The searing cold where my fingertips touched the notebook had become the background hum of my existence, like the rhythm of a god's breathing. The world, that vast, filthy canvas, was being wiped clean and redrawn inch by inch by my invisible pen, with death as its solvent.
For my next target, I chose the "Crimson Queen"-not a specific individual, but the name I had given the anonymous alliance that controlled nearly a third of the world's dark web data trading, human trafficking, and contraband distribution. It had no leader in the traditional sense. It was more like a nest woven from countless venomous snakes.
In the past, I would have patiently sought out its crucial nodes and taken them down one by one. But now, there was no need.
I opened the notebook, no longer content to write a single name. Like an invisible engraving blade, my will carved seventeen names into its blank pages at once! They were the Crimson Queen's central hubs across different continents and sectors, the load-bearing walls that kept this dark network standing.
I wrote multiple targets simultaneously, attaching complex, interconnected "Purification scripts"-making their deaths appear to be a sudden "plague" sweeping through the underworld, driving them to suspect and undermine one another, and triggering preset data bombs at the moment of death that scattered the core evidence of their crimes to law enforcement agencies worldwide.
The mental burden engulfed me in an instant, like a tsunami. It was no longer a loss of memories; those had long since ceased to matter. This time, the price was something more fundamental-a foundational cognitive module called "empathy," torn out of my personality's architecture by the roots and crushed into dust of nothingness. From then on, human joys and sorrows were no different in my eyes from