Everyone listened in complete silence as Chang'an continued his story. But when he reached this point, the room fell into a silence even deeper than before—almost suffocating.

  “…I’m sorry, I can’t wrap my head around this,” Zhu Shi said, disbelief written all over her face. “How does Goldfish joining the very pleasure house her father frequents have anything to do with framing him?”

  Goldfish gave a deliberately casual shrug. “Exactly the connection you’re thinking of.”

  Chang'an spelled it out plainly: “She wants to arrange it so her father specifically requests her, spends the night with her, and then make sure the whole thing blows up in his face—ruin his reputation completely.”

  Clearly, this kind of calculated revenge plot was way beyond Zhu Shi’s moral framework. She fumbled, “Wait—forget why she’d even want to do that for a second… wouldn’t her father recognize his own daughter? How could he possibly end up requesting her in a place like that?”

  “The customers all wear headgear, and the staff wear masks,” I recalled from my earlier reconnaissance inside the club. “That setup would make it entirely possible for them not to recognize each other.”

  “Wait—how do you know what it’s like in there?” Chang'an looked stunned.

  “I did some investigating,” I said. “Never mind me for now. Keep going.”

  “Right…”

  He picked up the story again.

  After hearing Goldfish’s outrageous plan, Chang'an was floored. He immediately pressed her on why she would even come up with something so extreme.

  Maybe she’d already reached the point of no return, or maybe she saw this stranger she’d just met as a safe place to unload everything—she started pouring it all out through tears, like spilling beans she couldn’t hold back anymore.

  The reason she wanted to frame her father in such a drastic way was, naturally, deep-seated hatred.

  Goldfish’s parents had both come from rural backgrounds with nothing special in terms of education or family status, yet they’d genuinely loved each other. Her father had been a strong, dark-skinned young man full of ambition; her mother, an oval-faced girl who wore a goldfish hairpin and carried a certain charm. When he left for Saltwater City chasing dreams and opportunity at the tail end of the twentieth century, she followed him without hesitation, leaving her hometown behind.

  Back then, the city wasn’t nearly as orderly as it is now—gangs of all kinds ran rampant. To climb quickly, her father joined one of the bigger outfits in his teens. Thanks to his fearless temperament and a healthy dose of luck, he amassed considerable wealth by his twenties and married the childhood sweetheart who had stuck by him from poverty to prosperity.

  As the gangs gradually lost influence with changing times, he managed to wash his hands clean and pivot into legitimate business just in time to avoid crackdowns. By middle age, he’d built a successful real-estate career and climbed into the upper echelons of Saltwater City society, gaining a polished, respectable public image.

  But just like that wine club—all glamour on the outside, rot within—beneath his shiny exterior lay something ugly and hidden.

  Because her father was always out socializing for work, Goldfish had grown up close only to her mother. In early elementary school she’d even made an embarrassing mistake, thinking her rarely home father was just “the nice uncle who visits sometimes.” Overall, though, her parents’ relationship had seemed fairly harmonious. That didn’t last.

  After she finished elementary school, her father changed.

  She never learned exactly what triggered it, but he became volatile—exploding in rage at the slightest provocation, verbally abusing and physically beating her mother. To the child watching, he looked like a demon. The terror left deep psychological scars.

  The nightmare continued all the way into her university years. Far from stopping, he only got worse. Every time he came home, he’d unleash on his wife—and increasingly on his daughter too. One time he beat her mother so badly she suffered serious internal injuries and broken bones, requiring emergency hospitalization and leaving permanent pain.

  That incident finally turned years of accumulated fear into pure, burning hatred and rage. From Goldfish’s perspective, her mother was the only real family she’d ever had—the one constant presence growing up—while her father was nothing but a monster who periodically invaded their home to inflict suffering.

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  By any reasonable standard, domestic violence at that level should have been reported to the authorities long ago. After that brutal beating, Goldfish finally resolved to get her father locked up. But somehow—through whatever connections he pulled—he escaped any real investigation or trial. Worse, he turned around and beat her so badly she ended up in the hospital too.

  After she was discharged, the punishment didn’t extinguish her hatred—it only fanned the flames higher.

  She began plotting how to make him pay. A lone, powerless female college student—how could she bring down a man with deep social networks and influence? She quietly gathered information about him while racking her brain for ideas. She even considered murdering him in his sleep, but lately he barely came home at night, so the opportunity never arose.

  Then one day she heard a rumor: her father was a regular at a certain wine club, and word was the place was actually a masquerade-themed nightclub that offered “special services.”

  The moment she learned that, inspiration struck like lightning. She might not be able to get him legally convicted, but she could destroy him socially.

  The plan was straightforward: get herself hired at the club, arrange for her father to request her specifically and spend the night, collect undeniable evidence during the act, then leak everything online. Even if it didn’t spark widespread outrage, as long as the people in his circle found out, it would be enough.

  Who would keep associating with a man who’d slept with his own daughter? His reputation would collapse, his career would implode.

  As for what would happen to her own name afterward—she didn’t care in the slightest.

  Fueled by hatred, she acted immediately. And the rest unfolded with almost uncanny ease.

  The club’s behind-the-scenes owner was once the wife of an elite figure; after her husband’s affair drove her to a breakdown, she’d thrown herself into the vice world and somehow ended up running the place. When she heard Goldfish’s story, instead of turning her away, the owner—whether out of malicious amusement or some other motive—actually hired her.

  Even so, the owner couldn’t force pairings between clients and workers. Requesting someone was the customer’s privilege. She claimed she’d already done enough by letting Goldfish in—“that’s as far as my kindness goes”—and afterward treated her like any other employee, offering no further help.

  If things had kept going so smoothly, Goldfish might actually have succeeded. But perhaps there really is some law of conservation of luck in the world: after a streak of good fortune comes the inevitable reversal. Or maybe, for Goldfish, getting hired so easily was the real misfortune—and what came next was the stroke of luck. The very first client she served in her new role was Chang'an.

  After hearing her full story, Chang'an felt genuine pity for the woman and wanted to stop her from destroying herself.

  He began trying to talk her out of the revenge plan.

  Not because he thought she had no right to revenge—but because he believed she shouldn’t sacrifice her own body and future just to get it.

  Unfortunately, he wasn’t the most persuasive person. Goldfish brushed off everything he said. Still, he had one quality that might be considered a virtue—or at least a stubborn flaw: once he latched onto something, he refused to let go. The harder she tried to push him away, the more convinced he became that he couldn’t just walk out and leave her to ruin herself.

  So the very next night, he came back to the club and requested her again.

  That second attempt failed too. But he didn’t quit. After the third failure came a fourth… He kept it up for nearly three months straight. Every time he’d book her into a private room, then spend the entire session talking—passionately lecturing about life, the future, dreams, ideals—without ever touching her for anything “business-related.”

  Even on nights he couldn’t come in person, he’d pay in advance to reserve her, making sure she didn’t see other clients.

  When Chang'an reached this part of the story, Goldfish suddenly spoke up.

  “—Guys like him who just want to preach aren’t actually that rare in places like this,” she said. “You get the occasional middle-aged client who treats it like playing an adult game but insists on a ‘pure’ route—books someone, then does nothing but sit there yapping dryly. ‘One machine gun here and I could control the whole street,’ that kind of nonsense… utterly boring.”

  Though her words were dismissive, her tone felt more like she was covering up some inner wavering. Maybe his persistence hadn’t been entirely in vain.

  “So the campus rumors about you constantly hitting up pleasure houses… that was all because of this?” I asked, looking at Chang'an.

  Zhu Shi, meanwhile, stared at her brother with newfound respect. “I never would have guessed… Brother, you were actually trying to do the right thing. I’ve misunderstood you this whole time.”

  “Heh…” Chang'an gave a sheepish grin, like someone caught secretly doing good deeds.

  But honestly—even with his stubborn streak—was it really plausible that he’d spend over two months tirelessly trying to talk a complete stranger out of self-destruction just because he heard her wild backstory?

  From what I knew of him, his desire to keep her from throwing her life away was genuine. Still, there’s an old saying: men throughout history have two great hobbies—one is “turning good girls bad,” the other is “reforming fallen women.” It was hard not to suspect that some part of Chang'an’s motivation carried a touch of that classic “save the courtesan” complex.

  Since Zhu Shi was finally seeing her brother in a better light for once, I decided not to poke at that angle.

  “So what happened next?” I asked. “How does any of this connect to you getting kidnapped and beaten by that supernatural thing? The story isn’t over yet, right?”

  “No, it’s not over.” Chang'an’s expression darkened completely. “At first I was only going to the club every day to talk Goldfish out of her crazy plan—convince her to walk away from that path. But the longer I spent there, the more I realized the club itself was hiding something seriously wrong—something evil and dark that couldn’t be ignored.”