#Vault Hu Wenzhao **Episode 2: The Thorny Path**
**Hospital Confrontation**
Su Man rushed into the ward clutching the blood-stained 'Hundred Birds Facing the Phoenix,' as her mother's respirator emitted a piercing alarm. She slammed the pieces of embroidery onto the bedside table, choking back tears, and questioned, 'How did Dad die back then? Whose blood is this?' Her mother's pupils dilated suddenly, the oxygen mask covered in a layer of mist, and a nurse rushed in to push Su Man out the door. On the bench in the hallway, the anonymous number flashed again: 'Abandoned embroidery workshop in the eastern suburbs, there are answers you want.'
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**Mysterious Person Appears**
On a stormy night, Su Man stealthily entered the embroidery workshop. The decayed wooden stairs snapped beneath her feet, and as she fell into the basement, her phone's dim light swept across the yellowed design drafts on the walls—each one signed by her father's name, yet marked with the words 'plagiarism' in vermilion ink. A sound of leather shoes crunching on broken glass echoed from the shadows, as a man wearing gold-rimmed glasses approached with a lighter: 'Miss Su, are you sure you want to touch the secrets that the fire didn't burn away twenty years ago?'
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**Shadowy Figures in the Workshop**
The man (Lu Shen) threw the charred account book in front of Su Man, and the transaction record from 1998 showed that the Lin Group had heavily invested in acquiring her father's original 'Double-Sided Colorful Embroidery' patent. When Su Man flipped to the record from the day of her father's death, the page was glaringly missing, with blood seeping through the binding. 'Your father was not the first embroiderer to be silenced,' Lu Shen said, his fingertip grazing the torn 'Hundred Birds Facing the Phoenix' in her hand, suddenly pulling down his tie to reveal a burn scar on his collarbone: 'This is their warning to me.'
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**Crisis Escalates**
A call from the hospital announced her mother's critical condition. Su Man was intercepted by two black cars while running. President Lin crushed the old house key that fell from her hands beneath her ten-centimeter heels: 'Did you think no one would know you were secretly filming the design department's documents?' Her phone simultaneously displayed the surveillance from her mother's hospital room—an IV tube was being swapped for a different bottle. In the depths of the dark alley, Lu Shen's voice came from a public phone booth: 'Turn around now and head to the southern city funeral home; you can still see the last things your dad left behind.'
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**Ending Suspense**
In the funeral home's morgue, a straw man in a burial outfit lay in freezer number 097, with a half emerald clasp pinned to its heart (matching the pair on Su Man's mother's hospital gown). As Su Man trembled and reached for the clasp, the lights in the cold storage suddenly went out, and the freezer doors behind her popped open one after another, with blood-stained items drifting out of each compartment.