Overly Intense [Criminal Investigation] 51

Chapter 51: Passive Dysregulation

Qin Luo was in the mountains.

Just five minutes before she replied to Shen Yiyi’s message, she had just finished giving her statement at the police station.

Zhan Luo was squatting at the corner of the street, eating a boxed meal. Seeing Qin Luo’s pale face, he immediately went up to her.

“How did it go?”

“They’ve filed a case.”

Zhan Luo closed the lid of his boxed meal, wiped his mouth, and asked, “So what are the police saying now? Can they find them now?”

Qin Luo shook her head. “They’ve only managed to control one warehouse manager for now. The people from the other logistics companies have all run away. The police said they need time to investigate.”

Investigating a case takes time.

Zhan Luo took a tissue from his pocket and wiped the grease from his fingers. He picked up the packed boxed meal from the ground and handed it to Qin Luo. “Since it’s going to take time, you should eat something first.”

“I have no appetite.”

Qin Luo waved her hand. “Has the legal team arrived yet?”

“Sister Wang hasn’t landed yet. I’ll go pick her up in a bit.”

Zhan Luo was still worried and held up the boxed meal in his hand. “Sister Qin, it’s been two days. You have to eat something. You’ll collapse if you keep going like this.”

Qin Luo’s gaze followed Zhan Luo’s movement and landed on the braised pork. A stuffy fire was blocked in her throat, and a feeling of disgust surged up from her chest. She covered her mouth and dry heaved. “I really can’t eat this.”

Seeing her nausea, Zhan Luo immediately threw the boxed meal into the trash.

He pressed the car key and said, “Then let’s go find a noodle shop.”

Qin Luo had no strength to argue with Zhan Luo. She couldn’t argue with anyone. The cotton in her head was being pulled out, strand by strand, along her veins.

She had lost her logic, her language, her trust. Her body was having a severe rejection reaction to the world.

She glanced at her phone. There was only a faint 4G signal.

Qin Luo didn’t know how Liu Jia was doing. She said anxiously, “No need. You can take me to the hotel and hurry up and pick up Sister Wang. I’ll go back and have a meeting.”

“Alright, then I’ll go buy you a bowl of noodles later.” Zhan Luo knew that Logos was in a crisis and quickly opened the car door for her. “I’ll take you back now.”

The police station was on the mountainside. The road was bumpy, and there were very few streetlights. Qin Luo sat in the back seat, looking at the financial audit accounts. Zhan Luo drove carefully, afraid that Qin Luo would get carsick from the shaking.

Taking advantage of a flash of signal, Qin Luo quickly sent a voice message to Liu Jia.

[I just went to the police station to report the case. They’ve already accepted it. When Sister Wang and the finance department arrive, we’ll start checking which month and where they purchased the counterfeit goods.]

Before this voice message was sent, she pressed it again.

[Have the finance department calculate how much of the March batch of goods was sold in the live stream. Let’s do a basic assessment of the compensation first.]
[I remember that the assisted products all had liability insurance. Have the finance department make an appointment with the insurance manager to see how much this batch of goods can be compensated for.]
[I’ve already made an appointment with the leader of the Consumer Association. I’ll take Sister Wang to talk to them tomorrow.]
[Thank you for holding down the fort at the company. I’ll sync with you as soon as I have any news here.]

The message was not sent. Qin Luo closed her eyes, her thoughts racing. In her ears were the sounds of condemnation that had not stopped for three days. They were pulling at Qin Luo’s nerves, warning her not to stop.

A notification sound suddenly appeared in the quiet space.

She looked at her phone in a panic.

Perhaps it was because there had been too much negative information these past few days. Qin Luo was as sensitive as a peeled capacitor core. Any movement could startle her and make her feel a pain from the bottom of her heart. A tingling sensation, a jolt of electricity from her back to the back of her head. She was about to get PTSD from the messages.

The events of the past few days flashed before her eyes, one by one.

First, the controversy caused by the SD live stream had fermented online. As an experience guest, she had become unimportant in this debate of “whether women can show their armpit fat.”

What was important was whether she, as a woman, could speak freely, whether she could protect the rights of female consumers, and whether she had an objective view of the market.

The netizens’ attacks on her had started from Logos’s track and had gone all the way to her personal expression. The ones who were scolding her were not even consumers, but a large wave of male bloggers in the female track.

They had made videos, jointly condemning Qin Luo, and then dragged out the inappropriate remarks from the Logos live stream room and compared them with the previous long articles from the Logos official account.

They had forcefully transformed her from a leader into an unprofessional, unfaithful, and commercially driven businesswoman.

Qin Luo thought that this might be a case of professional jealousy, or that her past sharp remarks had offended certain camps. But whether it was black fans or rivals, it was certain that this was a man-made sabotage.

Qin Luo even defined this public opinion as an organized and carefully planned public opinion offensive. They had spread malicious comments on major social platforms, inciting netizens who couldn’t distinguish the truth to attack her personally, hoping to erase her pride through the media and netizens, thereby completely questioning her.

Qin Luo looked at their curses on her parents, her career, and her future.

In these past few years of being in the public eye, it was inevitable that she would be treated this way. But she still felt a pang in her heart when she saw it.

Qin Luo could only pretend not to see it.

Because not defending herself and handling it coldly was the best way to crush public opinion. Time would take away the netizens’ passion for cursing.

But she had never expected that at three in the morning that night.

A large number of marketing water army had suddenly flooded the short video platform. They had organized and posted a bunch of garbage videos that had been quickly edited, using AI to create a former employee, and using forged audio files to tell the story of Logos’s development with embellishments, including its financing and holdings, and the government projects that the team of scholars had participated in. They had even released a conspiracy theory of collusion between officials and businessmen.

This AI employee had even sought justice online, hoping that the online judges could get her justice in the workplace. And so, the workplace bullying at Logos had become a new hot topic, trending on the short video platform.

Liu Jia had rushed to the company as soon as she received the news. Before six in the morning, the company’s legal team had contacted the platform and had the illegal videos quickly taken down.

Then Liu Jia had gone to the police to report the case, and then had issued three lawyer’s letters in a row to set the record straight and prevent the baseless black material from continuing to incite.

Just as they thought that this public opinion storm would pass smoothly, at seven in the evening, a new revelation appeared on a certain long video website—Logos was selling counterfeit and shoddy products under the guise of public welfare, passing off inferior goods as good ones.

Passing off inferior goods as good ones was no longer slander. It was a well-founded report.

If the report was true, then all the senior executives of Logos would be investigated, and Logos might even be fined a huge amount.

The live stream department was Logos’s most important source of profit. The eighty-person live stream department accounted for forty percent of the company’s performance. The reading group and public welfare projects were all supported by the live stream revenue.

This was the most important business in Logos’s rising period. It could not be ruined by a live stream accident, and a live stream accident could not affect Logos’s development. So Qin Luo had discussed with Liu Jia countless times about moving the live stream department out of Logos and operating it under a different model.

And now, this ticking time bomb had finally been detonated.

And it had been detonated without their knowledge.

In just two days, Logos was like a camel stuck in a swamp. The employees were in a panic, and the senior management had lost their sense of direction. Qin Luo felt that God had pulled the plug on her. All that was left around her were dark walls.

But she couldn’t stop.

She was in charge of the public welfare project. She could only fly to the mountains as soon as possible, go to the factory where the incident had occurred, and review every step of the production line.

She was thinking about which part had gone wrong.

After so many years of hard work, the re-employment project she had built, which step had gone wrong?

Why had the faith she had maintained collapsed so quickly?
Why had the feedback from the outside world become so bad?
Why were the people she had helped turning back to devour her?

Why?

Qin Luo didn’t dare to look at her phone. She was afraid of Liu Jia’s breaking voice, afraid of another piece of news that was worse than the last.

She really couldn’t take it anymore.

Zhan Luo looked in the rearview mirror. Qin Luo’s phone was on the seat. She was covering her face with her hands, as if she didn’t want to face it.

He reminded her, “Sister Qin, your phone is ringing. Maybe it’s good news from President Liu.”

Qin Luo rubbed her face and took a deep breath before picking up her phone.

A faint 5G signal flashed by. It wasn’t Liu Jia, not the legal team, not the finance department, but a notification from the carrier about a missed call.

Thirty contacts had called her today.

Qin Luo scrolled through the missed calls, sorting the contacts in order so she could prioritize her work matters.

As she scrolled, she found that Shen Yiyi had called her three times.

Shen Yiyi.

She said the name to herself, and her emotions were relieved for a second. The goal she had lost was instantly re-locked.

Her anxiety was compensated by this name.

She leaned against the window and replied to the other party: [Sorry, I was too busy at noon. I just saw it.]

[Are you and Liu Jia okay?]

On the unlit road, a car was winding through the mountains. In the back seat, Qin Luo’s emotions lost control at that moment, and she suddenly burst into tears.

She put her phone on her lap, put her hands in her hair, and rested her head on the back of the front seat, trying her best to control her impending sobs.

Zhan Luo heard the rustling sobs. He was surprised by Qin Luo’s breakdown at this moment. Even though he was on a winding mountain road, he couldn’t help but look back.

“Sister Qin, are you okay?”

Qin Luo didn’t speak. At this moment, she was fully feeling the fear in her heart, like a childhood compensation object had shattered, the lighthouse’s light had failed, and her body was passively dysregulated.

When the car reached the bottom of the mountain, Qin Luo wiped her tears and then slowly replied:

[We’re fine. Did you see the news online?]