After experiencing a breakdown, Liu Xu calmed down instead. She realized that merely crying and evading couldn't solve the problem. She must go and seek the truth herself, to find the source that destroyed everything for her.
The cold words of Su Qing echoed in her mind: "This is the truth you deserve." What on earth is the truth? Su Qing sold the negatives for money. But what about the black market artists? Why did he use her memory for malicious creation and dissemination? What role did Cheng Yu play in it?
She decided to look for clues from Su Qing. Su Qing once said that he sold the negatives to black market artists, and the place of the transaction was very likely related to him. Liu Xu recalled an abandoned warehouse that Su Qing had mentioned before, which was where he sometimes went to store some "treasures".
Alone, following her vague memories, she found the old warehouse located on the edge of the city. The warehouse door was tightly locked. It took her a lot of effort to pry open a gap and squeeze in.
The warehouse was filled with dust and a musty smell, and the air was dull and oppressive. By the faint light of her mobile phone, she carefully groped around in the space filled with clutter. Here are piled up all kinds of dilapidated furniture and rusty metal objects, like a forgotten corner of time.
She rummaged through any possible traces left by Su Qing, hoping to find information about that black market artist or other clues related to the negatives. In the deepest part of the warehouse, she kicked a hard object. Looking down, it was a broken camera lens.
The casing of the lens has been damaged and the glass lens has cracked into several pieces. Liu Xu picked up the lens and looked through the remaining half of it. She saw the blurry reflection and the faint light on the top of the warehouse.
Somehow, she brought the camera close to her eyes, trying to see something through it. Suddenly, the blurry reflection on the lens seemed to outline a familiar contour.
That's... A photo of her with her father?
This lens, this broken one found in the dilapidated warehouse, turned out to be from the camera that recorded her and her father's final moments!
The heart of the willow catkins began to beat sharply. Although the lens is cracked, it seems that the image from that time is still preserved in the remaining half of the lens. That blurred outline, her father's smile, the way she leaned against him... All of this, like a faint ray of light, pierced through all the darkness and gave her a glimmer of hope that was almost destroyed.