Chapter 4 — The Photograph in the Pocket

Her swollen, tear-stained eyes successfully drew a flurry of sympathetic gifts from the audience. The comments continued to cascade in a relentless stream of spam: "Support the righteous wife!" and "Death to the home-wrecker, may she rot!" With a steady finger, I tapped the button to connect to the livestream. The comment section erupted instantly. "Heavens, the actual person is here! She actually dares to connect. Has she lost every last shred of shame? Get out of here, you vile homewrecker!"

I cleared my throat, pitching my voice to be calm and deliberate. "I am joining this broadcast today precisely to take the opportunity to set the record straight regarding a series of completely fabricated falsehoods."

"Lili, you claimed that your husband and I were engaged in an illicit affair, yet you have utterly failed to produce a single shred of credible evidence. As for my side, however, I am holding entirely different proof."

I raised my phone, holding the chat interface directly up to the camera lens.

"It was your husband who initiated the contact to add me. He merely inquired about a professional development course and asked about the registration procedure. Counting his final expression of gratitude, our entire correspondence consists of a grand total of three messages."

"In less than twenty characters total, exactly where on earth can anyone possibly discern that I was attempting to destroy your family?"

"What kind of evidence is that supposed to be? These two clearly don't know each other well. Everyone knows chat histories can be easily deleted! A simple chat log doesn't prove anything; they could easily be pretending to be strangers in public while secretly cultivating a torrid affair behind closed doors." The public sentiment in the chat was still heavily skewed in her favor, but I felt no need to rush. Jiang's mother had stopped crying; instead, she glared at me with venomous hatred.

"You must have pretended to be strangers on your main account, only to use a secret secondary account for your real communications!"

She lifted her own phone, thrusting the screen toward the livestream camera for all to view.

"Look closely, everyone! This is my husband's phone. The person he chats with constantly uses the display name 'A Pleasant Dream', and her real surname on monetary transfers ends with the character 'Jing'!"

The comments exploded once more. "Jing, it has to be Jing! The proof is ironclad this time! Let's see how she talks her way out of this one!" I glanced briefly at the screen, my expression remaining entirely unchanged.

"There are countless people across this entire country whose names contain the character Jing. Are you seriously going to pin this entirely on me based on a single character?"

I switched over to a mini-program interface on my screen. "This is the official record of all telecommunication accounts associated with my identity, issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Every single phone number registered in my name and every account linked to them is clearly displayed here. As you can see, this document proves beyond a doubt that I own only one phone number and have registered only a single messaging account." "She actually dares to bring out an official inquiry result; it seems she really doesn't have a secondary account. Surely government data from the Ministry cannot be forged, right?" Jiang's mother let out a cold, harsh laugh and aggressively swiped open a detailed chat history.

"Are these pieces of evidence still not enough for you to confess?"

"Every single day, exchanging such disgusting, vulgar endearments, and regularly coercing my husband into transferring massive sums of money to you..."

"So she's nothing more than a gold-digger after all! Just look at these logs; this pair of shameless adulterers even flies off to other provinces together constantly! The poor, pitiful wife was simply trying to hold her family together, never imagining that her husband's heart and all his money were being squandered entirely on a mistress." I looked over those chat snippets. She wasn't entirely lying—her husband indeed had someone else on the outside.

"The object of your husband's infidelity is not me." I stared directly into the camera, meeting her gaze. "When I communicate with people, would I ever be foolish enough to omit even a photograph of myself?"

I unlocked my phone, opening my personal profile pictures and my public social feed. It was filled from top to bottom with genuine photographs of myself surrounded by my family and close friends.

"If you have no shame, take a very close look through the shared moments on that account. Has there ever been a single photograph of my daughter posted there?"

Jiang's mother's finger flicked frantically across her screen back and forth, before abruptly freezing in place, completely motionless.

"You can't find them, can you? Or rather, if you did manage to find something, you realized it isn't me at all." My voice remained flat and detached. "You never bothered to verify the basic facts, yet you came storming in to severely disrupt and ruin my life. You did it simply because I am single, and because my name happens to contain the character Jing, making me fit your preconceived, malicious fantasy of the kind of 'immoral, loose woman' you wanted to punish."

The scrolling comments ground to a halt for several agonizing seconds. "So the affair is real, but she isn't the mistress? The legal wife couldn't actually catch the real homewrecker, so she just arbitrarily picked the most prominent person around her to take the blame? Good grief, has she been cyberbullying an innocent person for this long over nothing?" The woman's lips began to tremble uncontrollably. "You're lying! It is you! Everything points directly to you..."

"Everything points to a woman whose name contains the character Jing. Because you were utterly incompetent at catching the real party responsible for the betrayal, you seized upon someone who closely matched your suspicions to condemn, purely because you desperately needed a scapegoat."

My tone remained remarkably even, my pacing measured and deliberate.

"Furthermore, as my legal counsel investigated and gathered evidence over the past few days, they discovered something fascinating: whether it was the accounts harassing me and my family, or the coordinated troll accounts intentionally manipulating public opinion within your livestream, every single IP address traces back to the exact same origin. Tell me, exactly how much money did you spend on hired internet trolls?"

The prevailing wind in the comment section shifted dramatically in an instant. "Oh my god! Trolls?! Just a minute ago I was actually helping her hurl abuse at this person—we've been completely manipulated! She targeted the wrong person and actually paid for trolls to cyberbully an innocent woman?" Without warning, Jiang's mother abruptly severed the connection. The screen opposite me went pitch black.

"You can escape a livestream connection, but you cannot escape formal legal documents. Official lawyer's letters will be delivered by this afternoon, and every single second of the broadcast we just witnessed has been fully recorded to preserve the irrefutable evidence."

"I will not settle privately, I will not conciliate, and I will not withdraw the charges."

"Lili, you are going to pay the full price for your malicious mistakes."