The deeper Tian dug, the more the truth unraveled like rotted thread.
He sat in the heart of Marvel Tower, lights dimmed, several monitors blinking around him. The room was locked, encrypted, and swept for bugs twice before he began. Trust was no longer a luxury he could afford—not when everything he had ever believed about his mother was a lie.
He started with the official death certificate.
Han Yulan. Declared deceased on October 29, 2009. Cause: Acute respiratory failure due to pneumonia complications.
Clean. Clinical. Flawless.
Too flawless.
He sent it to a private forensic analyst in Iceland—someone who owed him a favor—and within two hours, the answer returned: the signature was digitally inserted. The certificate was forged. The hospital seal, copied from a template. Whoever created this paper had access to state-level clearance—or was buried so deep inside Marvel's power structure that no one dared question it.
Tian's jaw tensed as he stared at the document.
He wasn't just chasing a ghost.
He was chasing a cover-up.
He accessed his father's travel logs from that year. There was a three-day gap during the week of her supposed death—three days with no records, no corporate engagements, no financial activity. A blackout window.
During that window, the family doctor who signed her death certificate also left the country. Destination: Switzerland.
The same country where the shell fund transferred money.
Coincidence? Impossible.
The hospital's footage from the night of her alleged passing was next. It took nearly twelve hours to retrieve the archived security logs. He watched the lobby footage first.
No ambulance. No hospital staff running. No stretcher wheeled through the doors.
Nothing.
Han Yulan never entered that building.
But something even more disturbing surfaced.
Tian found footage from the underground garage of Marvel Tower from that same night. At 2:14 a.m., a black unmarked car arrived and parked beside the executive elevator. Two men in suits exited. A woman stepped out slowly—wearing a scarf and sunglasses despite the hour.
Tian enhanced the footage, froze it, and stared.
It was her.
Han Yulan.
She looked nervous. She looked like she didn't want to be there.
The men escorted her into the building. Twenty minutes later, the car left—with only the men inside.
She never came back out.
Tian leaned back, blood pounding in his ears.
She didn't die in some sterile hospital bed. She was taken. Or hidden. Maybe both.
He needed voices—witnesses.
He tracked down Mei Jia, a journalist who had once worked for The Shanghai Chronicle. She had been a rising star, famous for her exposés on corporate corruption. In early 2010, she'd published an anonymous blog post questioning Han Yulan's sudden death.
Two days later, her column was pulled. Her press credentials were revoked. She vanished from the public eye.
Tian found her teaching English in a village school near Yunnan, under a new name.
He chartered a private plane and arrived unannounced.
Mei Jia refused to speak at first. Her eyes were hollow, voice clipped. "I don't do journalism anymore," she said, brushing chalk dust from her fingers.
"You tried to tell the truth," Tian said gently. "About my mother."
Her eyes darkened. "I tried to ask questions. That's different."
"Who silenced you?"
She hesitated. "Marvel Legal sent three men to my apartment. They didn't threaten me. They didn't need to. They showed me footage—of my father. They said he'd lose his pension. My mother would lose her state housing. That's all it took. I stopped asking."
"Did you find anything before they shut you down?"
She reached under her desk and pulled out a plastic file, yellowed and bent at the corners.
"I shouldn't have kept it. But some truths don't rot."
Inside were three photographs. One was a picture of Han Yulan standing outside a gate—wearing a white coat and looking behind her shoulder.
"Where is this?" Tian asked.
"A property tied to a fund Marvel buried under five layers of dummy corporations. The name on the deed was Yuan Xiang Holdings. It was a shell."
He checked the photo's metadata. The location pinged to a secluded estate in the outskirts of Hangzhou.
A Marvel safehouse.
No one but executives knew about it. Not even the press.
But days before her supposed death, his mother had been there.
Tian returned to the city without saying goodbye. He had work to do.
By the time he reached the safehouse, night had fallen. The air was thick with the scent of pine and forgotten power. He stepped past the rusted gates with a flashlight and a digital scanner in hand.
The house was cold, clean, and abandoned. Not even dust. Someone had erased this place with precision.
But upstairs, in the smallest bedroom, he found a trace they missed.
Under the wallpaper, faded handwriting scrawled in ink:
"Trust no one born after the fire."
Beneath it, a date: 1985.
That was the year his father took over Marvel's special projects division—the one no one talked about. The one responsible for military contracts, off-book R&D, and political donations.
And that handwriting?
He would recognize it anywhere.
His mother's.
His fingers brushed the ink, heart pounding.
She'd been here. She'd left a message. For him?
Or for someone else?
Tian didn't sleep that night. He combed through archived payrolls, guest logs, and surveillance contracts tied to Yuan Xiang Holdings. Most had been scrubbed.
But one name kept appearing on receipts.
Yun Sejin.
Marvel's Head of Security.
A man loyal to Tian's father. A man who disappeared six months after Han Yulan's "death."
Tian stared at the name and the date of his resignation.
Exactly one week after the forged death certificate.
He started connecting the dots: A secret fund. A hidden property. A mother declared dead after visiting a safehouse. A head of security who vanishes quietly.
Someone in Marvel had orchestrated this.
Someone close to his father.
He looked again at the timeline and noticed something he hadn't seen before.
The morning after Han Yulan vanished, Marvel stock dropped by 3.2%.
But by noon, it rebounded with a mysterious influx of capital.
A shadow investment from a foreign entity.
The name on the document: The Red Trust.
He froze.
That name had only appeared twice in Marvel's hidden history.
Once during an acquisition that swallowed a rival media conglomerate in 2001.
And once in 1989—right after Tian was born.
Suddenly it hit him.
What if this wasn't just about his mother?
What if she hadn't run?
What if she was erased—because she knew something she shouldn't?
And what if she wasn't the only one?
The pieces were falling into place, jagged and horrifying.
He stood at the edge of a larger war. One with old blood, ancient secrets, and enemies who wore his last name.
He thought of the message on the wall: "Trust no one born after the fire."
Was it a code? A warning?
A memory?
Tian looked out the window of the safehouse, the sky stretched dark above him like a wound.
His mother wasn't dead.
She had been buried—alive in memory, erased in record, and hidden behind decades of silence.
But now he was remembering her.
And that made him dangerous.