The story begins in 2017.

That year marked the peak of content investment in new media. Money came quickly, and good material could be sold by the minute.

As my daughter was born, expenses grew larger, and the fixed salary from the daily newspaper was far from enough to support a family.

So, I quit my job at the newspaper and relied on my old contacts to become a field reporter, running around with a photographer, going wherever there was news, just like a fly chasing after decaying meat.

The most lucrative segment was folk tales and odd news.

This segment merely needed to follow the style of "Into the Science," with cases everywhere, and decrypting the content by copying local reports. It was simple and profitable, almost like robbing money.

In November of 2018, an old classmate from the Northeast routinely sold me a lead.

The lead was a news report, with straightforward and concise content.

A certain Mr. Bai's son had developed a lung disease. The father believed in exorcism and missed the child's treatment period, leading to the child's death.

The story was cliché, but with the addition of keywords like a small village on the Sino-Russian border, exorcism, underage, and death, it was content that would almost certainly become a hit.

Almost the same day I received the news, I took the photographer, Xiao Zhao, to our destination.