He lost.
Utterly defeated.
Faced with absolute power and boundless malice, his personal persistence and that tiny, insignificant hope seemed so laughable, so fragile.
What else could he do? What else could he gamble with?
Looking at his mother's peaceful, unguarded face in the photograph, imagining the pain his father might be enduring, Lin Chen felt his soul being slowly torn apart.
He staggered to his feet and walked to the window. Downstairs, Lu Tianyu's assistant was getting into a black sedan and speeding away, as if he had only completed a trivial delivery.
The sun still shone brightly, the city still bustled.
But his world had completely collapsed, leaving only boundless, suffocating darkness and the stench of blood.
The final warning had been issued.
He had nowhere to go.
The blood-stained work clothes, like a flag proclaiming a cruel reality, were clutched tightly in Lin Chen's hand. The dried, hardened bloodstains dug into his palm, a dull ache in his already battered heart. The cracked lines on his father's phone screen mirrored the shattering tension in his nerves.
The final warning wasn't empty talk. Next time, what might be delivered truly were unbearable "parts."
Time was running out. There was still no news from Su Yuqing. The hope of rescue, faced with the bloody reality, burst like a bubble in the sunlight.
He was driven to a true dead end.
Either immediately surrender, confess, and sign the agreement, like a groveling dog begging for a little "mercy" to spare his family—even though that mercy was so unreliable.
Or…
A crazy, dangerous, almost suicidal thought, like a will-o'-the-wisp flickering in the darkness, danced in his despairing eyes.
Since external rescue was hopeless, and since compromise might only lead to deeper enslavement and eventual abandonment, his only option was to deliver a fatal blow to this dark kingdom from within before it was utterly destroyed!
He needed evidence! Core evidence of Xingyao Entertainment's money laundering, illegal transactions, and possibly even more serious crimes! Only substantial evidence could shake Lu Tianyu, serve as a bargaining chip, and offer a chance to rescue his father and secure a glimmer of hope for his own survival!
This thought was so audacious, so reckless, that even Lin Chen felt a chill run down his spine. He knew what it meant. It meant he was willingly stepping into a den of wolves, touching Xingyao Entertainment's most sensitive and heavily guarded nerve center. Failure would mean a fate a thousand times worse than his current one.
It was tantamount to a moth drawn to a flame.
But even a moth drawn to a flame has a fleeting moment of light and glory. If he sat idly by and waited to die, he could only watch helplessly as he and his family were consumed in darkness and humiliation.
There was no other choice.
He took a deep breath, forcing himself to calm down. Madness requires extreme calm to execute. He began to think rapidly.
Where was the most likely location for the crucial evidence? Lu Tianyu's office? The company's core server room? Or, like that assistant, stored on some encrypted mobile device?
Lu Tianyu's office was heavily guarded, with independent access control and surveillance; it was virtually impossible for him to enter. The server room was an even more technically sensitive area; he would find it difficult to even get close.
Therefore, the most likely opportunity was the encrypted hard drive that the assistant often carried, or… Lu Tianyu's laptop, which might be on his person and contained the most important data.