He was evolving

Kannazuki stepped into the stairwell.

The security door closed. Click.

He banished the image of the trash can from his mind. Walking to the window, he reached out and drew the cheap blackout curtain. His movements were steady, without a moment's hesitation.

The room darkened.

Ryuk crouched at the head of the bed and bit into an apple with a crunch.

"What were you looking at just now?" Ryuk asked.

"The sunlight." Kannazuki walked to the computer desk and picked up the old phone with a chipped screen.

He unlocked it. Opened the system settings.

He ignored the usual app battery usage figures.

His finger swiped across the screen, entering developer mode and bringing up low-level network data monitoring.

Rows of code scrolled across the screen.

Kannazuki scanned them rapidly. His eyes captured data far faster than before.

There it was.

The built-in location service had changed its packet transmission frequency ten minutes earlier. Instead of once every five minutes, it now sent a packet every thirty seconds.

And that wasn't all.

Kannazuki walked to the window and glanced through a gap in the curtain at the electric scooter parked downstairs.

The police wouldn't limit their surveillance to his phone.

A phone could be switched off or discarded. For a delivery worker, the electric scooter was his real pair of legs.

"Comprehensive physical and electronic surveillance." Kannazuki set down his phone.

Chen Lei had moved fast.

In their confrontation last night, Chen Lei had lost on logic.

But he hadn't given up. Instead, he had bypassed logic altogether and deployed the highest level of surveillance.

Why?

Kannazuki sat on the plastic folding chair. He clasped his hands beneath his chin.

His brain began working at high speed.

The neural enhancement brought on by killing had turned his mind into a precision supercomputer.

Zhao Gang, Wang Hu, Zhang Wei, Sun Ming, Lei Bao, Li Jianguo, Lin Yaodong, Zhou Hai.

Eight victims.

Eight scenes.

No physical contact. No trace of a murder weapon.

Chen Lei couldn't possibly have found clues on the bodies.

Then the flaw could only lie with Kannazuki himself. In the trail of his activities before he became "Kira."

Kannazuki closed his eyes.

His memories began to rewind.

Every action, purchase, and conversation from the past year flashed through his mind like slides.

Finally, the image froze on a package from six months ago.

Hunter × Hunter, volumes 1-12.

Kannazuki opened his eyes.

He clearly remembered how crudely the black Death Note had been packaged when it arrived.

"Weight," Kannazuki murmured.

Twelve physical volumes of the Taiwanese manga edition would weigh at least two kilograms. But that notebook weighed a mere three hundred grams.

The shipping system's automated scales had recorded that fatal piece of physical data.

Chen Lei had traced the order.

"Human intuition can sometimes be more frightening than logic."

Kannazuki looked at the old magazine on the desk.

Beneath it lay the black-bound book that could decide whether someone lived or died.

Ryuk swallowed his mouthful of apple and leaned closer. "You've been exposed?"

"There's no evidence," Kannazuki said evenly.

"A package's weight can't prove I killed anyone. But it's enough to make Chen Lei latch onto me and never let go."

Kannazuki stood.

He walked to the sink and turned on the tap. Cold water washed over his hands.

This crisis had made one fact clear to him.

In this era, rigorous logic and supernatural methods of killing alone couldn't guarantee absolute concealment.

As long as you were alive, you generated data. As long as there was data, there were traces.

The police's surveillance camera network, big-data comparisons, shipment tracking, cell tower positioning. Together, they wove an impenetrable net.

He needed to tear that net apart.

He needed to become the master of the online world.

Kannazuki turned off the tap. He pulled over a towel and dried his hands.

His intelligence and memory had already surpassed human limits. He was fully capable of mastering the most advanced computer technology in an extremely short time.

Seven days.

Kannazuki set himself an accelerated learning plan.

Within seven days, he would thoroughly master low-level code, network protocols, penetration techniques, and anti-tracking logic.

But learning required resources and hands-on practice.

He couldn't use his own phone to search for any hacking tutorials. Chen Lei was watching him.

He needed a stepping stone. An absolutely secure network node that couldn't be traced back to him.

Kannazuki walked behind the door, took down his yellow delivery jacket, and put it on.

He put his helmet back on.

Picking up his phone, he opened the delivery app. Went online.

The system began assigning orders.

Kannazuki tapped decline.

Another assignment. Another rejection.

Until the fifth order appeared.

[Pickup: Old Zhang's Barbecue. Delivery: Interstellar Internet Cafe.]

The Interstellar Internet Cafe. The largest esports internet cafe in Linhai City.

It had three hundred diskless workstations and an enormous daily flow of customers.

Kannazuki tapped accept.

He opened the door and left.

Eleven in the morning.

Kannazuki rode his electric scooter to a battery-swapping station and stopped.

He scanned the code and opened the battery cabinet.

His gaze swept over spare battery number four. Along its lower edge was a black protrusion the size of a fingernail. Its color was almost identical to the battery casing.

A GPS tracker.

Kannazuki didn't hesitate. He pulled out his old battery and slotted it into the cabinet, then lifted battery number four with its tracker in one hand and installed it in his scooter.

Power on. Start.

He rode out and merged into traffic.

Half an hour later.

Carrying two portions of grilled cold noodles and several skewers of kidneys, Kannazuki pushed open the glass door of the Interstellar Internet Cafe.

Air-conditioned chill washed over him.

The clatter of keyboards mingled with deafening game sound effects.

At the cafe's front desk.

An attendant with dyed blond hair wore headphones, his eyes fixed on the team fight on his screen.

"Delivery." Kannazuki set the food containers on the counter.

The attendant didn't even look up. His right hand clicked the mouse frantically while his left groped for the food.

"Leave it here, leave it here.

Pass me that bottle of Coke," the attendant called casually.

Inside the counter, near the billing computer, sat a half-finished bottle of Coke.

Kannazuki leaned forward.

His left hand reached for the Coke.

Between his right thumb and index finger, he held an extremely small black USB drive.

It was a miniature storage device he had picked up while buying phone accessories at the secondhand market the night before. He had loaded it with a simple autorun script he had written on his phone that same night.

Kannazuki's muscle control had reached a terrifying degree of precision.

The instant his left hand gripped the Coke bottle.

His right hand slipped below the edge of the counter.

A blind insertion.

The USB drive slid precisely into the USB port on the back of the billing computer.

Without a sound.

The entire process took less than three seconds.

The attendant's attention was completely occupied by the screen.

None of the customers passing nearby noticed the young man in the delivery uniform make those tiny movements, either.

Kannazuki set the Coke beside the attendant's hand.

"Enjoy your meal."

Kannazuki turned and left.

The glass door closed behind him.

The script on the USB drive had already begun running.

It would bypass the cafe's billing system firewall, open a hidden backdoor port in the background, and send the computer's remote access credentials to an anonymous email account.

From that moment on, the Interstellar Internet Cafe's three hundred computers became Kannazuki's first group of compromised machines in the online world.

Anytime, anywhere, he could use this stepping stone to reach any corner of the internet without leaving behind his real IP address.

Kannazuki climbed onto his electric scooter.

Sunlight fell on his yellow helmet.

He twisted the throttle and continued toward his next delivery destination.

The City Public Security Bureau.

The Criminal Investigation Detachment office.

Chen Lei sat before a computer screen.

An electronic map of Linhai City filled the display.

A green dot moved steadily across the map.

"Captain Chen." Xiao Li approached with two cups of coffee and handed one to Chen Lei. "The target's movements look perfectly normal.

He's delivering food. He picked up an order from Old Zhang's Barbecue, went to the Interstellar Internet Cafe, and is now heading to the next residential complex."

Chen Lei took the coffee and drank a large mouthful.

The bitter liquid jolted his nerves.

He watched the green dot.

Speed, route, time spent at each stop-everything checked out.

It perfectly matched a delivery worker's daily routine.

Chen Lei didn't relax.

He knew he was facing an extremely dangerous, extremely intelligent opponent.

"Keep watching him." Chen Lei set down his coffee. "As long as he's human, he's bound to make a mistake.

And when he does, I'll catch him."

The green dot turned at an intersection on the map.

Chen Lei's gaze followed it closely.

What he didn't know was that a war fought on utterly unequal planes had already quietly begun.

Kannazuki hadn't merely avoided making a mistake.

He was evolving.

He had taken his first step toward becoming an omniscient, omnipotent god.