Seven Seas revealed the cover for Vol. 4 of Silent Reading: Mo Du, a crime thriller danmei written by priest.
The cover art and interior B&W illustrations are provided by artist Rylee, who returns from their work on Vols. 1-3 of the series. [Source: Twitter/X, Bluesky]
Seven Seas provides the following volume summary:
A VANISHED KILLER REARS HIS HEAD
When several students from a prestigious private school flee campus overnight, the Yancheng Municipal Public Security Bureau launches a search—only to find one of the runaways murdered. As Sergeant Luo Wenzhou and his team investigate, they uncover a cruel ritual carried out by the students’ own peers, and powerful parents who would rather the case be forgotten.
But the ritual is only the beginning. The boy’s death is soon linked to a series of highway murders from more than a decade earlier. Following that trail, it becomes clear that all the bureau’s most recent cases contain a common thread…a thread tied to Fei Du.
Silent Reading: Mo Du Vol. 4 is scheduled for release on September 8, 2026. Preorders are available from several major retailers:
U.S.:
Canada:
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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.
