After the message was sent, a suffocating wait ensued. Twenty-four hours, every minute felt like dancing on a knife's edge.
Su Yuqing and her core team members dispersed and hid, shutting down all unnecessary communications, like submarines submerged in the deep sea, silently awaiting the explosion on the surface.
Time ticked by. Outside, discussions about the Xingyao incident seemed to have cooled somewhat due to deliberate efforts by capital to reduce the heat, but the undercurrents were growing ever stronger.
In the twelfth hour, the first piece of news arrived: President Liu's lawyer urgently met with a senior prosecutor. The content of the conversation was unknown, but President Liu's previously hardline stance had clearly softened.
In the eighteenth hour, the second signal appeared: Lu Tianyu's wife, through an agent, massively sold off some of her assets related to Xingyao, a swift and decisive move, as if urgently severing ties.
In the twenty-second hour, the most crucial turning point arrived! The vice chairman in charge of operations actually contacted a media outlet known for its outspokenness—one that had previously refused to interview him—and issued a cautiously worded but clearly intentional statement. In the statement, he expressed deep sorrow and grief over the serious problems that had occurred within the company under Lu Tianyu's personal control, promising to "fully cooperate with the judicial authorities in the investigation and thoroughly rectify the company's governance," and offering "deepest apologies to the victimized artist Lin Chen and her family."
This statement was tantamount to personally pushing down the first brick on a crumbling wall!
The 24-hour deadline had barely passed, and before Su Yuqing's team could take any further action, even bigger news arrived: President Liu, accompanied by his lawyer, voluntarily surrendered to the disciplinary committee, confessing his crimes! Almost simultaneously, the procuratorate announced the formal approval of the arrest of Lu Tianyu and others, and launched a thorough investigation into multiple charges against them!
The ice had shattered!
Inside the safe house, Su Yuqing watched the continuous stream of messages through the encrypted network. Her taut nerves finally relaxed slightly, and a wave of exhaustion washed over her. She had won her gamble. Human selfishness and fear, under the weight of irrefutable evidence and pressure, accelerated the collapse of the fortress from within.
They had narrowly won this life-or-death gamble.
But she also knew this was far from the end. Lu Tianyu and the potentially deeper forces behind him, how many people Liu's surrender would implicate, whether the judicial process could proceed fairly… all of this remained unknown.
However, the path to the truth had been forcibly carved open by blood and courage, a gap that could never be healed.
Liu's surrender and the formal arrest warrant issued by the procuratorate were like the first domino to fall. Long-suppressed public sentiment finally found an outlet, coalescing into an unstoppable wave of national outcry.
Those topics that had previously been restricted or deleted reignited across the internet like wildfire. The hashtags #XingyaoEntertainmentTruth#, #JusticeForLinChen#, and #ThoroughInvestigationOfEntertainmentIndustryDarkShows# swept across all social media platforms with overwhelming force, followed by countless "explosive" headlines. This time, any technical censorship or suppression proved utterly ineffective; the torrent of public opinion overwhelmed all the barriers erected by capital.
Countless netizens spontaneously became "truth detectives," uncovering more of Xingyao Entertainment's past misdeeds: exploitative slave contracts for trainees, a data-manipulation assembly line, and a systematic ban on artists who refused to cooperate… These fragmented pieces of information, corroborated by Su Yuqing's team's in-depth reporting, pieced together a complete and dark picture of the industry's ecosystem.