The Murder of God in Modern European Intellectual History (23,000 characters)

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The Murder of God in Modern European Intellectual History

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[Note] This article is composed based on the author's personal research, reading, and reflection, and the author is not an expert in the fields covered herein. In creating this content, I have utilized references to publicly available materials and information gathering, organization, and fact-checking using AI, which has become common in recent years; however, these are merely auxiliary means to aid understanding and do not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or currency of the information provided. In addition to introducing information that can be verified as fact, this article includes metaphorical expressions, hypothetical reasoning, and personal interpretations and re-readings. These are not intended to assert any specific position or conclusion, but rather to provide material for the reader's own thought. Please ensure you make your own final judgments and interpretations after consulting primary sources and other perspectives.

Prologue: The Request

That day, Yuri Arnold Thorne was off duty.

The communication came in late in the afternoon. On the screen was the face of a woman who looked to be in her early thirties. She had eyes as cool as a calculator. Joan Eunice Smith. A pillar of the theater, and a person who was once an old millionaire named Johann Sebastian Bach Smith. By transferring her brain into the body of a secretary, she avoided death, and now sits at the center of the theater, housing a seasoned consciousness within the appearance of a young woman. Her overbearing personality did not change even after changing bodies.

"Thorne. I have a job for you," Joan said.

"I'm off duty," Thorne said.

"I know. That's why I called."

Thorne thought for a moment. There was no room to argue with that logic.

It was Joan who handed over the request form. Before Thorne broke the seal, she said,

"I cannot tell you the name of the client."

"And the source of the payment?" Thorne asked.

"Same."

"I'm off duty."

"I've already heard that."

"What is the deadline for the investigation?"

"There isn't one. However, the investigation will end the moment you reach the truth."

The secret society to which Yuri Arnold Thorne belonged, known as "The Theater," was an organization that breathed beneath the very abyss of the stage apparatus called history. While official history performed stories of heroes, revolutions, and progress, The Theater read a different script. It was an organization that dealt with the inexplicable incidents lurking within the history of civilization. Thorne possessed a unique ability. He could freely manifest his astral body and travel across the walls of time to past eras. However, The Theater had strict discipline. One must not interfere with the past. Actions that would alter history were prohibited. His role was merely to observe, collect testimony, and write reports.

Thorne broke the seal. Only one line was written. Joan had already shifted her gaze away from the screen.

"Investigate who killed God."

At first, Thorne took this request half as a joke. However, as he read through the materials, he gradually became serious. There was a strange commonality in the intellectual history of modern Europe. Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud. Although they belonged to different fields, they were spoken of as individuals who had done the same thing as a result.

God is dead.

Could it be that this was not someone's metaphor, but the trace of a historical event? If it were an incident, there must have been a culprit.

Thorne's intuition pointed to one person from the very beginning.

Friedrich Nietzsche.

He began his time investigation.

1. The Incident

In 1883, God was discovered to be dead. The location was first in Germany, and then it was scattered across various places around the world. That in itself was not surprising. After all, since God was omnipresent, his corpse must also have been omnipresent.

The incident seemed simple. God is dead. Then who killed him?

Detective Yuri Arnold Thorne accepted this question as the most significant deicide case in the history of thought. The records lined up before him spanned the entirety of religion, philosophy, science, politics, literature, theology, and the history of civilization. Modern people speak of the death of God as if it were an established fact. But was that death truly a natural one? Or did someone intentionally kill God? Thorne's investigation begins, heading toward the center of modern thought.

2. The Detective

Yuri Arnold Thorne continued to pursue the culprit who killed God. His investigation began not as a mere analysis of metaphors, but as a criminal investigation into the history of spirit, thought, and religion itself since the modern era. He was not just reading the words in books. He treated concepts cited like epitaphs, falsified letters, heroized thinkers, exploited religions, and mass-produced myths all as evidence.

For Thorne, deicide was not an abstract concept. If there was a culprit, there must have been a motive. If there was a motive, there must have been accomplices. If there were accomplices, then money, authority, resentment, jealousy, inferiority, ideological ambition, or the spirit of the times must have been lurking there. That is what he thought. And he was convinced from the start that there could be no lone offender in a crime of such magnitude.

3. Preliminary Investigation: Luther

However, as the investigation progressed, Thorne discovered that there were traces even before the nineteenth century. God was discovered as a corpse in 1883, but it was possible that he had received the fatal wound much earlier.

Martin Luther. Born 1483. He was a reformer who denounced the corruption of the Catholic Church and advocated for salvation by faith alone. He did not try to kill God. Rather, he was a person who tried to protect God. However, that attempt at defense resulted in damaging God's authority in a different way.

Luther despaired that the Jews would not convert to Christianity, and in his later years, he wrote harsh anti-Semitic works. In its theological background lies supersessionism. That is, the understanding that God effectively lost his covenant with the Jews and that the promise was transferred to a new people called the Church.

However, Thorne saw a contradiction here. The covenant God made with Abraham was supposed to be eternal. To claim that this eternal covenant was revoked due to human faithlessness is equivalent to implicitly declaring that God is a being who cannot keep His promises. In attempting to defend God, Luther undermined God's reliability.

Furthermore, his writings were utilized by later anti-Semitic movements, especially the Nazis. Moreover, this was not a falsification, but rather his own words were quoted directly, which carries a different weight than the case of Nietzsche, whose words were later distorted.

"Luther tried to protect God, but ended up undermining Him. Is that a crime?" Thorne said to Horst, the registrar.

Horst thought for a moment before answering.

"If the intent and the result do not match, the theater's rules treat it as a preliminary offense."

"Good intentions are not an indulgence," Thorne said. "History has proven that."

Thorne added Luther to the margins of the suspect list. As someone who had been entering and leaving the scene before this incident. He is a suspect for a preliminary offense.

4. The Philosophical Reconstructors

Thorne expanded the scope of his investigation further, turning his eyes to German philosophy before the nineteenth century. There were thinkers there who did not destroy God, but rather tried to redefine Him within the framework of philosophy. Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

While Kant rejected the proof of God's existence through reason, he assumed God as a postulate of morality. Fichte reinterpreted God not as a personal deity, but as a moral order. Schelling envisioned the Absolute as the source of nature and spirit, and Hegel understood God as the Absolute Spirit unfolding itself within history.

Thorne realizes an important point here. They did not deny God. Rather, they absorbed God into their philosophical systems and tried to reconstruct Him metaphysically. In other words, they were not the culprits of the God-murder, but were closer to a philosophical reconstruction team for God.

However, at the same time, this redefinition opens up another possibility. When God is moved outside of religion and converted into a philosophical concept, God's personality gradually becomes diluted. As a result, later thinkers could further abstract God and eventually deem Him unnecessary.

Thorne understood this lineage as a flow of intellectual history following Luther's Reformation. Luther shook the authority of the Church, German Idealism philosophized God, and nineteenth-century thinkers replaced God's functions with other principles. Thus, the suspicion of the God-murder eventually converges on four main suspects.

5. The Suspects

The first people Thorne set his sights on were the major figures of modern thought who were considered to have dragged God's authority down from the heavens. Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. As those who made God unnecessary, or those who replaced God's position with other principles, they seemed like the most likely suspects.

Thorne rearranged the investigation records according to their actual periods of activity. It was not a coincidence. The order in which God's authority collapsed in intellectual history overlaps almost perfectly with the era in which they appeared. If a crime called the God-murder exists, its footprints should appear in this chronological order.

The first suspect is Karl Marx. Next is Charles Darwin. Following him is Friedrich Nietzsche. And finally, Sigmund Freud. Marx began theorizing the relationship between capitalist society and religion from the 1840s, and Darwin significantly shook creationism after the 1859 publication of 'On the Origin of Species'. Nietzsche verbalized the death of God as a cultural diagnosis from the 1870s to the 1880s, and Freud redescribed religion as a product of psychological structure after the 1890s.

6. The Investigation of Marx

Thorne first investigated Karl Marx. Marx was the person who called religion the "opium of the people" and criticized religion as a product of social structure. If the God-murder occurred in the realm of social theory, it was natural to suspect him as the primary culprit.

—Time jump. London, Maitland Park Road, 1867.

Thorn aligned the coordinates and descended into London.

The room was cramped, the ceiling was low, and the air was a mixture of tobacco, parchment, and potato dishes. Piles of manuscripts stood haphazardly on the desk, and a candle flickered in the gaps between them. The man continued to write while coughing.

"You must be Karl Marx," Thorn said.

The man did not turn around.

"Who are you? Don't you know how to knock on a door?" Marx said.

"I do. I skipped it this time."

Marx finally looked up. His eyes were red. There were traces of a skin condition on his neck.

"What do you want?"

"I've come to ask you about the god-killing incident," Thorn said.

"I don't believe in God," Marx said.

"I know. That is what I want to ask you about."

Marx scoffed once and put down his quill.

"I wrote that religion is the opium of the people. If that is what you call killing God, then I killed him. But my real concern was why humans are placed in such miserable conditions that they need God. I didn't want to attack God. I wanted to denounce the social structure that makes God necessary."

"And what about the fact that later generations have used those words for their own convenience?" Thorn asked.

"I don't know. I have no copyright after death," Marx said.

"Friedrich!" he shouted toward the next room. "Explain it to this man. I'm going back to my manuscript."

The door opened, and a sturdy man poked his head out. It was Friedrich Engels.

"He's not angry," Engels said to Thorn. His voice was quiet. "He's tired. He's always tired. Dissecting capitalism while worrying about living expenses is like performing surgery on the operating table itself."

"You're the one supporting him, aren't you?" Thorn said.

"I am," Engels said. His tone was matter-of-fact. "Because we are friends. But when friendship and support are confused, later generations end up tarnishing both. That is how history works."}]

“Regarding the killing of God.”

“He did not kill God,” Engels said. “He simply wrote from the perspective of suffering people. It is the greatest irony that words standing on the side of the suffering are later transformed into the words of those in power.”

There was the sound of coughing again in the next room. Thorne offered his thanks and adjusted the coordinates to the next location.

A detailed examination of Marx’s thought reveals that his interest was not in God himself, but in the structures of alienation within capitalist society. To him, religion was not a cause but a symptom, and an expression of human suffering. Therefore, his critique was less an attack on God himself than an analysis intended to expose the contradictions of human society.

Furthermore, Thorne scrutinized Marx’s private life and those around him. There, rather than the majestic figure of a thinker, was the reality of the exploited: the struggle for survival, illness, debt, newspaper contributions, life in exile, the exhaustion of his family, and dependence on comrades. Engels was not only a friend but also his de facto economic pillar, and Marx’s household relied heavily on that support. This was a friendship, but also a structure where thought expanded beyond an individual’s capacity to live, sustained by the financial resources of a friend.

Within the home, contrary to the greatness of his theories, his wife Jenny and their daughters took on the burdens of poverty, nursing, household austerity, manuscript organization, and correspondence. While they worked like co-creators, they were often relegated to the shadows on the surface of history. Marx was not so much a subject who exploited those around him as he was the focal point around which his entire family was chronically consumed for the sake of forming his ideas.

After his death, this structure expanded even further. Marx’s works were edited, dogmatized, and transformed into the language of power apparatuses by friends, editors, the party, the state, and revolutionary movements. What Thorne saw here was the fact that the institutions that used him after his death were far more voracious than the thinker himself. Thus, rather than being the primary culprit in the killing of God, Marx became a witness who, as a result of exposing social contradictions, was himself absorbed into an ideological apparatus.

7. The Darwin Investigation

Next, Thorne investigated Charles Darwin. "On the Origin of Species" is known as the book that explained the diversity of life through natural selection rather than divine design. Because this theory significantly shook the authority of creationism, it was natural to suspect it as a murder weapon in the killing of God.

—Time jump. Down House, Kent, 1860.

The study was dim and orderly. Specimen jars lined the shelves, and the trees in the garden swayed outside the window. Charles Darwin lay on a sofa, a cloth pressed to his forehead.

“You seem unwell,” Thorne said.

“It is always like this,” Darwin said. He did not seem surprised. “Shall I call my wife?”

“No. Please, give me a moment of your time,” Thorne said.

“By all means. I cannot get up anyway.”

“I have come regarding the killing of God.”

Darwin closed his eyes under the cloth for a moment.

“Again,” he said. “Why that story is told in my name, I myself cannot fathom. I merely investigated the mechanisms of life. I wrote nothing about whether or not there is a designer.”

“But many people read your book as proof that God is unnecessary,” Thorne said.

“That is how those people choose to read it,” Darwin said quietly. “Emma still goes to church. I have never stopped her. If my writing on natural selection has wounded her faith, that was not my intention.”

“The fact that the theory of natural selection is being used to praise the strong.”

Darwin removed the cloth and looked at the ceiling.

“A man named Herbert Spencer coined the term survival of the fittest. It is not my term. Yet it is spoken of alongside my name. No matter how many times I think about it, I cannot accept that. Natural selection does not indicate the absence of design; it describes a mechanism. Why should describing a mechanism become a value judgment?”

“Why do you think that is?” Thorne said.

Darwin paused for a moment.

“Humans are good at turning explanations into permissions,” he said. “You can rewrite a book, but you cannot rewrite how it is read.”

Emma’s voice came from the hallway. Darwin put the cloth back on his forehead.

“Please go now. My wife is coming.”

“Just one thing. Did you yourself believe in the existence of God?” Thorne said.

There was a long silence.

“I don’t know,” Darwin said. “That is the honest truth. I believe that leaving it as an unknown was the greatest sincerity I could offer.”

Thorne stood up and set the coordinates to the next destination.

However, examining Darwin’s private correspondence and life reveals that he was, in fact, a cautious man who never forgot to be considerate of his family, who held religious sentiments. His research was not so much a rebellion against God as it was an academic inquiry into understanding the mechanisms of nature. Furthermore, his theory was greatly distorted by later Social Darwinism and used to justify the principle of competition.

Here too, Thorne focused on the process of dissemination rather than the theory itself. Unlike his cautious writing style, Darwin was surrounded by friends, supporters, and polemicists who aggressively pushed his theory to the forefront. His ideas were gradually transformed within academia, newspapers, the general readership, and the imperialist zeitgeist into a simple, crude slogan: “Nature commands competition.” The praise of the strong, which Darwin himself never wrote, was attached to the outer shell of his thought by the vocabulary of his disciples and subsequent readers.

Even in his domestic life, Darwin was less of a conqueror and more of a managed invalid. He suffered from chronic poor health and maintained his research life through the nursing, care, and daily support of his family, especially his wife Emma and his children. The exploitation mentioned here is not the blatant plunder seen in Nietzsche’s case. However, at the very least, his academic output was built upon the countless unpaid and emotional labor of his household.

And after his death, Darwin’s name was expanded far beyond his own cautious theory. Eugenics, Social Darwinism, and imperialist selection theories used Darwin’s name as a shield to justify themselves. In other words, Darwin, too, was not the primary culprit in the murder of God, but one of the victims whose name was offered as collateral for the competitive principles of later generations. Here, too, Thorne was forced to reject the theory of a lone perpetrator.

8. Investigation of Nietzsche

As the third suspect, Thorne focused his investigation on Friedrich Nietzsche. As the man who left behind the most famous declaration that “God is dead,” it is inevitable that he would be placed at the center of the investigation as a symbolic suspect in the murder of God.

Born in 1844 into the home of a Prussian pastor. The sense of loss from losing his father in childhood had a profound impact on his existence. He was an exceptionally young professor at the University of Basel at 24, but resigned at 35 due to his break with Wagner and chronic physical and mental illness. He continued to write while wandering in solitude, and suffered a mental breakdown in 1889. After his death, his works were significantly distorted by his sister Elisabeth, leading to a tragic history where they were used for Nazi propaganda.

Thorne jumped to Nietzsche twice.

—Time jump. Sils Maria, Switzerland, 1881.

The mountain air was thin, and the light was hard. Nietzsche was at his notebook in a small room at an inn. Outside the window, the Engadin Valley stretched out. He was 36 years old. Two years had passed since he resigned from his professorship at the University of Basel. His migraines and eye pain had become chronic, and his ties with friends were gradually thinning.

“Friedrich Nietzsche,” Thorne said.

He turned around slowly. His eyes were narrow, and it was immediately apparent that his eyesight was failing. His mustache was well-groomed.

“Another guest?” Nietzsche said. He did not sound displeased. “It seems this place is liked. It doesn't matter to me, though. Sit. If the window sill is fine for you.”

“I have come about the death of God,” Thorne said.

Nietzsche smiled slightly. It was a weary kind of smile.

“I haven't written it yet. For now, it is still at the stage of a premonition. However, as a question, it is correct.”

“Do you intend to use the phrase 'God is dead'?” Thorne said.

“I don't know. I just have the feeling that something is dying. Not so much God, but the entire value system that was supported by God. The people of Europe half-believe in the church, while the other half do not. That is the honest truth of it,” Nietzsche said.

“And you yourself?”

“My father was a pastor,” Nietzsche said. “He died when I was five.”

There was silence.

“I am not saying that God does not exist. Our current civilization has become accustomed to living without God. Someone must say it. It is better than letting it rot away without being spoken.”

“Do you intend to use the name Zarathustra?” Thorne said.

Nietzsche looked slightly surprised.

“You know that? I haven't told anyone yet,” Nietzsche said. “That name carries weight. As the person who first posed the problem of good and evil, I thought the words to overcome that problem should also be spoken from that name.”

“Zoroastrianism is not a religion of dualism between good and evil, you know,” Thorne said.

Nietzsche's eyes stopped.

“You are well-informed.”

"Ahura Mazda is the one supreme god. The principle of evil, Angra Mainyu, is not an equal, but a derivative existence," Thorne said.

Nietzsche remained silent for a while.

"It is true that my understanding may have been too simplistic," Nietzsche said slowly. "I had an interest in Eastern religions, but I never had the opportunity to read Persian texts directly. I intended to use my Zarathustra as a philosophical symbol. However, if it is being circulated as a misreading..."

He looked out the window.

"I accept that as criticism," Nietzsche said. His voice was quiet. "I do not think I will stop using that name. However, I admit that I lacked respect for the original context. I have no choice but to take responsibility for my work, including that error."

--Time jump. Turin, the night of January 2, 1889.

In a room at a cheap inn facing the Piazza Carlo Alberto, Nietzsche was writing a letter. The candle on the desk was burning low. He was 44 years old. The morning of the following day, January 3, when he collapsed after seeing a horse being whipped by its driver in the square, is considered the beginning of his mental breakdown. Thorne had arrived the night before.

Thorne knocked.

"Who is it?" Nietzsche said.

"We met in Switzerland some time ago," Thorne said.

The door opened. Nietzsche's eyes held a light that made him look like a different person from eight years ago. It was impossible to tell if he was excited or exhausted.

"I do not remember. But come in. I am currently writing a letter to Caesar."

Thorne entered. He looked at the desk. Several names were written on the paper: Dionysus, the Crucified, Caesar.

"Eight years ago, in Sils-Maria, I spoke to you about the Zarathustra matter," Thorne said.

For a moment, Nietzsche looked as if he were trying to remember something.

"Ah. That conversation. I thought about it even after that. What you said might have been correct. But now, it is too late. The book has been published. The world has moved on."

"Do you regret it?" Thorne said.

"I am not well enough to have the luxury of regret," Nietzsche said.

"Regarding letting your sister manage your works."

Nietzsche's eyes clouded over.

"Elisabeth thinks I love her. That is likely true," Nietzsche said slowly. As if placing each word down. "But she does not love my philosophy; she loves the name 'me.' She cannot make that distinction. That is what is terrifying."

"Can you stop it?" Thorne asked.

"I cannot. Because we are family. That is all," Nietzsche said.

The next morning, a horse collapsed in the square. Thorne saw it from the window. He saw Nietzsche run out. And then he cut the coordinates.

Nietzsche's philosophy certainly declared the death of God. However, it was not a declaration that physically denied God, but rather a cultural diagnosis that the value system of modern civilization could no longer support God. In other words, he is closer to a coroner who discovered a corpse than a god-killer. Furthermore, his philosophy was also altered by his sister Elisabeth and political forces, and used as a tool for power. Here, too, the same composition is repeated. The thinker is not the principal offender, but a medium used within history.

9. Freud's Investigation

Finally, Thorne arrived at Sigmund Freud. As the person who analyzed religion as a patriarchal illusion and dragged God down into the interior of psychology, he was also counted as a major suspect in the god-killing.

--Time jump. 19 Berggasse, Vienna, autumn 1909.

The consulting room was dim and orderly. There was a couch, a chair behind it, and ancient statuettes lined up on the desk. Fragments from Egypt, Greece, Rome, and China were tucked between academic books. Freud was reading a paper at his desk. 53 years old. Cigar smoke drifted near the ceiling.

"Trespassing, are we?" Freud said, without looking up. "However, well, sit down. If the couch is fine. You don't need to pretend to be a patient."

"I came regarding the god-killing incident," Thorne said.

"Ah. That matter," Freud said, finally looking up. "I expected it. People who ask such questions always come."

"You called religion an illusion," Thorne said.

"I did. To be precise, I wrote that it was an illusion born from a regressive desire for a father figure. I do not retract that even now," Freud said.

"Do you think you killed God?"

"No," Freud said immediately. "What I killed was not God, but the lack of awareness regarding God's psychological function. I explained the mechanism of why humans need God. Those who read that as a denial of God's existence have not read my writings."

"When you clashed with Jung, what did you feel?" Thorne asked.

Freud was silent for a moment.

"I felt it was a betrayal," he said. "However, thinking about it later, a disciple must surpass their master. That is natural. Whether there is class in how they surpass them is another matter."

"What about the fact that psychoanalysis was later commercialized?" Thorne asked.

"It had already begun while I was still alive," Freud said. "When I went to America, I felt it. That country intends to sell psychoanalysis as a therapeutic technique. Not as a science, but as a product. I had no power to stop it."

There were footsteps in the hallway. Freud placed his cigar in the ashtray.

"It is my daughter, Anna," he said. "She will succeed me. That is my pride, but at the same time, it may have constrained her life. That is something that has always weighed on my mind."

"It is a matter of parent and child, then," Thorne said.

"Everything returns to that," Freud said. "Religion, revolution, the killing of God. Ultimately, it is a father problem."

Thorne stood up.

"One last thing. Do you still believe in the existence of God?"

Freud looked at the window.

"I do not use the word God. But I do not think there is nothing, either," he said. "That is the honest truth. Not as a psychoanalyst, but as an old man."

Thorne thanked him and cut the coordinates.

Freud explained religion through the human psychological structure, interpreting it as a system of psychic desire, dependency, and projection. If God is an illusion created by the human unconscious, then Freud could potentially be the psychological perpetrator of the killing of God. However, when Thorne examined Freud's theories, he saw the same structure there as well. Freud's analysis explained the psychological aspects of religion; it was not an attempt to scientifically deny the existence of God itself. He sought to explain why humans need religion, not to erase religion from history.

Furthermore, tensions separate from the ideas themselves swirled around Freud. His disciples were both successors and competitors in splinter groups. Jung, Adler, and the subsequent psychoanalytic movement, while pretending to protect Freudian theory, selected, emphasized, and severed core doctrines to build their own schools. From Thorne's perspective, there was also a mediocre ambition here. A community of truth-seekers quickly turns into a market of academic cliques and authority.

On the family side, too, Freud's ideas and fame were not maintained without cost. Close relatives, starting with Anna Freud, took on the heavy burdens of nursing, organizing, preserving, inheriting, and maintaining the movement. His family was both a logistical support unit for his ideas and an internal institution that continued to labor to protect his ideological empire. Here, too, the fame of the individual thinker was built upon the labor, loyalty, and competition of his family and disciples.

Moreover, psychoanalysis itself was heavily consumed and commodified within later cultural industries and the culture of self-analysis. Here, too, the ideas left the thinker's hands and diffused into social apparatuses. It became increasingly likely that Freud was not so much the mastermind behind the killing of God as he was a mediator of the spirit of the times.

Thus, Thorne approached the same conclusion for all four primary suspects. They were not the culprits in the killing of God. Rather, they were witnesses, and sometimes victims, given roles within the spirit of the times and social structures.

10. The Banality of Evil

Having finished interrogating the four, Thorne spread his investigation records on the desk and spent a long time drawing a single diagram. It was not a list of the suspects' names, but a genealogy of the side that used those names.

On the right side, he placed a column for the Nazis. There were two lines connecting to it. One led to Nietzsche. The "Overman" and "Will to Power" were conveniently distorted into the logic of Aryan supremacy and the survival of the fittest. It had already been confirmed that his sister Elisabeth had devoted herself to the Nazis and had edited and provided his works to suit Nazi tastes. The other line led to Darwin. The description of the mechanism of natural selection was converted into "Social Darwinism" and functioned as the basis for eugenics, which excluded ethnic groups deemed inferior. Darwin himself was a cautious natural scientist and was almost entirely unrelated to this.

On the left side, he placed columns for Communism and Capitalism. There were also two lines connecting to them. One led to Marx. The words he wrote as an accuser of social contradictions were elevated by Lenin and Stalin into official state doctrine and became an apparatus for justifying revolution and purges. The other line led to Freud. However, this one was refracted. The Nazis suppressed Freud and burned his works. This was because Freud was of Jewish descent and his psychology was considered "un-German." On the other hand, in the West, Freudian theory was repurposed as the foundation for the advertising industry and consumerism. His nephew, Edward Bernays, applied his uncle's theory of the unconscious as a technique for mass manipulation, which became the prototype for modern PR and consumer society.

Thorne stopped here.

There was a blank space in the center of the diagram.

The Nazis utilized Nietzsche and Darwin. Communism utilized Marx. The advertising industry utilized Freud. The users are different in each case. However, the structure is the same. The thinkers were utilized, the content of their thoughts was transformed, and the users achieved their own goals by borrowing only the authority of the thinkers.

Moreover, most of those responsible for this utilization were not incarnations of evil. Bureaucrats who followed orders as party members. Editors who tried to protect the profits of publishing houses. Relatives who tried to maintain their family's livelihood. Researchers who tried to survive within academic cliques. They simply behaved normally in their respective positions.

That ordinariness destroyed the thought.

"There is a common structure here," Thorne said to Horst. "Whether it is the Nazis, Communism, or the advertising industry, the utilization of thought was not completed by immense malice, but by countless small, ordinary acts. No one was trying to kill God. They were just each doing their own job."

"That is Arendt's question," Horst replied quietly.

Thorne looked up.

"That's right. We need to go see her."

--Time jump. New York, Manhattan, autumn 1963.

A few months had passed since the publication of "Eichmann in Jerusalem." Hannah Arendt was in the midst of a storm. The concept of the "banality of evil" had drawn anger and criticism far beyond expectations from both the Jewish community and the philosophical world. Even so, she continued to work while smoking.

The study in her apartment was buried in books and manuscripts. Outside the window, the light of the Hudson River could be seen.

"Someone has come again," Arendt said, without turning around. "I forgot to lock the door. This is the third time today."

"Excuse me," Thorne said.

"Sit down. There is no coffee. I won't share my cigarettes. I have a little time," Arendt said.

"I came to ask about the Eichmann trial," Thorne said.

Arendt finally turned around. Her eyes were tired, but they had not lost their sharpness.

"Everyone says that. But what is it that you really want to ask?"

"About the banality of evil," Thorne said. "I am investigating the structure by which thinkers were utilized by the Nazis and Communism. Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, Freud. Many of those who utilized them were not particularly evil people. They just did their jobs, followed orders, and tried to survive within the system. That ordinariness created massive destruction. In your words, it is the banality of evil."

Arendt lit a cigarette.

"Let me be precise," she said. "Eichmann was not a monster. That is the core of the problem. He had no thought. He was a man who had stopped thinking for himself. He was completely adapted to functioning within the chain of command, and he never once took it upon himself as his own problem that the result of that functioning led to the deaths of millions."

“Is the exploitation of thinkers a similar structure?” Thorne asked.

“It is the same,” Arendt said. “Those who edited Nietzsche’s works, those who applied Darwin to social policy, those who converted Marx into party dogma. Most of them did not truly think about what they were doing. They simply responded to the demands of the institution. Being loyal to an institution is the most efficient way to kill thought.”

“But you were fiercely attacked for publishing that concept,” Thorne said.

Arendt paused for a moment.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “The criticism from the Jewish community in particular was intense. My concept was perceived as diluting the responsibility for Nazi crimes. But what I meant was the exact opposite. The banality of evil means breaking the illusion that evil is only committed by exceptional monsters. Anyone can become a collaborator if they stop thinking. That is not a mitigation of guilt, but a universalization of it.”

“You yourself were also misread,” Thorne said.

Arendt laughed slightly. A thin trail of cigarette smoke rose.

“Yes. I, too, had my writings used for other purposes,” she said. “My critics read my concept as sympathy for the Nazis. That is not what I wrote. But I had no power to stop that reading. All thinkers are placed in the same situation. The four people you investigated are the same, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” Thorne said. “But let me ask you one thing. Where does the concept of the banality of evil place responsibility for evil? If no one is particularly evil, who takes responsibility?”

Arendt placed her cigarette in the ashtray.

“The abandonment of thinking is where responsibility lies,” she said. “Eichmann is guilty because he did not think for himself. Those who distorted Nietzsche’s works also became collaborators because they stopped thinking for themselves. Banality of evil does not mean there is no malice. It is the cessation of thought. And that cessation can happen to anyone. That is why continuing to think is the only form of resistance.”

“That applies to you as well,” Thorne said.

“Of course. I, too, can be wrong. That is why I keep writing. I keep rewriting. That is what thinking is,” Arendt said.

The phone rang in the hallway. Arendt stood up.

“It is time,” she said. “I do not know what your investigation is heading toward. But I will say only one thing. Questioning the institutions that used those ideas is a much more accurate inquiry than judging the thinkers themselves. And to question an institution, it is necessary to keep asking what you are doing within that institution.”

She headed toward the phone. Thorne quietly cut the coordinates.

The families and colleagues of the idealists followed the extremely banal motive of earning a living. They sought to ensure their own survival by leaning into the idolatry of the Nazis and the social customs of the time. The banality of evil defined by Hannah Arendt is strongly reflected here. The thinkers had their ideas exploited, and as a result, they were branded with the stigma of god-killing.

What is important here is that evil is not necessarily driven by a massive will or clear malice. Rather, just to eat, just to protect their household, just to gain a social position, people sell out their ideas, turn philosophy into a weapon, and reduce religion to a label. At the end of that chain, the grand narrative of god-killing is established.

In other words, Thorne’s first conclusion is this: the suspects of god-killing are not simple criminals. They are also individuals who were processed by countless banal hands—relatives, colleagues, publishers, academic societies, the state, and the reader market—and fashioned into spokespeople for god-killing.

“So does that mean no one is evil?” the assistant, Lena, asked.

"Saying that no one is to blame is completely different from saying that everyone is a little bit to blame," Thorne said, shaking his head. "The latter is much worse."

11. The Prime Suspect: Nietzsche

Yet among them, Thorne felt the need to investigate Nietzsche with particular focus. This is because it was he who articulated the death of God most memorably. Darwin showed the structure, Freud exposed the psychology, and Marx dismantled society. But it was Nietzsche who took on the symbol of God-killing with the all-too-decisive sentence that God is dead.

What should be emphasized in Nietzsche's life is the fact that, despite being circulated as a philosopher of the strong, he was in reality sickly, lonely, economically vulnerable, and in a position easily exposed to misreading and exploitation. He was not a hero who ruled the world, but rather a philosopher who was devoured by it.

12. Nietzsche's Achievements

Thorne believed that in order to judge a suspect, one must first fairly estimate their capabilities. Therefore, he did not dismiss Nietzsche's achievements.

Nietzsche used aphorisms and poetic prose to advocate for the "Overman" and the "Will to Power" in works like "Thus Spoke Zarathustra." While condemning traditional Christian morality and metaphysics as the "resentment of the weak," he established a new analytical method called genealogy. However, he harbored a major contradiction in that he made the very Manichaean framework he criticized—namely, the conflict between the strong and the weak—the foundation of his own philosophy.

To be fair here, Nietzsche's achievements cannot be ignored. His perspective of viewing morality not as an eternal, unchanging truth but as a historical product, his insight into the nihilism of modern civilization, the fusion of philosophy and literature, and his genealogy as a methodology for digging into the origins of values were indeed milestones in the history of thought. However, acknowledging those achievements and criticizing the destructive errors inherent in his thought are compatible.

13. Nietzsche's Contradiction

What Thorne looked at next was the internal self-contradiction of the suspect Nietzsche's thought.

Despite criticizing the Manichaean view of good and evil, Nietzsche constructed a new dualism of "master morality" and "slave morality." The dualism of "strong and weak" that he threw out ironically ended up reinforcing the very framework of dualism he had criticized. The Overman philosophy he aimed for became, in an unintended way, the soil that justified the totalitarianism and supremacy of the strong in the 20th century.

This problem is not merely a contradiction in phrasing. While he spoke of being beyond good and evil, he actually established new standards of good and evil. The oppositions of master and slave morality, strong and weak, Overman and last man, and the ascent and decline of life functioned precisely as a new form of Manichaean dualism. Therefore, Nietzsche is both a thinker who criticized dualism and a thinker who rearmed dualism in a modern style.

As a result, his thought became easily connected to the competitive principles, selection consciousness, logic of hierarchy, and aesthetics of power of modern civilization. This may have exceeded his subjective intentions, but as a historical consequence of his thought, it cannot be overlooked.

14. The Name of Zarathustra

However, there was another reason why Thorne considered Nietzsche the prime suspect. It was the name of Zarathustra.

Thorne dug deeper. Contradictions in thought alone were weak evidence for being the main culprit. There had to be a more decisive trace. The biggest question was why Nietzsche used the name of the Zoroastrian prophet Zarathustra as a philosophical character in his own work.

In "Ecce Homo," Nietzsche explains the reason for choosing Zarathustra. According to him, it is for the paradoxical reason that Zarathustra was the first person to create dualistic morality, and therefore the thought that overcomes that morality should also be spoken from the mouth of Zarathustra. It is the logic that the one who first created the error has the responsibility to overcome it.

Researchers have discussed this issue from various angles. Many researchers believe that rather than Nietzsche plagiarizing the historical Zarathustra, he reinterpreted him as a philosophical symbol. In 19th-century Europe, interest in Eastern thought grew, and the Persian prophet was used as an external perspective to criticize Western thought. Some religious scholars and Zoroastrian researchers strongly criticize Nietzsche for making him speak thoughts that were the exact opposite of his original teachings. This is discussed as an issue of cultural appropriation and misrepresentation. The tradition of using historical figures as characters in philosophy and literature is old and can be seen in Plato's dialogues. However, in Nietzsche's case, it caused controversy because he made him speak content that was the exact opposite of the original thought.

15. Plagiarism and False Accusation

Thorne saw here a trace of Nietzsche's crime. But it was less the murder of God itself, and more the plagiarism and misreading of religious authority.

It is pointed out that there are three problems with Nietzsche's use of Zarathustra.

First is plagiarism. He borrowed only the name and authority of a historical religious figure.

Second is misreading. He simplified Zoroastrianism into a religion of good-evil dualism.

Third is Orientalism. He used the image of an Eastern sage as a stage prop for Western philosophy.

Nietzsche's choice of the Zoroastrian prophet Zarathustra as the protagonist in 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' cannot be called mere literary freedom. He arbitrarily labeled the monistic Zoroastrianism as the 'founder of good-evil dualism' and used it in an Orientalist manner as a stage prop to reinforce his own erroneous dualism. This is cultural appropriation and an expression of profound dishonesty toward the world's wisdom that seeks the original One.

As a result, for many people, the name Zarathustra has been recognized as a character created by Nietzsche, and the original religious context has been distorted. What we have here is not merely the freedom of naming, but a problem of symbolic power, where a historical religious figure is repositioned for one's own philosophy, overwriting their original context.

16. Evidence of Monism

But Thorne investigates deeper. If Nietzsche's labeling is false, what was the original structure of Zoroastrianism?

Zoroastrianism was originally a religious system with Ahura Mazda as the supreme god, and it cannot be called a complete dualism where good and evil exist as equals. Similarly, Hinduism and Japanese Shinto can be interpreted as having a single ultimate principle even if they appear polytheistic on the surface.

In religions across the world, the fact that the afterlife—the other shore, Nirvana, or Heaven—is spoken of in the singular suggests that there is only one designer. Both Hinduism and the myriad gods of Japan have a single principle behind their diverse manifestations. Nietzsche's sin in ignoring this unity of the eternal world and continuing to incite dualistic conflict is profound, and breaking the structural spell of modern civilization that has deified him is the first step toward human maturity.

If good and evil were a dualism of complete equals, the final outcome should never be decided. However, many religions speak of a structure where good triumphs in the Last Judgment or the renewal of the world. This can be interpreted as logic showing that good is the fundamental reality and evil is a derivative existence.

Therefore, the good-evil dualism label that Nietzsche propagated is a false accusation against Zoroastrianism. Ironically, Nietzsche's own thought is dominated by the dualism of the strong and the weak, the Overman and the Last Man, and he disseminated this as the pathology of modern civilization. This structure resonates deeply with the current status quo where academia and Darwinism treat the principle of competition as good. It is precisely because humanity is still in the midst of its second adolescence that such dualistic conflicts are repeated.

17. Sister Elisabeth

But still, Thorne shakes his head. Even if Nietzsche is guilty, he is not a lone offender. Or rather, he might not even be the primary culprit. Because he himself was so blatantly exploited.

In other words, Nietzsche's life was killed three times by his sister Elisabeth. First, she deepened his spiritual loneliness by interfering with his romantic relationships. Second, after his mental breakdown, she displayed him as a 'spectacle,' stripping him of his dignity. Third, after his death, she monopolized the copyrights and rewrote her brother's philosophy in an anti-Semitic direction through the forgery of letters and the fabrication of 'The Will to Power.' Nietzsche was a victim who was used as a commodity by his own sister both during his life and after his death.

――Time jump. Weimar, Nietzsche Archive, 1903.

Thorne knocked on the door.

'Come in,' a voice said.

Entering the room, a woman in her fifties was at her desk. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. She was the director of the archive bearing her brother's name and its de facto dictator.

'What do you want?' she said. Amiably, yet her eyes never left the stack of papers.

"I am a Nietzsche researcher. I have a few questions I would like to ask," Thorne said.

"You are welcome. It is my mission to spread my brother's achievements to the world," Elisabeth said.

"There are claims that some of his letters have been tampered with," Thorne said.

The woman's hand stopped.

"Who would say such a thing?" she said. Her voice was calm, but the tone had hardened.

"Several researchers. Particularly regarding passages related to anti-Semitism."

"My brother hated the anti-Semites," Elisabeth said. "Therefore, organizing them in that direction is in line with my brother's original philosophy."

"But in the letters written by your brother himself, there are clear descriptions criticizing your husband Förster's anti-Jewish movement," Thorne said.

"Friedrich's mind was unstable," Elisabeth said quietly. "His later works sometimes contain such confusion. If I do not organize them, who will protect my brother's true intentions?"

"It is also said that after your brother's mental breakdown, you allowed him to be seen by outside visitors as a spectacle," Thorne said.

Elisabeth finally looked up. Her eyes were calm.

"I loved my brother. That is the truth," she said. "But love and possession are easily confused. I do not know if I myself was able to distinguish between them completely."

"However, let me say one thing," she continued. "If it were not for me, many of my brother's works would have been lost. That is a fact. Even if the motives were impure, some things were preserved as a result. History is full of such ironies."

Thorne did not answer. Instead, he cut the coordinates.

What becomes visible here is the fact that the family, the closest community, can often become the greatest apparatus of exploitation. Before Nietzsche ever reached the marketplace of ideas, he was first consumed by the family system.

18. The Market of Exploitation

Nietzsche himself received almost no royalties; rather, it was his sister, the Nazis, and the authorities of academia who gained wealth and fame by heroizing him after his death. Despite his preaching of "master morality" as the antithesis of the "slave morality" he criticized, he himself was placed on the side of those exploited by the system. This "Nietzsche the genius myth" may have been a manufactured brand, similar to the modern idol industry.

From this perspective, Nietzsche is not merely a transmitter of ideas. He was a commodity, an exhibit, a brand, a source of authority, and a symbol that could be used for political purposes. The gap between his poverty during his lifetime and the exploitation after his death illuminates not only his role in the history of thought but also the circulation economy of intellectuals itself.

19. Academia and Darwinism

Thorne's investigation expands further. It was not only his sister who used Nietzsche. Academia also used him.

Nietzschean thought has had a significant influence on modern ideologies and political movements. The framework of the conflict between the strong and the weak became intertwined with the discussions of twentieth-century totalitarianism and eugenics. Therefore, a critical examination of the influence of Nietzschean thought is essential for understanding the ideological structure of modern civilization.

Furthermore, there is a perspective that academic criticism itself is merely an influence of Darwin's theory of evolution, which, like Nietzsche, is the root of all evil. Since academia itself is governed by dualism and the principle of competition, it is only natural that it reproduces Nietzschean values as a consequence. The number of papers, citation counts, the struggle for positions, and the distinction between authority and heresy fix the composition of the strong and the weak within intellectual institutions.

In this sense, the critique of Nietzsche does not stop at the criticism of Nietzsche as an individual. It connects to a critique of Darwinism, capitalism, academia, nationalism, eugenics, the self-help industry, and even the entire myth of success in modern civilization.

20. The Second Rebellion Phase

Having reached this point, Thorne finally arrives at an intermediate conclusion. Darwin, Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche were candidates for the perpetrators of the murder of God, but they were also symptoms of the zeitgeist and pawns mobilized during the second rebellion phase of civilization.

There is also a view that human history is in the stage of a second rebellion phase, attempting to move away from the authority of God. At this stage, ideologies that deny the existence of God strengthen, and the conflict between religion and science is emphasized. However, historically speaking, this period may be nothing more than a relatively short ideological trend.

It is precisely because humanity is still in the midst of this second rebellion phase that dualistic conflicts are repeated, and figures like Darwin and Nietzsche are both heroes of that zeitgeist and clinical cases. They thought they had banished God, but they only recreated a more violent and immature patriarchy.

That is why the focus of criticism should not be on individual malice, but on the developmental stage of civilization itself. Nietzsche, too, is a child of his time and is reread as a symptom of the second rebellion phase.

21. The Second Investigation

But Thorne is not yet satisfied. If this is indeed the second rebellion phase, what is the structure that made this rebellion possible? Why did humanity turn toward the murder of God all at once? Why did civilization accidentally avalanche into competition, selection, superiority, relativization, and the denial of authority?

He then turns his eyes to the laws behind thought. The diffusion of spirit. The diffusion of values. The collapse of order. The dissipation of meaning. In short, entropy.

"Do you intend to call entropy the culprit?" Holst interjected.

"No. Entropy is the murder weapon. The one who created the weapon is the culprit," Thorne said.

Holst remained silent for a while.

"That means..."

"Yes. That is what it means," Thorne said.

Was it not the increase in the entropy of civilization, working through the thinkers, that killed God, rather than the thinkers themselves? But one must ask further: who laid down the law of entropy in the first place?

22. The True Culprit

Thorne closed the file. The records of the suspects he had spent so much time accumulating converged silently into a single conclusion. Everyone had an alibi. It was not a simple proof of absence, but an alibi provided to them by the structure itself. No one could have killed God. Because, in the first place, there is only one person in this universe who could kill God.

The true culprit is God himself. In order to stage humanity's second rebellion phase, God intentionally created a situation where idealists would bear the infamy of killing God. This can be said to be the result of God spreading the phenomenon of increasing entropy in spirit and philosophy as a law. Here exists the ultimate self-directed performance, where God, who created entropy as a physical law, leads humanity to independence by collapsing his own order.

In this logic, God is not merely a victim, but the director. For humanity to move away from the authority of a parent and recognize itself as a mature individual, it had to experience the death of God once. Darwin reducing design to chance, Freud reinterpreting religion as a structure of desire, Marx viewing religion as a reflection of social structure, and Nietzsche declaring that God is dead—all of these are rites of passage during the second adolescent rebellion.

However, this rebellious phase is not the completion of maturity. Rather, it created new dualisms and principles of competition, reproducing even cruder and more immature power structures. In that sense, humanity has not even finished cleaning up after the murder of God.

23. God's Long Production

Thorne, holding the conclusion, took a step further. If the true culprit was God himself, how was the production staged? Re-examining the evidence revealed a surprising procedure. It is the hypothesis of what would happen if God were not merely a victim, but the director of this long intellectual history.

God first gave humanity the rotary press and printing technology. Books moved beyond the era of manuscripts, and ideas began to spread at an unprecedented speed. And through reformers like Luther, the gates of biblical interpretation were thrown wide open. The right of interpretation, once monopolized by the clergy, was distributed to the laity, and faith drifted away from centralized order, dispersing into countless readers.

This event was a decisive blow to the authority of the Catholic Church. But at the same time, it sowed other seeds. Like the law of entropy, the more interpretation spreads, the more room there is for the banality of evil to enter within faith. While destroying the corruption that had accumulated within Catholicism, God also embedded new problems within Protestantism. A prime example is replacement theology. The idea of transferring the covenant with the Jews to the Church was a dangerous logic that rewrote God's eternal promise based on human judgment.

However, the production does not end there. Next, God gave humanity devices to exert external pressure on religion itself. Modern thought, science, and the economy. Darwin's natural selection, Marx's historical laws, Freud's unconscious, and the self-proliferation of the market economy all began to act as substitute principles for God. Catholicism, Protestantism, and indeed many of the world's religions, found their positions of faith shaken under the pressure of these new principles.

And the media through which these ideas permeated society were also technologies that God gave to humanity. Mass printing. Books became bestsellers, and ideas circulated through the market. Reformation pamphlets, books on evolutionary theory, socialist manifestos, and psychoanalytic works all spread throughout the world via the rotary press and the publishing market.

If this hypothesis is correct, the murder of God is not merely a crime. It may have been a stage set for an intellectual history prepared over several centuries.

24. The Problem of the Designer

To solve the ideological problems of modern civilization, a two-stage understanding is necessary. In the first stage, one recognizes the problem that the universe and the world cannot be explained by pure chance. In the second stage, one ethically examines the nature of the design or principles behind it. Through this staged understanding, one can re-evaluate the ideological conflicts of modern civilization.

The unity of ultimate reality, the singularity of the afterlife, the victory of good in the final judgment, and the problem of order that cannot be explained by chance—all of which have been shared by world religions—demand the perspective of a single designer. The first expedient is to break the spell of the atheism of modern civilization, followed by an ethical verification of design philosophy.

Standing on this stage-based theory, the critique of Nietzsche is not merely a critique of a thinker, but a self-diagnosis of the atheistic modern era. It is an effort to accuse a civilization that declared the death of God of actually creating a proliferation of new idols.

25. Conclusion

Synthesizing the above, the investigation into the murder of God and the critique of Nietzsche are different expressions of the same structure. The culprit Thorne pursued, while appearing to be an individual thinker, was actually the family, the academic society, political power, the structure of civilization, and ultimately, the second adolescent rebellion itself.

Nietzsche was a thinker with achievements. However, at the same time, he bears significant responsibility in that, while criticizing the dualism of good and evil, he circulated a new dualism, misrepresented monotheistic religion as dualism under the name of Zarathustra, and that misrepresentation connected with the modern principle of competition to amplify the pathology of modern civilization. Nietzsche himself was also a victim who continued to be exploited by his sister Elisabeth, the Nazis, academia, and power structures.

Therefore, Nietzsche is both a perpetrator and a victim, both a hero and a case study, both a thinker and a commodity. This duality is the core of the debate surrounding him.

And what finally becomes visible is the fact that humanity is still in the process of maturing. Modern people, who believed they had killed God, are still fighting in the shadow of that corpse. Therefore, what should truly be questioned is not how to judge Nietzsche, but how to transcend the civilization that needed Nietzsche.

Yuri Arnold Thorne closed the record. The case was solved. But the culprit has not been arrested. Because the culprit is still here.

26. Notification from the Theater

A communication came in while Thorne was in the middle of drafting the final investigation report. What appeared on the screen were those eyes, like the calculator he had seen before.

"Is the report finished?" Joan said.

"I am writing it right now," Thorne said.

"Abort it."

Thorne stopped his hand.

"Just to be sure, why are we aborting it?"

"Because the objective has been achieved," Joan said.

"Meaning?"

"This investigation itself was your promotion exam. You successfully reached the truth. You passed."

"Then, naturally, you don't need this investigation report, do you?" Thorne said.

"Rather than not needing it, it's something that must not be shown to anyone," Joan said. He paused for a moment. "That report is an explosive, Thorne. It's too early even for the executive level. Dispose of it where no one can see it."

"Dispose of it," Thorne said.

"That's right."

After a while, Joan added.

"Oh, I forgot to mention. The next assignment is much further away. It will be a jump not into the past, but into the future. Be prepared for it."

The communication cut off.

Thorne had intended to come to terms with the absurdity of the world through his work up until now. Even this time, he understood intellectually that if he thought about it calmly, it was a situation that should be called providence rather than absurdity. If God had staged His own death and offered Himself up as the culprit for the sake of humanity's maturation, then that was certainly worthy of the name of providence. However, there was one thing that he just couldn't feel satisfied with. Whether it was providence or not, having the client be the culprit—what kind of detective work etiquette was that? Thinking this, Thorne put the report deep into his drawer.

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