Chapter Five: The Dead Leave Honest Accounts

Gu Jingheng froze on the screen. "Why help me?" Xu Zhi asked. "I'm not." Shen Weining lifted her hair, revealing a faint silver waveform behind her ear. "My mother tried to send me abroad last night. I learned that every premarital examination arranged by the Gu family harvested my neural data." She removed a miniature sensor attached to her pearl earring. "I was never their chosen daughter-in-law. I was a reserve sample." As Gu Jingheng ordered the local network cut, blue light flared from her sensor. Xu Zhi and Gu Yanchen stood two meters apart. Every device forced itself online, broadcasting Gu Jingheng's still-open internal channel: [Shen Weining, that idiot. Once I inherit, the first thing I'll do is discontinue her father's medicine.]