Chapter Four: The Lowest-Cost Death

The servers' low hum filled the silence. Eleven days later, Ye Zheng died in a warehouse fire north of the river. The body was never identified; the news mentioned only an unnamed security guard. Ye Ning had investigated for seven years because, according to official records, there had been no fire that night. “What were his last words?” she asked. “Don't trust a complete sentence.” Song opened offline captures of the nine old posts. Every post should have ended with a period. The database character count exceeded the displayed text by one, but the punctuation had been filtered during rendering. Only the earliest post, STATION REMOVED, had no extra character.