Desperate people, accept the seed of my soul!

Chenxi City Police Department, Top Floor Confidential Conference Room.

Han Qiming sat in the main seat, flipping through the stack of red files marked "Top Secret" in front of him.

Beside him stood the core of power in Chenxi City: Mayor Wen Guangping, Deputy Mayor Lin Zhenshan, and Police Bureau Chief Zheng Guofeng.

"The situation is worse than I imagined." Han Qiming slowly raised his head. "This is not a simple case of post-traumatic stress disorder, nor is it some kind of large-scale psychological panic. We seem to be facing a... plague on the level of the soul."

Zheng Guofeng was the first to speak, his voice sounding hoarse and tired.

"Director Han, this is a report on the current status of the law enforcement system after the Li Rui case." Zheng Guofeng pushed a list to the center of the table. "As of yesterday, a total of 52 people within the city's security system have exhibited seriously abnormal behavior."

"The vast majority of them were commandos, special investigation agents, and traffic police who participated in the operation at Yunxiao Mansion that night."

Zheng Guofeng paused for a moment, then continued, "The main symptom is an extreme tendency towards violence, but this violence is clearly purposeful."

……

Han Qiming closed the list and asked, "Director Zheng, on the night of Li Rui's arrest, you weren't in the core command center, nor did you have access to firsthand footage from the scene, right?"

"Yes." Zheng Guofeng gave a wry smile. "Because of my guarantee for Li Rui, I was excluded from the command structure that night. But precisely because of this, I became one of the few people in the bureau who remained 'sober'."

……

Wen Guangping began, "The spread among ordinary citizens is even more troublesome. In the past two days, 37 extreme cases of 'violence against violence' have occurred among residents around Yunxiao Mansion, especially those who directly witnessed the dark red light on the top floor of the building that night."

"An accountant who wouldn't even dare kill a chicken could stab a thief to death with a shard of glass and then calmly declare to the police that he was 'burning away sins.' That's absurd."

Lin Zhenshan added, "We organized a team of experts to conduct brain scans on these individuals with abnormalities. The results showed that all infected individuals had organic changes in the prefrontal cortex of their brains."

"Simply put, the areas of their bodies responsible for moral judgment and impulse control have been reshaped. This is not just psychological suggestion, but a physical rewriting. The expert panel concluded that it is irreversible. The people who have been changed can never go back."

The meeting room fell into an even deeper silence.

Han Qiming broke the silence: "These situations are still all inferences at the moment, and we need to find further evidence, so I arranged an experiment in advance."

Han Qiming projected a previously unreleased video recording onto the screen. It was a control experiment conducted three days earlier in a prison called "Black Rock" in the province.

"We recruited 30 death row inmates and serious offenders. They had committed numerous crimes, including murder, rape, and fraud. We chose them because they had the deepest understanding of 'crime.' We divided them into six groups of five, and each group was given different types of materials related to Li Rui's self-immolation."

Six monitoring windows are playing simultaneously on the screen.

The first group consists of five prisoners sitting in front of a high-definition monitor.

They were watching the complete original record of Li Rui's final transformation into a dark red rain of light.

Lin Zhenshan, Zheng Guofeng, and Wen Guangping stared intently at the monitoring video of the experiment.

In just three minutes, a chilling scene unfolded in the laboratory.

A prisoner who had previously killed countless people froze the moment he saw that blood-gold light flash across the screen.

His pupils contracted sharply at first, then he slowly knelt down, covered his chest with his hands, and burst into tears.

A mixture of ecstasy and remorse appeared on his face.

Within just ten minutes, four out of the five people in the group developed highly similar symptoms.

They sat together, murmuring in a hollow yet devout tone: "Fire...fire is coming."

The results of the other groups were also presented on the screen: three people in the blurred image group showed mild symptoms, two people in the still photo group showed mood swings, while no one in the text description group, audio group, and blank control group showed any abnormal reactions.

"As you can see," Han Qiming swiped the screen, "the infection rate of the high-definition video group is as high as 80%, while the infection rate of the audio group and the text description group is zero."

"This confirms a fact: this pollution is a cognitive meme that spreads through 'visual' means. In the instant of his self-immolation, Li Rui 'encoded' his will of judgment into it. Only by witnessing that light can one trigger a resonance deep within the soul."

Han Qiming pointed to an outlier in the data chart: "But the most interesting finding is that not everyone will be infected."

"In the high-definition video, there was a prisoner who was completely unresponsive. We went back to his psychological file and found that he had an extreme form of antisocial personality disorder and had no concept of 'justice,' 'good and evil,' or 'guilt.'"

"This shows that Li Rui's spark is selective. It only resonates with the 'judgment tendency' that is already present in the soul of the viewer. It is a mirror and also an amplifier."

"If you have even a trace of obsession with justice, it will amplify that obsession infinitely until it burns away your reason and turns you into a second Li Rui."

Lin Zhenshan gasped: "So, those victims... were precisely targeted and killed by this supernatural power because they possessed a sense of justice?"

"That's right." Han Qiming turned off the screen, and the conference room returned to darkness. "This power, while erasing the enemy's free will, is also rewriting the logic of this world's order."

"If we don't stop it, within six months, the entire city, and even the entire province, will become a group of walking judges. At that time, the law will be a piece of waste paper, and everyone will be burning others to death in their own sense of 'justice'."

Han Qiming stood up and took out a document stamped with a gold lacquer seal from his briefcase.

That was the final ruling from the Star Federation National Security Agency.

"Given that the abnormal pollution caused by the Li Rui case has reached the highest level of safety threat, the state has decided to formally activate the 'Emergency Order on Comprehensive Control of Visual Information Related to Li Rui'."