Sun Zheng

Sun Zheng is an unemployed, gaming-addicted man who becomes the central perpetrator of an attempted abduction targeting Shen Tang. His scheme begins with a girlfriend he refuses to let leave and expands into a plan to obtain private photographs of Shen Tang for money. The episode is significant because it turns the novel’s recurring concern with public scandal and commodified attention into a concrete threat: images, rumors, and a woman’s reputation become objects that men attempt to control, trade, and weaponize. It also ends with the exposure of Sun Zheng’s motives and his arrest, establishing that his apparent opportunism is inseparable from a wider pattern of coercion.

Identity and Circumstances

Sun Zheng is presented through the police investigation that follows the incident. He is unemployed, has no useful professional skills, and spends his days addicted to gaming. That profile does not excuse his conduct, but it clarifies the combination of idleness, financial desperation, and online temptation behind the crime. His decisive stimulus is not a major criminal network or an elaborate financial operation, but a forum post offering 5,000 RMB for Shen Tang’s private photographs. The amount is modest beside the wealth and celebrity economy surrounding her, yet it is enough to redirect his attention toward surveillance, manipulation, and violence.

Sun Zheng’s personal relationship is itself governed by coercion. The girl involved is his girlfriend, but she has reached the point of wanting to break up because she can no longer tolerate him. During their relationship, the two had taken risqué photographs together. Sun Zheng retains those images and uses them to threaten her, attempting to make the end of the relationship impossible by turning intimate memories into leverage. His role in the later attack therefore grows out of an established pattern: he treats private images not as shared history but as property he can use to impose continued control.

The Scheme Against Shen Tang

After seeing the offer for Shen Tang’s photographs, Sun Zheng begins thinking about how to acquire them. By chance, he sees Shen Tang that morning and decides to use his girlfriend to lure her out. He threatens or pressures the girl into helping him, making her a reluctant participant in a plan she does not genuinely support. The structure of the scheme is revealing: Sun Zheng does not approach Shen Tang openly, and he does not rely on consent. Instead, he exploits an intimate relationship already damaged by blackmail and converts the girlfriend’s forced cooperation into access to a second woman.

The confrontation takes place through deception rather than a fair exchange. When Shen Tang is about to speak, powder is suddenly thrown at her from the opposite side. She manages to hold her breath quickly but still inhales some of it and collapses—or at least appears to collapse. Sun Zheng and the girl believe that the powder has incapacitated her and proceed as though she is helpless. Their confidence depends on a familiar script in which the target is unconscious, tied up, and unable to hear what is being said around her.

That script fails almost immediately. Shen Tang is pretending to faint, and while lying still she hears the girl ask whether Sun Zheng will delete the photographs. He refuses, treating the images as desirable possessions and admitting that he looks at them every night before going to bed. His vulgar response makes clear that the promised deletion was never a reliable bargain. The girl protests that Sun Zheng had promised her, exposing the immediate conflict between them: she has helped him in the hope of recovering control over her own private life, while he regards the photographs as too useful and pleasurable to surrender.

Shen Tang then breaks the scene open by sitting up and asking whether the two of them have finished tying her up. Her performance of helplessness has allowed her to gather information, and her sudden recovery reverses the power arrangement on which the kidnapping depended. Both captors are frightened when they realize that she never truly passed out. The moment also strips away Sun Zheng’s imagined control: the victim has been conscious throughout, the accomplice’s loyalty is collapsing, and the supposed incapacitating attack has not produced the result he expected.

Violence, Resistance, and Arrest

Sun Zheng is physically outmatched once Shen Tang responds. The narrative identifies the woman as trained in martial arts and states that he is no match for her. The girl, recognizing the danger, withdraws toward a corner and tries to make herself as inconspicuous as possible rather than provoking either side. The scene thus separates the two participants sharply: Sun Zheng initiates the coercive plan and is prepared to sustain it, while the girl is frightened by the consequences of the pressure he has placed on her.

The police arrive soon afterward, and the responding officer is someone Shen Tang recognizes from an earlier case in which she beat human traffickers on the street. That recurrence connects Sun Zheng’s attempted abduction to the novel’s broader pattern of Shen Tang confronting predatory threats directly rather than remaining a passive object of rescue. She identifies herself to the officer and immediately warns him to be careful because she believes Sun Zheng has a knife in his pocket. The warning adds a concrete danger to what might otherwise appear to be a failed blackmail attempt: Sun Zheng is not merely manipulative, but armed during the confrontation.

The group is taken to the police station to give statements. The efficient investigation soon reconstructs the chain of events. Sun Zheng’s girlfriend wanted to end the relationship; he used their risqué photographs to threaten her; and the forum offer for 5,000 RMB prompted him to seek Shen Tang’s private images. He saw her by chance, pressured his girlfriend into luring her out, and then helped carry out the attack. The investigation transforms a confusing ambush into a legible sequence of coercion, greed, and attempted kidnapping, while Sun Zheng’s arrest supplies the immediate legal consequence of his actions.

Motive, Media, and the Value of Images

Sun Zheng’s motive becomes more disturbing because it belongs to the same attention economy that surrounds Shen Tang’s public life. Her company’s public-relations team routinely pairs her with male celebrities to exploit her scandalous reputation, while black fans increase the popularity of her livestream simply by flooding its comment section. In that environment, visibility is treated as a commodity whether it arrives as sponsorship revenue, rumor, or abuse. Sun Zheng applies the same logic at a more intimate and criminal level: a stranger’s private photographs are potential income, and his girlfriend’s intimate photographs are instruments of control. The novel therefore places his small-scale scheme beside the entertainment industry’s organized image-making, showing how women’s identities can be converted into tradable attention under both commercial and coercive conditions.

Shen Tang’s response exposes the limits of that logic. During the ambush, Sun Zheng assumes that a photograph gives its possessor power over the person depicted, but Shen Tang’s awareness, physical training, and ability to reverse the scene make the image-based threat ineffective. Her professional experience also matters. She can maintain a constant smile while viewers insult her during a commercial livestream, treating hostility as part of the attention that generates income; in the warehouse, however, she refuses to perform helplessness for Sun Zheng and turns observation into tactical advantage. The contrast distinguishes emotional labor undertaken for a paycheck from submission demanded by a blackmailer.

Position in Shen Tang’s Wider Trajectory

The incident reinforces Shen Tang’s unusual combination of public vulnerability and practical strength. She is publicly branded with labels such as “loose tea bitch,” “plastic surgery freak,” “compensation scammer,” and “troublemaker,” and her company uses those labels to make her a profitable scandal figure. Yet the attempted abduction reveals that online hostility can move beyond reputational injury into physical danger. Sun Zheng is drawn to her precisely because her fame makes her photographs valuable, making her celebrity both a source of income and a security risk.

The episode also sits within a recurring pattern of Shen Tang entering social situations mediated by other people’s agendas. Fans wait for livestreams, companies arrange pairings, gaming partners divide roles and distribute abuse, and formal banquets turn marriage into a public display of cooperation. Sun Zheng’s plot is the most violent version of that pattern: he tries to control where Shen Tang goes, what she can hear, and what happens to her body. Her feigned unconsciousness interrupts the intended script before it can be completed, and her immediate warning about the knife ensures that the danger is not minimized once the police arrive.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

The police investigation establishes the full causal chain rather than leaving Sun Zheng as an anonymous attacker. His unemployment and gaming addiction, his girlfriend’s wish to leave, the risqué photographs used as threats, and the forum’s 5,000-RMB offer all converge in the attempted kidnapping. The girlfriend’s participation is consequently understood as coerced rather than equal cooperation, while Sun Zheng is identified as the person who converts both relationships and images into tools of possession.

His arrest provides a clear consequence, but the episode’s larger significance lies in the exposure of the mechanism behind the crime. The offered payment is small, yet it is sufficient to produce surveillance, deception, drugging, restraint, and the risk of a knife attack. Sun Zheng’s failure does not make the threat trivial; it demonstrates how quickly a seemingly disposable online transaction can become bodily violence. Shen Tang survives because she recognizes the ambush, pretends to be incapacitated, resists when the captors relax, and alerts the officer to the weapon. Sun Zheng is thus left not as a successful collector of valuable photographs, but as the revealed source of the coercion that had trapped both women.