Chapter Four: The Retoucher Who Refused to Retouch

Su Wanqing arrived at Cloud Crown One at 1:20 in the morning. She did not admire the river view or ask how Lin Yan had suddenly acquired a forty-eight-million-yuan home. Her first words were, “Where is the original?” Lin arranged the half-printed photograph, his paper notebook, and his screenshots of Tomorrow Layers on the table. Wearing gloves, Su examined the visitor pass with a portable microscope. Around the digits 0719, there were no printer dots—only cyan-violet noise repeating every seven pixels. “Obsidian renumbers temporary passes daily,” she said. “I can get the July nineteenth visitor log. But first tell me why your childhood home ceased to exist when you moved in here.”