The morning sunlight streamed down.
It held no warmth.
Like a cold, hard scalpel.
Wen Yan opened her eyes, her professional instincts instantly putting her on high alert. This feeling was off—it was exactly like walking into the dissection room and catching the scent of formaldehyde, an attempt to mask the stench of decay.
Without disturbing anyone, she threw on her clothes and headed straight for the rockery in the corner of the courtyard.
That was the burial site of the first piece of evidence—the tin box containing arsenic residue.
The moment her fingertips touched the soil, Wen Yan’s heart sank. There was no cold metallic sensation, only a lump of half-melted scrap metal, as if instantly vaporized by a high-temperature torch, now fused with the dirt into a muddy mess.
Physical destruction. Simple, brutal, and utterly lawless.
Wen Yan expressionlessly brushed the soil from her hands.
“It” had made its move.
It was destroying evidence.
“Method of destruction: high-temperature melting.
Scope of effect: precision strike.
Execution time: after the hour of Zi last night.”
She quietly reviewed the facts, her tone as cold as if she were dictating an autopsy report.
“Seems like a short-tempered one.”
Returning to her room, she stepped onto a stool to retrieve the Diamond Sutra from the top shelf of the bookcase.
Opening the pages, she found the second piece of evidence—Qiuchan’s fingerprint impression, sealed with wax.
The fingerprint was still there, but the wax seal was covered in cracks from rapid weathering, its edges blurred and indistinct. It was like a corrupted image file on a computer, its pixels crumbling away.
Even Buddhist scriptures couldn’t suppress this kind of “data deletion.”
Wen Yan tossed the book back into place and turned her gaze to the white silk beneath her pillow. This was her investigation notes, her only logical anchor point in this magically altered script.
The moment she unfolded the silk, the words on it had changed.
The original line, “Qiuchan leaves the estate every five days to visit Jishi Tang,” twisted and rearranged itself before her eyes, ultimately becoming: “Qiuchan attends to the young lady daily and has never left the estate.”
The handwriting was still hers, imitating the sharp, forensic-style strokes perfectly. But the content was a blatant false statement.
“Hah.” Wen Yan let out a cold laugh.
Just then, the silk stirred without any breeze.
In the blank space, as if branded by a red-hot iron, a line of charred words materialized out of thin air, carrying an air of condescending lecturing:
[Fate cannot be defied.]
Immediately after, a second line appeared.
[You are merely an error.]
The third line laid bare the truth.
[Cease your struggle, return to your script, and you may yet survive.]
A cross-dimensional, real-time communication.
Wen Yan stared at the words, a mocking curve forming at the corner of her mouth.
“So it’s a third-rate writer.”
“Illogical, relying only on administrator privileges to delete and run?”
“You’ve exposed your API interface, you fool.”
The other party could tamper with physical records and destroy evidence, but it hadn’t directly formatted her brain just now.
Why?
Wen Yan’s mind raced, instantly constructing a new logical model:
This “Plot Correction Force” was the server administrator.
It could freely modify cloud data—evidence, records, letters.
But it had no direct read-write access to the local cache of the client—human memory.
To alter memory, it could only rely on tampering with external information, engaging in “visual deception” and “cognitive guidance.”
This was its bug.
“Evidence does not lie.” Wen Yan grabbed a charcoal pen and wrote her reply beside those arrogant, charred marks:
“You also leave access logs. Guess if I can track you down through the network?”
The words had just been written when an invisible force swiftly erased them, strikingly similar to the mute package of someone embarrassed and enraged.
Wen Yan smiled. The more frantic they were, the more it indicated guilt.
She immediately began testing her hypothesis. Four slips of paper, each bearing the same message: “Gu Xiewei is being slowly poisoned. The poisoner is Qiu Chan. The source of the poison is Jishi Tang.”
The first slip was tucked under the pillow (plot core area).
The second was placed on the tea table in the outer room (secondary area).
The third was attached to the leg of a bookshelf in the corner (marginal area).
The fourth was crumpled into a ball and thrown into the muddy ground in the courtyard (background area).
After completing all this, she sat at the table, lightly tapping the surface with her fingertips.
One second, two seconds… a quarter of an hour.
Time for inspection.
The slip under the pillow had turned to ashes.
The one on the tea table had its characters blurred as if washed by water.
The one on the bookshelf leg remained intact and undamaged.
The one in the muddy courtyard hadn’t even changed its wrinkles.
The experiment was over; the data loop was closed.
A hunter’s gleam flashed in Wen Yan’s eyes.
First, the correction force had a “hotspot range.” The closer to the female lead and the plot core, the stronger and faster the correction. Her bed was the “high-risk zone” with the highest firewall level.
Second, the correction force was snobbish. For “abandoned data” like the mud in the courtyard, it couldn’t be bothered to waste computing power.
Third, it truly couldn’t modify “local storage”—that is, people’s real memories.
Paper could lie.
The system could delete databases.
Then she wouldn’t store it in the cloud anymore.
She’d store it locally.
Wen Yan picked up a sewing needle and heated it over the candle flame. Then, she lifted her trouser leg, revealing the fair skin on the inside of her thigh.
This spot was the most hidden, the most painful, and the safest.
She took a deep breath.
The needle tip pierced her flesh.
Without the slightest hesitation, stroke by stroke, it drew beads of blood.
“Qiu Chan. Five days. Jishi Tang. Arsenic.”
The sharp pain of the needle breaking through her skin made her mind clearer than ever before.
Every prick was a declaration of war against that arrogant “script.”
Pain was the best memory anchor point. This scar was living evidence that the system could never erase.
After tending to the wound, Wen Yan’s face was pale, but her eyes were frighteningly bright.
She walked to the window and looked at the little maid Chun’er sweeping fallen leaves in the courtyard. The girl was clean, without any golden particles of the “protagonist’s halo.”
She was “redundant data” outside the plot.
A crazy yet meticulous plan took shape in Wen Yan’s mind.
Since concentrating evidence around her would draw “focused fire,” she would “decentralize” the evidence.
Scatter all the clues into countless plot blind spots.
Have a farmer outside the city keep a pinch of poisoned medicinal residue because farmers weren’t in the script.
Have a monk at the temple carve the key names on the back of the merit stele because monks didn’t engage in household strife.
Have Chun’er sew fingerprint imprints into discarded old clothes and throw them out of the estate.
Wen Yan gazed into the void, as if a pair of eyes were watching from there.
Silently, she mouthed a message to those eyes in the void:
“You think you’re playing chess?”
“No.”
“I’m writing a virus for you.”
Death countdown: three days.
Counterattack program, deploying.