chapter 3

At first, Jiang Ning did not believe the files were real.

She thought it was all scripted.

Who would sell a relative’s “death file” and let strangers livestream their life after losing a child?

The details were too exhaustive.

But some coincidences in this world were almost absurd.

At the police station, an older policewoman received us.

She looked startled when she saw Zhang Hua’s photograph. “Her…”

Jiang Ning stared. “She really exists?”

The officer nodded. “I used to work in W City. She came in every few days.”

Since Zhang Hua believed there was something suspicious about her son’s death, she had naturally made repeated visits to the police.

“Do you know the case?” I asked.

She did. The forensic evidence and autopsy had established beyond doubt that Zhao Chong had killed himself.

He had also behaved strangely before his death.

He had stopped speaking to his parents, spent long stretches staring blankly into mirrors, and the autopsy revealed numerous self-inflicted wounds.

“We all believed his mother simply couldn’t accept it. Clinging to another explanation was a defense mechanism.”

After Zhao Chong died, Zhang Hua became the target of universal condemnation.

Everyone said she had driven him to suicide.

Without her conviction that she had to “uncover the truth” for her child, she might not have survived.

The kindly officer remembered her well.

“It wasn’t as though the boy had only one parent,” she sighed. “His mother couldn’t possibly bear all the blame.”

Several times, Zhang Hua had come to the station accompanied by former students who were now adults.

Her whole family had abandoned her, yet her students remembered her kindness.

How could someone like that have been a terrible mother?

“If only she could learn from her husband,” the officer said. “He has already remarried and had another child.”

Then she told me, “You may not be able to recover your money anytime soon.”

I said solemnly that it did not matter.

Jiang Ning explained for me. “She wasn’t tricked into paying. She paid voluntarily because she wanted to find out the truth.”

She added that advertisements for the game appeared almost every day and that people could begin playing without even downloading anything.

Not everyone would reach the end, but the game had an enormous audience.

The officer looked at us approvingly. “You two have a strong sense of civic responsibility.”

Exactly. Civic responsibility was my excuse—no, my reason—for taking the bait and losing all that money.

As we left, the officer said the cybercrime unit would take over.

“We’ll investigate a game like this. We’ll also try to stop the dissemination at its source.”

For now, however, they viewed it primarily as a matter of privacy violations, unlawful distribution, and cybersecurity.