Chapter 75

Chapter 75

Just as the online buzz was intensifying, the police also announced the cause of Chu Qingyi's death—

He died from cyanide poisoning.

As soon as this news came out, everyone was stunned.

Wasn't it said that Chu Qingyi was strangled by Zhou Yueze? The paparazzi who had been tailing Chu Qingyi even managed to secretly film the entire altercation and supposed killing by Zhou Yueze. The video spread widely online, and everyone believed it to be true. How did Chu Qingyi end up dying from poisoning?

"Is Zhou Yueze still the real culprit?"

"I always thought it was strange. The angle of the video taken by the paparazzi was too clear, as if it was prepared in advance. Now thinking about it, could it be that someone deliberately did this, wanting to kill Chu Qingyi and also frame Zhou Yueze?"

"Who hates these two the most? And has the ability to frame them?"

"I have a suspect!"

"I also have a suspect..."

For a while, various conspiracy theories were rampant online. Ye Mingzhao and Chu Hengyi, who had conflicts with both Chu Qingyi and Zhou Yueze, could not remain hidden, and even the Ye family was subtly implicated.

The public relations and legal departments of the Ye family business had been monitoring the changes in online public opinion. After discovering this trend, they immediately took action to trace the source of the rumors. However, the other party was very cautious. Upon noticing the actions of the Ye family business, they immediately disappeared online.

The Ye family business only managed to trace a few paid troll accounts and marketing accounts, but the related rumors had already subtly spread online.

Notably, most of the troll and marketing accounts caught by the Ye family business's PR team were linked to marketing firms closely tied to Zhou's film company. Since Zhou's film company went bankrupt, these marketing accounts had not released any marketing materials related to Zhou's film company. Now, with rumors suddenly spreading, it inevitably pointed fingers at Zhou Heting.

"...But our people have carefully investigated, and recently, Zhou Heting has been busy with activities for Zhou Yueze and has not contacted these marketing companies at all." Ye Mingchen paused slightly here: "The person behind this seems eager to pit us against Zhou Heting."

Ye Mingxi, hearing his elder brother's words, was somewhat suspicious: "Do our family and the Zhou family even need someone else to stir the pot?" Haven't we already reached a point of no return?

The Ye family members: "..."

Chu Hengyi chuckled and said, "Alright, leave this matter to me to handle."

Ye Mingzhao glanced at Chu Hengyi.

Chu Hengyi smiled, "Actually, I'm also very curious about who killed Chu Qingyi."

Although the divisive conspiracy theories online are superficial, the angles are quite bizarre, spreading fast and widely. If the public relations department of the Ye family business had not been closely monitoring the online buzz, even a slight delay could have left us unprepared.

Even now, some suspect the Ye family's involvement in Chu Qingyi's death. Otherwise, why would such rumors spread for no reason?

This just goes to show how sneaky the person behind all this is.

And with such sneaky methods, liking to hide behind the scenes, and deeply hating the Ye family, he also has a candidate in mind.

Ye Mingzhao looked steadily at Chu Hengyi: "Are you suspecting Hua Rui?"

Chu Hengyi smiled slightly: "Aren't you?"

Ye Mingzhao succinctly said: "She might be behind hiring trolls to stir up trouble online, but she might not be the one who killed Chu Qingyi."

The reason is simple, it's unnecessary.

Even if Hua Rui wanted to stir up conflict between the Ye family and the Zhou family, there's no need to use a life as a fuse. The risk is too great, but the gain is minimal.

Of course, this is just Ye Mingzhao's personal conjecture. Maybe Hua Rui is just that unhinged and beyond help.

However, Ye Mingzhao still had an intuition that the person who killed Chu Qingyi was targeting Zhou Yueze.

To verify his intuition, Ye Mingzhao went over the original story in his head repeatedly. But the original story never mentioned any feud between Zhou Yueze and Chu Qingyi, so even with the script in hand, Ye Mingzhao remained clueless.

Putting aside Chu Hengyi and Ye Mingzhao's curiosity, after the cause of Chu Qingyi's death was announced, Zhou Heting and his wife also reacted. Mrs. Zhou immediately stood up for her son, insisting that Zhou Yueze could never have committed murder.

"Someone must have wanted to kill Chu Qingyi and then frame my son. Our Zhou family is truly wronged. Chu Qingyi was the one who extorted us first. My son went to see Chu Qingyi only to seek justice. How could he possibly kill someone..."

"If you don't believe me, you can check my son's call records with Chu Qingyi. Even this meeting was initiated by Chu Qingyi. He called my son to his rented apartment and had paparazzi find the perfect angle to secretly film it. It was clearly premeditated. Go investigate! My son is definitely innocent. How could he risk being caught on camera killing someone when he knew Chu Qingyi was being followed by paparazzi?"

Mrs. Zhou's explanation after the fact didn't carry much weight, but the autopsy report confirmed that Chu Qingyi was not strangled by Zhou Yueze.

Now the question is, if Zhou Yueze didn't kill Chu Qingyi, then who is the real murderer? And what was the motive?

Because this incident had caused a huge uproar online, attracting widespread attention, the police were under immense pressure to solve the case. The higher-ups had given them only three days to crack the case.

Chu Hengyi, being particularly curious, also sent his private investigator, Dagger, to look into the case secretly. As a private investigator who had been won over by Chu Hengyi's charisma, Dagger had always been helping Chu Hengyi with various investigations.

Now that Chu Qingyi had been killed—though it had nothing to do with Chu Hengyi—he was still itching to know the truth behind it. He had a hunch that the person who killed Chu Qingyi must be someone he knew.

So he sent Dagger to investigate the case, hoping to find some clues. After all, Dagger had previously taken on the task of investigating Chu Qingyi and Zhou Yueze and was very familiar with their family backgrounds and interpersonal relationships.

However, before Dagger could uncover any leads, the police had already solved the case. Based on the autopsy report provided by the forensic team, the police deduced the time of Chu Qingyi's poisoning from the contents of his stomach and the time of death. Following this lead, they traced it back to the deliveryman who had delivered Chu Qingyi's lunch. During the investigation of the deliveryman, they discovered that his daughter had suddenly developed leukemia and urgently needed money for surgery. However, the deliveryman's family was too poor to afford the expense.

But just three days ago, the deliveryman suddenly received a large sum of money for his daughter's surgery.

When the police confronted the deliveryman, he didn't put up a fight and immediately confessed to killing Chu Qingyi, but he had no idea who had hired him to do it. He had encountered the person on his delivery route. It was raining heavily at the time, and the person was wearing a black raincoat, a cap, and a mask. The deliveryman couldn't see his face.

"He stopped my electric bike and asked if I wanted to cure my daughter. If I did, he told me to put something in the delivery for Room 301 on the third floor... The resident of Room 301 was Chu Qingyi..." the deliveryman said with a blank look.

He could tell right away that whatever the person wanted him to slip into the delivery was definitely bad. But what could he do? His little girl was only five years old, and he couldn’t just watch her die.

So, after hesitating for less than a day, he agreed. Then, as instructed, he took the order when Chu Qingyi ordered delivery and slipped the drug in...

"How could you be sure that the delivery order from Chu Qingyi would definitely be picked up by you?"

"I deliver most of the orders in their area. If not this order, then the next."

So here’s the thing: how could the other party ensure that after Chu Qingyi ate this meal, he would definitely contact Zhou Yueze, and the two would definitely get into a fight in the rental house?

The delivery guy didn’t know this either. In fact, he was only responsible for slipping the drug into Chu Qingyi’s delivery.

Afterward, the other party gave him a reward of 300,000 yuan. It was all cash, stuffed in a black canvas bag, and they specifically used old bills that were not in sequence. The other party was quite cautious.

"Since then, I have never seen that person again," the delivery guy confessed honestly, adding, "Actually, I never saw that person, at least not his face."

The trail seemed to go cold here. The police, based on the clues provided by the delivery guy, wanted to find the person he mentioned.

Unfortunately, the rain was too heavy on the night of their first meeting. Even though the police pulled up the surveillance footage from that time, they couldn’t identify the person’s figure from the continuous rain.

As for the second transaction, the two didn’t meet at all. The delivery guy received a phone call and went directly to a trash bin in a certain alley to pick up the money.

That alley was in a village within the city, with many illegal buildings, and the place was always crawling with people. The location of the trash bin happened to be in a blind spot of the surveillance cameras, so no clues could be found.

The case seemed to stall out again, so the police continued to interrogate the paparazzo who had captured the dispute between Zhou Yueze and Chu Qingyi. The paparazzo had been following Chu Qingyi for more than half a year and didn’t seem suspicious.

At this moment, the police who had been checking Chu Qingyi’s phone contacts discovered a crucial clue—

A week before Chu Qingyi arranged to meet Zhou Yueze, he had been frequently contacting someone, and this person was Jujunjie, who had previously been reported for group drug use and sentenced to three years in prison.

Two months ago, Jujunjie applied for medical parole due to a sudden illness in prison. A week ago, rumors began spreading online that "the Zhou family is promoting Chu Qingyi because he has leverage over their collaboration with Hua Rui." Jujunjie then managed to contact Chu Qingyi. It was also under Jujunjie's instigation that Chu Qingyi came up with the idea to use this rumor to extort money from the Zhou family.

"I also found out that after applying for medical parole, Jujunjie has been in contact with Zhao Chengfu, a shareholder of Zhou's film company..." Dagger explained smoothly.

Although the police announced that the real murderer of Chu Qingyi was the deliveryman, the details of the case were not disclosed. So Dagger still had to find ways to satisfy his employer's curiosity.

Thanks to Dagger's efforts, the truth gradually came to light.

After Zhou's film company went bankrupt, Zhao Chengfu was sentenced to seven years in prison for embezzlement, bribery, and using his position to coerce female artists.

Zhao Chengfu, of course, couldn't accept this. He believed that the reason he ended up like this was entirely due to Ye Mingzhao's retaliation. And the reason he was retaliated against by Ye Mingzhao was definitely because he acted as Zhou Yueze's lackey, humiliating Ye Mingzhao in public to curry favor with Zhou Yueze.

As Zhou Yueze's henchman, Zhao Chengfu considered himself loyal to Zhou Yueze. But when he was retaliated against by Ye Mingzhao, the Zhou family treated him like a useless old dog, not only kicking him aside but also trying to make him take the blame for heavier crimes.

Now, suffering in prison, the real culprits—Chu Qingyi, seen as the jinx who caused Zhou's film company to go bankrupt, and Zhou Yueze—remained unscathed.

Zhao Chengfu couldn't tolerate this. So he instructed his family and confidants to closely monitor the Zhou family's movements. When he heard the rumors about the Zhou family, Chu Qingyi, and Hua Rui, he had an idea and quickly devised a brilliant revenge plan.

He first had his confidant contact Jujunjie, who was already on medical parole, and used Jujunjie's hatred for Zhou Yueze to get him to approach Chu Qingyi and stir up conflict between Chu Qingyi and Zhou Yueze.

Jujunjie was originally a promising young star, but after starring in Zhou's film company's production of "Prince Transformation," he was targeted by the Ye family and exposed for group drug use. Rather than reflecting on his own mistakes, he grew resentful of Zhou Yueze and Chu Qingyi.

Given the opportunity to incite a feud between the two, Jujunjie naturally wouldn't miss the chance to get his revenge. Under his constant instigation, Chu Qingyi indeed developed greed.

Jujunjie didn't know Zhao Chengfu's entire plan, so after successfully inciting Chu Qingyi to extort Zhou Yueze, he relayed the matter in detail to Zhao Chengfu's confidant.

Zhao Chengfu's confidant then sent someone to contact the paparazzi who had been closely monitoring Chu Qingyi, instructing them to capture the dispute between Chu Qingyi and Zhou Yueze and post it online, aiming to cement the rumor that the Zhou family was colluding with Hua Rui and had been exposed by Chu Qingyi. However, this inadvertently disrupted the mastermind's plan—

The paparazzi, after secretly filming Zhou Yueze "killing" Chu Qingyi, were so terrified that they immediately called the police.

What happened next is known to everyone.

Now, the only question remaining is—who is the mastermind behind bribing the deliveryman to poison Chu Qingyi?