[Cloud City · Detention Center · Interrogation Room]
"Zhang Yunxiang. Male, thirty-two years old, self-media content creator, married. Admitted to assaulting the deceased Chen Wan on the night of the incident. Voluntarily confessed after being taken into custody."
Yin Wuwang looked up from the case file in his hands.
The interrogation room before him was small. The walls were a uniform gray, and the fluorescent tube overhead emitted a faint electrical hum. One iron table, two iron chairs. A dome-shaped surveillance camera mounted high in the corner operated silently, its red indicator light blinking on and off.
Zhang Yunxiang sat across the table, both hands flat on the iron surface, fingers unconsciously interlaced.
His condition was worse than Yin Wuwang had expected. Several days of detention had drained him completely. Stubble covered his jaw, his eye sockets were sunken, his lips cracked and peeling. The orange detention center t-shirt hung loose on his frame—he hadn't been particularly robust to begin with, and now he'd lost even more weight.
But what caught Yin Wuwang's attention most were his hands.
Those hands were trembling slightly. Not from cold—the interrogation room wasn't particularly chilly. It was a tremor that had accumulated over days, seeping out from the bones. The kind of reaction that only came when body and mind were under extreme pressure, on the verge of being overwhelmed. Yin Wuwang knew this trembling all too well—after all, his mother had once trembled just like this, unable to control herself as she held him tight through countless dark nights in the Demon Palace. Back then, he'd been too young to understand why she shook. Now, three thousand years later, he understood perfectly.
Fear. Helplessness. The weight of something too heavy to bear alone.
Yin Wuwang shifted his gaze from those trembling hands and made his first judgment: This man was not the killer who had strangled someone to death.
In three thousand years, he'd seen all manner of killers. In the cultivation world, there were demonic cultivators who'd slaughtered entire clans for a single pill, hypocrites who'd smiled while pushing people into bottomless chasms, honest men who'd snapped after being driven to the edge, and pure madmen who simply craved blood. Each type of killer had a different aura, but one thing was universal—someone who had killed, no matter how cowardly, always carried something irreversible in their eyes.
A mark left by crossing a certain line, from which there was no return.
Zhang Yunxiang's eyes held nothing of the sort.
His gaze was murky, confused—like an animal locked in an unfamiliar place, unable to tell north from south.
Little Deer Assistant 9527 provided supplementary information in Yin Wuwang's mind: "Zhang Yunxiang's character profile is contradictory. The original setting describes him as kind-hearted and soft, with everyone who knows him saying he'd never hurt anyone. But the plot then has him commit impulsive murder. The original author probably wanted to write a complex character but didn't have the skill to pull it off."
Yin Wuwang mentally connected this information to Collapse Point Two, which they'd seen on the television. The original author had forced a kind, good person to become a murderer, creating a complete disconnect between character and action. But since this world needed to be repaired, this man surely held key clues that would connect the storyline.
He pulled out the iron chair and sat down. The sound of chair legs scraping against the concrete floor was particularly harsh in the enclosed space.
Yin Wuwang didn't rush to speak. Instead, he spread the case file on the table and flipped through it page by page. Neither fast nor slow, pausing two seconds on each page.
Zhang Yunxiang's gaze followed the moving pages. His Adam's apple bobbed.
This was intentional on Yin Wuwang's part.
In the cultivation world, there was an interrogation technique called "grinding the heart"—no torture, no pressing questions, just sitting quietly across from someone, using silence to crush their psychological defenses. Three thousand years ago, he'd used it countless times in the dungeons of the Wuwang Sea. Extremely effective. The more guilty someone felt, the less they could endure this scrutinizing silence.
Sure enough, less than half a minute later, Zhang Yunxiang spoke first. The silence had done its work.
"Are you... new?" His voice was hoarse, carrying the dryness of days without much talking. "The officer before wasn't you."
"Name's Jiang Ye, Major Crimes Unit." Yin Wuwang closed the file, his tone casual as if chatting. "I've taken over your case."
Zhang Yunxiang's body shrank back against the chair, as if this news made him even more uneasy.
"Major Crimes?" He repeated the words slowly, as if uncertain. "Is it... serious?"
"A person died." Yin Wuwang looked directly into his eyes. "What do you think?"
Zhang Yunxiang lowered his head and said nothing. His shoulders hunched forward, as if trying to make himself smaller. The fluorescent light overhead buzzed faintly, filling the silence between them.
Yin Wuwang let the quiet stretch. He'd learned long ago that silence was its own kind of pressure—sometimes more effective than any question. In the cultivation world, he'd broken demonic cultivators who could withstand days of torture simply by sitting across from them without speaking, letting their own guilt devour them from the inside.
Zhang Yunxiang lasted about thirty seconds before his breathing grew uneven. His fingers twitched against the iron table.
Good. The man was already on edge. Already cracking.
Yin Wuwang reached into the case file and pulled out a photograph, sliding it slowly across the iron table. The image showed Chen Wan collapsed in the back alley—limbs sprawled at unnatural angles, a dark pool spreading beneath his head, the flash of the camera washing out the color of his skin.
Zhang Yunxiang's eyes fixed on the photograph. His face went pale, almost gray under the fluorescent lights, and for a moment he looked like he might be sick.
"Tell me what happened that night."
[End of V2_Chapter 10]
Next: A wife's affair, a mysterious woman, and words that were spoken too fluently to be real memories.