Ruan Chen lightly tapped the touchpad, and before she could even open the 1TB file, it opened automatically and began to flip through the pages in front of her.
Meanwhile, nobody's words continued to pop up in the pop-up window, "I know how fast Miss Ruan reads things, so I took the liberty of turning the page for you."
"I think I know what kind of content you would be interested in, Ms. Ruan, so I'll find out the content that you would be interested in for you, so you don't have to go through the trouble of looking at it."
"There's so much content here, spanning 1,300 years. You may only have seen many of these names in textbooks, Miss Ruan."
"Why don't we look at it backwards, starting with the last name—Feng Yuankai?"
The last page is Feng Yuankai's biography, and this is the first time Ruan Chen has clearly learned about the past of this always kind-smiling old man.
He graduated from the First Military Academy at the age of 21 with the highest score in basic physics, but then plunged into teaching in remote mountainous areas.
He spent five years in remote mountains, sending batches of children abroad, and at the age of twenty-six, he won China's highest award in chemistry.
During the award ceremony, his acceptance speech simply expressed his hope that people would pay more attention to those children, and he even donated the entire million-dollar prize money.
Later, he was transferred to the county and city. At the age of thirty, he came to the No. 1 Middle School in Jingzhou, which was ranked second to last—the last one was a vocational high school.
At the age of thirty-six, our school produced a total of thirty-five students who were admitted to the top four colleges, ranking second in the city overall.
At the age of thirty-eight, 132 students were admitted to the four top colleges, breaking the all-time record. Naturally, No. 1 Middle School became the best school in Jingzhou and even the whole country.
This year marks the 35th year that Feng Yuankai has been at No. 1 High School, and his students are all over the world.
These are just his achievements in education.
He has more than a dozen research projects under his control, any one of which could provide an ordinary person with enough to live comfortably for a lifetime, yet he has not profited a single penny from them.
Ruan Chen gently wiped away the tears from the corner of her eyes with her index finger, and saw a new message pop up in the nobody chat box: "Actually, I wanted to kill him more than 20 years ago, but he always had students protecting him, so we had to be careful."
As Ruan Chen flipped through the folder, he glimpsed the life stories of countless people from all walks of life, each with their own unique story.
Some were renowned scientists, while others were just unknown plumbers; without exception, all of them died.
Just like the title of this document—"The Erased Geniuses".
Ruan Chen saw goosebumps rise on her wrists. Her voice trembled—but it was anger, not fear—as she asked, "Who are you people? Or... what organization are you?"
Nobody made that request again: "Let's meet. If we meet, I'll tell you everything."
Ruan Chen really wanted to know the truth, but if she could see this face, why did Fu Jianzhi interrupt her just now?
So Ruan Chen didn't reply. She silently stared at the document, page by page.
The causes of death for those people were varied and bizarre. Feng Yuankai died from a drunk driving accident caused by a truck driver, while others died from food poisoning, gas explosions, electrical leaks, and so on.
Ruan Chen even saw a person being bitten to death by a rabid dog in the street.
These people are not just Chinese; they are found in every corner of the world, and they do not consider nationality when choosing their targets.
For thousands of years, these people have been relentlessly stifling the geniuses of human civilization. Some of these geniuses have already made their mark on the international stage, while others have only just proposed a theory that may one day shock the entire world.
She suppressed her disgust, closed the file, didn't say another word to nobody, and reached out to close the laptop.
Her thoughts had returned to reason and calm, thanks to the inspiration she had gained from the document she had just read.
She could start with the truck drivers, who are witnesses, and then dig deeper into the organization's background.
But it seemed like nobody was watching her. The moment Ruan Chen reached out to close the laptop lid, the screen flickered, went completely black for a moment, and then a surveillance video shot from above popped up.
In the empty classroom, Ruan Chen sat in the corner of the first row by the window, the time displayed in the lower left corner showing the current time.
Ruan Chen looked up at the monitor at the front of the classroom, and as she moved, the image on the computer screen also looked up.
Then the surveillance footage was switched off and replaced with a blurry photo, causing Ruan Chen's pupils to constrict sharply.
The picture shows her looking rather young, around seven or eight years old, wearing her only summer outfit of short-sleeved shirt and shorts. The edges were a little frayed, but she had washed them clean. In the picture, she is leaning against a bookshelf in the Meicheng Library, intently reading a thick book full of text.
The photos switched like a slideshow. She saw herself dragging a large snakeskin bag on the street picking up trash, her bare arms covered in bruises and a bloodstain on her face; and herself looking on with envy at the gate of Meicheng Elementary School. It was September in Meicheng then, and she was still wearing a slightly small short-sleeved shirt and shorts, with sandals that were clearly adult size on her feet.
She saw herself fighting with adults for a broken plastic bottle like a mad dog in the garbage dump, and she saw herself carefully hiding books in the cracks of the roadside wall...
The next image made Ruan Chen catch her breath.
She was eight years old.
The image quality of this one is blurrier than the others. It was obviously taken late at night in a place without any light, so the photo was overexposed to barely make out the small details.
In fact, these details are as clear as if they were engraved in Ruan Chen's memory.
That year she killed someone, the first time in her life.
She stabbed two thugs to death with a steel pipe who tried to grope her in an alley in the slums. Ruan Chen had always thought there were no surveillance cameras there, but today she realized that she had lived under surveillance all her life.
The photo lingered on the screen for an unusually long time. Ruan Chen said nonchalantly, "If it's a threat, there's no need for that. This digitally manipulated photo proves nothing."
A dialog box popped up with "nobody," and he typed as if time didn't matter. "Miss Ruan, please don't misunderstand. I just want to invite you to appreciate these treasures with me."
The next photos changed style, and the image quality noticeably improved. They depicted Ruan Chen's life after arriving in Jingzhou—a villa on a hillside, Huating Public School, the city library, a coffee shop, No. 1 Middle School, the competition venue in the US, Shengling Technology...
nobody typed: "Ruan Chen, look at you. You are so beautiful and charming in the camera no matter when or where. Even your pain is so beautiful... If you ask me, you are the most outstanding masterpiece of this century of civilization."
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