During the family meeting convened by Fushimi Roku, Minamoto Tamako died twice more, with the second layer of the dream realm being even worse than she had imagined.
After helping the young Roku escape from the attic, a door appeared before her. She didn’t rush to enter, but instead called Fushimi Roku first, chatted a little, and then pushed the door open.
This time, Minamoto Tamako was finally not a cat, because the cat died.
According to Big Roku, the cat was killed by the lady of the house, who smashed it to death right in front of him.
In the second layer of the dream realm, young Roku had grown up and was now twenty-four years old. He studied law in college for four years, took a year for an internship, another year for the bar exam, and received his lawyer’s license, becoming a practicing lawyer at a very young age.
In Minamoto Tamako’s impression, lawyers are elite professionals, just like the gold buttons of Japan. Lawyers are notoriously arrogant, threatening lawsuits that can bankrupt you. Even the underworld dares not provoke them lightly; in Europe and America, the social status of lawyers is even higher, especially those from big law firms or criminal defense lawyers who earn millions in US dollars annually and can rise to the top of high society by handling just one case a year.
However, the lawyer industry at East University didn’t seem to be like that.
They resembled invisible people, only active on short videos, performing flashy dances, discussing popular cases, or live-streaming to offer legal advice... ordinary people, if they don’t break the law or care about legal issues, might never encounter them in their lifetime.
It’s no exaggeration to say that before 2015, there wasn’t a true criminal defense lawyer from East University. Take the famous Simpson case in the United States, where the criminal defense lawyer secured his acquittal—it’s inconceivable that such a thing could happen at East University.
In first-tier cities, the monthly income for a newly hired salaried lawyer is around 8,000 to 15,000 yuan. As work experience and business capability improve, the income gradually increases; in second-tier cities, salaries are halved; in third-tier cities, lawyers are usually commission-based or self-employed with their own studios, typically without base pay or with very low base pay, relying entirely on case resources for income.
A newly entered commission-based lawyer without stable case resources will have a very unstable income, which might not even support basic living.
Roku was a commission-based lawyer, and the law firm he joined was heartless, offering a monthly base salary of only eight hundred. To increase his income, he had to actively seek out cases himself.
Although he was very poor at the time, there’s no doubt that he lived a fulfilling life, as after 2015, the era of true criminal defense lawyers at East University had finally arrived.
The criminal defense field was a bloody battlefield in those days, even reaching the courts. The industry divided into various schools of thought like the ’die-hard school’, ’red-top school’, ’collusion school’, ’formalism school’, etc. Updates are released by novel{f}ire.net
Of course, the criminal defense lawyer mentioned here isn’t Fushimi Roku himself.
In his two years of practice, he took on four cases involving criminal defense lawyers being arrested for their practice, which instilled in him a deep respect for the law.
In this extremely realistic dream realm, there were no twisted humanoid monsters or supernaturally strong women; everyone spoke amiably, and any unruly or unreasonable clients would be escorted out by security.
So where did the danger come from?
At present, Minamoto Tamako is hiding in a bathroom stall in a single apartment, covering her mouth and not daring to breathe loudly. The sound of relentless chopping comes from the kitchen, while a strong metallic scent of blood fills the living room. She cracks the door open and sees a trail of blood dragged across the living room tiles.
This was already the third person.
She had been lingering in the second layer of the dream realm for about ten days, spending most of the time hiding in Fushimi Roku’s house... According to her observations, every three days, Fushimi Roku would bring a body home and dispose of it.
That’s right, the danger came from "Young Fushimi Roku" in the second layer.
He killed his employer, dismembered the body, used chemical agents like drain cleaner to dissolve the bones, and then buried the solution in the deep mountains.
Just like in the famous movie "American Psycho," during the day Fushimi Roku was the genteel lawyer, young and successful, taking and winning numerous cases; but by night, he became a serial killer, eliminating everyone he disliked.
The mood indicator above his head was perpetually black, irrespective of how much money he made or good things happened to him; even if he was laughing, the mood indicator remained as stagnant as dead water, staying black without a single ripple.
Minamoto Tamako had tracked him and was exposed twice, subsequently being killed by Fujimura-kun.
For her, this was a terrible experience, akin to her prior experience in Miyazaki Shizuka’s consultation room.
Fortunately, this was just a dream; Fujimura-kun hadn’t acted out his dream-based thoughts. Minamoto Tamako could tell from his crude methods... in reality, Fujimura-kun couldn’t possibly have the chance to kill a second person, for he would be exposed by the skyrocketing electrical meter right after the first murder.
But this also indirectly indicated that Fujimura-kun’s psychological state was deteriorating beyond repair, and he might very well kill those ’he deemed guilty’ without any psychological burden during the act.
If left unchecked, there was a real risk that, in reality, Fujimura-kun might become like Sister Chihime, killing everywhere in the name of justice!