Charles Gray was probably still half-asleep. While everyone else was pretending to be wooden statues, he did something incredibly bold—he mustered up his courage and looked up at the other person.

He saw that the “person” was tall and slender, completely wrapped in a black robe. Hands and feet were nowhere to be seen, and the face was hidden beneath a shroud of black mist. Apart from a mass of darkness, nothing about the figure was discernible.

The person first stopped at the doorway, gave Logan Sullivan a distant cupped-fist salute, the long robe sleeves sweeping over the tops of his feet, and said, “Sorry to disturb you.” Seeing Logan Sullivan nod back politely, he then unhurriedly walked inside.

Logan Sullivan picked up a yellow talisman paper, lit it, and caught the ashes in a cup filled with hot tea. The ashes quickly dissolved into the hot water, and the steaming tea instantly seemed to cool, losing all its warmth.

At the same time, a steaming cup appeared out of thin air in the black-robed person’s hand.

“No rush, it’s freezing cold out there. Reaper, please have a seat,” Logan Sullivan said. “Have some water to warm your hands.”

Watching him burn the talisman and serve tea, Charles Gray couldn’t help but think of the words “burning paper” in his mind. Then, his hypersensitive nerves caught onto Logan Sullivan’s choice of words.

“Freezing cold”? Charles Gray wondered, it’s the height of summer—how could it be “freezing cold”? Where did this person come from?

Suddenly, a thought flashed through his mind, making the intern shudder violently.

He remembered something his grandmother had told him when he was a child—before an old person “set out on the road,” you had to make sure they were well-fed and warmly dressed, or else on the road to the underworld, with no one to accompany them, the cold could chill a person’s very soul.

Could it be...

The black-robed Reaper took a sip and said, “Good tea, thank you.”

Then he walked past Charles Gray and sat down in the chair opposite Logan Sullivan. As he passed by, Charles Gray caught a whiff of something.

It wasn’t the putrid smell they’d encountered in the hospital—far from unpleasant, it was even faintly fragrant, very subtle. Yet, the moment he inhaled it, Charles Gray was inexplicably reminded of the depths of winter outside the Greater Khingan Mountains.

It was the scent of freshly fallen snow after a night-long storm, the first breath of air you take when you open the door in the morning—a smell that seemed to come from endless, everlasting snow, pure and cold to the extreme, mixed with the distant, dying fragrance of some withering flower.

After just a moment in that air, your sense of smell would be numbed by the cold, leaving only the instinct to breathe, unable to distinguish anything else.

This Reaper spoke softly and gently, with the refined air of a pedantic scholar from a period drama. If someone hit or scolded him, he’d probably just mutter, “How unreasonable.” Logically, aside from the black mist obscuring his face, which was a bit eerie, there was nothing particularly unusual about him. Yet as Charles Gray gradually woke up, he couldn’t shake off a deep, bone-chilling sense of fear.

That fear was utterly baseless and inexplicable.

Yet it came from the soul.

Charles Gray finally understood why the ghosts in the hallway acted like mice seeing a cat when they saw this person.

“He’s from the southern hemisphere, and it’s winter there…” Charles Gray closed his eyes, not daring to look at the Reaper again, desperately trying to convince himself with scientific reasoning.

There were four people—living and dead—in the office, not counting the unconscious black cat, so Logan Sullivan poured four cups of hot tea. But even as the aroma of tea filled the office, neither Julian West nor Charles Gray dared to step forward to take a cup. Only Logan Sullivan sat steadily behind his desk; even when the Reaper entered, he didn’t get up to greet him, his seat so steady that everyone—human and ghost alike—in the building admired him.

Not until the Reaper had calmly finished his tea did Logan Sullivan finally stand up. “Come on, I’ll take you to the interrogation room next door.”

The Reaper silently followed behind him. Amidst the terrified silence of people and ghosts, he began to chat casually: “I see the Lord’s complexion isn’t good. It’s probably because you’ve been troubled by us and overworked these days. You should take care of your health.”

Logan Sullivan waved his hand lazily. “It’s nothing, pulling an all-nighter or two won’t kill me. If I die, that’s fine too—I’ll just go to the underworld and keep working as a civil servant.”

The Reaper disapproved. “Life and death are serious matters. The Lord shouldn’t joke about them.”

Logan Sullivan just grinned carelessly, unconcerned, and pushed open the door to the interrogation room.

The “Quinn Barnes” locked inside had “woken up” at some point. Ear-piercing screams kept coming from within, but the moment the Reaper entered, they abruptly stopped.

“Quinn Barnes” saw the Reaper and looked like a hen with its neck wrung, trembling all over, staring at the doorway in utter terror. After a moment, she suddenly rolled her eyes and collapsed limply.

Bringing up the rear, Charles Gray felt something rush straight at his face. He hurriedly stepped back, and the Reaper raised an arm in front of him. Charles Gray saw the huge robe sleeve stir up a wave of blackness in the air, and then a hazy ghostly figure appeared—a woman, with long hair, wearing a tattered dress, her face twisted and contorted, wailing incessantly. In an instant, she was crushed, turning into a wisp of black smoke that was sucked into the Reaper’s sleeve.

“Obstinate and unrepentant, still trying to possess another. Deserves to be destroyed,” the Reaper said calmly, his gentle and courteous tone no different from when he’d greeted and thanked them earlier.

This time, Charles Gray shivered for real.

Logan Sullivan acted as if nothing had happened, stepping aside and gesturing for them to enter. At some point, four chairs had been set up in the interrogation room. Quinn Barnes, her face deathly pale, was strapped to the other side of the table.

Julian West pulled a spray bottle from his pocket, walked up, and—treating beauty as bones, showing no mercy—sprayed Quinn Barnes’s face with cold water. When she slowly came to, he put on a stern, Buddha-like face and said, “Police. Answer the questions truthfully, or bear the consequences.”

Quinn Barnes’s eyes were dazed. After a violent shiver, her terrified gaze shifted to Charles Gray and Logan Sullivan. Recognizing them, she was about to speak when she realized she was tied to the chair. Frightened, she looked down at the rope binding her. “Wh-what happened to me?”

Compared to Julian West, Logan Sullivan, who could appear on TV as an official spokesperson, was much more pleasant to look at, and his tone was very gentle. He sat next to Julian West and asked Quinn Barnes, “The person who attacked you and killed your classmate has already been caught. Now we need your help to confirm some details and make a routine statement, is that okay?”

This didn’t feel like a routine statement at all—it was more like a three-way trial.

Quinn Barnes wasn’t stupid. After a brief pause, she quickly calmed down and asked warily, “Then why did you tie me up?”

Logan Sullivan raised an eyebrow and snapped his fingers. The ropes on Quinn Barnes seemed to respond to his voice, automatically falling away.

The girl was startled by this, but then pretended to be calm, raising her head to meet Logan Sullivan’s gaze. She rubbed her wrists, which bore marks from the ropes, and instinctively edged back, putting on a brave front. “Since you’ve already caught the culprit, what else do you want to ask me? I’ve told you everything I know. What time is it? I want to go home.”

Julian West slammed the table with a bang, playing the role of the unreasonable bad cop to perfection. “Just answer the questions and cut the nonsense. What, are you trying to cover for the criminal? What’s your motive? What’s your relationship with the culprit?”

Quinn Barnes was startled by this fierce approach.

As Julian West put on a stern face, Logan Sullivan pretended to gently press his shoulder, then turned to Quinn Barnes with a kind expression. “At 10:20 p.m. on August 31st, you met the victim, Lu Ruomei, at the school gate. You saw the thing following her—we’ve already confirmed all this. The case is basically clear now, but I personally have a few more questions. For example, when did you first start seeing them? Was it after you used that old sundial from your hometown—the one engraved with the Wheel of Return?”

Quinn Barnes shot a quick glance at Julian West, then, not wanting to suffer in the moment, lowered her eyes, nervously bit her lip, and quickly nodded.

Logan Sullivan’s long fingers tapped lightly on the table. “It’s said that the Eternal Sundial is set on a base made of the Three-Life Stone, with the scales of a black fish from the River of Forgetfulness inlaid on the back. It can bring the dead back to life, pulling those who have passed away back into the world of the living. But using a living person’s lifespan to exchange for the dead is like sticking your own hand into the underworld… From then on, the worlds of yin and yang are superimposed in your eyes, aren’t they?”

Quinn Barnes’s shoulders trembled slightly. She stared at Logan Sullivan’s fingers and nodded again in silence.

Logan Sullivan leaned back in his chair.