Wrongfully Imprisoned, He Died with Grievances Unredressed

Cold.

A bone-piercing cold was the first thing to invade Lin Feng's senses.

It came from the hard metal seat beneath him, from the rough cuffs binding his wrists, and even more from the cramped, sealed interrogation room itself, where the air lay stagnant.

His eyes flew open. A fierce headache, as though a cluster of steel needles were stabbing into his skull, made him suck in a sharp breath and groan hoarsely. His vision was blurry, filled with nothing but a dizzying, sickly white light. It took several seconds before he could bring it into focus.

The first thing he saw was his own blurred reflection in the one-way glass wall-a young man with a deathly pale face, disheveled hair, and frightened, helpless eyes. Wearing a cheap T-shirt washed nearly white, he was curled up in the cold interrogation chair, looking particularly small and pitiful.

Then a vast, chaotic torrent of memories forced its way into his mind without warning, engulfing him in an instant.

The library, where the scent of books and the quiet were torn apart by a piercing scream.

"Pervert! You groped me!!"

The girl named Sun Tingting, the dazzling campus belle, was pointing at "him," her eyes brimming with tears and her voice trembling, as though she had suffered an immense injustice.

The looks directed at him-shocked, scornful, eager for a spectacle-pricked him like countless needles.

"I didn't! You're lying!" That was the original owner's feeble defense, drowned out by Sun Tingting's increasingly loud tearful accusations and the pointing and muttering of the people around them.

Then came her, the student counselor Li Jing.

Around forty, she always wore a kindly mask that said, "It's for your own good," as she hurried over.

"Lin Feng, I know you might not have meant it. Young people act on impulse sometimes. I understand, I really do." She pulled "him" aside and lowered her voice, speaking earnestly. "But Tingting is a girl. Her reputation matters! If this blows up, it won't do you any good! Listen to me: write her a statement of remorse and give her a sincere apology. We'll handle it within the school, turn a big problem into a small one and make the small one disappear, all right? I guarantee it won't affect your graduation..."

The original owner was frightened. A college student from an ordinary family, he was introverted and even somewhat timid. More than anything, he feared causing trouble, being disciplined, having a stain left on his record, and seeing his future ruined. Under Li Jing's "persuasion," which seemed caring but pressed him at every step, his mind descended into chaos. In the end, humiliated, he picked up a pen and wrote a statement of remorse admitting to "inappropriate behavior." Every stroke of the pen felt as though it were tearing apart his dignity.

He naively believed the nightmare would end there.

Yet the moment Sun Tingting received the statement, the hurt expression and tears vanished from her face, replaced by a cold, triumphant look, like a hunter finally drawing in the net and seeing her desperate prey. She didn't even spare Li Jing another glance before pulling out her phone.

"Hello, is this 110? I want to report a crime. Someone sexually harassed me in the library, and I have a statement of remorse he wrote himself as evidence!"

The original owner felt as though he had been struck by lightning. He jerked his head up and looked at Li Jing.

A flash of shock and panic crossed Li Jing's face, but she quickly composed herself. She avoided the original owner's disbelieving gaze, and her lips moved, but in the end she said nothing. She even turned slightly, imperceptibly moving closer to Sun Tingting. It was a gesture of tacit approval, of drawing a line between herself and him.

After that, he was taken to the police station.

The images in his memory finally froze on the scene before him: behind the interrogation desk sat a policewoman with a cold face and eyes as sharp as knives, Zhang Qian.

She picked up the statement of remorse as though she had obtained irrefutable proof. She made no attempt to retrieve any other surveillance footage that might exist from the library, nor did she patiently question the other students who had been present. She simply interrogated the original owner repeatedly and intensely, with strong personal malice.

The long ordeal, the mental pressure, the humiliation of his person... The original owner's body and mind had already been weakened to the breaking point. When Zhang Qian slammed the desk again and shouted, "I've seen plenty of scum like you. Confess honestly!" a sudden, tearing pain ripped through his chest, and everything went black before his eyes...

"Awake?" The cold female voice rang out again, dragging Lin Feng back to reality from the surging waves of memory. "I thought you were going to play dead until dawn. Now that you're awake, keep explaining what you did!"

Lin Feng raised his head with difficulty and finally got a clear look at Zhang Qian. She was around thirty and not bad-looking, but her taut expression and the scrutiny and disgust in her eyes made her seem particularly harsh. Her police cap rested on the corner of the desk, her shoulder insignia cold.

The fierce headache and the lingering pain from the spasms in his heart were still vivid. The original owner's immense sense of injustice, fear, and unwillingness to accept his fate enveloped Lin Feng's newly arrived soul like an icy tide, nearly suffocating him. He struggled instinctively, and his handcuffs struck the iron barrier on the desk with a sharp clatter that sounded especially piercing in the silent room.

"Stop moving! Sit still!" Zhang Qian immediately shouted, rapping her knuckles heavily against the desk. "Lin Feng, I'm telling you, what you did is extremely serious! The evidence is conclusive. Denying it will get you nowhere!"

Her finger nearly jabbed the "statement of remorse" on the desk. "This! You wrote it yourself, didn't you? That's your fingerprint, isn't it? Black words on white paper, evidence piled up like a mountain! What more can you say to wriggle out of this?"

Lin Feng licked his cracked lips, which were close to bleeding. His throat was terribly hoarse. "Officer Zhang... Teacher Li Jing told me to write that statement... She said if I wrote it, it would only be handled within the school, I..."

"Teacher Li was giving you a chance!" Zhang Qian cut him off roughly, her voice rising sharply with unquestionable authority. "She saw you were young and wanted to give you a hand, a chance to turn over a new leaf! Instead of being grateful or showing remorse, you're turning around and trying to frame your teacher? Your character is utterly vile!"

"I'm not framing her! Sun Tingting framed me!" The merged memories stirred Lin Feng's emotions, filling him with indignation on the original owner's behalf.

"Framed you? Ha!" Zhang Qian leaned back and folded her arms, the mocking smile on her face growing wider. "Sun Tingting gets excellent grades and behaves well. She's an outstanding student leader at the school! Why would she stake her own reputation on framing you? What's her motive? Go on, give me one!"

Lin Feng was at a loss for words. A spot for admission to graduate school without an entrance exam? That had been the original owner's desperate guess, without a shred of evidence. He simply couldn't bring himself to say it now.

"Nothing to say? I knew it!" Zhang Qian spoke even more aggressively, as though she had seized on a fatal weakness. "In all my years handling cases, I've seen plenty of spineless cowards like you who dare to do it but not admit it, then argue and lash out wildly once they're caught!"

She sprang to her feet, braced both hands on the desk, and leaned forward with an overwhelming pressure. Her face was almost against Lin Feng's as she stared him down. "Look at yourself! What part of you looks like a respectable college student? A dark mind and filthy behavior! You think your excuses will work? Let me make this clear: when this gets to court, with this statement of remorse you wrote yourself, will the judge believe a molester spouting nonsense, or the accusations of the female student he victimized? Hm?!"

"That statement doesn't represent the truth! The context at the time..." Lin Feng felt a dull ache start up in his heart again. The despair left behind by the original owner surged wildly as he tried to make one last struggle.

"Context? What context? Hard evidence is hard evidence!" Zhang Qian slammed the desk again. The thunderous bang exploded through the small interrogation room, leaving Lin Feng's eardrums buzzing. "Your actions already constitute molesting and insulting a woman, and the circumstances are grave! Even three to five years wouldn't be too much for you! Your life has only just begun. Do you want to spend it in prison? The only thing that can save you now is to confess honestly and seek leniency! How I write my report will have a direct bearing on your sentence! Do you understand?!"

Coercion, intimidation, insults, inducement...

Her words were like icy hammers, mercilessly smashing every hope and every possibility of a defense. She had already decided he was guilty. What she wanted wasn't the truth, only a confession bearing his signature and fingerprint.

The original owner's feelings of cowardice, despair, and helplessness in the face of accusations crashed down like the last dam giving way. Icy despair, mixed with the tearing pain in his heart, swallowed the last life in this body like a tsunami. Lin Feng clearly felt the original owner's final trace of consciousness let out a silent cry of utter unwillingness before it was extinguished completely, sinking into endless darkness.

"Ugh..." He gave a muffled groan of pain and pitched forward, his forehead striking the cold metal desktop with a dull thud. The world rapidly darkened before his eyes, and sounds began to recede.

"Playing dead again?" Zhang Qian's voice, filled with disgust and impatience, seemed to come from far away. "I'm warning you, that trick won't work on me! Get up!"

But a few seconds later,

The fingers of "Lin Feng," slumped over the desk, twitched ever so slightly.

Then, slowly and with immense difficulty, he raised his head again.

His eyes had changed completely.

The fear, cowardice, despair, and pain from before... All those emotions receded like a tide, vanishing without a trace. In their place was a bottomless coldness, a deathly stillness as though he had passed through mountains of corpses and seas of blood. Yet deep in his pupils, a faint, dark flame seemed to have been kindled, burning silently but with utter madness.

The fierce headache and the lingering pain from the spasms in his heart remained, but the one in control of this body was now an entirely new soul, one that had struggled its way out of a desperate situation in another world.

He slowly lifted his eyelids and fixed those eyes, cold and devoid of the slightest human emotion, directly on Zhang Qian's face. The change in his gaze made her pause.

In a voice that was unusually calm yet cold enough to freeze the air, he asked clearly, enunciating every word:

"Officer Zhang, in every case you've handled, have you... convicted people like this, without seeking objective evidence, relying entirely on your own subjective assumptions?"

The sudden defiance and those eyes, cold to an almost uncanny degree, sent an inexplicable chill through Zhang Qian, but it was immediately engulfed by an even greater surge of anger. She bristled like a cat whose tail had been stepped on, her finger nearly jabbing the tip of Lin Feng's nose.

"How dare you! Lin Feng! What kind of attitude is that?! How dare you..."

Just then-

[Ding! The host's intense unwillingness and resentment have been detected. Binding conditions met...]

[Binding Deathsworn Summoning System...]

[Binding successful!]

[One absolutely loyal deathsworn can be summoned at random each day. The system will automatically arrange a plausible identity for the deathsworn to integrate into the current world.]

[The deathsworn's identity rank is random. The higher the rank, the greater the ability and the lower the probability of appearing.]

[Summons currently available: 1.]

[Summon now?]

The cold, absolute, emotionless mechanical voice rang clearly in the deepest reaches of Lin Feng's mind, like a bell of judgment from the heavens above, yet also like the whisper of a demon from the abyss.

A system? Deathsworn?

A vast amount of information flooded in at once, but the new soul understood and accepted it all in an instant. At the bottom of the abyss of despair, a glimmer of cold, cruel light had finally appeared for him.

Under Zhang Qian's furious, slightly distorted gaze, the corner of his mouth curved upward ever so slightly, almost imperceptibly.

There was no warmth in that curve, only endless chill and a fire of vengeance about to set the plains ablaze.

"What kind of attitude?" Lin Feng repeated Zhang Qian's question, but his gaze coiled tightly around her like two cold venomous snakes, as though to carve her image, her voice, and every bit of her revolting prejudice deep into his soul.

At the same time, in that deathly silent sea of consciousness, he gave his first command to the cold system interface:

Summon.