A flaw in the logic

Kannazuki uncapped his pen.

He looked at Ryuk, a faint, indifferent smile on his lips. "The Creator wants a show without spoilers, so I'll keep performing for him.

Without the manga to consult, the police will never find anything they can use against me. That's good news for me."

Ryuk stood on the desk, his red eyes shifting twice. He picked up the half-used pencil on the desk, stuffed it into his mouth, and crunched it to pieces.

"Humans think in such strange ways." Ryuk swallowed the wood shavings and graphite. "But as long as you're happy."

Kannazuki turned his head, his gaze settling on the blank page.

Everything he had just said had been a smokescreen for Ryuk.

He didn't believe that nonsense about the Creator being afraid of spoilers. If the Creator really cared about spoilers, the relevant memories and information should have been erased the day he received the notebook.

Why now, of all times?

Why after he had executed Zhao Gang, Wang Hu, Zhang Wei, Sun Ming, Lei Bao, Li Jianguo, and Lin Yaodong in succession?

Kannazuki's fingers held the pen perfectly steady.

He could feel that his mind now worked at least twice as fast as it had half a month ago.

Clues that had once seemed tangled and trivial now sorted and filed themselves in his mind, forming clear logical trees.

It wasn't just his intelligence. His muscle control had also reached a terrifying degree of precision. When he had spun the utility knife earlier, its edge had slipped between his fingers with a margin of error no greater than a millimeter.

This was an evolution that defied the basic principles of biology.

A cold glint flashed in Kannazuki's eyes.

Ryuk had concealed the rules. The so-called Creator had added three hidden rules to the notebook.

The first was that he couldn't directly kill officially recognized positive figures. He had discovered that through his attempt to execute Chen Lei.

What about the other two?

Kannazuki recalled the changes in his body over this period. The more people he killed, the clearer his mind became.

He arrived at an eminently reasonable deduction: one of the notebook's hidden rules allowed its owner to take some quality from those he killed, or simply receive a boost to his lifespan and intelligence.

And the wholesale erasure of information about the Death Note from the real world was certainly not some perverse whim of the Creator.

A hidden rule had been triggered, forcing the system to overwrite reality to preserve logical consistency.

Ryuk was a pure hedonist. All he cared about was the thrill of the game.

If Kannazuki told him these deductions, he might well turn around and leave the police a hint just to "raise the difficulty."

A creature like him could only be fed lies mixed with half-truths.

Kannazuki gathered his thoughts. Lin Yaodong was dead, and the collapse of Dongding Capital would leave an enormous power vacuum in Linhai City's underworld. Unless he intervened immediately, gangsters fighting over territory would turn the city into a real meat grinder.

He needed to establish his authority. He needed the entire underworld to understand that Dongding Capital hadn't fallen to an accident, but to Kira's judgment.

Kannazuki mentally retrieved the list of senior figures he had overheard while infiltrating Dongding Tower that afternoon.

Zhou Hai. The man in charge of Dongding Capital's largest underground casino.

Lin Yaodong's money man.

At this hour, Zhou Hai had to be moving his assets.

Kannazuki lowered his wrist, and the pen touched the page.

[Zhou Hai.]

[Cause of death: hemorrhagic shock.]

[Detailed sequence: At exactly two in the morning, inside the underground casino's vault, Zhou Hai is overcome with extreme fear and remorse.

He feeds all the cash in the vault into the Industrial Shredder, then removes its alloy blade and swallows it whole.

Massive internal hemorrhaging. Death at 2:10 a.m.]

After writing the last word, Kannazuki capped his pen.

He made no unnecessary movements. He closed the notebook, tucked it into the hidden compartment beneath his bed, then lay down and shut his eyes.

"Aren't you going to check?" Ryuk asked, hanging upside down from the ceiling.

"No need." Kannazuki rolled over. "I'll watch the news tomorrow morning."

Two in the morning.

Beneath an abandoned meatpacking plant in Linhai City's South District.

The vault behind the locked iron door was piled high with bundles of hundred-yuan notes.

Three black duffel bags filled with gold bars lay at his feet.

Sweat covered Zhou Hai's head as he stuffed money into a suitcase with trembling hands.

With Lin Yaodong dead, the police would seal this place tomorrow. He had to take the money and run before dawn.

The digital clock on the wall changed to 02:00.

Zhou Hai suddenly froze.

His pupils dilated instantly, and blood vessels flooded the whites of his eyes. An irresistible command took control of his body from deep within his brain.

He straightened. The greed vanished from his face, replaced by an uncanny calm.

Zhou Hai walked to the Industrial Shredder in the corner. He pressed the power button.

The machine gave a low roar.

He turned, picked up a bundle of cash, removed the band, and fed the bills into the slot without expression.

Shredded paper spewed out like snowflakes.

Hearing the noise, his men outside pounded on the iron door. "Hai! What are you doing? The cops are almost here!"

Zhou Hai ignored them. He repeated the motions mechanically.

One bundle, two bundles, ten bundles.

Ten minutes later, the cash in the vault had become a mountain of shredded paper.

Zhou Hai switched off the machine. He took a screwdriver from the toolbox, deftly removed the shredder's casing, and detached the razor-sharp Alloy Rotary Blade covered in paper scraps.

He opened his mouth.

Without hesitation or resistance, he forced the palm-sized blade down his throat.

The sound of his esophagus tearing echoed through the sealed vault. Blood poured from the corners of his mouth, dripping onto the shredded paper.

Zhou Hai fell to the floor, his body convulsing violently.

At 2:10 a.m., his heart stopped beating.

The Municipal Public Security Bureau. The Criminal Investigation Detachment.

Chen Lei sat at his desk. The ashtray on it was crammed with cigarette butts.

He hadn't gone home. After Kannazuki had humiliated him to his face with his two-yuan-fifty balance, he had returned to the bureau, exhausted.

But he hadn't given up.

Chen Lei stared at his computer screen. It displayed every record of Kannazuki's life, from childhood to the present.

Orphanage records, report cards from his nine years of compulsory education, social insurance contributions from his jobs, and order data from the delivery platform.

Too clean.

So clean that he hardly seemed like a young man living in modern society. No online loans, no criminal record, no hotel bookings, and even his logged hours at internet cafés were pitifully few.

Chen Lei picked up a pen and wrote two words in his notebook: extreme restraint.

A twenty-five-year-old Delivery Worker at the bottom of society, faced with armed police arriving at his door in the middle of the night, had shown neither anger nor fear. Even his complaints had been perfectly measured.

That kind of psychological resilience couldn't possibly come from delivering food.

"Captain Chen." Xiao Li, who was on duty, pushed open the door with a report in his hand. "Something happened in the South District. Zhou Hai, the guy who ran Dongding Capital's underground casino, died in the vault."

Chen Lei snapped his head up. "How did he die?"

"The Forensic Doctor's preliminary examination says he swallowed a shredder blade and died of internal bleeding."

Xiao Li's face was pale. "What's even stranger is that before he died, he shredded all the cash in the vault. Tens of millions.

The door was locked from the inside, and the surveillance footage shows no one else went in."

Chen Lei stood.

Another locked room. Another bizarre act of self-mutilation. Another man from Dongding Capital.

"The Cleaner." Chen Lei clenched his teeth.

He walked to the whiteboard, wrote Zhou Hai's name, and connected it to Lin Yaodong, Sun Jianguo, and the others.

"Xiao Li, tell them to secure the scene. I'll be there right away." Chen Lei grabbed his coat.

At the door, he suddenly stopped.

He turned toward the computer screen. It was still displaying Kannazuki's spending records.

Chen Lei returned to his desk, gripped the mouse, and rapidly scrolled.

Kannazuki had no opportunity to commit the crime. When Zhou Hai died, Kannazuki had been sleeping in his rented room in the old district.

The covert watch Chen Lei had posted outside Happy Home reported every half hour. Kannazuki hadn't left the building at all.

Physical distance.

Chen Lei stared hard at the screen.

The Cleaner's murders seemed entirely unrestricted by physical distance. Once he identified his target, he could carry out an execution from anywhere.

This was already beyond the scope of criminal investigation.

Chen Lei's gaze swept over Kannazuki's online purchases. Clothes, dishwashing liquid, a secondhand phone.

Suddenly, his eyes stopped on an order from six months earlier.

Order contents: [Hunter × Hunter, volumes 1-12 (Taiwan edition).]

Amount paid: 200 yuan.

The record looked ordinary.

But Chen Lei's instincts prompted him to open the order's shipping details.

The page changed, displaying the shipment's tracking information from six months earlier.

Chen Lei's gaze settled on the lower-right corner of the shipping record. There was a line of automatically generated package-weight data.

[Billable weight: 0.3 kg]

Chen Lei froze.

He didn't read manga, but he knew basic common sense. Twelve physical books, however light their paper, would certainly weigh more than two kilograms in total.

0.3 kilograms meant three hundred grams. At most, that was the weight of a single ordinary notebook.

Chen Lei opened a drawer, took out a black work notebook issued by the bureau, and placed it on the digital scale he was holding.

The display read: 315 grams.

Chen Lei raised his head and looked at the shipping record on his computer screen.

Six months ago, Kannazuki hadn't bought volumes 1-12 of Hunter × Hunter at all.

He had bought something weighing only 0.3 kilograms.

But why did the order title say twelve volumes of manga?

Had the seller advertised one thing and sold another, or... had the transaction's text records been altered, while the weight data automatically captured by the underlying shipping system had been overlooked?

Chen Lei's heart suddenly began to race.