112: You want me to repent to these scumbags?

The elevator was ascending.

There was no floor indicator, only the sensation of weightlessness pressing down on their eardrums.

Chen Mo leaned against the elevator wall, looking down at his left shoulder.

The bandage there was already oozing black. It wasn't blood, but a kind of data residue similar to necrotic tissue.

"Does it hurt?" Su Qingxue stared at the wound, her knuckles white as she gripped her gun.

"Virtual pain is just a neural signal." Chen Mo moved his shoulder, the joints emitting a grating, acidic crackle. "As long as my brain isn't fried, I won't die."

"You know that's not what I'm asking about."

Su Qingxue looked up at the camera on the ceiling of the car.

"In reality, your body..."

"Is also bleeding."

Chen Mo interrupted her, his tone flat as if discussing someone else's affairs.

"That impostor is waking up. The higher my synchronization rate with it, the more the injuries I sustain here will materialize there."

"That lunatic Arthur..." Nightingale gritted her teeth, twirling the dagger in her hand. "He wants to trap your consciousness here first, and then use that perfect 'Container' to take over everything you have in reality."

"A perfect Container?"

Chen Mo scoffed, reaching for his cigarette pack, but finding nothing.

The fight just now had been too fierce; the cigarette pack had long since been tossed somewhere unknown.

"A piece of trash who can't even smoke doesn't deserve to be called perfect."

Ding—

The elevator stopped.

There was no smooth deceleration; instead, it was an abrupt stop that nearly threw the three of them into the ceiling.

The metal doors slid open slowly.

A musty, old paper smell wafted out.

Unlike the scent of blood or disinfectant from before.

The smell was heavy and oppressive.

It was like an Archives Office that hadn't opened its windows in hundreds of years.

"The Fourth Floor."

Chen Mo stepped out of the elevator, the sound of his boot soles crisp against the marble floor.

What lay before them was neither a maze nor a battlefield.

It was a massive circular hall.

Surrounding them were rows upon rows of towering mahogany cabinets, stretching up to the dark dome ceiling that was invisible to the eye.

The cabinets were densely packed with drawers.

Every drawer was vibrating, emitting a low buzzing sound.

In the center of the hall stood a high platform.

Seated on the platform was a... gigantic Puppet.

It wore judicial robes, a wig, and held a rusty gavel.

But its face was flat.

It had no features.

Only an extremely exaggerated crying face painted on with red paint.

:(

"Silence."

The Puppet had no mouth, yet the voice pressed down from all directions.

It was not an electronic synthesized voice.

It was a composite sound, a superposition of countless voices belonging to men and women, old and young.

Some were weeping over injustice, some were roaring in anger, and some were begging softly for mercy.

"Defendant Chen Mo, step forward to hear the verdict."

Boom!

The ground around the platform suddenly cracked open.

Dozens of iron cages rose up.

What was confined in the cages were not people.

They were corpses.

Some had shattered heads, some had holes ripped in their chests, and others had their necks twisted into pretzels.

Su Qingxue gasped, covering her mouth.

She recognized a few of them.

That one was the perpetrator of last month's serial murder case.

That one was the leader of the human organ trafficking gang.

And another... was the drug lord who had nearly killed her three years ago.

All these people had died by Chen Mo's hand.

"Deceased Number One, Cause of Death: Intracranial hemorrhage due to violent beating."

"Deceased Number Two, Cause of Death: Full-body comminuted fracture due to high fall."

"Deceased Number Three..."

The gavel in the Puppet's hand slammed down heavily.

Dong!

The entire hall trembled.

"Chen Mo, you abused private power, ignored the law, and slaughtered your own kind."

"Charge: Crimes Against Humanity."

"Verdict: Death Penalty."

As the words "Death Penalty" fell, the corpses in the iron cages suddenly opened their eyes.

They were entirely white.

They stretched their hands out of the cages, their withered fingers pointing toward Chen Mo in the center of the hall.

"A life for a life..."

"Come down and join us..."

"It hurts so much... Officer Chen, you should try it too..."

In that instant, countless malicious curses materialized into solid black chains, shooting toward Chen Mo from all directions!

"Watch out!"

Nightingale swung her dagger, slicing through two chains aimed at Chen Mo's throat.

But there were too many of them.

They were like a massive black spiderweb, covering everything as they descended.

Su Qingxue raised her gun and fired, but the bullets hitting the corpses were like striking a mud pit—they had no effect whatsoever.

"It's useless."

The Puppet's voice carried a sense of lofty pity.

"This is Karma of Sin."

"The more people you kill, the heavier the chains become."

"Chen Mo, kneel and repent."

The chains did not attack Nightingale or Su Qingxue; they had only one target.

Chen Mo was wrapped around the limbs by more than a dozen chains.

This was not a physical restraint.

The moment the chains touched his skin, a bone-chilling coldness drilled straight into his marrow.

That was the suffering these dead people endured while alive.

It was their desperation and fear right before death.

If it were an ordinary person, they would instantly have their sanity overwhelmed by this massive wave of negative emotion, turning into a drooling idiot.

Chen Mo did not move.

He allowed the chains to hoist him into mid-air.

His face was slightly flushed from the constriction, but his expression remained calm.

So calm that he almost wanted to laugh.

"Repent?"

He looked at the featureless Puppet on the platform, and his lips slowly curled into a smirk.

"You want me to repent to this bunch of trash?"

Snap!

A chain wrapped around his right arm suddenly cracked.

"You sentence me to death?"

The black light in Chen Mo's eyes surged—a darkness more pure and violent than the surrounding resentment.

"Are you worthy?"

"I didn't hold back when I killed them."

"Now that they've turned into ghosts..."

"I can still kill them again!"

Boom!

A black Scythe appeared out of thin air, tracing a cruel arc in the sky.

It didn't slice the chains.

Instead, it directly severed the arms reaching out from the cages, cutting them off at the root!

"Aaaah!!!"

Screams of agony echoed throughout the hall, one after another.

The corpses that had been cursing him now shrank desperately into the depths of their cages, as if they had just encountered a true devil.

"Silence! Silence!"

The Puppet seemed enraged, furiously slamming the gavel onto the platform.

"Incorrigible!"

"Execution! Immediate execution!"

Two massive black shadows suddenly leaped out from the darkness beneath the platform.

They were two monsters constructed from countless sheets of legal documents, wielding massive execution axes, swinging at Chen Mo from the left and right.

"Qingxue, the one on the left is yours!"

Chen Mo flipped in mid-air, broke free of the remaining chains, and used the momentum of his descent to slash the Scythe fiercely toward the head of the monster on the right.

"Understood!"

Su Qingxue took a deep breath; the fear in her eyes dissipated, replaced by determination.

She was a police officer.

Although this was a virtual world, since this was a judgment... she was the true enforcer of the law!

"Bang, bang, bang!"

Three bullets struck the monster's wrist joint in a precise triangular pattern.

The monster's movement stalled, its axe swung wide, smashing a large pit into the floor.

Nightingale's figure appeared behind the monster like a phantom, wrapping a grappling hook around its neck and pulling hard.

Crash!

The monster's head was violently ripped off, scattering into shredded paper fragments everywhere.

But this was not the end.

The paper fragments danced in the air, and the densely packed text on them suddenly glowed red.

The Criminal Law, The Law on Public Security Administration Punishments... Warm reminder: The website is about to be revised, which may cause loss of reading progress. Please save your "Bookshelf" and "Reading History" in time (screenshot saving is recommended). We apologize for any inconvenience!