CH 113

Lin Chen stared at the clouds that were constantly lighting up and gradually expanding on the pure black background and asked, “So, who are the key spreaders?”

Wang Chao answered seriously, “The data show that in addition to ‘Liu Ying’ and ‘Li Jingtian’, the key spreaders are mainly Li Jingtian’s fans: those on Weibo, Baidu forums, his ground fans, ect…. The second conclusion can basically be drawn by looking at the picture. Li Jingtian’s fan community is closely united and is a very large group. Well, closer united than your average fan group. I suspect that this may be because of the rape incident. It has attracted a lot of attention from the fans, and the heat hasn’t died down yet, so after the throat-slitting incident, these fans quickly united as a result.”

“Very enlightening.”

Lin Chen continued to praise the teenager, which only made him happier. His ass swayed restlessly on the seat as he happily clicked on the key Weibo posts of those cloud centers. “A’Chen, let me show you the Weibo posts they are frantically retweeting!”

“Nn.”

Wang Chao turned the screen around.

Lin Chen glanced at it. Among those key posts were statements by Liu Ying and Li Jingtian.

The second was warm wishes from Weibo, and the rest were all refutations analysis that Li Jingtian schemed this throat-slitting incident. They had read similar contents earlier in the comments on Weibo.

What was surprising was that among those key “tipping points”, there were also posts questioning if Li Jingtian was self-hyping, but those posts—how to put it—were more like hot water being thrown into a frying pan. They only provoked more scolding and ridicule from Li Jingtian’s fans.

It could clearly be seen from the map that those doubts actually played a big role in driving the heat of the incident.

“There’s even more!” Wang Chao clicked on another chart. “These are the positive high-frequency words and negative high-frequency words in the comments and retweets of the event I pulled. Looking at the relative ratio of their appearance, you can instantly tell what’s going on.”

Lin Chen once again lamented that with Wang Chao around, their investigation was indeed too efficient.

“How do you define positive and negative words?” Lin Chen couldn’t help but ask.

“Uh…” Wang Chao was suddenly stunned. “I automatically classify it according to the lexical nature. Wait, since you asked, I feel like I did this wrong. Wait for me to change it!”

“No need. You’ve been a big help.”

Lin Chen stopped him, put the laptop on his lap, and started carefully reading the contents.

Positive high-frequency words for the incidents were: victim, praying, get well, sympathy, cheer.

Negative high-frequency words for the incident were: murderer, prostitute, wronged, revenge, throat slitting, hype.

From the analysis of the high-frequency words, it could clearly be seen that the negative words, such as murder and prostitute, account for a large proportion of them.

If Li Jingitan really hired a water army to guide public opinion, then the direction they wanted to guide, as Wang Chao stated, was indeed the direction of “the throat-slitting incident is a revenge act from the prostitute”.

Then the remaining inferences became simpler. In the case of Li Jingtian’s throat slitting, the party with the most motivation to guide public opinion and benefit from it couldn’t think of any other suspicious person except for Li Jingtian.

Looking at it that way, whether he walked out of the emergency room after the throat-slitting case or posted on Weibo and deleted it, saying his account had been hacked, this meant that Li Jingtian had predicted what they would suspect him, so he deliberately used these means to clear his suspicion. Since he wanted to hype up the incident, it didn’t matter whether it was positive or negative, as long as the positive comments that supported him overwhelmed the negative ones in the end. The question remained, why was Li Jingtian so confident?

Moreover, they had to return to the most critical issue regarding the motivation in this case. It wasn’t an exaggeration to say that Li Jingtian was a superstar, so why did he need to hype such an incident just to create the illusion that a prostitute was retaliating against him? To whitewash himself of the rape case?

Lin Chen suddenly thought about the facts surrounding this case. In this war of public opinion, there was a third possibility. That was, someone wanted to kill Li Jingitan and the poor wandering warbler.

But did this possibility really exist?

Inadvertently, Lin Chen raised his head and looked in Xing Conglian’s direction. He found that Xing Conglian was also looking at him through the rearview mirror.

Just now, although Xing Conglian had been driving, he actually controlled the speed quite well, giving Lin Chen enough time to clarify some of the contents he had found.

“There are still five minutes until we reach the hospital, Consultant Lin. Have you figured out what to ask our victim?” Xing Conglian asked.

Lin Chen felt a bit incredulous. “Is Captain Xing sure he wants to send me for questioning?”

“Apart from Consultant Lin, who among us can judge Li Jingtian’s psychological condition with some short questions?” Xing Conglian replied rhetorically.

Although Xing Conglian expressed his trust in him in these words, Lin Chen thought for a bit before replying, “But my questions may be extreme.”

Xing Conglian laughed as if he were satisfied with this response.

“What are you afraid of? As long as you don’t stab him to death with a knife, I can still protect you from other things.”

Lin Chen couldn’t help but shake his head when he saw Xing Conglian’s expression of indifference.

Although he knew very well that Xing Conglian’s words were just to reassure him, at that moment, he felt Xing Conglian was quite manly. It was rare that Lin Chen didn’t feel embarrassed when he was mentioned as being protected and instead actually felt grateful to Xing Conglian, thinking he was extremely sweet.

However, this sweetness only lasted for less than a second.

The reason was, Wang Chao’s laptop suddenly made a strange scream. There seemed to be a woman on the laptop who was singing a high note at the top of her lungs. The cry was extremely miserable. This shocked him so much that he almost dropped the laptop. Wang Chao’s reaction was faster. The teenager quickly pounced on his knee, as if he noticed something strange, and cut the picture back to the information cloud map just now.

From the chart, it could be clearly seen that among all the clouds, a point was rapidly lighting up, as if a human neuron were being transmitted, and around the lit-up dot, countless more dots started lighting up. They quickly formed a cloud and spread out, like a virus.

This meant that a key tweet was spreading at an extremely terrifying speed and had detonated the entire information network. The singing just now was probably the tone set by the teenager to monitor abnormal information.

Lin Chen lowered his head and saw that Wang Chao had opened Weibo in shock.

Then, the young man, who was rarely frightened, quickly shouted, “Fuck, shit. How is this possible?!”

He pressed the trackpad a few times, and a large picture immediately appeared in front of them.

That was the scene before the throat-cutting incident, when Li Jingtian was singing on stage.

Despite the lack of on-site surveillance video, there were a large number of Li Jingtian’s fans shooting their idol in 360 degrees, ensuring that there were no blind spots in the audience.

Naturally, among the fans were those who possessed advanced professional photography equipment. That photo was a high-definition photo taken by one of the fans at the time of the assault.

“Since the police are useless, we have to do it ourselves,” the Weibo post said.

Lin Chen stabilized his breathing and looked intently. The female fan holding the bouquet of roses was about to arrive. Although she was wearing a mask, her eyebrows could still be clearly seen. Though her hair color was different, those eyebrows looked like those of the prostitute who falsely accused Li Jingtian of rape.

They didn’t even need to bring up the original picture for comparison. The Weibo poster had already made a comparison picture. She enlarged the eyes of the throat-slitting fan from the upper part of the bridge of the nose to the forehead and did the same to the prostitute who accused Li Jingtian of rape.

Though the color of the hair was different, at first glance, the two were almost exactly the same.

So, the question now was, could it be that Wang Chao’s inference was wrong? Was this indeed an act of revenge against Li Jingtian that the wandering warbler deliberately planned?