A distorted roar

A busy tone.

The shrill, monotonous busy tone still vibrated in the air, like a string stretched to its limit before suddenly snapping.

The room was deathly silent.

Ryuk's massive body stood frozen in the shadows of the corner. Even his irritating chewing had stopped. For the first time, his scarlet eyes were fully open. Gone was the lazy mockery or curiosity; instead, he fixed me with something close to... astonishment, as though he were truly seeing the human sharing his room for the first time.

I stood motionless. My fingertips still held the cold sensation of the phone's casing, but that utterly distorted roar kept echoing in my ears, tearing through every layer of electronic disguise.

"Are you fucking insane?! Do you know what SRO-7 is?! Do you have any idea what you've gotten into?!"

The voice was hoarse and warped, charged with raw terror and rage. A middle-aged man. His voice carried the habitual force of someone accustomed to giving orders, yet the sheer impact of his emotions had made it crack completely.

Only for an instant.

So brief it could have been a hallucination.

Yet so real it had branded itself into my brain.

SRO-7.

He wasn't afraid of death or judgment. He was afraid of that code being exposed this way. That meant what I had touched was far more than a chain of corruption. It was some deeper, darker core secret with much wider implications.

And that voice... that distorted roar...

My heart pounded heavily in my chest, once, then again, slow and strong. It wasn't fear. It was an almost dizzying exhilaration, wildly intertwined with cold calculation.

Found you.

Mentor.

So that's where you're hiding. In a position where the code SRO-7 can scare you out of your wits. A middle-aged man accustomed to giving orders, yet capable of losing control and roaring over an unforeseen variable.

The scope narrowed sharply, from somewhere within a nebulous system to an outline I could almost touch.

But it wasn't enough. Nowhere near enough. A voice, a possible age range and level of authority weren't enough to pinpoint him. I needed more. While he was at his most rattled, most desperate to repair the damage, I needed to give him another gentle push and make him expose more traces himself.

My next target couldn't be another direct strike at anything connected to SRO-7. That would bring down a truly devastating blow I couldn't withstand. It needed to be someone... who would let me cleverly exploit this "code leak" to steer the investigation and internal suspicions in a particular direction.

A scapegoat. An internal suspect who, by anyone's reckoning, would be an entirely plausible person to hold responsible for the "code leak."

My brain worked faster than ever before, sifting through every fragment connected to Liu Jianming's case, classified departments, and information control. Who had access to courier Wu Guoqiang's itinerary? Who might have known about, or even indirectly leaked, the existence of the SRO-7 code? Whose position made him just right for quelling the internal earthquake triggered by the "judgment"?

Got it.

Zhang Zhiyuan. The head of a section within the municipal police bureau responsible for technical investigations and information security. His position was crucial, giving him access to vast amounts of data monitoring the flow of sensitive information. More importantly, word circulating through anonymous channels claimed that he had recently had several "private meetings" with people on Liu Jianming's side, possibly providing them with certain informational advantages. After Sun Ming's emails were exposed, his section had come under enormous pressure.

The perfect scapegoat. His "death" could be perfectly explained as the mastermind urgently eliminating a possible internal "traitor" after the code leak.

I walked to the desk and abruptly opened the notebook. The tip of my pen trembled slightly with a cold excitement.

[Zhang Zhiyuan]

Cause of death: self-elimination. Time: tomorrow morning, in his office in the municipal police bureau building. Cause of death: shooting himself in the temple with his service pistol. Before dying, he must leave a suicide note on his office computer, admitting that corruption had drawn him in, that he had long leaked internal surveillance information to Liu Jianming's faction, and that he bore full responsibility for courier Wu Guoqiang's murder and the SRO-7 code leak. The note must be scheduled to send to the internal disciplinary inspection mailbox five minutes after his death.

As I wrote the words "SRO-7 code leak," I could almost imagine the spectacular expression on the "Mentor's" face when he saw this note. Would he believe it? Of course he wouldn't believe all of it. But he would go along with it. Because this was the fastest, "cleanest" way to quell the internal turmoil.

And I would use it to observe how he would "handle" this "gift" I had sent him.

The next morning, at the municipal police bureau building.

A muffled gunshot, mostly absorbed by the thick walls, drew little attention.

Five minutes later.

The internal disciplinary inspection mailbox received a suicide-note email from Zhang Zhiyuan's account, right on schedule.

Its contents were earth-shattering.

The building immediately went into lockdown, while the news was tightly restricted to a tiny circle. Yet that sense of impending crisis still seeped out, thread by thread, through various covert channels.

In my room, the screen displayed veiled unrest and speculation in various encrypted channels.

Ryuk remained silent, only occasionally scratching his scaled neck with one enormous claw, making a dry rasping sound.

I was waiting.

Waiting for his reaction.

This time, the phone stayed silent for a very, very long time.

So long that the light outside the window faded into dusk.

At last, once night had fully fallen, it rang.

The ringtone had returned to that steady, monotonous beeping.

I answered.

The cold electronic voice spoke, without a trace of emotion, as though that distorted roar had never happened.

"The suicide note was encrypted using version seven of the bureau's standard internal algorithm, which was phased out three years ago."

He stated it calmly.

"Next time you fabricate evidence,"

"remember to update your database."

A brief pause.

"The cleanup was very timely."

"As for the results,"

"a passing grade."

The call ended.

A busy tone.

I stood in the deepening darkness, holding the phone.

My fingertips were icy.

He had seen through it. Unsurprisingly, he had seen right through it. He had even pointed out how "outdated" my forgery techniques were.

But he had accepted the "gift." His "cleanup" had been "timely," and he had given it a "passing grade."

He had put that cold, flawless mask back on.

And in an even more humiliating way, he had told me: I know your little tricks. I accept them. But I'm still looking down on you.

A performance worth a passing grade.

I slowly raised my head and looked out the window at the distant city shrouded in night.

The ice and fire in my veins began to roar silently once again.

Mentor.

The game...

Has only just begun.