The twists and turns in the case had gone far beyond anything they had imagined before, and Shu Yu’s temples began to ache again.
With so many clues suddenly piling up at once, the situation had become extremely complicated.
The special investigation team went to interrogate the man in black, while Shu Yu and the others followed the cyber police to retrieve the local records left behind from Yang Jie’s internet usage at that internet café.
“Good grief. She’d been coming to this internet café regularly ever since she finished the high school entrance examination. But why didn’t her parents say anything?” Feng Tang stared at the dozens of gigabytes of files, nearly dropping the lollipop in her mouth from shock.
“Maybe her parents thought it was embarrassing that she secretly went online?” Lu Anran guessed randomly.
She was analyzing the data together with the cyber police.
“That’s strange. She hardly ever watched videos when she came here.” Feng Tang pulled over a chair and sat behind Lu Anran. “What website is this? Why does it look kind of familiar?”
“It’s a famous fanfiction website. You’d probably recognize it if you saw the normal homepage,” Shu Yu said. “If I remember correctly, you go there pretty often too.”
“Oh, so it’s that one.” Feng Tang suddenly understood. “She’s so young. How did she end up hanging around a site like this?”
“Actually, among the users of sites like this, you’re on the older side.” Shu Yu looked at her. “There are plenty of girls her age using these kinds of websites.”
Feng Tang was momentarily speechless.
“Good grief, she was even a fanfiction author.” The more Lu Anran looked, the more startled she became. “And her writing style is pretty dark.”
Shu Yu opened several of the fanfics Yang Jie had written and found that they contained a great deal of dark and even bloody content.
It was completely different from how she behaved at school and at home.
“I knew there was no way a normal first-year high school girl could have absolutely no negative emotions, but why do I feel like her negative emotions were practically overflowing?” Feng Tang flipped through several of Yang Jie’s fanfics. “She’s so young. Forget how skilled she already was at writing explicit scenes—how was she writing stuff this dark and twisted?”
Xiao Que leaned over to take a look and said, “You could check whether she usually liked reading this kind of thing.”
He then named several novels and comics. “You need to bypass the firewall to read some of these. I’m guessing she read quite a lot of them.”
“Good grief.” Sure enough, Lu Anran found records showing that Yang Jie had bypassed the firewall. “She even followed some occult bloggers on Twitter.”
All four of them fell silent at the same time.
But merely following things like that shouldn’t have been enough to make someone suddenly want to commit suicide.
“Found it. These are some articles she posted recently. Quite a lot of people were insulting her in the comments.” Lu Anran finally found the most recent data records. “Good grief, these insults are vicious.”
“It’s not just that they’re vicious. It looks more like everyone ganged up on her,” Shu Yu said after reading through them. “Later, she posted an announcement saying she was leaving the community, only to get hundreds of comments accusing her of playing the victim.”
As for how Yang Jie had started getting attacked in the first place, the reason was actually rather absurd.
The pairing she wrote about was different from the pairing another group of people liked, and because she wrote better, she attracted more readers.
Her “rivals” were unhappy about it. At first, they hadn’t done anything, but for some unknown reason, they suddenly began attacking her en masse, hurling particularly vicious insults at her.
In real life, Yang Jie was a girl with little presence. This corner of the online world that she loved so much, along with the readers who adored her and called her “Author,” were almost her last source of emotional support.
And now, even that final refuge was being destroyed.
Someone had also dug up the fact that she was actually an ordinary-looking high school student living in a small county, which led to even more people piling on her.
“It looks like someone was guiding these people to do this.” Shu Yu was extremely sensitive to this sort of thing. “And the other side clearly targeted exactly what Yang Jie feared most and where she was most vulnerable. She was afraid of people discovering that she was a student, and even more afraid that her family would find out she was writing this kind of thing.”
“Her parents definitely weren’t as open-minded as they described themselves. At the very least, they absolutely wouldn’t have accepted her secretly going online and writing this kind of ‘disreputable’ content. Yang Jie already had mild depression because of the pressure from her family, and this made it even worse. Look at the last private messages she received. Several people somehow got hold of her real personal information. They even had her home and school addresses.”
“Wait, that doesn’t make sense. How did they get it?” Lu Anran suddenly noticed something wrong. “When Yang Jie completed the real-name verification for the account, she used an ID number she found online, and it belonged to a much older adult. The phone number linked to the account was from a virtual SIM card she bought at a street stall. It wasn’t hers either.”
From this point onward, things became suspicious.
Just as the cyber police had said before, there was absolutely nothing connecting this account to Yang Jie herself. No matter how they investigated it, they shouldn’t have been able to trace it back to her.
Even the police, with all the resources at their disposal, had been unable to find the account she had hidden behind an unlicensed internet café.
So how had the people who sent those private messages obtained her information?
It was obvious that those messages had been the final straw that shattered her psychological defenses. After seeing them, she had finally broken down completely.
Compared to those private messages, the few angry words her math teacher had said to her were nothing at all.
“The cause behind Yang Jie’s death is basically clear now, but we still need to continue investigating how her identity was leaked,” the special investigation team leader said. “We have you to thank for reminding us this time. We really don’t know enough about the circles students nowadays are involved in. I’ve never even heard of some of the websites she used.”
“In the internet age, it’s perfectly normal that you wouldn’t know much about these things,” Shu Yu said. She didn’t consider it a failure on their part. “Especially when your children absolutely don’t want you to know about them.”
Yang Jie had ended her life for reasons that perhaps most people would never have imagined. As Shu Yu looked at the dark stories she had left behind, her feelings became particularly complicated.
In fact, Yang Jie had probably already been suffering from depression before she became involved in this circle. That was why she had made this secret that no one knew about into her emotional refuge.
She had never expected that, in the end, this immature community would also be what destroyed her.
There had been too many unfortunate coincidences. After seeing everything, all that remained was a sense of sorrow.
As for the internet café owner, he was both involved in the matter and yet not truly involved.
After learning that something had happened to Yang Jie, her parents quickly noticed the gap between the time her classmates said goodbye to her after school and the time she usually arrived home. They realized that Yang Jie must have been secretly doing something after school during that period.
At first, they thought their daughter had been doing something “improper,” so instead of telling the police, they found their way to the unlicensed internet café themselves.
When the internet café owner realized that Yang Jie’s death might have something to do with her going online at his establishment, he desperately tried to distance himself from the matter. He told Yang Jie’s parents that she had been working as a paid online chat companion at the café.
The internet café owner took advantage of how much Yang Jie’s parents valued their reputation. Using another computer, he pulled up some random content and showed it to them, convincing Yang Jie’s parents that what he said was true.
To prevent the police from discovering their child’s “improper” experiences and causing them to lose face completely, the internet café owner and Yang Jie’s parents discussed the matter and decided to steer public opinion toward the idea that a male teacher had harbored malicious intentions toward a female student and caused her death.
Afterward, they joined forces to cause trouble at the school gates precisely so they could make that version of events seem like established fact as quickly as possible.
Right up until the very end, Yang Jie’s parents actually had no idea why their daughter had committed suicide.
They only wanted to preserve their own reputation as respectable people.
After hearing the internet café owner’s confession, Shu Yu’s feelings became even more complicated.
But she had to admit that this really was something many parents were capable of doing after their child died.
Even by the time Yang Jie leaped from the fourth floor, they still hadn’t known that their daughter had been under such immense pressure that she had developed depressive feelings, much less that their daughter had died because of cyberbullying.
They even considered themselves very open-minded parents.
Everything about it seemed painfully ironic.
“Don’t give these fanfics to her parents. I don’t think she would’ve wanted them to see them,” Shu Yu said to the special investigation team leader. “This much, at least, we can do for her.”
“What fanfics? All I know is that because the internet café’s computers were old, the data on the hard drive was corrupted. A large number of files couldn’t be recovered. Only evidence and chat records related to this case remained.” The cyber police officer pushed the computer away.
The office fell silent for a while.
In the end, no one mentioned Yang Jie’s online account again.
However, when the special investigation team contacted the people who had sent Yang Jie those private messages, all of them said that the personal information had come from an anonymous email address.
The cyber police investigated for a long time, only to discover that the IP address associated with the anonymous email was located overseas, making it impossible to trace any further.
Although the case was successfully closed as a suicide, and they had found the true reason behind Yang Jie’s death, a thorn remained lodged in Shu Yu’s heart.
Who had guided Yang Jie toward those occult accounts on the foreign internet?
When had she started becoming interested in such dark and disturbing writing?
During the few short months after she first encountered this kind of content, what else had she seen?
Why had that anonymous overseas email sent her personal information to the people cyberbullying her?
And where had that personal information come from in the first place?
Although the investigation could no longer continue, Shu Yu vaguely felt that this matter wasn’t truly over yet.
There was simply no way to tell when these things had begun seeping into Yang Jie’s life.
Could it really all have been an accident?
When they connected it to the somewhat unusual battle over public opinion surrounding this case, it wasn’t only Shu Yu. The others also sensed that something about it was out of the ordinary.
But the case had indeed been closed. Yang Jie’s parents no longer had any objections. Instead, they began demanding that the internet café owner be held responsible, but those matters no longer had much to do with Shu Yu and the others.
Xiao Que published a complete and extremely detailed official case statement as a long image with white text on a blue background through the official account, then handed control of the account back to J County.
They had already responded in such detail that every suspicious point and rumor surrounding the incident had been clearly explained. Even if someone tried to stir up trouble again, no one would believe them.
Especially when it came to the reason behind Yang Jie’s suicide.