Conan: I'm a zaibatsu in Tokyo

"Conan, come and see the imaginations of these guys. It's absolutely outrageous."

He held a phone screen right up to Conan's eyes.

Conan looked at the screen and saw that discussions about Kaito Kid had completely exploded on various social media platforms.

The discussion isn't about whether Kaito Kid is Zheng Yi's lackey; it's all about begging Zheng Yi to let Kaito Kid debut.

Seeing the screen full of messages asking for his debut and for a contract, Conan's face was filled with shock and incomprehension.

Has Kaito Kid become an idol?
Conan's lips twitched slightly as he looked at the enthusiastic comments from fans on the screen.

But then I thought of Sonoko, and it seemed quite reasonable.

He pushed up his glasses and sighed helplessly: "It's really outrageous that there are actually people who think it's a good idea to make a wanted criminal an idol."

"Right?!" Zheng Yi said indignantly, "My Zhengyi Entertainment is a legitimate company. We only sign artists with real talent and who abide by the law. How could I possibly sign a phantom thief?"

Conan wholeheartedly agreed.

……

On the coffee table, a delicate wooden contraption box lay quietly.

"Snapped."

Ai slapped a brand-new blank notebook next to the puzzle box and crossed her arms.

"Seiichi, let's establish some rules now," Ai's voice was very serious.

"Since we're going to keep an exchange diary, we have to agree that no one can peek at what the other has written. Whoever breaks the agreement will have to do housework for a whole year."

Zheng Yi leaned back lazily on the sofa and shook his head: "This punishment is too lenient."

"So how do you want to be punished?" Ai asked.

Zheng Yi suggested, "How about washing their feet for a month?"

Ai's feet twitched, and she shook her head frantically.

That won't do; she's afraid Zheng Yi might deliberately break the rules.

"No, try another one."

"Then wash your feet for two months."

"You can't wash your feet!" Ai said.

Ai glared at Masakazu.

Have you already decided to breach the contract?
Zheng Yi asked, "Then how should we punish him? Doing housework is too lenient a punishment; it has no deterrent effect whatsoever."

Xiao Ai scratched her head.

She couldn't think of any kind of punishment that would affect Zheng Yi.

Moreover, she was afraid that Zheng Yi would be shameless and break the agreement without accepting punishment.

“How about the person who breaks the agreement bows down to the person who keeps the agreement for a month?” Ai suggested.

"Okay." Zheng nodded in agreement.

Seeing how readily he agreed, Ai quickly added, "Should we add Momiji too?"

If you break the agreement, she can even get Hongye involved to punish you.

"no problem."

Ai looked at the puzzle box on the table and said, "Let's lock it in this box, hide it, and then take it out to read each other's diaries a few years or even a decade later. That would be really interesting."

“A few years later…” Zheng Yi said softly, “It feels like that’s a long time from now.”

A few years isn't a very long time, is it?
But then Ai reflected on her experiences this year. It's only been a year, and she's already encountered so many things. Several years is indeed a long time.

"Pinky promise".

Shoichi extended his little finger, and Ai glanced at him with disdain, feeling that he was too childish. She also extended her little finger, and the two fingers gently hooked together.

"Pinky promise, a hundred years from now."

"Anyone who peeks is a puppy," Ai added.

"Childish." Zheng Yi looked at her with disdain.

Xiao Ai was annoyed.

The two agreed not to peek at each other.

But since it's written in a diary, it's quite difficult not to peek at it.

Ai turned slightly to the side, pressing her left elbow firmly against the edge of her notebook, while her right hand flew across the paper.

She not only tilted the notebook at a 45-degree angle, but also deliberately used her other hand to block the table, ensuring that Zheng Yi's gaze could never go over her shoulder.

After she finished writing, she quickly turned the page and said to Zheng Yi, "When you're done writing, close the diary quickly. Don't peek at what I've written."

"no problem."

Shoichi took Ai's pen and nodded.

Zheng Yi's defensive stance is also textbook-worthy.

He was practically lying on the table, his upper body tilted awkwardly to the left, completely concealing the notebook in his arms.

Ai stood behind Shoichi, and could only see that he hadn't turned the page.

She didn't intend to peek over there.

Because Zheng Yi didn't even think of peeking while she was writing, how could she be more tasteless than Zheng Yi?
Zheng Yi wrote very quickly, glancing back at Xiao Ai every now and then, just like Xiao Ai had been doing when she was writing in her diary.

After finishing writing, they closed their diaries, looked at each other, and fell into an eerie silence.

Masakazu glanced at the notebook, wanting to flip through it, feeling that Ai must have written bad things about him.

Ai also wanted to open it and take a look.

She felt that agreeing with Zheng Yi to open it a few years later was too hasty; with such a long time, she was afraid she wouldn't be able to hold back.

"cough!"

Ai coughed and said, "Let's call Hongye and ask her to write a page too."

"it is good."

Zhengyi called Hongye and told her about the incident involving his friend's wife and her husband, and also mentioned that he and Xiao Ai were going to write an exchange diary.

Hongye was very interested and asked all sorts of questions, saying that she would also write a copy, lock them together when she got back, and then read them together a few years later.

After writing everything down, Ai asked, "Who will keep this diary for now?"

"How about I do it?" Zheng Yi said. "I have complete faith in my own morals and would never peek."

"No, I don't trust your morals," Ai said. "Let my sister keep it."

"I don't believe in your sister's morals either."

The two were at an impasse, so they had no choice but to temporarily put it on the table in the living room.

Strangely, neither of them objected to this method, which was only slightly safer than directly handing it over to Zheng Yi for safekeeping.

In the stillness of the night, a diary sat on the desk of a family member.

This is the diary exchanged between Shoichi and Ai.

However, the so-called spirit of contract is clearly worthless in the face of these two people.

At two o'clock in the morning, Zheng Yi tiptoed into the living room.

He glanced back at Ai's closed bedroom door to make sure she was fast asleep before calmly approaching the desk.

“Just one look…” Zheng Yi said softly, “I’m just checking to see if she has written anything bad about me in her diary.”

Besides, Ai definitely won't keep the contract and will secretly come to see me, so I was just acting first, which is legitimate self-defense.

He carefully opened Ai's diary.

I had expected to see some kind of experimental research or admiration for him, but what I saw were lines of extremely strange text.

"..."

Zheng Yi leaned close to the desk lamp, his brows furrowed, his eyes almost touching the paper.

It wasn't Japanese, nor English, nor any Chinese he was familiar with.

The characters resembled some kind of ancient hieroglyphics, or perhaps deliberately scrambled coded symbols, intertwined haphazardly.

"What kind of scribbling is this?" Masakazu scratched his head. Was Ai just scribbling nonsense?
He casually copied down a few words, intending to look them up, then closed the diary and gently put it back in its place.

On the way back, I glanced at the direction of Ai's bedroom again, and only breathed a sigh of relief when I was sure she hadn't come out.

Three o'clock in the morning.

Wearing oversized pajamas, Ai rubbed her sleepy eyes and quietly walked out of the bedroom.

She was clearly thinking the same thing as Masakazu, using the cover of night to inspect his diary.

Zheng Yi will definitely not keep his promise; he will absolutely find a chance to peek.

Even if I don't look at it now, once I've written more, that guy will definitely peek at it. I need to be one step ahead of him; that's called self-defense.

She opened her diary, glanced at the page she had written, and smiled smugly.

She wrote this diary using various shorthand symbols used in the laboratory.

Even if Zheng Yi secretly read her diary, he still couldn't understand it.

Many years later, when the box was opened, she still had to translate it for Zheng Yi.

If Zheng Yi had angered her back then, she wouldn't have let him know what she had written.

Ai smiled smugly and reached out to turn the page that Zheng Yi had written.

However, when she turned to the first page, the smugness on her face instantly froze.

"..."

Ai stared intently at the page that Masakazu had written, her brows furrowing deeper and deeper.

There were no words, no complaints, not even a complete sentence on it.

Instead, there is a dense, seemingly random combination of letters, numbers, and punctuation marks.

"What is this?" Ai frowned. "Some kind of encrypted Morse code? Or some kind of code used for corporate espionage?"

Is Zheng Yi really that smart?

It's unbelievable that they would use this kind of encryption method.

Besides, is it really necessary to be so secretive about just writing a diary?

Xiao Ai looked at it for a long time but still couldn't understand it. She copied down a few sentences and hurriedly went back to her room.

She needs to try and see if she can crack the code of Zhengyi.

Zheng Yi was sleeping soundly in his bedroom.

He agreed to put the diary on the living room table because he thought Ai wouldn't understand what he wrote.

He wrote it using the company's internal financial encryption algorithm, to protect against hackers, spies, and especially Xiao Ai.

If he opens the puzzle box years later, and Ai doesn't listen, he won't let her know what he wrote.

Inside the bedroom of the Ooka family mansion.

Hongye sat upright at the mahogany desk, having changed into a soft silk nightgown.

She took a deep breath, as if about to perform an extremely solemn ceremony, and solemnly opened her diary.

"Since Shoichi and Ai both have it, I naturally can't be left behind."

Hongye picked up the fountain pen and wrote swiftly, but the pen tip stopped after writing just one line.

Years later, she wrote something for Ai and Masaya to see.

Moreover, both Shoichi and Ai said that a diary should be written with one's true feelings, otherwise it is meaningless.

But the thought of Masakazu and Ai seeing what she had written, something so private, made Momiji feel ashamed.

"No, no, absolutely not..." Hongye shook her head frantically.

She bit her lower lip, decisively grabbed the page where she had just written, tore it off cleanly, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it into the wastebasket.

She pulled out a brand new sheet of paper, laid it flat on the table, held the pen in mid-air, and fell into deep thought.

"It has to be a way that expresses my feelings without making me want to crawl into a hole a few years later..."

Hongye's gaze swept over the dictionary on the desk, and a flash of inspiration struck her.

That's right! Chinese!
Writing in Chinese provides a buffer, unlike the directness of Japanese.

That would make it much easier for her to accept.

……

The next morning.

Ai was woken up by Masakazu pulling back the covers.

She groggily opened her eyes and saw Zheng Yi's smug face right in front of her, instantly waking up.

"Get up! Why are you up later than me today?" Zheng Yi glanced at his watch. "You're an hour later than me today. If you don't get up soon, breakfast will get cold."

Xiao Ai hummed in agreement, sat up, rubbed her eyes, and yawned slightly.

She didn't look at Zheng Yi, afraid of revealing her guilty conscience.

She secretly got up last night to do something naughty.

Zheng Yi didn't look at Xiao Ai either, because he was afraid that Xiao Ai would see the bloodshot in his eyes.

He did something bad last night, and he got up early this morning to prove his innocence.

The two walked out of the bedroom one after the other and brushed their teeth at the sink.

Two sleepy faces were reflected in the mirror, and neither of them spoke.

After washing her face, Ai walked to her desk and her gaze inadvertently swept across the tabletop.

Zheng Yi glanced at the desktop without even realizing it.

The two of them simultaneously looked away, as if there was nothing on the table.

The entire breakfast process was eerily quiet.

During meals, Zheng Yi would always chat casually or tease Xiao Ai, making things anything but peaceful.

Ai would occasionally retort and then mock Shoichi.

But today, the two of them ate their breakfasts in silence, even deliberately making quiet chewing noises.

Masaichi glanced at Ai.

That despicable Ai Haibara uses such high-level encryption to write her diary. Who is she trying to protect herself from?

Ai lowered her head and drank her milk, glancing at Masakazu out of the corner of her eye.

Why use such complicated encryption to write a diary? Who is he trying to protect himself from?

"The fried eggs are pretty good today," Zheng Yi suddenly said.

"Mmm," Ai responded, continuing to eat her toast. "It really is quite delicious."

"..."

"Did you sleep well last night?" Zheng Yi asked.

"It's fine, how about you?"

"It's also very good."

"Ah."

The two continued eating in silence.

At the Ooka family's house, Momiji was also having breakfast.

She felt shy last night when she was writing in her diary, thinking that if she wrote it simply in Chinese, both Masakazu and Ai could easily understand it.

Therefore, she interspersed Chinese with Korean, which served as a kind of encryption.

She patted her cheeks, feeling a little sorry for Masakazu and Ai.

The two of them were supervising each other, and it was definitely written in standard Japanese.

I was far away in Kyoto, with no one supervising me, and I even used an encryption layer. I really feel bad for the two of them.

Forget it, I'll write it in normal Japanese when I get back to Tokyo and write it with them, without encryption. For now, let's continue with the encryption. (End of Chapter)