Seven Seas revealed the cover for Vol. 2 of Silent Reading: Mo Du, a crime thriller danmei written by author priest. The cover art and interior B&W illustrations are provided by artist Rylee, who returns from their work on Vol. 1 of the series. [Source: Twitter/X, Bluesky]
This volume focuses on a criminal case that many fans of the series find particularly emotionally challenging, involving the grooming, abduction, rape, and murder of generations of young girl victims. The crime genre is often defined by its exploration of the dark side of humanity, and Silent Reading proves willing to engage with these difficult topics.
Seven Seas provides the following volume summary:
LAMBS TO THE SLAUGHTER
Yancheng Municipal Bureau is called in to handle a school bus hijacking—a bizarre crime, but seemingly an isolated one. Sadly, the police are unable to return one of the bus’s young passengers to her parents. She’s vanished without a trace.
The schoolgirl’s disappearance leads Luo Wenzhou and Tao Ran to reexamine a police investigation that took place twenty years earlier. That strange case seems to have haunted almost everyone who lived through it—especially Luo Wenzhou and Tao Ran’s own mentor.
Soon, it’s impossible to overlook the fact that the school bus passenger wasn’t the first young girl to go missing in Yancheng. On the contrary, girls have been vanishing into thin air for twenty years. And the next to go missing is one Tao Ran knows personally.
Dealing with that bus hijacking already forced Luo Wenzhou to enlist Fei Du’s help, and it seems he won’t get a break from the petulant young scion anytime soon. The only way for Tao Ran and Luo Wenzhou to find this girl alive may be to follow Fei Du’s instincts—however strange or disturbing they may be…
Silent Reading: Mo Du Vol. 2 is scheduled for release on February 10, 2026. Preorders are available from several major retailers:
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Silent Reading
默讀
[Synopsis Provided by Seven Seas Entertainment:]
A young man’s body is found outside a glitzy high-rise on the West Side of Yancheng—dressed for celebration, strangled, and left with a sheet of paper covering his face. One word is scrawled across it: money.
To Sergeant Luo Wenzhou, head of the Criminal Investigation Team at the Yancheng Municipal Public Safety Bureau, it’s just another case in a city rife with power plays and buried secrets. But as he digs deeper with his team, what begins as a straightforward homicide unravels into something far murkier—reaching into the city’s darkest corners of wealth, privilege, and police corruption.
And then there’s Fei Du: the aloof, razor-sharp CEO of the Fei Corporation, who seems to know far too much about the murder—and about Luo Wenzhou himself. Once a troubled youth with ties to Luo’s past, Fei Du now walks a fine line between brilliant ally and inscrutable suspect. His insights are disturbingly precise. His motives? Frustratingly opaque.
As the investigation twists through layers of trauma and moral ambiguity, Luo Wenzhou finds himself reluctantly drawn toward the very man who unsettles him most. But in a city where justice is easily bought and truth wears many masks, can either man afford to trust the other?
Silent Reading (默讀) is a danmei novel written by priest. It began serialization in 2016 and ran for 180 chapters (plus 5 Extras), and is available to read in Chinese on JJWXC.
The series has received an audio drama adaptation. A donghua and manhua adaptation were announced in 2020, but their current production status is unknown.
Silent Reading also inspired a live-action adaptation known as Justice in the Dark. Only eight of a planned thirty episodes made it to air in China in February 2023 before further updates went silent, and it was eventually delisted from all official channels in July of the same year. In March 2025, the Japanese streaming service WOWOW began streaming the drama under the name 光・淵, and it is now also available to stream in English.
You can learn more about Silent Reading in the DanmeiNews catalog.
