Thou shalt not

The crimson faded.

The screen went black, like a gravestone suddenly stripped of all light, reflecting my expressionless face and the deeper darkness of the room behind me.

Thou shalt not...

Thou shalt not...

What came next? Thou shalt not overstep? Thou shalt not pry? Thou shalt not... continue?

A forcibly interrupted warning from some ancient being, laden with authority.

My heart beat steadily in my chest, once, then again, pounding against the deathly silence. No fear, no panic, only an intense, icy exhilaration, like the most precise instrument detecting a powerful signal it had long awaited.

It was here. At last.

No longer an agent like "Mentor," no longer a tool like "SRO-7." Something deeper, more fundamental... It had noticed me. Not "Kira," but the... rule-breaker who dared to use the Death Note to write protocols directly and erase nodes.

In the corner, Ryuk made an almost inaudible sound, like a sharp intake of breath. His enormous body seemed to shrink farther into the shadows, and even the smell of rotten apples grew faint and stagnant. His crimson eyes were fixed on the black screen, roiling with an emotion I had never seen in them before-a mixture of profound wariness and a certain sick excitement.

"Oh... ohhh..." he murmured hoarsely, as though afraid of disturbing something. "The old one... s... have been woken up..."

Old ones? More than one?

I did not turn around. My gaze remained locked on the screen, as though I could glean more information from that darkness.

A warning. An unfinished warning, at that. What did that mean? Had something prevented the other side from intervening? Or was the warning itself merely an automated, condition-triggered mechanism, like an antivirus notification?

No. That crimson background, that archaic calligraphy, the weight within it that could almost crush the soul... this was no simple automated program.

It was a proclamation. A declaration of sovereignty.

It told me: This pasture has an owner. You, the sheep that refuses to follow the rules, have caught the owner's attention.

"Thou shalt not"...

The corners of my mouth slowly rose into a cold, almost twisted curve.

Shalt not?

Who made the rules?

You?

The moment my pen touched the page and Victor Crane died, I had already answered that question through action.

I would do it anyway.

And I would keep going.

But that did not mean charging headlong into a confrontation like a fool. The level and power the other side had displayed far surpassed Mentor's. I needed to be more cautious, more... subtle.

The next target. It could no longer be a node like the Eye of Odin, secretive but still existing on the worldly plane. That would mean continuing to move pieces across the board the other side had laid out.

I needed a target that could directly answer that "Thou shalt not" warning. A target that could probe the other side's limits and patterns of response. An entity... that also walked the edges of the rules, and might itself have some connection to the Deep Nest.

My mind worked faster than ever, filtering every piece of information I knew. Fragments of Mentor's memories, remnants of SRO-7's archives, the occasional scraps Ryuk let slip, records of supernatural incidents that had been covered up...

A name-or rather, a code name-surfaced from the depths of my memory.

The "Silent Council." Not an actual council, but an ancient, international secret society made up of a handful of powerful figures and scholars who knew the world's true nature, including the existence of shinigami and the Death Note. They did not involve themselves directly in worldly affairs. They were more like observers and chroniclers, occasionally exerting influence through extremely subtle means to maintain a certain "balance." They were said to possess secrets about the Death Note's origins and limitations that even Ryuk did not know.

Did the Silent Council have tendrils within Mentor's system? Was that interrupted warning connected to them?

Targeting one of their members carried enormous risk. But the potential rewards were just as great-it might yield crucial information about the Death Note and the Deep Nest directly.

He would be the one.

I knew the Silent Council's current "secretary," an old man named Elias Frost, resided in Vienna. His public identity was the director of a private library.

His death should be... knowledge turning against him.

I walked to the desk and opened the notebook again. My mental strength had not fully recovered, but it was enough to sustain this entry. The tip of my pen touched down, steady and resolute.

[Elias Frost]

Cause of death: the weight of truth. Time: tomorrow evening, while consulting an ancient manuscript in the restricted section in the deepest part of his library. Cause of death: the manuscript he is reading, written in an unknown language and concerning the Death Note's early taboos, will manifest a certain mental "weight" through its words, slowly crushing every bone in his body. Before his death, every confidential file in his collection concerning the Silent Council and the Death Note, both physical and electronic, will spontaneously combust or self-destruct simultaneously, leaving nothing behind. His body must remain in a reading posture, as though devoured by the book.

Location: a sanctuary of knowledge. Cause of death: crushed beneath forbidden knowledge. Outcome: knowledge and its guardian annihilated together.

It was a judgment, a destruction of evidence, and, more than anything, an undisguised provocation aimed at the "observers."

The pen lifted from the page.

The draining sensation came as expected, but this time it seemed to carry a trace of something infinitesimal and cold... resistance? As though the act of writing had touched some invisible barrier.

It worked. But it felt... different.

In the corner, Ryuk suddenly let out a stifled cry!

"You... have you lost your mind?! Targeting someone from the Council?! They'll-" His words cut off abruptly. As though realizing he had said too much, he snapped his mouth shut, his crimson eyes filled with genuine terror.

I ignored him. I merely sat quietly, feeling the gradually subsiding sensation of writing, with its trace of strange resistance.

Judgment had been passed.

Now, I waited.

For news from Vienna.

And also for...

That crimson screen

To light up again.

The following evening.

Inside an old library on an out-of-the-way street corner in Vienna.

Wearing white gloves, Elias Frost carefully turned the pages of a "book" made from thin sheets of some black metal, engraved with twisted symbols.

His brow was furrowed, as though he had encountered a passage he could not understand.

Suddenly, his body went rigid! It was as though an invisible mountain had crashed down upon him!

He heard a series of faint yet distinct cracking sounds inside his body, enough to set his teeth on edge!

His pupils dilated with unbearable pain and disbelief! He tried to lower his head to look at the "book," only to find that even moving his eyes had become agonizingly difficult!

He could feel the air around him growing thick and heavy! The other ancient volumes on the shelves, the encrypted files stored on his computer, even the notes he had hidden in a secret compartment-all began to give off wisps of smoke and a scorched smell!

"No... impossible... forbidden..." He forced a few final, broken syllables from his throat as blood spilled from the corners of his mouth.

That immense, invisible force slowly crushed his body until he collapsed over the reading desk, his head resting on the black metal "book." His eyes remained wide open, staring at the ceiling, as though he had glimpsed some ultimate, horrifying truth.

Wisps of smoke rose, spreading through the dust-covered restricted section.

Every record of value turned to ash with them.

In my room, the screen displayed a brief international news report about an elderly librarian in Vienna who had died when a bookshelf accidentally collapsed.

The story had been heavily suppressed, its details vague.

I waited.

For that warning.

Time passed, minute by minute, second by second.

The sky outside the window gradually brightened.

My phone remained silent.

The computer screen was black as well.

As though yesterday's crimson warning had been nothing but a hallucination.

Just as I was almost convinced the other side had chosen silence-

On the desk, the discarded burner phone I had long since stopped using, its screen cracked,

Suddenly

Lit up with an extremely faint, intermittent

Red glow.

Like a dying candle in the wind.

A few incomplete characters struggled into view on the screen, distorted, as though exhausting the last trace of its energy:

... presu... me... not...

(... do not... pre... sume...)

The characters flickered once,

Then went out completely.

The phone's screen went utterly dark with them,

Never to light up again.

I stared at the completely dead phone

For a long time.

The curve at the corners of my mouth

Grew colder still.

Presume not?

No.

I was already

On my way.