Apocalypse Forecast

”Invite me to what? A meal or tea?”

Hearing him, Huai Shi stayed unmoved. Instead, she sat back down on the chair in the room and calmly shot back, ”Don’t tell me when the time comes that old geezer will suddenly smash his cup as a signal, and your Li Jian family’s Eight Canine Warriors will rush out from behind the screen and chop me into several pieces?”

”You are Miss Zhenxi’s agent, and at the same time an honored guest of the Li Jian family. Something so disgraceful to our family name will absolutely never happen again in the Li Jian family.”

Horn Mountain answered calmly: ”We merely hope to conduct a temporary inquiry to clear you of suspicion… Miss Amber is already here, so please don’t worry.”

”What about Zhenxi?” Huai Shi asked. ”If I leave, will anyone else try to use her to make a fuss?”

”Before your return, I will stand guard here and not move a single step,” Horn Mountain replied with firm resolve. ”If Miss Zhenxi suffers any harm at all, you may cut off my head at that time, and I will have no objections.”

Right outside the door, a car had already pulled up in complete silence.

The car door opened.

Awaiting Miss Huaizhi’s grand arrival.

After confirming once again with Zhenxi that Horn Mountain could be trusted, Huai Shi handed The Fly King to her right in front of Horn Mountain, then gave Horn Mountain one last look.

That look made Horn Mountain’s back go a bit cold.

He couldn’t tell whether it was intimidation or mockery.

But by the time Horn Mountain came back to his senses, that graceful figure had already vanished without a trace.

And only after Huai Shi sat down in the car did he finally come back to himself.

Thinking of the way he’d just swayed his hips, he couldn’t help but sigh from the bottom of his heart.

I’m so slutty…

.

.

”Name?”

”Huaizhi Sushi.”

”Age?”

”Eighteen.”

”Gender?”

”Male.”

Huai Shi rolled his eyes, making the faces of the old men in the seats of honor darken all at once.

”Miss Huaizhi, this session was proposed by the Inugami Old House and convened specifically as a temporary inquiry for you. We hope you can treat it with some gravity and not joke around.”

”That’s so weird. Some questions, don’t you already have the answers? Like my gender… You can’t decide to change the answer just because you squeezed what you thought was a soft persimmon and found nails inside, right?”

Huai Shi was still dripping sarcasm today.

Right up until Amber, who’d been coldly watching from the side, was about to poke several holes in him with her gaze.

”Fine, fine. Whatever you want to ask, hurry up and ask.” Huai Shi lowered his eyes and glanced at the clock on his phone. ”Time is money, after all.”

”Then, let’s get straight to the point.”

From the central seat of honor, the cold-faced middle-aged man beside the Inugami Old House spoke: ”Where were you last night?”

When he asked, his gaze was razor-sharp, like a straight razor that would carve fine, shallow cuts into a person’s skin.

”Sleeping,” Huai Shi answered calmly. ”I was drunk last night, everyone saw it. The bartender went heavy on me; I didn’t open my eyes until ten this morning.”

The middle-aged man suddenly asked, ”Who can prove you stayed in your room the whole time?”

”Who can prove I didn’t stay in my room the whole time?”

Huai Shi sneered: ”I thought the Li Jian family would at least understand some basic common sense. Or is this the kind of place where, like online, whoever shouts louder is automatically right?

I haven’t read that many books, but as far as I remember, this country and all your borders adopt the Sea system of law, right? But regardless of which legal system, there’s a basic principle—no one is obligated to incriminate themselves.

Who asserts must prove—that’s the most fundamental truth. Do you need me to teach you that? I even did a stint as class rep in Border Law at the Ivory Tower.”

Class rep was the least of it. With Huai Shi’s level, the Professor of law had already started occasionally skiving off and asking Huai Shi to cover lectures.

And on days when Huai Shi wanted to slack off, he’d even hand Classical Music Appreciation over to him.

To be fair, that Professor’s taste in music was genuinely solid, with some rather unique insights into certain classical pieces, and he especially loved Mozart!

In fact, everyone in that law classroom, one by one, had a soft spot for Mozart… Maybe they all felt that while hopping back and forth on the edge of the law, listening to Mozart gave them a strange sense of aesthetic bliss.

Now it seemed the intimidation value of Border Law was off the charts.

Anyway, the moment Huai Shi finished talking, the middle-aged man’s face immediately turned ugly.

The Ivory Tower’s Border Law course was notorious for being hard to deal with and for stirring up trouble. Every year, all sorts of brilliant near-graduates would tirelessly shuttle between various borders, trying to do things that the law hadn’t explicitly said you couldn’t do, just to get a higher evaluation from their teachers…

This was a warning.

If Deer’s Sing Hall kept trying to press like this, Huai Shi had every right to retain a graduate as a lawyer to defend the poor, helpless, yet still edible Miss Huaizhi Sushi.

As the atmosphere gradually deadlocked, the silent Inugami Old House suddenly coughed twice. Playing the role of the ”good cop,” he finally spoke: ”Mr. Yamada was momentarily at a loss for words, please don’t take offense. He’s simply too anxious. Because the way you usually operate is far too similar to the Murderer. So…”

”No, that’s not the same thing at all.”

Miss Huaizhi suddenly spoke up, interrupting him. She spread her hands and told him, seriously and solemnly, ”These are obviously two completely different matters.”

Inu River was stunned for a moment, then nodded. ”I’d like to hear the details.”

”I… cough, cough, had a friend who once told me this: beheading and agleam are not the same thing.”

Huai Shi raised a finger and said seriously, ”It’s not just about whether you completely cut it off, or leave a little bit still attached. Even the way you strike and the whole line of thinking are completely different.

In your eyes, is there really only one way under the sun to chop a neck?”

”Even if you put it like that…”

Mr. Yamada was about to speak, but got interrupted again.

”Listen up. What I’m telling you is—between beheading and agleam, there’s a decisive difference!”

Huai Shi said coldly, ”What we call beheading is a very clean, very satisfying method that doesn’t drag on all sticky and tangled… when it’s time to cut, you cut. You get that?

It’s the simplest, most straightforward way to put an end to something.”

”Its purpose is to kill something, make something disappear, let something say goodbye to this world so its toxicity doesn’t spread endlessly.

You just need to find the right spot, then one stroke, and everything is over. Anything beyond that is unnecessary.

That’s why you need to be all the more cautious—examine your goal, examine your own bias and ideas. If there’s a second way to solve it besides this, then you shouldn’t be using it.

Because a human life only comes once; there’s no taking it back…”

What the fuck kind of ridiculous crap are you spouting.

Mr. Yamada really wanted to shoot her down like that.

But when she said these things, her expression turned solemn and grave, as if she were stating some irrefutable Truth. And she clearly wasn’t going to let anyone cut her off.

”But that Agleam Murder Demon bastard is different.”

Huai Shi narrowed her eyes and suddenly said, ”If I didn’t see wrong at the scene—some of those people were tormented before they died, right?”

She recalled again the corpse she had seen in that alley.

The brutal ravaging that took place before the beheading…

”For that guy, the focus isn’t the beheading, but what happens before the beheading… The victim experiences pain, and that final agleam is just a bit of mercy he’s gifting you.

From the very beginning, it’s run completely counter to the basic idea of beheading.”

Mr. Yamada flew into a rage, glaring at her. ”You think that kind of wordplay with fuzzy concepts is going to work?”

”I’m just voicing some of my own thoughts. Weren’t you the ones who asked?”

Huai Shi shrugged and spread her hands helplessly.

But as she looked over their faces, she couldn’t help but smile. ”Honestly, I don’t know why he insists on killing this way, but I think he wants you to pay a price.

Could it be that among you… someone’s got a guilty conscience about something?”

Silence. No one spoke.

Only Mr. Yamada’s face grew darker and darker.

Inu River still kept his silence, as if he hadn’t heard a thing.

Bingo.

It was as if Huai Shi could actually hear some illusory notification chime.

.

.

It wasn’t long before the brief questioning finally wrapped up.

They hadn’t managed to clear away the suspicion. Not that Huai Shi would believe them anyway, even if Deer’s Sing Hall claimed they believed Huaizhi Sushi couldn’t be the Agleam Murder Demon.

The final decision was that although she was a suspect, the suspicion wasn’t strong.

During the investigation she wasn’t allowed to leave the Li Jian family’s estate or go out—basically a house arrest in another form. Maybe that earlier little excursion where she went out and killed like crazy had left some psychological trauma on the old men of Deer’s Sing Hall?

Huai Shi didn’t care about ”personal freedom” anyway. She was just hired to cook; once the Chef Demon trial match ended and Zhenxi’s affairs were settled, she’d just walk away. Was Deer’s Sing Hall really going to dare stand in her way?

After she escorted her out, even Amber felt like she was about to collapse from exhaustion.

”It was just for show. Why do you have to keep tempting fate?”

”Heh, if they could handle me they’d just drag me off directly. Since they can’t, they put on a show instead. Good cop, bad cop, they want all the lines for themselves at Deer’s Sing Hall…” Huai Shi sneered, not buying the slightest bit of those old geezers’ fake solemn act.

”You’d better be careful. Those old guys might be planning how to dispose of you once the match is over.” Amber shook her head. ”What do you think of the Sublimators in Deer’s Sing Hall?”

”Mediocre. Just about reliable enough to Maintain public order. But when it comes time to actually do something, they’re trash to the core, can’t get anything done.”

Huai Shi commented, ”If you’re honestly counting on that lot to capture the Agleam Murder Demon, you might as well hope they die somewhere they won’t cause trouble for anyone else.”

”That’s normal. The Left, Right, and Center magistrate offices are nothing more than agencies Deer’s Sing Hall uses to coordinate with the MPD to Maintain social order. The ones who really have Ability were long ago drafted into Huo Fu Gai Department and Thief Change Department, not to mention the ’Seat,’ the elite imperial guard that nominally serves only the Former Emperor.”

After casually giving a few warnings, Amber asked, ”From the sound of it, you seemed to have gotten some kind of lead back there?”

”Maybe it’s just me judging others by a petty man’s heart, doing some reverse-engineering based on my shallow criminal experience.”

Huai Shi thought for a long moment and said seriously:

”I think there’s something wrong with your family.”