He opened his door — and found the hallway blocked by a row of composed, well-dressed individuals.
Yuan Chenguang's mind was already overwhelmed. He couldn't stop to think; he only knew he had to get to his parents.
The person at the front stopped him. "I'm an assistant to Mr. Bai Xia. We'd like a moment of your time."
"Bai Xia — look, I don't have time for this right now, I have to—" His head was chaos. His only thought was to get through.
No one moved to physically restrain him, but they filled the narrow corridor completely, and he understood he wasn't leaving. Something in him gave way. He sank to his knees in the middle of the hallway and broke down entirely — hands over his head, shoulders shaking, all the accumulated fear and guilt pouring out of him without warning.
Secretary Xu waited. His expression remained even. After several minutes had passed, he said quietly: "Are you done?"
Yuan Chenguang's crying had eased to something exhausted. He wiped his face and looked up. "You said — Bai Xia's assistant. What does that mean?"
"I'm Mr. Bai's secretary. I understand you've been holding on to certain materials. If you're willing to provide them, I may be able to help resolve your situation."
Yuan Chenguang was still on the floor, forced to look up at them all. His feelings were a mess — shame at being surrounded like this, and beneath it the desperate, trapped sensation of someone who could see no way out, and underneath everything the knife-sharp worry about his mother.
He steadied himself with a breath.
"Could I — could I call my parents first?"
"Of course." Secretary Xu helped him to his feet, waited for his agreement, and then gestured for everyone to go inside. Yuan Chenguang noticed, as they moved, that most of the people clustered in the corridor were not part of the group at all — neighbours, drawn by the noise. He felt a small, genuine gratitude that they'd chosen to handle this inside, with some measure of dignity. Compared to what Liu Fengyu had once sent through his door, this was another world.
Once the door was closed, Yuan Chenguang called home at once. The phone was answered quickly. It was his mother — and she sounded entirely normal. He sat with that for a moment, watching the people around him, and something clicked into place. He asked a few careful questions. When he was certain both his parents were fine, he ended the call.
"It was all fabricated," Secretary Xu said. He nodded to one of the others, who brought a laptop over.
Yuan Chenguang couldn't follow the dense code on the screen. But after a few quick keystrokes, someone ran the same searches he'd run before using a standard browser — and nothing came up. The posts, the topics, the news items: gone. His phone had been manipulated at a level he didn't understand; the results he'd seen were his alone.
The whiplash hit him all at once. He lowered himself onto the sofa and sat there in silence.
And then, whether from some belated surfacing of memory, or simply from the accumulated weight of the past few days — he put his face in his hands and wept again. This time the words coming out of him were different. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done it. I'm sorry.
Secretary Xu watched from where he stood and judged that the moment had come. He carried the laptop over and opened it in front of Yuan Chenguang.
"The events of three years ago have resurfaced these past few days," he said, and walked him through what had been happening. "Mr. Bai has been subjected to another round of abuse."
Yuan Chenguang looked at the screenshots on screen — the comments, most of them vile — and thought about the past few days, what they'd put him through. And what had been done to him was only theatre. Neighbours murmuring, an employer calling with a cold voice. He'd barely held together. He didn't want to imagine what the real thing had been like for Bai Xia.
He thought about the people in this room. Their methods, their reach, their composure. He was completely at their mercy. And they had chosen this.
When he finally looked up, his voice was quiet but certain.
"I have evidence."
The tension in the room eased visibly. He went into the bedroom and dug through drawers and boxes for some time. When he returned, he was holding a USB drive — every chat record, every transaction, documented. He'd known from the beginning that what he was doing was wrong, and so he'd been careful, backed everything up across multiple drives and cloud accounts. He'd told himself it was leverage, in case he ever needed it against Liu Fengyu or Han Zichen. He hadn't imagined it would end like this.
Secretary Xu received the drive and passed it to one of the others for verification. He put the laptop away and said: "What you did before — that debt is now cancelled. Mr. Shen's original position was that you should repay it many times over. Mr. Bai said to let it go."
The verification came back with a nod. They left.
From the window, Yuan Chenguang watched their cars pull away. He stood there for a long time, uncertain of the line between what was real and what he'd only imagined.
He was exhausted in a way that went through to his bones. He felt suddenly older than he was. His whole life lay before him — he was barely past twenty, and this was it: a small apartment in a small city, early shifts and late nights, keeping himself useful to men he despised. Measured against the bright surface of what he'd reached for once, this was, perhaps, already the cost he owed.
After today, even though nearly all of it had been staged, the neighbours had heard enough. His supervisor had heard enough. He'd have to move again. The thought settled over him like something final, and he sat in the wreckage of the past few days and let himself feel it.
In the months and years that followed, Secretary Xu's parting words sometimes surfaced in his mind, unbidden. He'd paid enough. What more was there to say.
As for Liu Fengyu and Han Zichen — they would have had much to say on the subject of cost.
What no one had anticipated, on the night everything began to unravel, was that Bai Xia would simply walk out. More than that: he'd apparently stumbled into someone significant in the process, and by the end of that same evening he'd been quietly removed from the situation entirely — so completely that even Shen Wenbin couldn't get a thread of information about where he'd gone or who was sheltering him. It threw everything into uncertainty. What they'd done was serious enough to constitute a crime; the last thing they needed was for someone with real authority to have taken an interest.
Then, after a day or two, Bai Xia reappeared at the dormitory as though nothing had happened. Another few days passed. Nothing moved.
Shen Wenbin had been rattled. He was a Shen, after all — peripherally, distantly — and he knew enough about the main family to know that members of it had in fact been at that hotel that night. When his security informed him that Bai Xia had apparently exited via the sixteenth floor, he'd put things together as best he could. For several days he'd kept very quiet, with people out making inquiries. But nothing surfaced. Bai Xia gave no sign of having any new protector. He'd probably just slipped out through some service exit and gotten lucky.
The conclusion made Shen Wenbin furious. He'd been frightened half to death by a nobody — had kept himself subdued for days out of caution — and apparently it had amounted to nothing. The humiliation of it curdled into something ugly. He called Zhou Peng and two others together. They met, the four of them, and Shining Stars was in its final round with the public storm still at full height. Shen Wenbin's expression was flat and cold. He listened to Liu Fengyu and Han Zichen's proposals and found them insufficient.
Then he said: "Let him debut."
A beat of silence.
"If he doesn't debut," Shen Wenbin said, "the public gets to feel that their outrage worked. They calm down. In time they forget. But if he debuts anyway — after all of this—" He left the sentence unfinished. The other three understood. A chill moved through them.
Words were fragile things, individually. But in sufficient quantity they buried people. Each of the three felt some hesitation — things had grown complicated, and they were less confident than they'd been. But the four of them were bound together now. There was no clean exit from this. The decision was made.
With Shen Wenbin's money and pressure behind it, and Zhou Peng placed inside the production, the result was managed without much difficulty. Bai Xia was pushed to the last debut position. The public reacted exactly as anticipated.
What no one anticipated was what happened next.
Within days of the finale, retribution arrived.
Liu Fengyu and Han Zichen were still in the competition dormitory — there were post-group-formation obligations, and the situation around Bai Xia made things complicated enough that no one was going anywhere quickly. In those days, both men could barely meet Bai Xia's eyes; they found reasons to be elsewhere whenever he was nearby.
They were sitting in the break room one afternoon when they heard movement in the corridor. A number of people came in. The production director was at the front. Behind him were others whose uniforms made Liu Fengyu and Han Zichen go very still.
The new arrivals introduced themselves and showed their identification. Then, in clear, measured language, they announced that charges of criminal defamation and the fabrication of evidence had been filed, that sufficient proof had been gathered, and that both men were required to accompany them for questioning.
The break room erupted in whispered chaos. The two men, barely present to themselves, signed the paperwork and were taken out.
Bai Xia's evidence — recordings, video — was unambiguous. The purchased trolls and the manufactured traffic were traceable in the platform records. The case was settled before it was properly begun. Bai Xia himself was absent throughout, represented by his lawyer, a Mr. Guo, whose bearing alone made clear this was not his first time in a room like this. Zhou Peng was brought in shortly after, having been implicated in the same matter. The three of them looked at each other and understood that there was nothing left to retrieve.
During questioning, they were informed that Shen Wenbin had also been detained. The last thread snapped. They said everything.
The three were sentenced to seven years — the upper limit for the charges, at the insistence of Bai Xia's legal team. They went to prison carrying the obligation of civil compensation as well; their management companies, unwilling to absorb the liability, pursued the breach-of-contract penalties without mercy.
In a single day they went from enviable to criminal. Whatever came after — even a decade later, with the sentences served — the record would follow them.
Shen Wenbin's situation was more complicated. Beyond his involvement in this particular scheme, years of financial misconduct across his own holdings had been building a separate case. He was not, by the standards of the Shen family, a significant figure — but compared to an ordinary person he had resources and reach, and so did the charges against him. With the full evidence collected and assessed, he received fifteen years.
