"This Taoist was persuading the woman not to jump; he might have been hit," said an enthusiastic old man chiming in from beside me.
Several other witnesses claimed they saw Beichen walking in circles downstairs, saying something to the upper floors.
It drew countless people to sigh and lament.
A young man, in the prime of his life, eager to help others, yet he ended up risking his own life.
But judging from the height of the fall, even if he shouted, it would have been very difficult for his voice to reach the top.
The likelihood that Beichen was so foolish as to be persuading from the ground floor was incredibly low.
I furrowed my brow and asked the old man, "Do you remember what the Taoist said then?"
"I didn't hear it clearly; I just heard him speaking," the old man replied with a wave of his hand.
I pondered deeply, "If even you couldn't hear what he was saying clearly, it's even less likely that the person about to jump from the building could have."
"Well... perhaps the young man was flustered with concern. I reckon that girl must have been his girlfriend. Seeing her about to jump, the young man was so anxious he was going in circles and had broken out in a sweat... I tell you," said the old man, his demeanor slightly embarrassed as my questioning nearly stumped him.
Girlfriend...
Was this old man really clear about what had happened at the time?
I knew better than to rely on bystanders; most of their accounts were unreliable. I turned to Yu Longting, "Beichen seems to be in a deep coma and won't wake up soon. If we want to know what happened, we'll have to check the surveillance."
"Let's go to the surveillance room," Yu Longting reached behind me and patted my shoulder with his long arm.
I glanced back at Beichen, lying in a pool of blood, not feeling very reassured, "But if we're going to see the surveillance, we obviously can't take him with us."
"With so many people around, could anything else happen to him? The ambulance will be here soon and take him to the hospital first," Yu Longting responded, his expression casual, showing no worry about Beichen's condition.
I was irked by his nonchalance and my mouth twitched, but I had no other choice,
"Alright, I'll listen to you."
There were only two security guards on duty in the surveillance room of the neighborhood.
Compared to the upscale neighborhoods in big cities, the management here was relatively poor.
Someone had just fallen to their death, yet the two security guards remained oblivious, sitting and watching dramas.
The surveillance room was filled with the smell of instant noodles.
Upon hearing our purpose, both guards became impatient, "Check the surveillance? That's a matter for the police station. We can let them view it, but not anyone else."
"This is a matter of life and death. One of those people is named Beichen, and he's my friend," I insisted forcefully, "As his family and friend, I should have the right to view that part of the surveillance. I won't look anywhere else, just the area downstairs of the building where the accident occurred."
"No, no! There are rules. When someone calls the police, the authorities will come and check the surveillance. Don't meddle in affairs that aren't your concern."
The guards became impatient and started to shoo us away.
I was furious; their negligence was typical.
Even though such a serious incident had occurred in their own neighborhood, they didn't even bother to check it out.
And they wouldn't allow others who wanted to help to do so.
At that moment, Yu Longting's cellphone made a loud sound.
Myself and the two guards all looked over to see that his phone displayed a surveillance video.
The video was quite advanced, and it even included audio.
The loud sound from before,
was actually the fall.
Dragging the progress bar back revealed that Beichen was downstairs before the woman fell.
As the old man had said, he was looking up, saying something.
It looked like he was trying to persuade someone, but he certainly couldn't be heard from upstairs, as his voice was too soft to be captured by the video.
However, watching the frequency with which his lips moved, his speech was incredibly rapid.
The guards were stunned, and it took them a moment to find their voices, interrupting before the video finished playing, "How did you get our surveillance footage? Are you... are you a hacker?"
"With your shoddy computer system, do you really need a hacker to extract the video?" Yu Longting said with disdain.
I knew this guy had been around for a long time and probably had hacking techniques. My train of thought wasn't interrupted by the guards' reaction. Matching Beichen's lip movements, I slowly recited,
"Heaven pure and Earth spiritual, supremely pure and white, I command the spirits of wind, rain, thunder, and lightning, summon you as divine, haste with divine soldiers, Evil-Suppressing!!"