“Oh, not tall, a bit chubby.” Logan Sullivan repeated what he had just said, slowly, leaning back against the chair, his hands crossed on the table. “So, is it male or female, old or young?”

Everyone present except Quinn Barnes knew what a starving ghost looked like—it had nothing to do with being male or female, old or young, it wasn’t even human-shaped: emaciated, with a bulging belly, taller than a person, and upper limbs like a mantis.

Julian West and Charles Gray immediately looked at her with puzzled expressions. Soulwarden, as always, radiated his unparalleled, terrifying presence. Quinn Barnes, after all, was inexperienced and not very shrewd. She felt as if countless eyes were staring at her, all with indifferent expressions, all mocking her, all aware of the secret she thought she had hidden so well.

This made her panic.

Logan Sullivan lowered his voice even further, almost to a whisper. He said, “What I said earlier was a lie. Human memory does get blurry, especially when frightened and unprepared. That’s why sometimes eyewitness accounts aren’t accurate. That thing scared you, and your brain decided it couldn’t handle the fear, so for self-protection, you had a momentary blank in your memory. Then your imagination automatically filled in that blank, so what you blurted out was just what you imagined… the thing you fear most.”

Only now did Charles Gray belatedly realize that what he was experiencing wasn’t some “routine questioning,” but a real interrogation. And he, foolish and sensitive, didn’t know exactly what was going on, but he had a vague sense of foreboding.

He was almost suffocating under the pressure of the unmoving Soulwarden on one side and the relentless pace of the interrogation.

Quinn Barnes’s face turned from deathly pale to ashen.

Logan Sullivan withdrew the gentle smile from his face. “Can you tell me now, why did you want to jump from the eighth floor this morning?”

Quinn Barnes’s chest heaved violently.

“You didn’t sleep at all last night, did you? When you ran up to the rooftop, was there a moment when you thought, if you just went through with dying, you wouldn’t be afraid of anything anymore, that whatever happened before could all be wiped away?” Logan Sullivan curled his lips, showing an expression that was half a sneer, half a sigh. “Little girl, I’m a few years older than you, so I’ll call you a kid—many kids your age think they’re not afraid of death. Because you’re young, you don’t understand what real death is, especially since you’re such a… strong-willed, decisive, impulsive young person. You think you’re not afraid of death at all.”

Quinn Barnes instinctively retorted, but her voice was very weak: “You… what gives you the right to say that? How do you know others don’t understand what death is? I know that feeling, I’ve seen it with my own eyes! Someone who was talking just the day before, in the blink of an eye, curled up somewhere you can’t see… heartbeat stopped, breathing stopped, slowly… slowly growing cold, turning into a corpse, something that’s no longer a person. You can never find out where she went, never see her again, never…”

“Quinn Barnes.” Logan Sullivan interrupted her. “What you understand and fear isn’t death, it’s separation. You just can’t accept your grandmother suddenly leaving you.”

The entire interrogation room fell silent. Quinn Barnes’s body trembled like a fallen leaf caught in an autumn wind.

Logan Sullivan spoke again: “That night, at the school gate, the shadow following your classmate that you saw—was she very old, wearing cotton clothes, with a wig bun on her head?”

As soon as he said this, everyone’s expression changed from confusion to shock.

Quinn Barnes let out a short, hoarse scream, her features twisted into a terrifying expression.

Has she gone mad? Charles Gray thought in shock. He didn’t understand what was happening. When he turned to look at his boss, he saw Logan Sullivan’s fingers unconsciously rubbing together, as if he desperately wanted to hold a cigarette in his mouth, trying hard to restrain himself.

Logan Sullivan’s gaze was deep and calm. The light shone on his face and his now-wrinkled but still snow-white shirt. He suddenly looked a bit like someone from another world.

Logan Sullivan took a photo from his pocket—a memorial portrait of an old lady, kind-faced, smiling gently, looking peaceful. Charles Gray glanced at it and immediately recognized her as the old lady who had rushed to shield Quinn Barnes at her hospital bed in the most dangerous moment.

Logan Sullivan pushed the photo in front of Quinn Barnes, his ten fingers pressed together, propping up his chin, which now had a bit of stubble from working overtime: “This is Mrs. Yvonne Warren, born in the spring of 1940, passed away at the end of last month. Cause of death: accidental ingestion of oral hypoglycemic medication.”

Quinn Barnes stared wide-eyed at the memorial photo. Charles Gray almost thought her eyes would pop out of their sockets.

Logan Sullivan continued, “You grew up with your grandmother, had a very close relationship. You used the Reincarnation Sundial for her, giving her half your lifespan. After that, her mental faculties gradually declined, and you were always the one taking care of her. My colleague told me that your online purchase records are almost all for elderly products. And according to the doctor, even after her mental decline, she never showed aggression toward anyone—so can you tell me, what made you think your grandmother would harm you after she died? Why were you so afraid of her?”

Quinn Barnes seemed to have turned into a human-shaped wax figure.

Logan Sullivan’s voice sounded even gentler, as if telling a bedtime story to a child: “Why aren’t you talking? Quinn Barnes, I’ll ask you one last time. If you don’t tell the truth now, you’ll never have another chance in this life. You want to be free, but you never will be. A lie is always a lie. Once you take it on rashly, you’ll never be able to put it down.”

Today, someone… someone had said almost the same thing to him.

Quinn Barnes’s dull gaze slowly lifted.

Logan Sullivan leaned forward slightly, looking into her eyes, and said, word by word, “My colleague told me that two people linked by the Reincarnation Sundial will live and die together. Now that your grandmother is dead and you’re still alive, it’s likely she died before her time. I’ve never understood how that could happen—was it a mistake by the underworld, or did someone illegally detain her soul?”

“Later, I realized how stupid I was. There’s another possibility: the Reincarnation Sundial that was connected to her life was accidentally severed. Yes, in other words, the person who gave her life… killed her with their own hands.”

“Elderly people with dementia are like children—helpless, greedy, they like to grab little snacks left around the house. Tell me, who put that bottle of hypoglycemic pills next to the candy box she often ate from?”

The interrogation room was so quiet you could hear a pin drop.

Within a few seconds, Quinn Barnes’s face first showed extreme terror, like a balloon being blown bigger and bigger, then, at the peak, it suddenly burst… and her expression, unexpectedly, became calm.

Charles Gray held his breath.

He heard Quinn Barnes’s hoarse voice break the dead silence. The girl said softly, “It was me.”

Chapter 20 Reincarnation Sundial Nineteen …

“When I was little, she woke me up in the morning, braided my hair, and took me to school. I was always sleepy, so every day while she did my hair, I’d lean against her and doze off a bit more. When she finished, she’d gently pat the back of my head and say, ‘Wake up, little sleepyhead.’ Then she’d take me to school, telling me stories all the way—from Sun Wukong fighting the White Bone Demon, to Zhu Bajie eating watermelon, the whole saga of the Sui and Tang dynasties was in her head. She told it better than the storytellers on the radio. My parents didn’t care about me. When people asked who I liked best, I always said, my grandmother.”

Quinn Barnes ignored everyone else and just kept talking.

Logan Sullivan finally took out a cigarette from his pocket, fiddling with it between his fingers without saying a word. Charles Gray, however, asked in a daze, “So later… you didn’t like her anymore?”

Quinn Barnes looked at him deeply. “Yes. I remember you said you’d give your life to bring your grandmother back, but your family doesn’t have a Reincarnation Sundial, so you’re really lucky.”

Charles Gray stared at her blankly. After a while, he started struggling to find some reason for what he couldn’t understand: “Did you think she was a burden, that she brought you too much trouble, life was too…”

Quinn Barnes’s eyes were so red they looked like they might bleed, but her gaze was numb and cold, with an indescribable cruelty—almost inhuman, yet only a human could have it. She cut Charles Gray off: “Don’t insult me with such stupid reasons.”

Charles Gray’s face flushed red.