Tokyo: Proving one's position from behind the scenes

At six o'clock in the morning, just as dawn was breaking, the streets around Ayase were illuminated by flashing red and blue police lights.

The police cordon stretched from the entrance of the drab three-story "Ayase Financial Consultation Center" building all the way to the street corner. A dozen police cars were parked on the side of the road, their flashlights whirring and casting patches of red light on the walls of the surrounding buildings.

A crowd of onlookers gathered in front of a nearby convenience store. Several housewives, an elderly woman pushing a bicycle, a middle-aged man who had just come from a pachinko parlor, and two young men who had clearly just finished their night shifts and were still in their work clothes. They craned their necks to look in the direction of the police tape, whispering amongst themselves.

"I heard it's a monster."

"What monster? You've been reading too many comics."

"It's true, the owner of the flower shop across the street saw it with her own eyes. She said she got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night and heard a noise outside. She looked out the window and saw something more than two meters tall come out of the building. It was covered in scales and had a head like a fish."

"and then?"

"Then she called the police. When the police arrived, the thing was gone."

The speaker paused, lowering their voice even further.

"But everyone in the building is dead."

Inside the cordon, the situation was even more bizarre than the onlookers imagined.

A thin layer of water had accumulated on the ground at the entrance. It wasn't the kind of large-scale flooding caused by a burst water pipe, but rather the kind of dampness left on a beach after high tide. It was evenly spread across the ground, and walking on it made a slight crunching sound. The water was the wrong color; it wasn't transparent, but rather looked like bodily fluid seeping from somewhere.

A strong, fishy stench filled the air. It wasn't the smell of blood; that's the rusty, dry, pungent smell of blood. This stench was damp and salty, like silt turned up from the mudflats after the tide has receded, mixed with the smell of rotting fish and shrimp and the sea. The further you went in, the stronger the stench became, so strong that it gave you the illusion that you weren't standing inside a building, but on a mudflat submerged by the tide.

Dark water stains were scattered on the steps of the stairs, extending upwards step by step. The water stains were irregular in shape with blurred edges, as if something wet had crawled over them.

Two corpses lay in the corridor on the second floor.

The first body was leaning against the wall, twisted at an unnatural angle. His face was completely sunken in, as if his skull had been crushed from the front by a giant hand. His features were completely unrecognizable, leaving only a blurry mass of flesh and blood and shattered white bone fragments. The torso below the neck was relatively intact, but there were deep, bone-revealing claw marks on his arms. The edges of the claw marks were jagged, not like being cut by a sharp weapon, but more like being torn apart by something blunt and sharp.

The second corpse lay at the end of the corridor, in an even more bizarre posture. His body was face down, but his head was turned 180 degrees, face up, and his eyes were still open. His chest and abdomen had been ripped open, not with a knife, but with claws—three parallel slits from his chest to his lower abdomen, the edges of the flesh rolled back to reveal the dark red internal organs inside.

The walls, ceiling, and floor of the entire second floor were covered with grayish-blue stains. They weren't bloodstains, but rather more viscous ones, which dried and formed a thin, glossy film on the surface. Forensic experts were squatting next to the body, taking samples.

The situation on the third floor was even worse.

The office door lay on the floor, its hinges ripped from the frame. There was a dent in the center of the door, shaped as if something enormous had crashed into it. Hiroaki Tanaka's body lay beside the door, or rather, the various parts of his body were scattered throughout the office.

The forensic team spent nearly an hour collecting samples in the office before emerging. When they came out, one of them was pale and, after removing his mask, leaned against the wall and dry heaved for a while.

The situation was almost exactly the same in another building next to this one—the headquarters of the "Ayakiri Group".

The same grayish-blue water stains, the same fishy smell of the mudflats, the same traces left by the half-human, half-fish monster. Thirty-seven corpses were scattered in two locations, each with a different appearance, but they all shared one common feature: the ground around each corpse was damp.

At 7:15, a black motorcycle drove through a gap in the police cordon.

The rider turned off the engine, took off his helmet, revealing a face that looked to be around forty years old.

He was about 1.7 meters tall, with short hair and very short sideburns that revealed the skin behind his ears. His facial features were strong, with prominent cheekbones and deep-set eyes, giving the impression of someone who was chronically sleep-deprived but always mentally tense. What was most striking about him were his eyes—the whites of his eyes were very clean, and his pupils were dark brown. He looked at people without any extra expression, as if he was used to maintaining the same gaze in all situations.

He was wearing a black leather jacket with reinforced shoulders and elbows, the zipper not fully zipped up, revealing a dark gray T-shirt underneath. He wore dark jeans with noticeable wear and tear at the knees. On his feet were a pair of military boots, slightly dusty, the soles making a dull thud as they stepped on the ground.

Naoya Taniguchi, from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department's Violent Organization Countermeasures Division. Everyone in the division calls him "Taniguchi," while the yakuza call him by other names, depending on how many times they've been taken down by him. Regardless of their relationship with him, they always tease him for constantly cosplaying Schwarzenegger.

He hung his helmet on the handlebars, took out a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, pulled one out and put it in his mouth without lighting it. Then he walked towards the police line, his pace neither fast nor slow, his military boots making a slight crunching sound as they stepped over the wet pavement.

A young policeman in uniform jogged over, carrying a white hazmat suit.

"Section Chief Taniguchi, please put on your hazmat suit before—"

Naoya Taniguchi glanced at him.

"Biohazard?"

"It's not confirmed yet, but the situation at the scene is very unusual. A total of thirty-seven people have died. The instructions from this department are—"

"OK."

Naoya Taniguchi took the hazmat suit and quickly put it on.

Naoya Taniguchi first examined the scene on the first floor, then the second, and then the third. At each location, he squatted down and looked for a long time, not at the corpses, but at the water stains on the ground and the scratches on the walls. His gaze moved very slowly, from one point to another, as if he were measuring the trajectory of something with his eyes.

"What about the surveillance footage?"

"The security cameras in this building are broken," the forensic staff member next to him replied. "But the cameras at the Ayakiri-gumi headquarters are still working; we've accessed footage from 1 a.m. to 3 a.m.

"Let's take a look."

The laptop screen was turned around; the resolution wasn't high, but it was clear enough to see what was happening.

At 1:42 AM, the surveillance footage at the entrance of the Ayakiri Group headquarters showed an empty street. At 1:43 AM, a shadow appeared in the lower right corner of the screen. It didn't walk over, nor did it run over; it darted over—entering the field of vision from the edge of the frame at an extremely fast speed, leaving a blurry trail in the low frame rate of the surveillance footage.

The shadow stopped at the doorway.

The image freezes. Zooms in. Naoya Taniguchi squints.

It is over two meters tall. Its back is hunched. Its arms are longer than its knees. Its body is covered with a dark substance, the color of which is not visible in the black and white image, but the texture of the surface is not like skin, but more like scales. The outline of its head is wrong, the mouth is in the wrong position, and it is split in a place where it shouldn't be split.

It raised its paw—a claw—and slapped at the door lock. The screen flickered, and the door opened inward.

Then it went inside.

The surveillance footage switched to the building's hallway. The lights were on, and the image was clearer than from outside. The way the thing moved in the hallway was strange; it wasn't walking or running, but rather a posture somewhere between gliding and crawling, with a low center of gravity and mostly on all fours.

The first person to appear in the frame was coming down the stairs from the second floor. He was wearing a vest, his arms were covered in tattoos, and he was holding a metal baseball bat. He was halfway down when he saw the thing.

His mouth opened.

There was no sound. The surveillance cameras didn't record audio. But the angle of his open mouth and the way his facial muscles contorted made it clear he was shouting something, even without a sound.

The thing pounced on it.

The scene lasted only a few seconds. Naoya Taniguchi watched the timestamp on the screen; from the first person appearing in the frame to only that one moving object remaining, no more than five seconds had passed. Then came the second person, the third person, and more people rushed down from the building, followed by more people falling.

Naoya Taniguchi fast-forwarded the scene.

The corridor was littered with human figures lying on the floor. The thing moved back and forth in the scene, and when it stopped, it would squat next to a corpse and make a gesture that was hard to understand.

Fast forward to 2:21 AM.

The thing in the picture suddenly stopped moving. Its body began to convulse, first slightly, then violently. Its back arched even more, its whole body like a fully drawn bow, its limbs curled up, and the muscles beneath its scales spasming violently. Its mouth opened, but no sound came out, though the mouth, splitting open to its ears, was wide open to its limit, revealing two rows of uneven teeth.

Then it fell down.

After it collapsed, its body continued to convulse, but the spasms gradually subsided. Scales began to peel away, one by one, rising from its skin to reveal grayish-white, water-swollen flesh beneath. The scales fell to the ground, quickly turning into a pool of grayish-blue liquid. Its body also began to shrink—not slowly, but rapidly deflated like a burst bubble, its over two-meter height shrinking to the size of a normal human teenager in less than a minute.

The image freezes on the last frame.

Lying on the ground was a half-mermaid corpse that looked like it had been soaked in water. In the very center of its chest, a faint blue light could be seen through its skin, as if something was crystallizing inside its body.

The forensic team removed the object from the body.

A coral. About the length of an adult's forearm, its entire body is a translucent grayish-blue, with fine veins on its surface, like a reef washed by seawater for thousands of years. The coral's branches are very thin, with sharp ends, and its overall shape resembles a miniature underwater coral tree. Light flows within it, a cold, bluish-white glow like moonlight spilling onto the sea surface.

Naoya Taniguchi took the coral and twirled it in his hand.

"What is this thing?"

"I don't know." The forensic technician shook his head. "It looks like coral, but we'll have to wait until we get back to do the composition analysis. But the preliminary assessment is that it's not any known mineral or organic matter. And—" He hesitated for a moment, "this thing was found on the deceased's body. It wasn't on the surface; it was growing inside. It grew out of the abdomen and penetrated the skin."

Naoya Taniguchi put the coral back into the evidence bag without saying a word.

He glanced at the evidence bags again. One of the bags contained several torn pieces of clothing. He recognized the style; it was the uniform of a public high school in Adachi Ward.

"Check the students at that public high school, prioritizing those who are missing or connected to the Ayakiri group," Naoya Taniguchi said.

Someone responded and went to investigate. Taniguchi Naoya turned and walked out of the office, his military boots leaving a trail of wet footprints as he stepped over the water stains on the floor through his hazmat suit. He stopped at the door, glanced back at the broken door at the end of the third-floor corridor, and then at the scratches on the wall.

"It can't be some kind of mutated revenge, can it?" he muttered to himself.

Outside the cordon, the crowd of onlookers had grown considerably larger than before.

Akira Nagayama stood on the outermost edge of the crowd, leaning against a telephone pole with his hands in his pockets. He wore a dark blue hooded sweatshirt, but the hood was off, revealing the ordinary black hair of an eighteen-year-old boy and a face that would not attract any attention on the streets of Adachi Ward.

His gaze passed through the crowd, through the police tape, and landed on the drab three-story building.

The magical power circulated at an extremely low level, and a wisp of perception extended out from the crowd, like a thread probing into the water, probing the spiritual atmosphere around the building.

The atmosphere has changed.

Last night, when Yoshida Sho committed the murder, the atmosphere only rippled slightly, like someone throwing a grain of sand into stagnant water. But now, that stagnant water is no longer just ripples.

The spiritual atmosphere surrounding the building was slowly and continuously changing. It wasn't flowing, nor was it tides, but rather a much slower, more stagnant process. It was as if something was seeping out from the ground, from the walls, from the air, gradually altering the nature of the surrounding spiritual atmosphere.

Water is associated with bad land.

In the cultivation world of past lives, when a great cultivator dies unnaturally or when a large number of cultivators die in a certain place, it forms an evil land; conversely, it forms a blessed land.

The spiritual atmosphere of this place is permeated by the imagery of water, becoming damp, cold, and stagnant, suppressing most water-element cultivators, while simultaneously becoming a breeding ground for other cultivators and certain specific beings.

Akira Nagayama's fingers twitched slightly inside his pocket.

The phantom images of three copper coins flashed past his fingertips; they were not physical objects, but merely hexagrams formed by magical power. He didn't need to actually toss the coins; with his Dao wisdom from his previous life, he could calculate this level of divination from thin air.

The hexagram appears.

Akira Nagayama's brow twitched slightly.

Evil spirits.

The spiritual atmosphere here is deathly still; when a person dies, it's like a lamp going out—their soul, scattered into the world, has no chance to coalesce and take form like in their previous life. But the evil land of water is different. Compared to the stagnant spiritual atmosphere of this world, the evil land is a closed yet active spiritual environment. Its stagnant nature traps the scattered fragments of the soul within, preventing them from dissipating. The resentment, fear, and despair of the thirty-seven people, along with the scattered True Qi of Zhen Shui after Yoshida Shodo's transformation, are trapped by the evil land of water, gathering but not dispersing. Over time, something will be born.

According to the standards of the previous life, this kind of thing is called an evil spirit.

It is not the kind of ghost that drifts around in folk legends, but a spirit with simple instincts formed from a mixture of resentment and true qi. Its rank is not high, at most equivalent to a Dao-transformed demon in the early stage of Qi Refining, but it has form but no substance, and modern technology cannot harm it.

Akira Nagayama withdrew his senses and pulled his fingers out of his pocket.

His lips twitched, not in a smile, but in a slight relaxation that came from confirming something.

In places with negative water element, evil spirits will be born, and these evil spirits will further disturb the spiritual atmosphere. However, the disturbance caused by the evil spirits on their own is ultimately limited. Moreover, the instinct of evil spirits is to devour the life force of living things. If left uncontrolled, they will spread outwards from Adachi Ward, devouring everything in their path. If the disturbance becomes too great, it will only cause more trouble.

Water is a cursed land, where water nourishes wood. Wood overcomes water, and life force controls death. If he were to plant a seed of a wood-element cultivator on the edge of this cursed land, allowing the cultivator's practice to continuously draw upon the water energy of the cursed land and transform it into wood-element vitality, it would not only accelerate the disturbance of the spiritual atmosphere but also suppress the evil spirit from spiraling out of control. Furthermore, it would cultivate a proper cultivator rather than a one-time-use demon.

Three birds with one stone.

Then, he thought of the comics he had read in his previous life, and wondered why he could create some kind of battle between good and evil.