Silence.
Not ordinary quiet, but the absolute silence of the void, swallowing every sound. The phone screen was pitch-black against my ear, as though I were holding a cold stone tablet from a tomb.
No busy signal, no static, no breathing.
Only an absolute absence of sound that seemed capable of sucking out my soul.
Three minutes. Five minutes. Perhaps longer.
I stood there like that, holding up that pitch-black "gravestone," listening to the emptiness. Dawn filtered through the gap in the curtains, casting an ever-brighter patch of light on the carpet, yet it could not dispel the chill in the room.
Ryuk remained curled up in the corner, his massive body almost melting into the shadows. He no longer rubbed his claws together, no longer moved at all. Even his crimson eyes seemed to have lost their focus, staring blankly into the void ahead. He seemed to be... hiding from something. An instinctive retreat from an incomprehensible presence.
At last, I slowly lowered my arm. The phone moved away from my ear, its screen still lifeless black, showing no sign of life.
He had disappeared.
Not physically. Some kind of... connection had been severed. That taut thread linking him and me had snapped after that faint breath, impossible to distinguish as a sigh or a sob.
Had the incomprehensible judgment of the "Gatekeeper" utterly shattered his understanding? Or had exposing his true emotions, even the slightest trace of them, filled him with overwhelming shame and panic? Or... was it something more practical, some outside intervention? After all, the panic sparked by the "Gatekeeper's" death extended far beyond online forums.
Whatever the cause, the result was: silence.
A vast, suffocating silence.
That silence weighed more heavily than any roar, any threat, any accusation in an electronic voice. It was more... dangerous.
He needed time. He needed to recalibrate. He needed to digest the impact of this "effective" result and consider how to keep "playing" with a being who could rewrite the laws of physics at will.
But I could not wait for him.
Stagnation meant death. Before he finished weaving his net anew, I had to keep moving. I had to use more "effective" judgments to drive the panic and chaos to new heights, so high that he could no longer easily conceal or control them.
The next target. I had to choose carefully, but the result still had to be shocking enough. It could not be another entirely supernatural being like the "Gatekeeper." That would provoke the entire system too severely and might invite an unpredictable, all-out counterattack. I needed to return to the "human world," but choose a target whose crimes likewise lay beyond the reach of ordinary legal punishment, whose death could likewise send tremors through the structure itself.
A betrayal... by one of the rule-makers himself.
My gaze swept over the screen. The panic in the financial markets had yet to subside, and the "Gatekeeper's" disappearance had added fresh chaos, but official voices were working hard to steer public opinion, trying to explain everything as "coincidence," "mass hysteria," or "a high-tech attack by hostile forces." They were trying to regain control of the narrative.
That attempt had to be interrupted.
I needed a judgment they could not easily blame on something "external" or "supernatural." A bloody betrayal from within.
I found him.
Shao Guoping. A leading expert in national cybersecurity and one of the architects of several core security protocols, he had always presented himself as a discreet, dependable technocrat. But the most deeply encrypted files in Sun Ming's emails revealed long-standing, covert financial dealings with Zhou Huaian, Zheng Guodong, and others. He had also abused his position to provide the crucial technical workarounds that allowed them to transfer funds overseas. He was the "technical gatekeeper" who laundered their dirty money.
A traitor hiding behind code, personally building safe passage for those parasites.
His death should be a technical... self-execution. One that took place in the most secure heart of the system, the ultimate mockery of his life's "work."
I walked to the desk, my fingertips touching the cold pages of the Death Note once more. They felt the same, but something had changed. After I had written about the "Gatekeeper," the notebook itself seemed to have acquired a faint, indescribable... aura of emptiness.
[Shao Guoping]
Cause of death: protocol betrayal. Time: tomorrow at precisely ten in the morning, at a critical juncture in the national cybersecurity emergency drill he is directing. Cause of death: his own access privileges will spiral out of control, bypassing every security protocol and directly broadcasting all his bribery records, the complete codebase of his technical workarounds, and three top-secret cybersecurity vulnerability reports to the drill's simulation system and connected public information platforms. Once the broadcast is complete, the core server room will trigger an irreversible physical meltdown protocol of his own design, completely melting down both him and the core servers. Before his death, at the end of the broadcast, a personal identification code must be appended: [Guardian_Turned_Traitor].
Nothing supernatural, only the most advanced technology, used to carry out the most complete self-destruction.
It would happen during a cybersecurity drill, inside the core server room itself.
Let's see how you explain this one as an "external attack"!
The next morning, at precisely ten.
The National Cybersecurity Center.
The emergency drill was underway in a tense atmosphere, streams of data cascading down the large screens.
Suddenly!
Every screen was instantly engulfed by the same enormous stream of data! Bribery ledgers, intricate code, vulnerability assessment reports bearing red "top-secret" headers... flooded the screens like a rampaging virus!
An eerily calm synthesized male voice-Shao Guoping's voice-came over the broadcast system, clearly reading out those appalling revelations at astonishing speed!
The technicians stared in disbelief. They tried to cut the power and block the signal, only to discover that all operating permissions had been locked!
"...This concludes the final broadcast by Guardian_Turned_Traitor."
The synthesized voice fell silent.
Then!
A muffled explosion came from the core server room! Not a violent blast, but a low, implosive roar! The specialized fireproof materials instantly melted and vaporized, reducing everything inside the room, including Shao Guoping himself, to nothing!
A deathly silence settled over the drill hall.
Then came utterly uncontrollable panic!
In my room, the screen displayed a jumble of intercepted internal communications and grim news spreading beyond anyone's ability to suppress it.
Ryuk seemed to have recovered a little from his rigid state. He slowly raised his head, his crimson eyes turning toward me again, something complicated and indescribable now in them. He opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something, but in the end let out only an extremely dry little cough, as though his throat were clogged.
No call.
No ringing.
No echo from the void.
Only dead silence.
And...
About an hour after news of Shao Guoping's death broke.
An extremely obscure database node on the internet, accessible only with special authorization, suddenly came online for a single second.
It uploaded just one encrypted data packet, less than 1 KB in size.
Then the node self-destructed, its traces erased.
No one could decipher the contents of that packet.
But its identifier was a familiar code name-
[SRO-7]
I stared at the scattered technical discussions about that mysterious packet on the screen, my pupils contracting slightly.
He had returned.
In this way.
Not a phone call.
A signal.
From deep within the void,
a cold,
echo.
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