The score sheet was densely packed with hundreds of names. It showed the rankings of every student in the entire grade.
Such score sheets had become uncommon in good schools in major cities, but at a school like J County No. 1 High School, where the college admission rate was always the top priority, results like these were published after every exam.
The pressure at J County No. 1 High School was immense. As one of the few key high schools in J County, it shouldered more than half of the county’s university admission expectations. Although this was never an explicitly stated target, both the students and teachers understood it perfectly well.
The girl who had jumped to her death was named Yang Jie. Just like her appearance and grades, she was the kind of person who would be difficult to pick out from a crowd. Among the more than seven hundred students across twelve first-year classes, she ranked just over two hundredth overall and around twentieth in her class.
With each subject carrying a full score of 120, her mathematics score hovered in the eighties. No wonder she had been called to the teachers’ office for extra tutoring.
“Her grades aren’t considered bad at our school. If she maintained them normally until her senior year, she could probably get into a public second-tier university,” the young female teacher explained.
For a remote county in a province where the pressure surrounding the college entrance examination was notoriously high, that was already a decent result.
From these records, Shu Yu could tell that the police investigation into Yang Jie yesterday had not missed much. They had more or less found out everything they were supposed to know.
There had been no abnormalities at school. That meant the biggest possibility might have something to do with her family.
To be honest, Shu Yu usually wasn’t particularly interested in the life experiences or emotional journeys of people who took their own lives. Countless people died by suicide across the country every day, for all sorts of reasons. If the media actually had the time to dig into the emotional journeys of every single one of them, even working forty-eight hours a day wouldn’t be enough.
What made Yang Jie’s suicide so puzzling to Shu Yu was that she simply couldn’t see any reason for it.
A girl whose grades were above average, who hadn’t experienced bullying, and who, although she didn’t have many friends, still had her own little social circle—unless there was some serious problem with her family, it was difficult to imagine her taking the step toward suicide simply because of academic pressure and other ordinary stresses.
She had thought about it for a long time without figuring it out, which was why she had come here to take a look herself.
“Looks like there’s nothing unusual either.” Feng Tang had gone through all of Yang Jie’s recent score sheets. “Her grades fluctuated a little with every monthly exam, but overall they were very stable. It doesn’t look like something happened that caused her emotions to deteriorate over a period of time.”
“Yeah, I didn’t find anything either.” Lu Anran was just as clueless. “Technically, this isn’t even our job, but everything we’ve thought of should have been checked by the police already. They probably don’t know what caused Yang Jie’s death either.”
For an official statement to be convincing enough, they needed to provide a relatively clear explanation for Yang Jie’s death.
Otherwise, most people would have the same reaction as Shu Yu and Feng Tang.
How could she have suddenly killed herself when everything seemed fine?
There had always been many people in the real world who took their own lives without any clearly identifiable trigger. But Yang Jie’s suicide still struck Shu Yu as extremely strange.
Surely she hadn’t really killed herself just because her mathematics teacher had scolded her a few times.
Even Shu Yu couldn’t convince herself of that explanation.
They left the teachers’ office and went to Class Three of the first year, where Yang Jie had studied. Since it was the weekend, there wasn’t a single person inside.
The police had already taken away all of Yang Jie’s personal belongings when they collected evidence.
Shu Yu stood beside her desk for five minutes, but found no graffiti or anything unusual on it.
“Let’s go. We probably won’t find anything here.” Shu Yu looked around the classroom, sensing the intense atmosphere of competition permeating the room.
The class ranking had been enlarged, printed out, and posted on the blackboard at the back of the classroom. Students’ mathematics exercises covered the walls, while high-scoring essays were displayed near the front blackboard.
Shu Yu walked over and discovered that one of them had been written by Yang Jie.
“These essays are stuck down too firmly. The police took photos of them last time and told us not to remove them,” the female teacher explained.
Shu Yu briefly read Yang Jie’s essay.
Her writing was quite good, and the content was ordinary and conventional. There was nothing in it that revealed any particularly negative emotions.
It was a perfectly acceptable examination essay.
When they finally left the school building, Shu Yu felt somewhat lost.
Everything was simply too normal.
So normal that she couldn’t figure out why Yang Jie had jumped to her death.
Even if the cause had been pressure from her family or something similar, there should have been at least some trace of it left behind in her daily life.
“Don’t look at me. I couldn’t figure it out either.” The moment Xiao Que noticed Shu Yu looking at him, he immediately waved his hands. “This girl was just too normal.”
That was exactly what Feng Tang and Lu Anran thought as well.
They had spent the entire morning at the school without discovering anything useful. They also had no idea whether the police had made any progress.
At least, nothing new had happened online throughout the day.
The wave Shu Yu had anticipated that morning had been dismantled in time after she predicted their opponent’s prediction.
So, in the afternoon, they simply went to the special investigation team.
They needed to see how far the investigation had progressed.
After contacting the female police officer they had met the previous day, she came over after lunch.
While eating, Shu Yu and the others discussed what they had seen that morning.
“Seriously, I can’t figure out why Yang Jie would want to die.” Feng Tang poked at her boxed meal with her spoon. “Sure, nothing in the real world has to make logical sense, but this is a little too illogical.”
“At least half a month ago, there hadn’t been any drastic changes in her emotions.” Xiao Que stared at his boxed meal, clearly lacking an appetite. “Unless something happened during those two weeks that suddenly caused her emotional state to change.”
“That depends on whether the police found anything. But I don’t think the information they have is much more extensive than ours.” Shu Yu wasn’t very hopeful. “Right now, I feel like there must be something strange behind this, but I can’t put my finger on what it is.”
Her intuition told her that something wasn’t right, and everything they had observed that morning only reinforced that feeling.
“Could we just be overthinking it?” Lu Anran lifted her head from her meal, a grain of rice still stuck to her face. “Maybe the direction the rumors took this time was so different that it caused us to make the wrong judgment?”
Shu Yu found it difficult to accept that explanation.
After all, this was genuinely the first time she had handled something like this.
The original owner’s experience wasn’t hers.
But they were clearly stuck now, and no amount of worrying would change that.
After lunch, they went to the special investigation team.
The female police officer they had met the previous day led them into the team’s office.
“Do you have any progress on your side?” Shu Yu asked, forcing herself to speak to the group of detectives with dark circles under their eyes and hair resembling bird’s nests.
It was obvious they hadn’t gotten much rest the previous night. Every one of them looked like they were hovering on the verge of collapsing from exhaustion.
“We’ve basically ruled out homicide, but we haven’t found any clues regarding why she committed suicide.” The leader of the special investigation team looked troubled.
Under normal circumstances, as long as homicide could be ruled out, the case could be closed.
But this case had already triggered such a huge public controversy. Being able to determine the reason for the suicide would make it much easier to respond to the questions coming from all sides.
The problem was that they had spent the entire night pulling records and calling Yang Jie’s relatives and friends, yet hadn’t found anything unusual.
They had more information than Shu Yu had managed to gather that morning, but they had reached exactly the same conclusion.
Yang Jie had seemed completely normal in the last post she made to her social media three days ago.
“She didn’t have many social media accounts. Only WeChat and QQ. Her friends were basically teachers, classmates, and people she interacted with in daily life. We checked every friend on her social accounts and didn’t find anything unusual.” The team leader pointed to the thick stack of documents on the desk. “We even printed out all her chat records from the past three months.”
“We also visited her teachers and classmates. The three girls closest to Yang Jie said that they had still been chatting with her the day before her death about what they wanted to do during the Qingming holiday. They even made plans to go into the city together. At noon on the day she died, they bought milk tea together. None of them noticed anything unusual at all.” Another member of the investigation team added to the report.
“As for her family, she was an only child. Her father was an elementary school teacher, and her mother worked for a television station. Their financial situation was average. Although her parents were relatively strict with her, according to their longtime neighbor, they were mainly strict about her studies. Normally, they didn’t interfere much when she went out with friends on weekends. They even took her to get her hair permed after she graduated from middle school. We didn’t find anything like a suicide note at home either, and she didn’t have a habit of keeping a diary.”
Everyone present fell silent.
“When you encounter a situation like this, do you actually become more suspicious of homicide?” Shu Yu asked.
The leader of the special investigation team nodded. “Normally, when someone commits suicide, we can usually find some kind of trigger from various aspects after their death. But our forensic team examined her repeatedly and still couldn’t find any evidence supporting homicide.”
The investigation had reached a deadlock.
No one present could figure out why a girl like this had taken her own life.
“So what are you planning to do now? Continue investigating, or…?” Shu Yu looked at the team leader, who appeared to have gone two days without sleep. “You’ve already ruled out homicide. It would be difficult to uncover anything else, wouldn’t it?”
The team leader looked helpless, and his expression had already confirmed what Shu Yu suspected.
The investigation had reached this point.
The case could already be closed.
But Shu Yu was now facing an even bigger headache.
Given these investigation results, how were they supposed to write the official response?
Would people really believe that a girl with no obvious psychological problems had suddenly killed herself after being scolded a few times by her teacher?
The credibility of such a statement would be far too low.
“Let’s do this for now. If you can close the case on your end, hand the materials over to us. We’ll prepare the final response.” Shu Yu could only continue following the established procedure, even though she still felt that something about this case was deeply strange.
Xiao Que’s face was filled with despair.
He had absolutely no idea how he was supposed to write the official statement for this case.