Lines of death.

It was a rainy Thursday when Haruto found it. The sky hung heavy and gray, the streets smelled of wet asphalt, and his shoes squelched with every step. On a park bench, half-hidden under a soaked newspaper, lay a black notebook. No title, nothing marking it as special, but something about it drew him in. He picked it up, turning it over in his hands, noticing the weight. He opened it and found blank pages except for a first page that contained rules. Rules that made little sense, at first, about writing names and consequences.

At first, Haruto laughed, thinking it was a prank, some viral challenge he had not seen online yet. But curiosity took over. That night, alone in his room, he tested the notebook. He wrote the name of someone he barely remembered from class, Takashi Yamada. At first, nothing happened. But by morning, the news confirmed it. The person was dead. Heart attack. Doctors baffled. Strange circumstances. And Haruto knew. He knew the notebook worked.

Sleep stopped coming easily after that. Every face he had ever encountered, every person who had been cruel or careless, flashed in his mind. He started small, choosing targets he thought deserved it. But soon, the temptation grew. Every walk to school, every scrolling through news articles, made him wonder whose name he could write next.

He tried to stop. He really did. But the notebook had a pull, almost alive, that made it impossible. His friends noticed changes in him. Haruto became withdrawn. Smiles faded. Homework, once neat and precise, now sat in piles on his desk. And he could not tell anyone. No one could know. The consequences were too great.

Then there was Detective Satoshi Nakamura. Or at least, that is what everyone thought he was. He was not officially assigned, but he had a reputation, brilliant, patient, relentless. He began asking questions, connecting dots, noticing patterns others overlooked. Haruto watched from his window, heart pounding, as Nakamura visited crime scenes and interviewed witnesses. He was getting too close. Too close to the truth.

Haruto became meticulous. Every name had to be written carefully, every detail accounted for. Mistakes could give him away. Every step was planned. Sleep became dangerous. Shadows moved differently in his room. Every knock at the door made his heart jump. And the notebook seemed to whisper to him in his mind, demanding another name, another test of morality.

One night, Haruto made a mistake. He wrote a name he should not have. Someone innocent, someone he cared about, Aiko Fujimoto. The next morning, his chest tightened, his stomach turned. And the news confirmed the terrible truth. The consequence was real. The notebook was no longer a tool. It was a poison, and he was drowning in it.

He stared at it for hours, the black cover, the blank pages, the rules he had followed so carefully. He realized the only way to survive, to survive himself, was to stop. To never open it again. But even as he thought that, he knew the temptation would linger. The pull of power never fully left, waiting for the next mistake, the next name written.

Power, Haruto learned, did not feel like victory. It pressed down on his chest, heavy and suffocating. It felt like a silence after a scream, a weight that could crush him from the inside. And once he had held it, once he had tasted what it could do, he could never forget.

Haruto closed the notebook one last time, heart pounding. Silence filled the room. He knew the temptation would always linger, but for now, he chose life over power, finally free.