Overly Intense [Criminal Investigation] 8

Chapter 8: The Paper-Cutting Knife

Before Qin Luo even stepped into her company, she smelled luosifen in the elevator.

She sighed inwardly: An employee definitely added an excessive amount of pickled bamboo shoots to their takeout!

“Wang Dapao!!” Qin Luo frowned and exclaimed the moment she stepped out of the elevator.

She had carefully put together this look for her date with Shen Yiyi tonight. That Dr. Shen might be slow on the uptake, but her nose was sharp.

At sixteen, she could smell the almond in hand cream. At thirty-three, could she not smell… luosifen(snail rice noodle)?

Qin Luo’s high heels clicked rhythmically, but no one answered her.

Oh, right. Little Wang wasn’t here.

Her assistant, Ms. Wang, had gone to Singapore for a quick fling with a girl, ended up settling down there, and wrote a very sloppy, impulsive resignation letter. Qin Luo still hadn’t quite recovered.

“Ah, Sister Qin, you’re here.”

Zhan Luo popped up from somewhere in response to Qin Luo, a mop in his hand, and trotted over.

Qin Luo didn’t spare him a glance, striding straight inside. “Since when did the office afternoon tea change to luosifen?”

Qin Luo and Liu Jia had rented an entire floor in this building.

The company was called “W-Logos.”

The ancient Greek word logos means logic, speech, the truth that grasps the source of reason and human principles. Philosophers used this word to express the formula or definition of things.

It is often said that truth is justice.

The rational are the victors.

Thus, being sensitive, fragile, prone to tears, dramatic, delicate, beautiful, and a troublemaker became bywords for the irrational, treated as the losers in evolution. Irrational people were not qualified to comment on important news, and irrational people would forever lose the voice to express anger.

Qin Luo didn’t believe it. She only believed it was a tactic to confuse her. She felt that at certain moments, she was quite rational, yet she had never truly reached the side of justice. The biased scales remained tilted.

Nine years ago, her old friend Liu Jia resigned from the television station and became a freelance media professional. She and Qin Luo hit it off, and the two pooled two million yuan to establish this small self-media company. Back then, it wasn’t yet an institution for humanities scholars, not a media matrix company.

They chose the name W-Logos.

Using the homophone “Our Logos” as the name for their all-platform media channel, back when official accounts were still the main battlefield, several of Qin Luo’s viral articles had swept across Southeast Asia.

They hadn’t intended to grow so big at first. Nine years ago, when she and Liu Jia were seeking investment, potential partners thought they were a joke.

The ripples they made were too small.

Increasing exposure for overlooked female writers, finding partners for up-and-coming female screenwriters, securing commercial advertising placements for female bosses, providing basic literary training for executives who lacked eloquence—even though they did their best to balance input and output, the future returns were seen as uncertain by investors.

At that time, no one was willing to invest in the female market. Neither of them had expected that crossing class boundaries would happen in an instant. When luck arrived, no one could stop it. The self-media industry rose.

Later, their peers described their success with a simple phrase: “When you’re in the eye of the storm, even a pig can fly.”

Liu Jia added a suffix: “Let alone someone as outstanding as them.”

Their presence flowed from official accounts to all major platforms. The female bloggers under their matrix accounts rose to prominence overnight. Many writers’ videos became super IPs, and scholars’ paid knowledge courses received unanimous praise. Someone saw them, and so more humanities scholars joined.

Their office was no longer big enough.

So they built a larger team, providing personal IP agency services for more writers, screenwriters, and scholars, and launched an app to create a knowledge community for them, becoming a solid and powerful matrix universe. Their team of humanities scholars now gives closed-door strategy courses to corporate executives, and their literary writers hold regular reading groups and aid societies.

Most of the material for Her Kill, Hidden in the Shadows was accumulated from stories from the aid society. After the book was successfully published, Qin Luo donated a portion of the copyright fees to the Women’s Federation, and Liu Jia also invested in Her Kill under her own film company’s name, becoming one of the producers. They needed resources to constantly circulate in their hands.

As the boss, Qin Luo said only one thing to her employees during meetings: “I want to keep adding weights to the scale.”

Of course, this goal was still distant.

Some offered harsh critiques, saying they used lofty words to build a rosy dream. They carefully crafted an image of elite women who couldn’t possibly understand the suffering of the grassroots. All the aid and empowerment activities launched by W-Logos were, at best, just for show; they themselves had not severed ties with the discourse of capital.

Whether to sever ties or not, whether to wean off or not, Qin Luo couldn’t care less about these superficial comments. After all, while netizens were harshly criticizing her online, she was promoting children’s reading in mountainous areas. Every moment she spent replying to a netizen was a moment less spent on real work.

Liu Jia described her friend Qin Luo’s life as seemingly always smooth.

She went to a good university, was recommended for graduate school, her first book became a hit, her second was serialized in a youth magazine, and later, as a screenwriter, she even won an award in a film festival competition. Until… the day they started their business, Qin Luo could be said to have effortlessly reached a high position.

But Qin Luo knew that this smoothness was not a lottery win.

She didn’t have the good background that people online claimed. Her painful childhood, like that of hundreds of millions of others born in the 80s, had cooked her, tormented her. A frog being boiled in lukewarm water needs the courage to jump out of the pot. The grand gesture of severing ties also needs someone to raise the knife.

Shen Yiyi had raised that knife for her back then.

It was a small knife, one that could actually cut paper.

The seventeen-year-old Shen Yiyi had rushed into the boys’ restroom with the knife, held it to the throat of a boy who was spreading lewd rumors about girls, and told him to shut up.

Qin Luo had been standing at the restroom door at the time, her legs so weak they could barely hold her up.

The incident caused a huge stir back then and almost got Shen Yiyi suspended. But luckily, her grades were too outstanding, and she hadn’t caused any real harm. The school just made her give a self-criticism in front of the entire grade.

Shen Yiyi’s self-criticism at the time was very half-hearted.

“I’m sorry, I was impulsive. I impulsively wanted him to know the fear of being silenced. After the incident, I seriously reflected on myself and realized that cutting off his tongue wouldn’t actually solve the problem…”

That day, Qin Luo listened very attentively in the auditorium.

Listening, her own bland self began to run wild.

She had never seen a beam of light that could illuminate an observer so clearly. So she learned from Shen Yiyi’s wild force, crashed into a wall, and broke a huge hole in it.

Shen Yiyi slipped through that hole and went in a different direction at the fork in the road. And though Qin Luo was reluctant to see her go, she also held her head high and walked forward.

Sixteen years.

Qin Luo could slowly come to terms with herself. She began to feel unapologetic about everything, and her emotions tended toward a straight line. She could calmly debone and kill her father, cruelly wean herself off her mother mentally, and no longer bother with the order of choices. She wanted to live just like this, trembling, aggressive, pacing back and forth alone.

But Qin Luo wouldn’t admit that after seeing Shen Yiyi, she had been split in two again with a crack.

The walls of her indestructible house were peeling.

Now, Shen Yiyi had turned back onto her path and had asked her via WeChat to meet tonight at 5:30 at a Japanese restaurant near the criminal police brigade.

Qin Luo glanced at her watch. It was 3:30 now, and it would take a while to drive there.

She fanned the sour bamboo shoot smell away from her nose, her gaze falling on the bobbing heads in the breakroom, the group in the company that prided themselves on being the most relaxed introverts.

“This is a cultured company, not a smelly company!!”

“Sister Qin, we ordered for you! Extra sour, light on the spice, with your favorite fried egg,” Little Li from the agency department waved at Qin Luo.

“What egg?! More like you’ve got some balls!”

Qin Luo gestured to the little… she couldn’t remember his name again, who was trailing behind her.

She stammered for a long time before saying, “Little Zhan, have the cleaning uncle open all the ventilation windows on this floor. And have him get some help to move the books the publisher sent from the warehouse to the live-streaming department. How can he keep forgetting to move the books every Wednesday? Can’t he even handle a little physical labor?”

“Okay, Sister Qin.” Zhan Luo received his orders and immediately turned to carry them out.

“Hey, wait.”

Zhan Luo turned back.

“Tell them, just because there are a lot of women in the company doesn’t mean they don’t have to clean the men’s restroom. It stinks every day.”

Zhan Luo lowered his head. “I did think it was dirty, so I just cleaned it.”

Qin Luo waved her hand in satisfaction. “Alright, you’re commended. Your reward is that bowl of luosifen with the egg.”

An employee from some department with sharp eyes noticed Director Qin’s “extraordinary” look. “Sister Qin, are you attending an event tonight?”

Qin Luo nodded. She did have an event—a love-seeking event.

“That heather gray is nice. It’ll make you look very fair under the lights. No one will say you have sallow skin when you stand next to a celebrity anymore.”

Qin Luo glared at the audacious employee, then tapped the table. “Hurry up and put down your luosifen and go to the conference room for the meeting. I’m in a hurry.”

A certain Li, who had seen the boss’s private account, immediately asked, “Boss, are you going on a date tonight? You even did your hair.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Qin Luo not only liked to be open and frank, but also swift and decisive. She clapped her hands rapidly at the group of bamboo shoot eaters. “Quick, quick, quick, don’t make me late for my date!!”

Time was tight. Liu Jia’s favorite periodic report section was skipped entirely by Qin Luo.

She and Liu Jia had a division of labor, one handling internal affairs, the other external. Today, she was just here to listen to the podcast topics and the offline reading group topics. Other departments’ issues would wait for Liu Jia to handle when she returned.

But she also passed on the opening remarks for the topic meeting. “Get straight to the point. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, let me see them.”

“The balance between motherhood and career development: changes in consumer attitudes,” the self-media department began their report with the planned topic.

“Not good. Next.”

“Motherhood and the decision-making power of new careers in household consumption.”

Qin Luo frowned. “Is the advertiser for this podcast a consumer platform? Then why are all your topics focused on motherhood? The content is a real downer.”

She clicked her ballpoint pen on the table, thinking for a long time. “After the one-child policy fast-forwarded female consciousness by 8x, my mom and I…”

Qin Luo looked at the employee. “The second half… you guys think about it.”

The employee nodded.

“Okay, next part.”

The reading group had always been Qin Luo’s responsibility. She took only thirty minutes to sort out the offline outline. After the meeting, she walked into her office.

She pulled open the bottom drawer and crouched on the floor, rummaging for a long time.

“Where did I put those letters?”

Qin Luo even took the drawer apart, sticking her whole head inside to look, but couldn’t find a single sheet of paper.

Those were the letters she and Shen Yiyi had written in high school. There were 19 in total, plus another 12 she had written in her spare time.

A thick stack, which should have been easy to find.

She was sure she had never thrown them away. She had even bought a special file folder to protect them. This folder had moved with her to Beijing, then to Nanjing, and finally to Shanghai. It had moved with the company from the industrial park to this building.

She remembered putting it in the bottom of this drawer with her own hands. How could she find nothing now?

Dejected, Qin Luo sat in her boss’s chair, stunned. She glanced into the hole that had been pierced through her heart.

Strange. Didn’t she treasure those few letters?

A strange, unsettling feeling washed over her. She felt a disconnect from the person who had just been clapping her hands, rushing her employees to get to her date.

If a perfect score for looking forward to a date was one hundred.

Then the meeting at the Japanese restaurant could score a ninety-eight. But the emotion of not being able to find the letters was so overwhelming that it triggered a limited-time major discount on that high score.

Qin Luo’s rating system suffered a severe blow.

She took out her phone and reread the message Shen Yiyi had sent.

“Then let’s meet at 5:30.”
“Okay.”

Qin Luo took a long, deep breath. Somehow, she suddenly felt disenchanted with her crush.

A person isn’t just “infatuated” with love. Perhaps it’s just an infatuation with a certain beam of light, a restless feeling without a clear shape, a fresh impact. It’s the self, trying to bend an iron bar and break out of its cage, asserting itself.

I was expected to act this way, so I acted this way.

Qin Luo exhaled the breath she had been holding.

Very well. Since she had mentally removed the filters, she could physically collide with a clear conscience. Otherwise, she would always carry the illusion of sacrificing herself for a pitiful past, using the thirty-four-year-old Qin Luo to love the seventeen-year-old Shen Yiyi.

She could start over with a bold heart, and not for any other reason.

Qin Luo took out her phone and changed Shen Yiyi’s contact name.

“Getting to know 1 from 0.”