The dialogue in this section is sharp enough to cut and I want to talk about how each character's voice is instantly recognizable.
Hu Xiuchun's dialogue is all panic and deflection. "I—I don't recognize the person in the photo" — the stutter, the hesitation, the immediate lie. Then she pivots hard: "Officer, the Zhang family put me up to all of this." Classic blame-shifting. And then the most telling line: "I spend money freely, but I only get 30,000 yuan a month." She's not confessing — she's negotiating her own sentence in real time, trying to paint herself as a victim of her own expenses rather than a criminal architect.
Su Zhisheng's dialogue is almost nonexistent but when he speaks, it lands like a hammer. "Guess what I already know?" He doesn't need to explain himself. He doesn't need to gloat (though he does smile deliberately). His power is in what he doesn't say. The text says he "smiled, deliberately provoking his stepmother" — that's not dialogue, that's action, and it's more powerful than any speech he could give.
Su Jingye's internal monologue is where the author really shows off. "That ungrateful brat Su Zhisheng has no idea how much the Su family has done for him behind the scenes." The word "ungrateful" — that's the key. This man has been exposed as a criminal, his engagement banquet is destroyed, his wife is in custody, and his first thought is that his son is UNGRATEFUL. The narcissism is so complete it loops back around to being almost cartoonish, except the story never treats it as funny. It treats it as terrifying.
The police announcements are written in this dry, bureaucratic voice that contrasts perfectly with everything else: "Mr. Su, the adopted son of the Su family, is a special consultant to the police department and provided crucial clues for this case. Netizens are urged not to believe or spread rumors..." This is the voice of institutional authority, and it's deliberately flat. It doesn't need drama. It just states facts and the entire online narrative collapses.
And the netizens' dialogue — the gossip, the speculation, the whiplash from hating Su Zhisheng to praising him — feels authentically chaotic. "Come to think of it, what exactly happened for the head of the Su family to publicly disown his adopted son?" This is how real people process drama: retroactively, selectively, and with zero consistency.