A clean stain

The white light on the screen went out.

That last line-[Volatility: incalculable]-cut into the frozen air like an icy knife wound. There was no anger, no accusation, only an absolute bewilderment, like a model crashing.

He couldn't calculate it.

Teacher Chen Jing's "accident" was like a smooth, perfectly rounded pebble dropped into his precision analysis engine, jamming every gear. Goodness. Pure goodness, unconnected to any chain of wrongdoing. Its death produced no "meaningful" fluctuations in the data, leaving only a blank space that scorched his logic circuits.

In the corner, Ryuk gave a dry snicker, like a rusty bearing turning. "Ha! Incalculable? What's so hard about that?" He gnawed on a fresh apple covered in strange purple blotches, juice dripping down his chin. "Isn't it just good luck? Or bad luck? Don't you humans die like that every day? Does your 'mentor' only know how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide?"

I ignored him. My fingertips tapped lightly against the cold desktop, making a soft, rhythmic sound.

He was afraid.

Not of death itself, but of this utter "meaninglessness." His world was built on rules that could be analyzed, predicted, and quantified. However cruel my judgments were, however far they defied common sense, as long as they obeyed some internal "rule," he could understand them, try to dissect them, and even draw his pitiful sense of superiority from them.

But an "accident" that killed a "good person"?

In his equation, that was a division-by-zero error. A warning of an impending system crash.

A prisoner of Sigma. He had locked himself in a cage of data, terrified of the true chaos outside it.

But that wasn't enough. Merely showing him chaos wouldn't break him. I needed to forge this "meaninglessness" into the sharpest blade and cut out the festering rot deeper within. Teacher Chen Jing's "accident" couldn't be the end. It had to be a prelude, the calm eye of a greater storm.

Her "meaningless" death had to be forcibly endowed with the sharpest "meaning"-not by me, but by the parasites hiding in the shadows. Their own panicked reactions would become the best testimony for judgment.

My gaze returned to the screen. The warm tide of mourning for Teacher Chen was still surging, but inside the Morning Star Foundation, dark currents were already raging. The press conference had been canceled, the audit interrupted. Several investigative reporters who had been watching the Foundation closely were like sharks scenting blood, catching anomalies in the sudden chaos-a mistaken order from the acting director, a screenshot of transactions hastily left incompletely concealed... The cracks were widening in silence.

The next target had to be someone at the true heart of the Morning Star Foundation, a shadow hiding deeper than a front man like Zhao Yuan, convinced he was absolutely safe. His death couldn't be an accident. It had to be... self-destruction. An ultimate performance in which, under extreme terror and pressure, he tore away every disguise himself.

I needed someone who would lose all composure over Chen Jing's death and had enough authority to blow everything apart as he collapsed.

I found him.

Qian Yongming. A "special adviser" to the Morning Star Foundation who had never appeared on any public roster, and its actual final authority on financial decisions. He was a distant relative on Zhou Huaian's wife's side, a recluse versed in financial law, the ultimate architect of every complex money-laundering route. He was exceptionally cautious, never handling funds directly, issuing instructions only through encrypted channels. Teacher Chen Jing's accident, and the external attention and internal chaos that followed, were bound to have him on pins and needles. He knew better than anyone how fragile those seemingly perfect accounts were under sudden, intense scrutiny.

His death should be a complete breakdown under pressure and... a disclosure.

I walked over to the desk and opened the Death Note. The pen touched down with cold precision.

[Qian Yongming]

Cause of death: stress-induced breakdown. Time: three tomorrow morning, inside his suburban safe house. Cause of death: sudden rupture of an aortic dissection amid extreme anxiety and panic (note: ensure the dying process allows him enough time to complete the following actions). Before dying, he must use his highest-privilege account to mistakenly send, in a single transmission, a complete backup from his personal encrypted terminal of all records concerning the Morning Star Foundation's actual flow of funds, nested corporate structures, and benefits received by Zhou Huaian's family (including passwords and keys) to all the Foundation's senior board members, major donors, and... the public email addresses of those most tenacious investigative media outlets.

Not repentance, but an operational error during a breakdown. The most complete exposure, after pressure crushed reason.

Let his death be the final hammer blow that smashed through the Foundation's foundations.

The next day, at one minute past three in the morning.

The private inboxes of every senior board member of the Morning Star Foundation and several major donors, along with the public tip inboxes of three investigative media outlets, received an email from "qym_secure@..." at almost exactly the same time.

The email had no body.

Only a dozen or so encrypted attachments.

And the keys to decrypt those attachments were written right there in the subject line!

The reporters reacted first. They decrypted the files, and what they found left them dumbfounded-appallingly detailed diagrams of fund transfers, lists of shell companies, fraudulent project reports, and clear identification of the ultimate beneficiaries...

Dawn broke.

But the sky over the Morning Star Foundation came crashing down.

The news that Qian Yongming had died of a "sudden illness" barely caused a ripple amid the exposure of the immense financial scandal. His death fit perfectly into the narrative of an "accident" in which excessive internal pressure had caused a breakdown and the leaking of confidential files.

No one would connect it to the Judge. It was too "normal," too logical.

In my room, the screen displayed the explosive news of the Morning Star Foundation's total collapse.

Ryuk stopped chewing his apple. He tilted his head, a new, almost admiring gleam in his scarlet eyes.

"Oh...?" He drew out the sound. "Scare the bastard out of his wits, then make him skin himself alive? That trick... is interesting! More fun than just writing down names!"

I was waiting.

Waiting to see how the man trapped in Sigma's cage would interpret this "logical" chain of collapse triggered by an "accident."

This time, the phone's response was unusually slow.

Not until evening.

Only then did the screen light up again.

The white text no longer took the form of rapidly scrolling logs. Instead, it emerged slowly, character by character, as though every letter bore an immense computational strain.

[Initial event: accident (Chen Jing).]

[Indirect consequence: imbalance in internal pressure.]

[Chain reaction: irrational risk-taking by key node (Qian Yongming).]

[Final output: structural collapse of system (Morning Star Foundation).]

[Correlation analysis: ...nonlinear... highly probabilistic...]

[Model revision: introducing 'chaos catalysis' variable... weight: extremely high...]

[Risk assessment: extremely unpredictable.]

[Warning: unable to calculate volatility. Unable to establish a reliable predictive model.]

The text paused for a long time.

Finally, a new line slowly emerged, its lettering seemingly darker than before, more... weary.

[...Judge...]

[...What exactly... are you calculating?]

The screen went dark.

Deathly silence descended again.

I stared at the black screen and slowly, slowly leaned back in my chair.

An utterly cold smile curved my lips.

What was I calculating?

Mentor.

I was calculating your fear.

I was calculating

when your cage

would shatter completely.

How did it feel?

This clean stain,

this meaningless ripple,

this...

me,

whom you couldn't calculate.