Because the Truth Has Never Been Without Meaning

Five minutes.

Five minutes, Lu Yuzhu thought, and it would all be over.

The detonator's ticking filled the basement — like the pendulum clock in the old county house, years and years ago, marking time through what had once been a quiet life.

She had believed, then, that quiet was how her life would go.

Then —

As suddenly as that cub reporter had shattered everything.

The countdown stopped.

At the same moment, Lu Yuzhu heard the elevator shaft groan behind her.

She spun around. The doors were sliding open, and in the gap stood a man — tall, broad-shouldered, long-limbed — with beautiful peach-blossom eyes that held a sharp, cutting light.

Xie Qingcheng stepped out of the silver-grey elevator, his gaze driving into her chest like a wedge.

He Yu had been right.

Lu Yuzhu was here. The mirroring software he had downloaded before they entered had triggered a high-intensity signal alert the moment they arrived, and when He Yu ran a scan he had found detonators laid throughout the building.

More than one.

The one stroke of luck: these detonators could be controlled through the mirroring software. That was what had let He Yu crack the other side's firewall before going in and halt the countdown.

They had not alerted the Police Force before breaching — there had been no time. And they had already confirmed there were moles inside; word would only have made things worse.

Everything was clear now. Lu Yuzhu had intended a suicide run — to 'clean up' every file, every piece of evidence, for the person she owed her life to.

'I know the countdown was set for five minutes. It's stopped now.' Xie Qingcheng fixed his gaze on her face. 'Can we talk?'

'The countdown stopped — how did the countdown —'

'Thank your employer's taste for high technology.' A voice rose from behind Xie Qingcheng, smooth as satin.

Only then did Lu Yuzhu notice there was someone else in the back of the elevator.

Xie Qingcheng's presence had hit her like a wave — the way he had stepped through those slowly parting doors, as if he filled the whole world, every step landing on her heart. She simply hadn't registered the young man standing in the shadow at the far end of the elevator.

He wore a plain black turtleneck, autumn-weight, and carried himself with an easy, unhurried air; he was still scrolling idly through his phone as he walked out. Swap the archive room for a bookshop or a club and he would have looked completely at home.

He smiled at her. 'Ms. Lu, technology really is something.'

But he didn't linger on conversation — on the other side, their technician was hammering at the program he had just hijacked with something close to desperation. He Yu offered the warm, brief greeting, then drifted back to the wall and returned to the silent battle of code, eyes still and focused, paying no further attention to whatever passed between Xie Qingcheng and Lu Yuzhu.

Lu Yuzhu was a woman who had come through worse. Even now, after a brief shock, she found her composure again.

'You're not Police Force.' She studied them, the tension in her body easing slightly.

'No.'

'The dogs haven't caught the scent yet and you're already here.' She narrowed her eyes. 'Who are you?'

Xie Qingcheng had no patience for small talk. He went straight to it: 'Nineteen years ago my parents died in a car accident. An unmanned vehicle struck them, the engine caught fire on impact and destroyed any usable evidence. The method was identical to the way your people just killed Zhang Yong.'

'…' Lu Yuzhu said, 'So were your parents traitors who had to be swept away, or were they police dogs?'

Xie Qingcheng: 'They were police officers.'

'Then they died well — no injustice there. Posthumous commendations, I assume?' Lu Yuzhu twisted her mouth into a mocking smile.

'No.'

The smile faltered.

'They didn't die in the line of duty — not officially. There was no direct evidence to prove it was a targeted killing. Everyone who worked alongside them knew it wasn't a coincidence, wasn't an ordinary accident. But without proof, it was ruled just that. An accident.'

'…' A shadow passed through Lu Yuzhu's eyes. She seemed to be thinking of something from her own past.

'I've read your file. I know what happened to you.'

Xie Qingcheng paused: 'I know what it is to go years without any fair answer. Lu Yuzhu — not every police officer is corrupt.'

'…'

'My parents were gone by the time I was thirteen. In every memory I have of them, they never once did anything to be ashamed of. In fact they were killed precisely because they kept fighting for people like you — pursuing the truth, clearing the falsely accused.'

'Lu Yuzhu.' Xie Qingcheng said, 'I know you hate the journalist who framed you. The financial investigators. Everyone involved. You left everything behind, suffered through years of it, and when the verdict was overturned three years ago it was already too late — nothing that had been taken from you could be given back.'

'But do you know how many journalists, police officers, prosecutors — people you never saw, people whose names you don't know — bled for your case, gave their lives for it? What made them go back for something long buried, for cases where the people wronged might never forgive them even if the truth came out, and spend their blood and their youth and sometimes their lives doing it?'

'Because even when the truth arrives too late to change the past —'

Xie Qingcheng's voice was trembling slightly. He seemed to be speaking not only to Lu Yuzhu but tearing at something inside himself — something that had been knotted tight for nearly twenty years —

'— at least it can bring the future back to where it should have been.'

'It can let the living, broken by injustice, raise their heads again. It can give the unnamed dead a proper burial. It can lift the weight from the shoulders of the people who carried it longest. It can show those who thought they were beyond reach that there is still such a thing as consequence.'

'It can't close the wounds of the past, Lu Yuzhu.' His voice stayed level, the feeling held tightly down — but his eyes had gone red, and that gave away everything he was trying not to show. 'But it isn't meaningless. The truth is never meaningless.'

'When the prosecutor found you, and everyone lined up to bow and apologize — was there a moment, even one, when something that had been lodged in your chest for over a decade finally broke loose? When it hurt and it was release at the same time, and for just that one moment you could breathe?'

'…' Something shifted in Lu Yuzhu's eyes.

'You lived to see it, Lu Yuzhu. I've been waiting nearly twenty years. I still haven't.'

Lu Yuzhu: '…'

Xie Qingcheng: 'Somewhere you can't see, there are people who bled for the wrong done to you. You don't even know their names. But they kept chasing justice, kept trying to correct something they had no part in creating — for the living and the dead alike. Do you think that was meaningless?'

'More than a decade. Your husband betrayed you, your child grew up not knowing your face, until you yourself could barely remember what the Party Secretary of Qingli County had once looked like — and still, strangers who had never met you refused to put your case down. Do you really think they did all that just to say sorry? My parents, at least, didn't become police officers for that. They became police officers to earn a living, to support a family — they talked about it like a job. But in the end they died for it. No money. Their child didn't get raised by them. I was thirteen when they left.'

'Lu Yuzhu, you're a mother. Can you imagine what my mother was thinking in the moment she died?'

Until now she had simply been silent, but at that she shuddered — a sharp, full-body tremor — as if somewhere above there were weeping eyes watching her: another woman who had been forced to leave her child behind.

'Half her body had been crushed. I saw it myself.'

'By your people.'

'…'

'What did she ever do wrong, Lu Yuzhu? She was never one for grand speeches. The one thing she ever said with any real weight — I still remember it. She said that every ordinary person, when they are in despair, needs a truth to hold onto. That you need something bright in this world to believe in, or there is no reason to keep going.'

'She wanted the badge on her shoulder to be something bright. Something that anyone reaching out in helplessness could trust. But your comrades, your organization, your people — they killed her.'

'Her insignia were ground into pieces.'

Lu Yuzhu's fingertips were trembling.

Xie Qingcheng said: 'The people you should hate aren't the police. They're the criminals who framed you, who destroyed you. Come back, Lu Yuzhu. Some things shouldn't have ended this way.'

She looked like a wandering ghost, the tangled decades of her life turning inside her. Finally she raised her head and spoke to Xie Qingcheng — her voice had gone rough: '… I'm sorry.'

'…'

'I'm sorry…' she murmured.

But —

But then she said:

'Do you know — that phrase was the one the prosecutor repeated most when he found me.'

Quietly: 'I used to think — what does "I'm sorry" actually mean? That your life was wretched, and it has nothing to do with me.'

Her gaze on Xie Qingcheng was difficult to read.

After a few seconds she went on: 'But saying it to you now — I feel it differently. Maybe… maybe he didn't mean it the way I thought. Maybe he truly did grieve for what had happened to me. Only —'

The sentence turned.

In the cold light of the basement, Lu Yuzhu said slowly: '… Some things can't be undone.'

'Maybe our people couldn't avoid it — maybe they caught the innocent in the net. Or maybe what we did was genuinely wrong. But when I was at my most desperate, when I had nothing left to hold onto, it was our people who saved me. Who gave me somewhere to exist.'

'…'

'Without them, I think I would have killed myself somewhere in that long wait. It was too much pain. I never could have lasted until the verdict was overturned.'

She said, levelly: 'I can't tell you you're wrong. I know I'm wrong too. But I — I belong to the dark, entirely and completely now. The light is something I no longer know.'

'Right or wrong doesn't matter. He gave me this life. I will never betray him. Not even in death.'

Xie Qingcheng: '… Do you honestly think he saved you, and wasn't just using you? For exactly this moment — so someone would stake their life on keeping his secrets. That countdown was set for five minutes, with remote detonation. Why didn't they take you with them? Why let you go up with everything they wanted destroyed?'

Lu Yuzhu gave a small smile: 'You're underestimating him.'

'…'

'He said he would take me. He never planned to leave me behind. I chose to stay — because this had grown too large, and enough warnings had been given, and in the end he would always need to leave someone onshore for the Police Force to close the case with. If I wanted to live, I could have run after pressing the button. He even left me time to change my mind.' She said, 'It was my choice.'

'I didn't want to,' she said.

'I didn't want to fall into the hands of the Police Force. I didn't want to go back to the place that had already locked me away for too many years. I'm not willing to be interrogated again, not willing to cooperate with anything. Death means nothing to me.'

'It's living that feels endless and hopeless.'

As she spoke, she was slowly retreating deeper into the basement — back from the light, into the dark.

She couldn't make herself step forward.

She couldn't step forward at all.

Her hands moved behind her back. There was a gun at her waist.

She hadn't touched it — it was the last thing the organization had given her, meant only as a last resort. She wasn't sure she could actually aim, but she would have to try.

Her eyes settled on the young man in black who hadn't said a word since — tapping rapidly through his phone screen.

Yes.

She couldn't remember anymore what the Party Secretary of Qingli County had once looked like.

Her chest tightened. Soundlessly, she clenched her jaw and trembled as she released the safety —

Suddenly —

A chime. One notification.

He Yu, mid-battle, went still.

He had message notifications blocked. But this one had punched through his firewall — sent by the opposing technician during their exchange. In the middle of the fight, the other side had sent him an anonymous message.

A video.

Anonymous: 'Edward, I've found out who you both are. Watch this first, and then decide whether he's worth going this far for.'