Shrimp's voice caught in his throat. His face turned ashen.
London, a basement.
L crouched on a swivel chair. He had bitten his left thumbnail until it bled. He stared at the footage from Chen Lei's body camera.
There was nothing but empty air on the screen.
But L's eyes burned with unprecedented fervor.
Gods. Rules. Supernatural powers.
These elements, which shattered humanity's scientific understanding, were rapidly dismantled in L's mind and reconstructed into cold data models. A god was still a living being.
And every living being had a logic governing its behavior.
"Officer Chen." L spoke, his voice returning to absolute coldness. "You'll be my mouthpiece now.
Ask this Shinigami some questions."
Chen Lei took a deep breath. Cold sweat had soaked the back of his uniform.
"Ask," Chen Lei said.
"First question." L chewed the sugar cube in his mouth. "How many Death Notes like this are there in the world?"
Chen Lei looked straight into Ryuk's red eyes and repeated the question word for word.
Ryuk scratched his tangled black hair. Several flies flew out through gaps in his tattered leather clothes.
"Who knows?" Ryuk shrugged. "I'm bored all the time. All I do is sleep and gamble.
Maybe some other guys dropped their notebooks down here too."
L typed on his keyboard.
No direct answer. No exact number. But he had not denied the possibility that multiple notebooks existed.
"Second question." L immediately issued another instruction.
"Ask him whether this patched-together notebook had a previous human owner."
Chen Lei stared at Ryuk and asked again.
Ryuk shifted his crouching position on the table. He looked at the diary Chen Lei had opened, exposing the traces of glue.
"Shinigami rules. Once a notebook lands in the human world, whoever touches it first becomes its owner."
Ryuk spoke casually. "I only follow the person who gets the notebook.
I appeared when he got it.
As for who had this lousy book before that, I'm not interested, and I can't be bothered to remember."
Chen Lei's brow furrowed deeply.
In the London basement, L stopped chewing.
An exceptionally cunning answer.
The Shinigami had not lied. He had merely withheld information. Ryuk was playing word games, trying to preserve his amusement as a spectator.
But L did not need the Shinigami to tell the truth. He only needed the Shinigami to follow the rules.
"Last question." L suddenly slowed his speech, stressing every word. "Ask him.
If you write a name on a page torn from a real Death Note, does it have the same power to kill?"
Chen Lei's heart gave a violent thump.
He immediately understood L's intent.
Chen Lei stepped forward, closing the distance between himself and Ryuk. His gaze stayed fixed on the monster's deathly pale face.
"Can a torn-out page kill someone?" Chen Lei asked in a low voice.
Ryuk barely hesitated.
He let out a piercing, grotesque laugh.
"Of course." Ryuk extended two fingers and made a tearing motion.
"That's the rule.
Even a tiny scrap works exactly the same, as long as you write the name and have the face in mind.
Death is fair."
The interrogation room fell deathly silent.
Shrimp stared blankly into the air. He could not understand the significance of these questions.
The London basement.
L abruptly stood. The swivel chair slid back half a meter and struck an equipment cabinet.
He had won.
A mortal's logic had pierced straight through a god's arrogance.
"Officer Chen. The interrogation is over." L's synthesized voice echoed through the room, carrying excitement he could barely conceal.
"Put that worthless Shrimp in the highest-security isolation cell. Deny him access to any paper or pens."
Chen Lei did not move. "It's over?"
"It's over." L typed rapidly, sending his deductions to Chen Lei's terminal.
"Our Shinigami friend has supplied the final piece of the puzzle."
L's voice turned utterly cold.
"First. The pages in Shrimp's notebook were glued in. It's merely a container."
"Second. The Shinigami confirmed that torn-out pages have the same killing power."
"The conclusion is extremely simple." L stared at the screen.
"The real Kira tore up the real Death Note.
He glued those fragments into an ordinary diary and dropped it in the mailbox at the Red Star Meat Processing Plant, deliberately letting Shrimp find it."
Chen Lei's pupils contracted sharply. An icy chill shot up his back.
"Shrimp is nothing but bait pushed into the spotlight.
A scapegoat used to draw the attention of police around the world."
L delivered his final conclusion. "The real Kira still has the original notebook.
Not only is he alive, but he can kill anyone, anywhere, at any time, with nothing more than a scrap of paper."
Shrimp began convulsing violently in his chair.
"No! I'm a god! I'm Kira!" Shrimp shook his head frantically. The chains tore through the skin of his wrists, sending blood streaming down.
Ryuk crouched on the table, looking from the collapsing Shrimp to the grim-faced Chen Lei.
"Gah, gah, gah. Humans are so interesting."
Ryuk clapped his hands. "What a show."
Chen Lei snatched the patched-together notebook from the table, turned, and left the interrogation room.
The iron door slammed shut, cutting off Shrimp's desperate howls.
In the corridor, a cold draft swept past.
Chen Lei leaned against the cold wall. He lit a cigarette and took a deep drag.
Smoke swirled in his lungs.
L's reasoning was airtight.
The real Kira not only existed, but was exceptionally intelligent and ruthless.
He had even accounted for the Shinigami, exploiting his unwillingness to intervene in human affairs to achieve a perfect physical separation.
Kannazuki's charred face surfaced in Chen Lei's mind once more.
The DNA was an exact match.
The skeletal features were an exact match.
If the real Kira was still out there, free, had Kannazuki's death really been nothing more than an accidental gas explosion?
Chen Lei stubbed out his cigarette.
He strode toward the elevator.
He was going to the morgue. He needed to see that charred corpse again.
Linhai City. North District.
Night lay deep. Neon lights flickered.
Inside an upscale studio apartment, the lights were off.
Kannazuki stood before the floor-to-ceiling window, looking down at the streams of traffic below.
He wore a solid black silk shirt. His gold-rimmed glasses reflected a cold glint in the city lights.
A brand-new identity.
New, subtle alterations to his face. An entirely new life trajectory.
Light Yagami.
A graduate student at Linhai University's Law School.
Both parents deceased, a substantial inheritance, and social connections as clean as a blank sheet of paper.
The computer screen cast a ghostly blue glow in the darkness.
On the screen, the page for the dark web forum "Eye of the Abyss" was refreshing frantically.
News of "Kira's capture" had spread throughout the underworld.
Some cheered, some cursed, and some questioned it.
Kannazuki lifted a glass of red wine and gently swirled it.
He knew L would use Shrimp to deduce the rule that torn pages could kill.
L would inevitably work out that the real Kira was still in hiding.
That was exactly the outcome Kannazuki wanted.
If Shrimp had simply died or disappeared, L's attention would have remained fixed on Linhai City's South District. He might even have reexamined every detail of the explosion that killed Kannazuki.
But now, L had a clear profile of the "real Kira."
A supercriminal of extraordinary intelligence, possessing a complete notebook and hiding among 1.4 billion people.
However formidable L's processing power, that enormous population would overwhelm it completely.
Kannazuki's death had become a perfect unsolved case.
"Light."
A hoarse, grotesque laugh rang out in the apartment.
Ryuk passed through the wall and slowly floated into the living room, folding his black wings.
"That guy called L is smart."
Ryuk floated beside Kannazuki, his red eyes fixed on him. "He only needed three questions to uncover your trump card.
That idiot Shrimp has already been locked in an iron cage."
Kannazuki sipped his wine. The liquid slid down his throat.
"I know." Kannazuki's tone was flat, without a trace of emotion.
"You're not scared?" Ryuk leaned toward Kannazuki's face. "L knows you have the real notebook now.
He'll use the police all over the world to find you."
"He won't." Kannazuki turned his head and looked straight into the Shinigami's red eyes.
He walked to the desk and opened a drawer.
The black Death Note lay quietly inside, completely intact.
Kannazuki took out a utility knife and extended the blade.
He opened the notebook to its last page. The blade followed the binding in a precise, smooth stroke, cutting free an entire sheet of black paper.
The page drifted down, and Kannazuki caught it.
He folded the page three times and tucked it into a hidden compartment in the black leather wallet he carried.
"L thinks he's seen through my trump card."
Kannazuki slipped the wallet into the inner pocket of his trench coat. "He thinks he can stop me simply by preventing me from writing names."
Kannazuki walked to the floor-to-ceiling window and drained the remaining wine in one swallow.
"But he'll never know. The deadliest part of the notebook's rules isn't killing."
Kannazuki's voice was as cold as a polar glacier.
"It's control."
Rule: The victim's actions can be controlled during the 23 days before death.
Kannazuki looked at his reflection in the glass.
Shrimp's capture was merely the opening move of his grand plan.
Through Shrimp, he had successfully tested L's reaction speed, intelligence network, and thought patterns.
PS: Thank you for the gifts, everyone! To thank you for your support, I worked hard and posted an extra chapter today. Thank you all for your support!
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