At the end of the narrow corridor, the closed door looms like a boundary between order and chaos.

Eloise stands before it, jaw tight, voice low. “MP Wenton has gone mad,” he says, glancing back at Lin Yu and Mary. “He’s threatening to kill every staff member and guest in this restaurant if the identity of the killer isn’t found within three hours. And one of those hours has already passed.”

He pushes the door open.

The air inside strikes them like a wall—thick with fear, sweat, and the metallic scent of gun oil.

Lin Yu steps in behind Eloise, his calm presence seeming to swallow the noise around. Mary follows closely, her eyes flicking over the faces turned toward them.

Immediately, several rifles rise, barrels aimed directly at the newcomers.

“Who are they?” an old man demands, his voice sharp and ragged from shouting.

His wrinkled hands tremble, but his eyes burn with fury and desperation.

The guards’ tense stance softens just enough for breath to return to the room.

Eloise raises a hand to calm the pointing guns before turning to the woman among the trio. “Mary, why are you here?”

Mary steps forward, voice steady though her eyes flicker toward the armed men. “I brought the new coroner.”

Eloise nods once, then gestures toward the group of three standing beside the crime-scene partition. “Dr Yu Ling, meet the members of Investigation Team Three—Robert, the team captain, and Michael and Cecilia.”

Robert, slightly older, with blond hair and a scar crossing his chin, steps forward first. “Dr Yu Ling, thank you for coming.”

Beside him, Michael and Cecilia, both investigators, watch quietly—Michael with the sharp, restless gaze of a hound, Cecilia with composed precision, her gloved hands clasped at her waist.

Before Lin Yu can reply, a furious voice erupts behind them.

“All of your chitchat—finish it quickly!” Arthur Wenton’s voice trembles with rage and grief. “Find my daughter’s murderer, or I will start killing everyone in this building!”

Robert turns swiftly, his voice low but firm. “Calm down, MP Wenton. An extraordinary event caused your daughter’s death—these people are ordinary staff. They are not the killer.”

Arthur’s pale face twists, his eyes bloodshot as he slams his fist on the table. “I don’t care. Two hours! If you fail, they die!”

The words echo, clinging to the air like iron.

Lin Yu studies him quietly. The man’s aura is a mess—rage, despair, and faint traces of extraordinary energy clinging around his shoulders, though he is clearly not one.

He finally steps forward, voice calm. “Then let me see the body.”

Lin Yu nods once and steps past them into the private room where the girl lies with her head bowed on the table, pale and unnaturally still.

He studies the body from above—the skin unbroken, no wound, no obvious sign of violence, yet a faint, tremulous residue of extraordinary energy clings about her like dust in sunlight.

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From outside, he cannot discern the type of energy, and when Michael, impatient, asks, “Have you found why she died?” Lin Yu only shakes his head and answers, “I must look inside.”

Their gazes flick to Arthur Wenton, who stands behind them, eyes rimmed red, and when Arthur asks, voice thin with fear, “Is there no other way?” Lin Yu meets him and says simply, “No.”

Arthur swallows and murmurs, “Then please be careful.”

Robert offers practicality: “Will you perform the examination here or shall I fetch your medical kit?”

Lin Yu waves his hand. “Not necessary.”

He eases the girl onto the examination table with deliberate care and, without ceremony, slides his nails beneath the seam of her dress to part the fabric; a narrow blade of condensed vitality springs from his fingertips—no steel, only sharp life-energy like a surgeon’s scalpel but colder and cleaner.

The vital-blade parts tissue into shimmering light, and beneath the skin Lin Yu watches the girl’s organs as if they were pages in a book—lungs that flutter but are mottled with shadowed stasis, a heart whose rhythm is thin and worn as if lived a lifetime, a liver and kidneys dulled and pitted as though with age—organ failure like that of an old body, not a girl of bloom.

He reaches out with his senses and finds the explanation: faint, foreign currents of extraordinary energy embedded in each organ, each current tuned to opposite principles that tear at one another until the organs collapse inward—an engineered cancellation, a woven pattern of doom.

Slowly, clinically, he draws those energies out with a thread of vitality from his own core, gathers them into his palm and examines their pattern until the reason is clear; this is no sickness, no accident—this is a curse fashioned to make a youth die as if aged.

When his diagnosis is complete, he seals the wound with a wash of life-force, the cut closing like water smoothing over polished stone, and the girl’s dress lies whole once more as if no hand had passed through it; he straightens and, voice flat, tells the room, “She died of a curse.”

Surprise ripples across faces; Cecilia’s hand comes up in a small, incredulous motion—“A curse?” she asks for everyone.

Lin Yu’s answer is quiet and precise. “A curse is one of the ways of heaven and earth.”

Arthur Wenton’s chest tightens; fury and disbelief war in his eyes. “Do not lecture me,” he snaps. “I am an ordinary man, but in the thirteen true ways there is no curse.”

Lin Yu’s gaze never flickers as he lets the question hang in the air, then dismisses the MP’s certainty with simple facts. “Have you not heard of the Shadow Duke, the thirteen blood families, or houses like the Francis? Do their extraordinary paths belong to any single one of the thirteen true ways?”

Arthur goes still, the colour draining from his face as the implication sinks in.

Robert steps between them, voice low and steadier, “Is ‘curse’ another new way of heaven and earth?”

Lin Yu folds his hands behind his back. “That is not my concern. I have completed my duty: I found the cause of death.”

He turns and walks out of the room toward the stairs.

Arthur’s voice cuts after him, raw and desperate: “Do you not hear me? No one leaves until my daughter’s killer is found.”

Lin Yu pauses on the stairs, and when he looks back, his eyes are cold. “Do you want the same funeral as your daughter?” he asks quietly.

Arthur sneers, lips thinning. “You extraordinaries think yourselves above us—remember, a gun ends you like any man.”

Lin Yu’s reply is calm, unblinking and edged like the blade he just used. “I am on the Way of Life. I can take bullets and not die; in that time, I will kill you and all your men, then take your family. Do you dare to gamble on that?”

Robert grips the back of a chair and moves to steady the situation. “Dr Yu Ling, do not be angry—MP Wenton speaks from grief.” He turns to Mary. “Mary, take Dr Yu Ling back to the Medical Department.”

Mary bows and falls into step beside Lin Yu; he nods once to Robert and follows her down, the crowd parting for them.

They pass into the street and climb into the carriage waiting at the curb; it starts as Mary settles inside.

Back at his office, Lin Yu wastes no time: he closes the door, centres his breath, and returns to the pattern of death runes he has been composing.

The final, ninth rune at Tier-Zero is stubborn, a knot of intent and anti-life sigils that must be coaxed into place.

He draws the line, breathes life into the ink of the void, and each rune hums once in reply.

One by one, he lifts them, threads them together with care, and the glyphs pulse as a single instrument.

When the nine runes align, the air sours and then sings; death-particles in the room converge, drawn like iron filings to a magnet, and from the centre a heart of blackened essence forms—small at first, then swelling as it begins to beat with its own terrible rhythm.

Lin Yu reaches out, and the Death Energy Extraordinary Heart folds inward, accepting his command; the seed of Tier-One blooms.

He feels the first true presence of the Way of Death take root inside the pattern he’s built, and a calm satisfaction settles over him as the breakthrough settles into place.