When the cold scalpel touched the body of a prestigious university student, funeral director Su He felt a lie beneath her fingertips. This young woman, drained dry by predatory campus loans, had used the silent marks on her body to cry out against the violence. But the cost of uncovering the truth was far greater than she had imagined. A tide of online abuse smeared her as someone who was "profiting from another's tragedy." The police investigation hit one wall after another, obstructed by Jincheng Wealth, one of the country's top 100 taxpayers, and a shadow wearing the badge of the Justice Bureau. Even her mentor, Old Chen, lost an arm protecting her. Su He and the gravely injured police officer Zhou Zheng were like trapped beasts struggling inside a vast web spun from power and capital.
They used the dead as evidence, using a funeral director's golden finger to reveal the assailants' fingerprints beneath the victims' skin and trace the underground channels of cross-border money laundering. In one life-and-death struggle after another, from the "Carefree Flower" campus loan scheme to the new "beauty loans," they tore open a bloodthirsty chain of industries, each link connected to the next. When Lin Wanwan's parents turned their bloodstained hush money into a fund to fight predatory campus loans, and when the same fatal strangulation marks as Lin Wanwan's appeared on Zhang Xiaoya's wrist, Su He understood that bringing down individual criminals was not the end.
The systemic machinery of violence was still running. Online mobs could turn their sights on someone else at any moment, the corroded gears of the justice system kept grinding, and capital put on a new face and continued devouring the vulnerable. Su He published The Funeral Director's Notes, dissecting structural violence and wielding the fund as a weapon in the fight for the living. But the drawer piled high with anonymous pleas for help and Old Chen's bloodstained toolbox made one thing clear: when the funeral home's doors open again, another dead person bearing the same wounds may already be on the way... She speaks for the dead and fights for the living. The unrelenting struggle for dignity will never end.
