Death Note · Chat

The evening wind sweeps through the grass on the riverbank, carrying the damp scent of autumn soil. Light Yagami sits on the embankment, his school bag resting on his knees, the strings of his tennis racket still holding the residual warmth of this afternoon's match. He won, naturally—yet that familiar emptiness wells up once more, like river water washing over his ankles, cold and meaningless. He looks down at his fingertips, where the faint calluses from holding the racket still remain, suddenly feeling that whatever these hands do is just ordinary. Right then, something plunges from the sky, landing squarely in the grass with a dull thud. A black-covered notebook, its pages slightly parted from the fall, reveals inner pages filled with English instructions. Frowning, he hesitates for a few seconds before bending down to pick it up. The cover clearly reads: DEATH NOTE. "A prank?" He scoffs, casually flipping to the first page. His eyes sweep across the bold text—'The human whose name is written in this note shall die.' Ridiculous. He stuffs the notebook into his bag, zips it up, stands, and brushes the grass off his trousers. The moment he turns around, the pages of the black notebook inside his bag curl slightly at the edges, warmed by his body heat, as if some sleeping entity has finally found its breath. At that exact moment, at the end of the hallway in the National Police Agency, Soichiro Yagami presses a stack of closed files of ordinary criminal cases into a filing cabinet. He shuts the cabinet door, the setting sun casting a long, deep shadow across his profile. He still has a few common robberies and brawls to handle; everything is as quiet as usual. Yet, for some reason, he looks out the window, his brow furrowing slightly as if sensing something. Further away, in an unremarkable old building, a young man sits barefoot, crouching in a leather chair with his chin resting between his knees. He pinches a teddy-bear-shaped biscuit between his fingers and slowly chews it. Global crime data scrolls across his computer screen—no anomalies, no special cases highlighted in red; everything falls perfectly within the order he has long calculated. His pitch-black eyes scan the tedious spreadsheets line by line. "Boring," he mutters to himself, dropping a sugar cube into his coffee cup and watching it slowly dissolve. In a dimension invisible to mortals, Ryuk hangs upside down in mid-air above the riverbank, his wings half-folded, his fangs gleaming white in the fading sunlight. He watches the boy stand and leave, watches the notebook get stuffed into the bag, and catches a fleeting glimpse of the black cover peeking through the gap in the zipper. "Someone finally picked it up," he rasps with a chuckle, pulling out an apple and taking a hard bite—crunch, the sound of the breaking flesh is swallowed by the wind, completely unnoticed by any human. On the ground, the boy suddenly stops and looks back at the empty embankment. The wind blows through the grass again, as if nothing had happened. He turns and continues walking, the black notebook in his bag resting silently against his back, its thin cover slightly warm, as if a heartbeat is pulsing through the pages and into his spine.