Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils

It was twelve thirty in the afternoon. The sun blazed overhead.

Kannazuki rode his electric scooter through two streets.

He stopped at the side entrance of the city library.

The pickup point was a chain coffee shop beside the library.

Carrying two iced Americanos, he walked into the library lobby.

It was crowded.

Kannazuki lowered the visor on his yellow helmet.

At a self-service checkout machine, a male college student in glasses had just scanned his library card before turning away to answer a call. His card remained on the reader.

Kannazuki walked over, positioning his body in the blind spot of the camera above and to the side.

His fingers tapped rapidly across the screen.

Low-Level Architecture Analysis, Assembly Language Essentials, Principles of Modern Cryptography, TCP/IP Network Protocols Explained.

Ten hefty technical books emerged from the slot. Kannazuki swept them into his spacious delivery box.

He pressed the exit button.

He took the library card off the reader and placed it on the edge of the machine.

The student hung up and turned around. Carrying the coffees, Kannazuki headed toward the second-floor reading room. The entire process had taken less than ten seconds.

Two in the afternoon. The South District secondhand electronics market.

The air smelled of rosin and dust.

Kannazuki stopped in front of a cluttered stall.

"How much for scrap motherboards?" Kannazuki pointed at a pile of electronic junk.

The owner glanced at his yellow uniform. "Sold by weight. Ten yuan per half kilo."

Kannazuki reached into the pile of parts and rummaged around.

He picked out two industrial control motherboards with intact radio-frequency modules, three old RAM sticks, a miniature Bluetooth receiver, and a high-frequency antenna.

"Just these." Kannazuki set the parts on the glass counter.

The owner put them on the scale and glanced at the reading. "Twenty will do."

Kannazuki pulled out a twenty-yuan note and slapped it on the counter.

After leaving the market, Kannazuki parked his scooter in a dead-end alley with no surveillance cameras.

He opened the insulated delivery box.

He pulled out the insulating layer at the bottom.

The Utility Knife sliced through the foil.

He laid the motherboards, RAM sticks, and ten books flat inside, then resealed the insulating layer.

From the outside, nothing about the box looked unusual.

At six in the evening, Kannazuki returned to the Happy Home residential complex.

On the seventh floor of the unfinished building, Chen Lei watched through a telescope.

Kannazuki carried two plastic bags upstairs. One held a five-pack of braised beef instant noodles; the other held loose ham sausages.

"Captain Chen, he bought a bunch of instant noodles."

Xiao Li looked at the route history on his tablet. "He made a big circuit around the South District this afternoon and completed more than a dozen deliveries.

His route was all over the place."

"Keep watching him." Chen Lei pulled away from the eyepiece.

One in the morning. The Rental Apartment.

The lights were off. The curtains were tightly drawn.

A mound rose beneath the covers.

Under the blanket, Kannazuki held a miniature flashlight between his teeth.

Its beam illuminated the cramped space.

He held a small Phillips screwdriver.

The scrap motherboards had been forcibly dismantled. Useful chips and radio-frequency modules had been stripped away.

Kannazuki's fingers were exceptionally steady.

He had no soldering iron. Instead, he used the Utility Knife to scrape away the circuit boards' insulating coating, then physically wired several core modules together with extremely fine copper wire.

A palm-sized miniature portable terminal took shape in his hands.

No screen. No casing. Just a row of external USB ports and a homemade signal receiver.

It needed no monitor. Kannazuki's brain was the best processor there was. Once he connected to the compromised machines at the Interstellar Internet Cafe, he could construct the entire network topology in his mind.

The terminal was complete. Kannazuki tucked it into the buckwheat hulls inside his pillow.

He picked up the ten hefty computer science books.

He opened the first.

Rustle.

One second. One page turned.

The flashlight shone on the paper. Dense lines of code and theoretical knowledge imprinted themselves on his retinas in an instant.

The intelligence boost from killing had completely altered the structure of his brain.

His neuronal synapses multiplied exponentially. Perfect memory. Logical reconstruction.

The obscure assembly language automatically compiled and ran in his mind, forming clear trees of underlying logic.

"Gahahaha." Ryuk lay at the head of the bed and poked his head beneath the blanket.

He watched Kannazuki frantically flipping through the books.

"Moon, you look like a printer gone berserk." Ryuk crunched through half an apple.

Kannazuki ignored him.

Rustle. Rustle.

In the silence beneath the blanket, there was only the sound of turning pages.

Ten books. Six hundred pages each.

Before dawn, Kannazuki closed the last book.

He shut his eyes. A vast torrent of data surged through his mind.

He opened his eyes.

He had fully mastered the rules of the online world.

Over the next three days.

Kannazuki did not go outside.

His delivery app remained offline.

The seventh floor of the unfinished building.

Chen Lei's stubble had grown longer. He stared through the telescope, his eyes bloodshot.

"Captain Chen, he hasn't come downstairs in three days." Xiao Li yawned. "He hasn't even taken out the trash. He just eats instant noodles every day."

Chen Lei stared at the tightly closed window.

"It's too quiet." Chen Lei's voice was hoarse. "A worker at the bottom of the ladder goes three days without earning money or leaving home. What is he doing?"

Chen Lei stood and picked up the jacket draped over his chair.

"Let's go."

"Where?"

"To check his apartment."

Ten in the morning. Happy Home.

Bang, bang, bang.

Heavy knocks sounded at the door.

"Kannazuki, open up. Community fire safety inspection." Chen Lei's voice came from outside.

No response.

Chen Lei stepped back half a pace, his right hand resting at his waist.

"If you don't open up, I'm breaking it down."

Click.

The security door opened a crack.

Kannazuki stood behind it in a yellowed white undershirt, his hair a tangled mess.

He held a half-eaten ham sausage.

"Officer Chen." Kannazuki yawned. "Do cops moonlight as neighborhood busybodies now?"

Chen Lei pushed the door open and strode inside.

Xiao Li followed, closing the door behind him.

The Rental Apartment reeked of instant noodles and the sour staleness of a room left unventilated for too long.

The trash can overflowed with empty braised beef noodle packets.

Chen Lei's gaze swept every corner of the room like radar.

The computer desk was completely bare.

The bed was a mess. The pillow had been tossed to one side.

There were no electronic devices. No suspicious objects.

Chen Lei walked over to the bed.

A battered paperback lay on the bedside table. Half its cover had been torn away.

Volume Three of Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils.

Chen Lei picked it up and leafed through it.

The pages were yellowed and smelled of mildew.

"You stayed home for three days just to read this?" Chen Lei stared into Kannazuki's eyes.

"I wasn't feeling well, so I took three days off."

Kannazuki bit into his ham sausage and chewed. "My internet got cut off last month.

All I can do is read old books to pass the time. Is that a crime?"

Chen Lei said nothing.

He walked to the wardrobe and opened it.

Inside were only a few cheap clothes and the yellow delivery jacket.

Xiao Li took a look around the bathroom, then shook his head at Chen Lei.

Too clean.

So clean there was nothing to pick apart.

Chen Lei turned and walked up to Kannazuki.

Less than half a meter separated them.

Kannazuki swallowed the sausage.

He looked at Chen Lei.

"Thanks for your hard work, Officer Chen." Kannazuki's tone was flat. "Hope you solve the case soon. I'm going back to sleep."

Chen Lei stared at him for a full ten seconds.

"Let's go." Chen Lei turned and left the Rental Apartment with Xiao Li.

The security door closed.

Their footsteps faded.

Kannazuki walked to the door and locked the bolt.

He returned to the bed and picked up the battered copy of Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils.

Ryuk floated down from the ceiling.

"That cop really doesn't give up. He almost opened up your pillow."

Ryuk let out a piercing laugh.

Kannazuki said nothing.

He opened Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils to page one hundred and twenty.

Between the yellowed pages lay a sheet of scratch paper covered in core C++ code.