WP Chapter 58

Jiang Yibai was silent for a long time. Then, all at once, his mind felt clearer than it had in years.

“That drummer’s boyfriend back then, the one surnamed Zhou. You were working together from the start, weren’t you?”

The pieces clicked into place. Just like how Zheng Yu had accomplices helping him this time with Chen Yi, maybe back then, he himself had walked straight into a trap and never realized it.

Zheng Yu knelt there, his legs long since numb. Dully, he said, “Yeah. It was him who first took an interest in your drummer. I don’t know if he was ever serious, but he told me later that he couldn’t stand you. Said you were too self-centered in the band. Always throwing fits. Every time his boyfriend missed a beat, you’d call him out in front of everyone. He said he felt bad for him. That’s why he came to me.”

Jiang Yibai remembered now. It was that guy surnamed Zhou who had introduced Zheng Yu to him.

But because he had assumed Zhou, being the drummer’s boyfriend, was automatically on their side, he never thought twice. Never had his guard up.

Li Xun slammed the table. “So you motherfuckers planned this from the start?”

Even someone as sharp as Li Xun had been completely fooled. Back then, he’d just assumed Zheng Yu wasn’t serious, just in it for money. Never paid Zhou any attention.

“So that’s what it was…” Jiang Yibai finally understood why Zheng Yu alone had been able to twist things, drive wedges, break the band apart, leave him completely isolated.

It hadn’t been one man. It had been two. One outside, one inside, working in perfect sync.

Jiang Yibai almost laughed. Looking back now, all the arguments, all the misunderstandings felt so childish. Childish and absurd. No wonder they never amounted to anything back then.

“You two really went to a lot of trouble for just one person,” Jiang Yibai murmured. “I should be flattered.”

Zheng Yu gritted his teeth. “I’ll pay you back double what I owe. With interest.”

Jiang Yibai nodded. “Fine. Then write an IOU. You’ve got three days. If I don’t see the money, I’m going to the police.”

Zheng Yu’s hands were freed, though they trembled so badly he could barely hold the pen. He scribbled down the IOU, hand shaking the whole way.

“Stand up,” Jiang Yibai said.

They untied his legs. A couple of security guards helped haul him upright. His knees were too swollen to support his weight, and he could barely stay standing without help. He swayed there, hunched and shaking.

Jiang Yibai rose and walked over. Up close, Zheng Yu looked swollen and bloated, his face puffed and greasy, eyes narrowed into bruised slits full of panic and shame. Jiang Yibai couldn’t for the life of him remember what this man had done to chase after him, and maybe that was better. Saved him the nausea.

Let it all go, he thought. Let all this filth rot where it belongs.

He flexed his hand once, then spoke, voice calm. “Love is mutual, I won’t argue with that. But you and that Zhou guy planned from the start to lie to me. That’s not love. That’s fraud.”

He let out a sharp breath, then grinned, baring his teeth like a wolf. Before the man could utter a single word, Jiang Yibai slammed a fist squarely into his face.

“Ah—!” Zheng Yu shrieked, but only once. Then everything went silent as he collapsed to the floor, completely unconscious.

Blood poured from his nose. His nasal bridge was bent at an unnatural angle, likely broken.

His face, already swollen and bruised, now looked monstrous. Li Xun stepped forward for a look and said, “Send him to the hospital. Use his money to cover it. Stay with him until he wakes up.”

“Yes, sir.” A few of the security guards lifted him by the arms and legs and carried him off like a pig to slaughter.

Zheng Yu’s blood left dark drops on the floor. Li Xun clicked his tongue in disgust, and Zheng Youli immediately came over with tissues and wiped it clean.

Si Shaorong had stayed quiet ever since asking about Chen Yi’s case. Now he picked up his phone, tapped a few times, then said, “I recorded the part where he talked about Chen Yi. I’ll have Zhen Zhen edit the audio and send it to Chen Yi’s father. He’s the legal guardian. He deserves to know what his son went through, and what kind of man their so-called business partner actually is.”

Li Xun laughed. “Nice work.”

Zhen Zhen had friends in the police department, and they still had Chen Yi’s family’s contact info from when they came to pick him up. It didn’t take long to get everything lined up.

Zheng Yu was still unconscious in a hospital bed when the court summons arrived. His company got wind of the situation too and fired him on the spot.

No one wanted to keep someone who tried to extort a business partner. That was a PR nightmare waiting to happen.

And from that point on, Jiang Yibai didn’t need to lift another finger. Li Xun barely had to either. The rest took care of itself. The Chen family had always spoiled their son. But now, after learning the full story, Father Chen nearly blew a blood vessel. The moment he saw the recording, he no longer gave a damn about whether his son was gay. He wanted to see Zheng Yu burned at the stake.

They hired the best lawyers, pulled every string they had, and made it their mission to bury Zheng Yu so deep even God wouldn’t find him.

Zheng Yu tried to retaliate. He accused Jiang Yibai and Li Xun of unlawful detainment and assault, naming them in a formal complaint.

But the Chen and Li families dismissed it with ease. If Zheng Yu wanted to press charges, he would need to provide evidence, something he couldn’t produce.

His “accomplices” all denied everything in perfect unison. No one tied him up. No one beat him. He’d gone out drinking and came back like that. Maybe he pissed off the wrong person, or maybe he just tripped and fell. Who knew?

As for surveillance footage, the cameras at Li Xun’s villa were coincidentally under maintenance, and the ones near the hospital had also malfunctioned. An unfortunate series of technical failures.

The Chen family wasn’t afraid of a scandal. Mrs. Chen personally followed the case, never leaving it unattended. The entire affair stirred up a storm.

And as all this unfolded, Jiang Yibai, guided by the leads Si Shaorong had quietly gathered, found his way to the drummer’s ex-boyfriend, the man surnamed Zhou, now working at a marketing agency.

After getting off work, the man ran into Jiang Yibai, who was sitting on a bench basking in the sun. His expression shifted slightly. He had also heard about Zheng Yu’s case recently. After all, they had once been friends, and the news had spread like wildfire through their social circles.

Jiang Yibai saw him and greeted him with a smile, though it never reached his eyes. “Hi.”

The man looked at him warily and glanced around as if afraid he might get tied up and beaten too. “What do you want?”

“That’s a good question,” Jiang Yibai said as he stood up with his hands in his pockets, staring at him blankly in the sunlight. “Most people would ask, ‘Why are you here?’ or just ignore me and walk away. But you asked, ‘What do you want?’ Hmm… Why would you assume I want something from you? Is it because you feel guilty?”

The man’s face turned pale, then dark, then pale again. He let out a cold snort and tried to act composed as he walked away.

Jiang Yibai followed behind unhurriedly. With his long legs, he easily caught up and walked alongside him. “Zheng Yu told me everything.”

The man grew visibly more flustered. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“If you say so,” Jiang Yibai replied. “But that’s not why I came here today.”

The man clenched his fists tightly.

“You two conspired to set me up. I won’t even bother asking how much Zheng Yu split with you,” Jiang Yibai said. “But while my friend was looking into you, he stumbled on something even more interesting. Want to hear it?”

The man suddenly stopped in his tracks. “You’re investigating me?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“I could sue you for that.”

“Sure, you could try. But before that, you might receive a court summons yourself.” Jiang Yibai smiled pleasantly, though the look in his eyes was icy. “Turns out you work at a marketing firm, running social media campaigns. You’ve taken advantage of that more than once to hire paid trolls to smear me and spread rumors.”

The man’s face turned ashen.

After Zheng Yu confessed that he and that guy surnamed Zhou had plotted against Jiang Yibai together, Si Shaorong had asked Zhen Zhen to have someone investigate the man.

Had they not looked into it, it might have ended there. But once they did, they uncovered all sorts of strange things. Si Shaorong immediately recalled a few suspicious comments under his own Weibo posts. Because he had once shared those same doubts himself, he had taken note of the replies. Among them were two that stood out—

“Am I the only one who feels like Jiang Luanyu has been getting an unusually bad rep all this time?”

“Agree with the comment above. Aside from being sharp-tongued and fond of clapping back at fans, he just seems a bit temperamental. His writing’s honestly not that bad.”

Si Shaorong had long been puzzled by this. Jiang Yibai was no big-name writer. He did not even have a consistent update schedule and only wrote when he felt like it. Even if his stories were all smut, even if they lacked logic and were a bit unhinged, none of that was reason enough to be hounded like this.

Sure, there would always be people who disliked him. A few insults here and there were normal. But how had it turned into a whole fandom trend of “you haven’t been in the scene if you haven’t trashed Jiang Yibai”?

The investigation revealed exactly how Zhou had done it.

He had used his job to launch a targeted smear campaign against Jiang Yibai. Back when Jiang Yibai was in a band, he occasionally wrote fanfics. He wasn’t prolific, but the people in the band knew his username.

After Zhou graduated, he found that Jiang Yibai was still doing well and could not stomach it. So he took advantage of his position at work to go after him. He arranged for negative reviews, spammed long negative comments, downvoted everything for no reason, made sarcastic remarks on Weibo, and spread rumors about Jiang Yibai’s private life, claiming he was promiscuous, into group sex, and even plagiarized others’ work.

At the time, Jiang Yibai was just a small-time writer. He had no resources to fight back against internet trolls, and eventually stopped caring. Naturally, his public image went downhill from there.

Nowadays, Zhou no longer controlled any troll accounts. After working for a few years, he had moved on from Jiang Yibai entirely. But the damage had already been done. The reputation had stuck.

“I should thank you, really,” Jiang Yibai said. “If you hadn’t helped spread my name for free, I wouldn’t have this kind of influence today.”

The man said, “You have no proof.”

“How do you know I don’t?” Jiang Yibai smiled pleasantly. “If I didn’t, why would I bother finding you? To catch up?”

The man said nothing.

Jiang Yibai said, “Zheng Yu said he wanted to settle things cleanly between us. I thought he made a good point. If we’re going to settle things, let’s settle everything.”

At the mention of Zheng Yu, the man’s knees went weak. He stammered, “It was you, wasn’t it… who…”

“He made his own mistakes. What does that have to do with me?” Jiang Yibai said. “I’ve already consulted someone. What you did falls under slander and defamation. If your fake posts were shared over five hundred times, that’s enough to press criminal charges. Want to guess how many years you’d get?”

The man swallowed hard and let out a cold laugh. “You’re bluffing.”

Jiang Yibai raised an eyebrow. “What you did back then went far beyond five hundred shares. Not only did it seriously harm my reputation, but it went on for years. I could easily get a psychologist to write me a report stating I now suffer from mental health issues as a result. You know that falls under Article 246, Paragraph 1 of the criminal law, classified as ‘particularly severe circumstances,’ right?”

The man was stunned. It took him a long moment to find his voice again. “You… you’re threatening me!”

“Come on, I’m not. I’m stating facts.”

“There’s nothing wrong with your mental health!” the man shouted in panic. “You’re faking it! You’re doing this on purpose! What do you even want!”

Jiang Yibai smiled. “Simple. Use your main Weibo account to publicly apologize to me. Then have your troll network sing my praises, one after another. However you smeared me back then, I want it all reversed. And remember, if anything feels even slightly fake and people find out it’s a marketing stunt, I swear I’ll take your ass to court.”