Enough.

"Liang Yizheng's maternal uncle, I remember his name is Tao Danqing, is also a police officer in City B. However, District B Middle School is not within the jurisdiction of his precinct. After Xu Yuan left, he would come to drink with me every few days.

"I knew he suspected that I had something to do with the disappearance of Xu Yuan and his son, believing that I helped them escape from City B. But every time he came, he was extremely polite. No matter how much I emphasized that I knew nothing about it, he acted as if he hadn't heard me, saying he just wanted to be friends with me. Later, I let my guard down."

Zheng Jiahou spoke in minute detail, his eyes not looking at the camera, drifting to the side as he recalled the past. The skin on the back of his hands was as dry and cracked as tree bark. Years of recurring skin disease began to flare up due to emotional agitation, and his hands were clasped together, scratching himself in a self-abusive manner. It was as if he were trying to dig out words with his fingernails from years of nightmares.

"Once after I got off work, he practically dragged me to a barbecue stall for a late-night snack. He kept drinking alone, and by the end, he was drunk and slumped over the table, tapping his chopsticks and saying to me, 'Brother Liu, actually I know what kind of person my nephew is. My elder sister has spoiled him beyond reason. She felt that my brother-in-law was busy and hardly ever home all year round, so my little nephew was like a child without a father, and thus she granted his every wish. You know what? Xiaozheng eats cauliflower but not the stems, and Chinese cabbage but not the stalks. Have you ever seen a child who is so picky and so wasteful? And my sister was actually proud of his picky palate.'"

As Zheng Jiahou spoke, snot and tears streamed down his face, and his tears flowed down his chin like a broken string. He wiped his face with his hand, leaving a thin streak of blood near his lips from his broken-skinned fingers.

He fished a folded stack of tissues out of his pocket, holding them up to his blurred vision, trying to pinch out a couple, but his damp fingertips instead turned the tissues into a soggy clump. He tried a few times without success.

"He rambled on to me about domestic trifles, talking about the childhood days of himself and his elder sister. He said it was mainly because his sister couldn't let it go. It was bad enough that her son was beaten blind, but she didn't even hear a single word of apology. What kind of justice was that? But he himself had visited Xu Yuan's home, and heard villagers talk about Xu Yuan's situation, knowing that Xu Yuan hadn't had an easy time either. He was a police officer, yet he couldn't make up his mind about who to help, and asked me if Xu Yuan was dead?"

"I thought to myself, three years had passed, a full three years! What he said was so sincere and moving, he must have figured it out. Without paying attention, I blurted out that I had given Xu Yuan two thousand yuan at the time, telling him to go to City A to find someone for help. I actually didn't know the person myself, I only knew that he was involved in charity and researched the psychological health of minors. That kind of expert knew more people than I did, and whether it would work depended on Xu Yuan's luck. Even if worst came to worst, City A had a developed economy, and settling an orphan like him there had to be better than in City B."

Unable to tear the tissue, Zheng Jiahou spread it directly over his face, rubbing the balled-up paper as he wiped away his tears.

"Tao Danqing's expression changed instantly. He raised his head from the table, staring at me unblinkingly, that cold and sinister gaze crawling all over my body like insects. I called his name, but he ignored me. He threw down the money and left without looking back. That was when I realized he had been faking drunkenness. For such a long time, he had been lying to me. He wouldn't let Xu Yuan go; he was determined to avenge Liang Yizheng."

"Since then, he never actively sought me out again. When I called him, he blocked my number. I knew he would go looking for Xu Yuan, probably afraid of implicating his brother-in-law. By that time, Liang Yizheng's father had already been transferred to City B, and he hadn't told anyone about this. I lived in terror for a month. Around the time after National Day, someone came to ask me if I had seen Tao Danqing recently, saying he had lost contact with his family for over half a month, and no clues were found in the system. They suspected he had met with some accident, possibly targeted in retaliation by criminals. My intuition told me otherwise, but I didn't dare say it. Xu Yuan could live under an alias, but Tao Danqing had no reason to do so. Therefore, it could only mean Xu Yuan killed him."

Hearing this, Liang Yizheng could no longer restrain himself. He smashed his phone heavily onto the ground, and roaring with bloodshot eyes and veins popping, he yelled, "Xu Yuan! I'll fucking kill him! I'll fight him to the death!"

"Stop right there!"

A young police officer sprinted forward, grabbed the hem of his jacket, and tackled him from behind.

Driven by a frenzied rage, Liang Yizheng possessed terrifying strength. With a single elbow strike, he shoved the officer off his back.

Fortunately, other colleagues arrived at that moment, joining forces to twist his arms and pin him firmly to the ground.

"Let me go!" Liang Yizheng's face was purplish-red, his eyes protruding, with a trace of bloody froth at the corners of his mouth. He let out a pathetic roar, "Why did he have to kill my uncle! You don't care, none of you care! Just because my father is some damn corrupt leader, for the sake of his career, you didn't care about me back then, and you didn't care about my uncle later!"

Hearing the furious curses coming from the narrow corridor, Captain Feng glanced back and then withdrew his gaze.

After a moment of silent readjustment, Zheng Jiahou suddenly began to speak about other matters.

"I am just a beat cop, with no education and no background, incapable of accomplishing any great deeds. I won't boast about how much contribution I've made; I'm just an honest, law-abiding ordinary person. I've been honest my entire life."

He looked into the camera, pointing at his speckled face, and said, "The skin on my face sheds countless layers every summer. The scars on my hands and ears are all left over from frostbite in the past. One winter, a child threatened to commit suicide, and a few of us risked our lives to pull him out of a pond. My feet were so frozen they almost had to be amputated. Another year, two families argued over a piece of land beside a house, and when I went to mediate, I was slashed across the waist, my intestines almost spilling out..."

Later on, he was sobbing uncontrollably, the syllables of his words sticking together as they rolled from his mouth like incoherent murmuring.

"For a job like this, making a few thousand yuan a month just to scrape by, it almost cost me my life several times over. After retirement, I'm left with countless sequelae, either lower back pain or leg pain. I can't even help my son look after a child..."

Captain Feng paced back and forth with his hands behind his back in the office. He knew that such bitter complaints would inevitably be followed by inescapable crimes.

He endured it for a moment, listening as the other man kept circling the same points, his anger flaring up to the crown of his head. He picked up his phone again and scolded the screen, "What have you said enough of? Will this ever end? What are you trying to accomplish by flaunting your merits here? Do you want me to bring out my colleagues from the station and have them compare themselves with you?"

Stung by those words, Zheng Jiahou deflated, gradually falling silent. With tears streaming down his face, he said, "I needed money. You need money for everything in this society. The child was sick, going to school, taking cram classes..."

Having bared his grievances, Zheng Jiahou covered his face and finally arrived at the main point.

"I was possessed by greed. Once, after I recognized the adult Xu Yuan online and contacted him, I used his identity as leverage. Over the course of more than a year, a total of six times, I extorted cash and property with a total value of over fourteen million yuan from him. I bought a school-district housing apartment for my grandson, a car, and other things."

Zheng Jiahou beat his face in remorse. The skin, already flushed red from crying, bore no visible handprints, but the loud slaps echoed "clack, clack, clack" inside the car, far clearer than Zheng Jiahou's confession.

Hearing of the massive fortune of over ten million yuan, Captain Feng felt dizzy, his lips trembling. Seeing the other man's near-collapse mental state, he swallowed all harsh words and urged him from across the line, "Old Uncle, Old Uncle! Enough, listen to me—"

Zheng Jiahou had no heart to listen to his persuasion. After finishing the origins of the story, he reached out and turned off the livestream room.

He detached his phone from the mount and met a pair of cold, sickly eyes in the car's rearview mirror. That gaze pressed down like a boulder, crushing his depression and grievance, telling him that his previous outpouring had been useless.

"I've always wanted to ask you, when you let me leave back then, was it genuine goodwill, or mostly out of self-interest?"

Yan Jianyuan's skin was rather fair, and under the sunlight, it was thin enough to appear translucent. The color of his pupils was also light, and even just meeting his gaze through the mirror felt as though he could pierce straight through one's soul.

Zheng Jiahou bent his knees, wanting to kneel to him, but the space inside the car was not enough for him to do so. With one leg half-propped, he humbly confessed his guilt, "I'm sorry, I don't know at which step I started walking down the wrong path, making every choice I made the wrong one..."

"Me too." Yan Jianyuan looked away. "I don't know why either. Even though I lost my name, I could never escape the identity of Xu Yuan. Every time I thought I could heal, you people would appear, using the so-called truth to demand a price from me."

He had tried his best to conceal and escape, resorting to endless lies and fleeing to foreign lands, yet he remained trapped in that windy and rainy night when he was eleven years old.

That fine drizzle soaked into his lungs, accumulating into a pool of bitter water.

The bitter water fermented and overflowed, turning into an endless, torrential downpour.

His life germinated and molded in this dark dampness. To appear alive was nothing more than a delayed death sentence.

Yan Jianyuan said, "You are better at lying than I am. In your version of the truth, only I am heinous."

Zheng Jiahou wiped his eyes repeatedly, yet still could not see clearly. The tip of his tongue tasted bitterly salty as he repeated that same old cliché over and over.

"I shouldn't have told my son these things; I didn't expect him to harbor crooked intentions. I didn't know he had looked for you so many times, and I thought you wouldn't care about that money..."

Yan Jianyuan unlocked the car door.

Under his silent coercion, Zheng Jiahou stopped rambling, pulled open the car door, and stepped out.

The wind blew from a distant place, stinging his eyes with pain. Unable to stand, he collapsed into a sitting position, his body temperature draining away completely along with his sweat and tears.

He felt the sand blown onto his body by the wind, and even that negligible weight was enough to keep him from lifting his head.

He felt inside his clothes and pulled out a brand-new utility knife. After tearing off the outer plastic bag, he held it in his hand and looked at it.

Zheng Jiahou pressed the blade against his neck, applying slight pressure, and just as he was about to pierce his skin, the instinct for survival yanked his hand backward.

He let out a couple of sobs, took out his phone, and flipped through the photos in his gallery.

One smiling and crying face after another flashed past his eyes, water stains covering the screen. He tapped his fingertip a few times, but the phone stopped responding.

Zheng Jiahou lifted his head, threw the phone aside, and after taking two deep breaths, issued the sentence of death upon himself. Just as the blade targeted his neck once more, a heavenly cry of "Dad!" echoed his fantasy by his ear.

Startled, Zheng Jiahou turned his head. In a daze, a dark figure struck like lightning, seizing his wrist and twisting it backward, forcing him to let go, and then swiftly raised a leg to kick the knife away.

Zhou Suirong glanced at the direction the knife flew away, touching his heart, feeling it beat abnormally and extremely fast, driving blood rushing toward his limbs, yet unable to prevent his hands and feet from turning cold.

He couldn't tell whether it was lingering fear from the hair-raising crisis just moments ago, or for some other reason.

Fang Qingzhou followed from behind, picked up the utility knife half-buried in the grass, and said, "Even if you commit suicide, your debts won't die with you."

Zheng Jiahou trembled, still not fully recovered from the pre-death hallucination.

Fang Qingzhou said, "Even if Xu Yuan promised you he wouldn't expose who really blackmailed him, what methods the fund transfers took, what they were spent on, and who the real beneficiary was, the police will investigate. It's not up to you just because you say so. You don't have a single valuable thing on you, you're even too stingy to buy a whole pack of tissues—who would believe you extorted over ten million? Or did you think they would turn a blind eye and silently condone it out of consideration that you were once colleagues and committed suicide out of guilt?"

Infinite desolation rose within Zheng Jiahou's heart. He asked, "Is my death not enough?"

"It's not that it's not enough," Fang Qingzhou sighed imperceptibly. "It's just that it's wrong."