The Wrong Note

"A mousetrap? Snap your neck? Wow, that sounds painful." Ryuk patted the floor with his enormous, knobby hand, producing a dull thud. He pulled out another apple, this one an ominous purplish black, its skin covered in wrinkles like aging flesh. "Are human arguments always this childish? You threaten each other, and then what? Wait to see who pisses their pants first?"

He stuffed the apple into his mouth and crunched it, making a grinding sound that set my teeth on edge.

I ignored his noise. My neck? No, that wasn't what he was aiming for. It was something deeper. My sources of information, my patterns of behavior, my... "curiosity."

He called me a "false god," yet expressed admiration for my "performance." He warned me, yet volunteered information. Contradictory signals. Like someone taming a dangerous beast, wanting both to intimidate it with a show of strength and to lure it closer with bait.

What did he want? To catch me? Or... understand me? Or both?

I couldn't let him lead me around by the nose. I had to control the pace. He had warned me not to touch Liu Jianming, not to touch the "cheese." If I obeyed, I would be accepting his rules and falling under his psychological control.

But I wouldn't go after Liu Jianming right away, either. That would be stupid, nothing more than acting out of spite.

I needed a deviation. A judgment that stayed outside the "forbidden zone" he had warned me about, yet caught him completely off guard. A judgment that was... less than "perfect."

A wrong note to disrupt the pursuit he was trying to orchestrate.

The target had to meet several conditions: first, they had to deserve death enough to preserve my image as the "Judge"; second, the manner of their death had to run counter to my carefully crafted "rituals," seeming hasty, crude, even... a little cheap. Third, ideally, it would temporarily steer the investigation in the wrong direction.

My fingers flew across the keyboard, filtering through a vast sea of negative news stories and online complaints. No more sensational cases, but smaller, more commonplace evils that were just as steeped in despair.

I found one.

Li Cui'e. An ordinary community office clerk. What made her extraordinary, however, was how she exploited every last scrap of the petty power she held. She deliberately made things difficult, delayed applications, demanded favors-sometimes no more than a box of fruit or a case of milk-and treated the elderly, the weak, the sick, and the disabled with the utmost cruelty. Complaints about her piled up online, only to disappear without a trace. A few days earlier, an elderly person with asthma had died at home, unable to afford urgently needed medication because she had deliberately delayed processing their health insurance reimbursement. The news had been quietly suppressed.

A fly perched on rotting flesh. Insignificant, but spreading disease all the same.

Her death would not cause much of a public stir, but it would send ripples of satisfaction through the ordinary people at the bottom who had suffered so much abuse.

And the manner of her death could be very simple, very... ordinary.

I opened the notebook.

The tip of my pen touched the page.

[Li Cui'e]

Cause of death: accident. Time: tomorrow morning, on her way to work. Details: while passing the exterior wall of an old residential complex, she will be struck directly in the head by a glass window falling from above and killed. No repentance required, no performance required.

Simple, brutal, devoid of any "artistry." Like a slipup, a careless erasure, or even a genuine accident.

It was utterly at odds with the "ritual of judgment" I had deliberately cultivated.

How would that observer interpret it? Would he think I had run out of ideas? Or that I had taken his warning and begun to rein myself in? Or would he think it wasn't my work? A copycat?

Whichever interpretation he favored, it would temporarily disrupt his judgment.

The next morning, a brief item appeared in the local news section: "Employee of XX Community Office Tragically Killed by Falling Object." The report was cautiously worded, stressing that it had been an accident and reminding residents to be mindful of safety hazards in older buildings. A few scattered comments read "Heaven finally opened its eyes" and "Karma," but they were quickly drowned out by calls to "respect the dead" and remarks that "accidents happen."

Barely a ripple.

It did not even spark much discussion about the "Judge."

The perfect "mistake."

I waited patiently. Would that phone stay silent longer this time? How would he rate this "clumsy" performance?

It came sooner than expected.

That afternoon, just as the sky began to darken, the phone rang.

Earlier than it ever had before.

I answered.

The person on the other end did not speak immediately. There was only a faint, steady electronic hiss, like some precision instrument running quietly.

Nearly ten seconds passed before the electronic voice sounded, devoid of emotion, as flat as a taut line.

"Crude."

That was his verdict.

Then came an even longer silence. As though he were waiting for me to defend myself, or... admit my mistake.

I said nothing.

The electronic hiss seemed to fluctuate slightly.

"Trying to use noise to interfere with the tracking frequency..."

"Not a bad idea."

"But the execution was far too immature."

"Are you starting to get scared, Judge?"

He spoke that final word very slowly, with a cold scrutiny that almost seemed to pierce my eardrums.

Click.

The call ended.

I stood in the middle of the room, holding the phone. Outside the window, the city lights gradually came on, casting shifting patches of light and shadow across my face.

He had seen through it.

He had seen through my intentions almost immediately. He had even defined them precisely as "interfering with the tracking frequency."

He had not been misled. Instead, he had read something else into it-the possibility of my "fear."

A cold emotion, something other than anger, churned in my stomach. Not fear, but the... humiliation of being underestimated, looked down on. He thought I was scared? That his warning had rattled me so badly I had started using cheap tricks like this to hide it?

Immature?

I slowly drew a breath. Even the air seemed to taste of gunpowder.

No.

This wasn't the end.

This was only a new beginning.

He liked watching "performances," did he?

He thought this one was "crude," did he?

Then let him see.

What the next act...

Would be.