I am L

Kannazuki tossed the instant noodle container into the trash.

He pulled out a tissue and wiped his mouth.

He drew the curtains, shutting out the midday sunlight.

The Rental Apartment fell into darkness.

Chen Lei had backed off.

But Kannazuki knew perfectly well that Chen Lei's intuition had not gone away.

Xia Ren was a shoddy imitation. Sooner or later, he would slip up.

As long as Chen Lei failed to find a complete, coherent chain of logic surrounding Xia Ren, that mad dog would come back to sink his teeth into Kannazuki again.

The only way out was to sever every anchor tying the identity of "Kannazuki" to the physical world.

Dead men were beyond suspicion.

Kannazuki sat back down at his computer desk.

He opened a drawer and took out the black Death Note.

He uncapped his pen.

"Yue, what are you up to now?"

Ryuk hung upside down from the ceiling, his red eyes swiveling.

"That stand-in is doing a pretty good job. You should be enjoying your freedom now."

"Freedom is relative." Kannazuki opened the notebook to a blank page.

"As long as this body of mine is still called Kannazuki and still lives here, I'll always be under Skynet's surveillance."

The pen touched the paper.

[Liu Jianguo]

A square face surfaced in Kannazuki's mind.

Hazardous materials warehouse manager at Linhai City Chemical Plant No. 2. Fifty years old. A compulsive gambler with enormous loan-shark debts who had repeatedly threatened to blow up the plant while drunk.

After the name, Kannazuki wrote detailed conditions for his death.

[Cause of death: fatal severe burns.]

[Detailed sequence: starting today, Liu Jianguo will exploit his position to evade all surveillance and security, secretly transporting five hundred kilograms of high-purity ammonium nitrate out of the chemical plant in batches. Within seven days, after confirming that no one is present and no innocent people will be harmed, he will transfer all the ammonium nitrate to the basement beneath the underground garage of the Happy Home residential complex in Linhai City's South District. At precisely eight p.m. on the seventh day, he will ignite gas in the basement, triggering a violent explosion. He will suffer severe burns in the explosion and die at the scene.]

He finished the last word.

Kannazuki closed the notebook.

Rule seven of the notebook: a person's actions could be controlled for up to twenty-three days before their death.

Most people who acquired this notebook would think only about killing. But in Kannazuki's eyes, it was the world's most perfect logistics system and demolition crew.

No mercenaries required.

No funding required.

No contact required.

All he had to do was write down a name, and the target would execute his assigned task with absolute precision. Five hundred kilograms of ammonium nitrate would be enough to utterly destroy the foundations beneath the entire floor containing his Rental Apartment.

"Gah-ha-ha!" Ryuk read what was on the page and let out a strange cackle.

"Yue, you're using a shinigami's power for manual labor? You're insane!"

"It's called maximizing resources," Kannazuki said calmly.

The explosion was arranged.

He still needed a corpse.

A corpse that could perfectly replace "Kannazuki" in DNA and skeletal identification.

Kannazuki placed both hands back on the keyboard.

Green code cascaded down the screen.

He went straight into the underlying databases of Linhai City's medical system and police household registration system.

He built a cross-referencing filter model.

Criterion one: male, aged twenty-four to twenty-six.

Criterion two: height, 178 centimeters, with a margin of no more than one centimeter.

Criterion three: blood type O, Rh-positive.

Criterion four: orphan, no immediate family, extremely marginal social ties.

Criterion five: wanted for a serious crime, with a strong need to flee.

He pressed Enter.

The databases ran at full speed.

Five minutes later, a file appeared on the screen.

[Zhao Qiang. Age: 25. Height: 178 cm. Blood type: O. Fled after committing robbery and murder in a neighboring city three weeks ago. Currently wanted province-wide. According to an informant, he is highly likely to be hiding somewhere in Linhai City's South District.]

Kannazuki stared at Zhao Qiang's photograph.

Deep-set eyes, prominent cheekbones.

His bone structure bore a seventy-percent resemblance to Kannazuki's.

As long as the explosion burned away his facial features and fingerprints, and the intense heat destroyed some of his DNA strands, this corpse would become the perfect "Kannazuki."

"You'll do," Kannazuki said quietly.

He opened the notebook again.

He wrote down Zhao Qiang's name.

[Cause of death: fatal severe burns caused by a gas explosion.]

[Detailed sequence: at seven fifty p.m. seven days from now, Zhao Qiang will sneak into the basement beneath the underground garage of the Happy Home residential complex to evade police pursuit. At precisely eight p.m., a gas explosion will occur. Zhao Qiang will be at the center of the blast, his facial features and fingerprints completely burned away, and will die at the scene.]

Both pieces were now in position.

Seven days from now.

Amid a police cordon or their suspicions, an earth-shattering explosion would destroy everything.

"Kannazuki" would be reduced to ashes.

And he would disappear into the shadows under an entirely new identity, truly taking control of this game.

The Red Star Abandoned Slaughterhouse.

The basement.

The stench of blood was thick enough to turn the stomach.

Bare-chested, Xia Ren sat in front of an iron operating table.

His eyes were bloodshot, the bags beneath them dark. He was in a state of wildly heightened frenzy.

More than a dozen pages of the brown diary on the table were already filled.

"Mexico. Sinaloa Cartel second-in-command, Julio."

Xia Ren read out a name.

The marker in his hand scraped down hard.

"Northern Myanmar. Scam Compound leader, Li Mingsen."

Another name.

A laptop sat beside him, its screen logged into the highest-level intelligence forum on the dark web. Xia Ren did not need to verify these people's crimes. He only needed to see who had the biggest bounty and who was the most notorious.

He wanted to kill the most evil people in the world to prove that he was the supreme god.

"Die! Die, all of you!" Xia Ren laughed wildly, spittle spraying onto the page.

Hovering in the air, Ryuk's spectral image watched him coldly.

"Two hundred and thirteen already."

Ryuk's dry voice echoed through the basement. "Human greed really knows no bounds."

Xia Ren ignored the apparition.

He grabbed the mouse and refreshed the dark web page.

The entire forum had erupted.

[Oh my God! Julio died of a sudden heart attack at his own estate!]

[Li Mingsen collapsed while inspecting the compound just now. The doctor said it was a heart attack!]

[Kira! He's a true god! He's cleansing this world!]

Reading those feverish comments, Xia Ren felt every pore in his body open.

He reveled in being worshipped by thousands.

He picked up the gas mask beside him and put it back on.

He started a livestream.

The feed connected to the dark web.

Instantly, more than a hundred thousand users flooded into the stream.

"My faithful." Xia Ren's hoarse voice emerged through the voice changer. "I have heard your prayers.

Kira's judgment will descend upon every sinner. Whether corrupt officials or international drug lords, all are equal before my power."

He raised the brown diary.

He waved it in front of the camera.

"This is the list of death. Who will be next?"

Comments poured across the livestream like a torrential downpour.

Lyon, France.

INTERPOL (ICPO) headquarters.

The highest-security conference room.

The atmosphere was unbearably oppressive.

Police representatives from twenty of the world's major nations sat around an enormous ring-shaped conference table.

On the huge screen at the front, red names kept flashing.

213.

214.

215.

Every change in the number meant that somewhere on Earth, a notorious criminal had died of cardiac paralysis.

"Forty-eight hours." The United States representative abruptly stood, planting both hands on the table.

"More than two hundred international criminals dead under mysterious circumstances. Every cause of death identical.

This is unquestionably a premeditated terrorist attack against the global justice system!"

"And the method?" the United Kingdom representative countered. "Can anyone explain a method of killing that transcends physical distance like this? Poison? A genetic weapon? Or brainwave control?"

"Have you traced the location of that livestream on the dark web, the one calling himself Kira?" the French representative asked the technical director.

The technical director was drenched in sweat. "He's using extremely advanced anti-tracing techniques. His IP address jumps thousands of times per second. We can barely narrow it down to Asia. We can't determine the specific country."

"Useless!" the United States representative snarled.

The conference room fell deathly silent.

Faced with slaughter that lay entirely beyond scientific understanding, these elites, who commanded the world's most powerful instruments of force, felt an unprecedented helplessness.

Suddenly.

The lights in the conference room flickered.

The enormous screen at the front went black.

Then a white English letter, rendered in a strongly vintage Gothic style, slowly appeared at the center of the black background.

[L]

An uproar swept through the room.

Every representative immediately sat up straight.

"Technical department! What's going on? Has our connection been hacked?" the ICPO secretary-general demanded sharply.

"It's not a hack!" The technical director hammered at his keyboard, his face stunned. "

The letter "L" on the screen remained motionless.

An electronically synthesized voice, devoid of emotional inflection, emerged from speakers on every side of the conference room.

"Ladies and gentlemen."

The voice was quiet, yet it instantly silenced the clamor.

"I am L."

The conference room went completely still.

That L!

He was a legend.

The world's greatest detective. No one knew his real name, nationality, or age. No one had even seen his face.

He took only the most difficult, most bizarre unsolved cases in the world, and he had never failed.

He had the privilege of mobilizing police resources in any country on Earth.

"I have conducted a preliminary investigation into the Kira case."

The synthesized voice continued at an even pace. "This is not divine punishment.

The killer is merely an immature human possessing some unknown means of murder."

The United States representative frowned. "Immature? He killed more than two hundred people around the world in forty-eight hours!"

"Numbers cannot conceal the flaws in the logic of his behavior."

L's voice cut off the United States representative. "First, Kira's killing times exhibit a clear pattern.

He is usually most active between six p.m. and two a.m. in the UTC+8 time zone."

On the large screen, the letter L disappeared.

In its place appeared a chart showing the distribution of times.

"This tells us that Kira needs sleep. He follows a normal human sleep schedule."

The screen changed again.

It now showed photographs of the twelve victims from Linhai City.

"Second, Kira's killings around the world were intended to conceal the trail of his earliest actions."

L's voice carried absolute confidence. "Look at these twelve people.

They were Kira's first victims. They had low social standing and very little influence.

Why did Kira kill them?"

No one in the conference room spoke.

"Because these twelve people were test subjects Kira used to try out his method of killing," L concluded. "Experiments are usually conducted in the safest, most familiar environment available. These twelve people all died in the same city."

A map zoomed in on the screen.

A red circle zeroed in on Dragon Country's eastern coast.

"Kira is in Linhai City, Dragon Country."

Everyone was stunned.

Using nothing but the times of death and a list of victims, this person had pinpointed the location of a killer on the other side of the planet.

"I've already sent a request for cooperation to the Dragon Country police."

L's voice returned to its flat tone.

"From this moment on, I will take full control of the Kira case.

I require the unconditional cooperation of intelligence agencies worldwide."

PS: I was genuinely overwhelmed today...

For the first time, I received a [Mass-Update Celebration] gift. Thirty-nine yuan isn't a small amount to me, especially coming from a reader whose name I didn't even recognize.

I stared at the gift notification for ages. My hands were shaking, and I was trembling as I typed. My heart felt warm and achy all at once. It really gave me this feeling: "Someone actually wants to spend money on my story. Someone is actually happy when I post extra chapters."

This was the first time I'd felt recognized since I started writing fiction.

Thank you so, so much, [Name Unknown.]. Thank you for spending money to support me, and thank you for giving me an incredible reason why I absolutely had to post a ton of chapters today.

I'm going to work myself to death today if that's what it takes to write a little more. Otherwise, I won't be able to live with myself.

I'm firing on all cylinders today. I'll write more even if it kills me, and turn your kindness into chapters to give back to you.

May everything go well for you in the days ahead, and may happy things happen to you one after another.