Chapter 8: The Serpent's Investigation and the Phantom's Past
The unnatural calm that had descended after the guild complaint's mysterious dismissal did little to soothe Qu Tang's nerves. It felt less like peace and more like the quiet eye of a hurricane, a temporary stillness pregnant with the promise of a more violent storm. She maintained her streams with a carefully crafted smile, her songs a little brighter, her stories a little less dark, performing a normalcy she did not feel. She used her own credits to buy ingredients for a stream about making sweet red bean buns, the process methodical and calming. The chat was supportive, but she could feel the lingering questions beneath the surface, the unseen damage Bai Youyou's smear campaign had inflicted on her reputation. The original owner's desperate, crazy persona was a ghost that still haunted her, a shadow the original female lead was all too eager to remind everyone of.
Meanwhile, in her lavishly appointed apartment that smelled of expensive perfume and cultivated flowers, Bai Youyou seethed. The failure of the guild complaint was a personal insult. Someone with significant influence was protecting that little gutter sparrow, and the thought made her blood boil with a jealousy so intense it was a physical ache. How dare that creature, with her pathetic D-grade power and her common voice, attract such protection? How dare she stand where Bai Youyou was meant to stand, adored and defended?
Her pretty features, usually arranged in a mask of gentle concern, were twisted into a ugly scowl. She had tried public humiliation and bureaucratic pressure. Both had failed. Now, she needed something more potent, more personal. She needed to remind the world—and the Beast Husbands—exactly who Qu Tang really was: a mentally unstable, viciously ambitious orphan who had clawed her way into a marriage she couldn't handle and had been rightfully discarded.
With cold determination, Bai Youyou accessed high-level networks, using the security clearances her status and her carefully cultivated image afforded her. She began a deep, malicious dive into Qu Tang's past, not to find anomalies or genetic mysteries, but to dig up the dirt she knew was there. She wanted the receipts of the original owner's desperation, the evidence of her madness.
The records from the fourth-class planet were scant, but Bai Youyou was relentless. She bypassed firewalls and paid discreet bribes to data clerks, her actions hidden behind layers of proxies and false identities. She wasn't looking for medical files; she was looking for school records, orphanage supervisor reports, psychological evaluations—anything that painted a picture of an unstable, unworthy woman.
And she found it.
It was a digital journal, archived from the orphanage's internal network. The username was a childish variant of Qu Tang's name. The entries were sporadic, spanning her late teens. Bai Youyou's eyes gleamed with malicious triumph as she read them.
The early entries were pitiable: a young girl's dreams of being someone important, of being loved, of escaping her dusty, impoverished world. But as the entries went on, a shift occurred. The tone grew more frantic, more obsessive. When news of the political marriage to the powerful Beast Husbands had reached the orphanage—a transaction she had no part in negotiating—the journal entries exploded with a delusional fervor.
"They say I am to be married to Patriarch Lu Jue! And the others! It is destiny! I will be beautiful and powerful, and they will love me. I will make them love me. I will be the perfect wife, and we will be happy. This is my chance. My only chance."
Another entry, later, was a list. It detailed the supposed likes and dislikes of each husband, gleaned from smuggled celebrity news feeds and wild speculation. She had written down their favorite foods, their alleged preferred colors, their battle accomplishments, all with the frantic energy of a fanatic, not a future spouse.
"I will learn to cook for Panther Patriarch. I will sing for the Lion Patriarch. I will be gentle for the Wolf Patriarch. I will be everything they need."
The most damning entries came just before she was shipped off-world. The writing was chaotic, filled with misspellings and jagged, emotional outbursts.
"They say my power is too weak. They say I am not good enough. They are wrong! I AM meant for this! I will prove it! I will make them see! If they won't love me, they will FEAR me! They will NOT ignore me! They will NOT send me away!"
Bai Youyou leaned back, a cold, satisfied smile spreading across her face. This was better than she could have hoped for. It was a goldmine of insanity. It wasn't just about being a fangirl; it was a roadmap to the obsession that would later lead the original Qu Tang to attack Lu Jue. It showed the genesis of the madness.
This was the true Qu Tang. Not the gentle songstress she pretended to be now. This was the real, unhinged, dangerous woman hiding behind a facade of talent and resilience.
Bai Youyou carefully copied the most incriminating entries. She wouldn't release them all at once. That would be too crude. No, she would leak them slowly, strategically. A snippet to a gossip columnist here, an anonymous post on a fan forum there. She would let the narrative build: that "The Little Nightingale" was not a redeemed soul, but a calculating fraud who had simply changed her tactics. That her current gentle persona was a carefully constructed lie, and that her past of violent obsession proved she was still unstable, a danger to anyone who got close to her, especially to the powerful men she had always coveted.
She wanted to shatter the image Qu Tang was building. She wanted to make every compliment in her chat feel like a lie, every donation like supporting a monster. She wanted to see the fear in Qu Tang's eyes when she realized her past was catching up to her, when the world saw the pathetic, crazy woman she truly was.
The original female lead's jealousy had curdled into a cold, precise hatred. She would use Qu Tang's own past as the weapon to destroy her present. The phantom of the original owner, the one Qu Tang had tried so hard to escape, was about to be summoned from the grave and unleashed upon her. The storm was no longer gathering; it was being meticulously manufactured, brick by poisonous brick, from the pages of a forgotten diary.