdong Police Station."
She shifted the paper bag under her arm. "I'm his older sister."
"Shen Zhi'an, seventeen, suspected of intentional injury. He's been brought in. Can you come down?"
"Who'd he hurt?"
The other end rustled some paper. "Someone named Qin. He's been sent to the hospital, and the family's here now."
She stood in place, pressing those words—"someone named Qin"—down into her mind.
"I'm on my way."
She hung up. Lu Jibai had already reached the alley's end and pulled open the passenger door for her. She ran over, and only then remembered the words were her own—call the police first, don't throw hands.