For three days, the city seemed unusually still.
Not the calm of peace—but the brittle quiet that came before a storm. Like oxygen holding its breath.
The revelations Lin Feng unearthed had begun leaking into expert circles. A few whistleblowing accounts—not officially connected to him—began releasing excerpts of land fraud data. Screenshots of ritual-ledger overlap, red-stamped approvals by now-disgraced bureaucrats, and even partial connections to foreign cultural funds began circulating across encrypted university networks.
It didn't matter whether the public yet understood.
The intellectual elite—planners, legacy families, and key bureaucrats—did.
And they were unsettled.
