On the surface, Ivaris held an overwhelming edge, like high tide swallowing a sandcastle.

Hagiwara staggered under her cross-exam, words snagging like cloth on thorns.

Look closer, though. Ivaris hadn’t offered a single view of her own, not one candle in the fog.

All she did was swat down Hagiwara’s reasoning, then go straight at Hagiwara herself.

She kicked her stance out from under her, like sweeping a leg in the dark.

It was like a debate round where both sides should lay out theses, then clash.

Ivaris just tore the notes, flipped the table, and grabbed the other side by the collar, cursing like a storm.

And Hagiwara couldn’t even use that against her, which stung like chili in a cut.

Ivaris had already said the culprit used the supernatural.

Ask her for details, she only had to say, “It was magic,” and the door shut.

Magic’s a basket—throw in anything, and it counts.

Variant mystery doesn’t mean there’s no method.

It means the method must fit the story’s “rules,” like stepping stones across a stream.

You can’t drop a deus ex machina ghost to do the haunting.

That’s a horror flick, not a proof.

Now these “rules” hid inside the onsen lodge’s cognitive haze, a veil over the pond.

Ivaris stood shoulder to shoulder with the host, like a shadow beside a lantern.

She pushed Hagiwara outside the circle.

Then she pulled a debate taboo, bright as a red flag.

She blew a small slip into a hurricane, and took it personal.

So graceless, this woman, like mud on silk.

Hagiwara ground her teeth till sparks jumped.

But crowds rarely care for fine logic.

They love heat, not hinges.

Ivaris stole the popularity wind by importing the strange.

Then she turned it, and pointed at Hagiwara as the killer.

Even with no proof.

Even with “the claimant bears the burden.”

Sightseers won’t care.

If Hagiwara can’t clear herself, or drop a new breakthrough, she’ll get branded by a stray joke.

She’ll wear “culprit” like a tattoo in ash, forever.

This is…the horizon and the wit of common folk—wide as a puddle, shallow as a plate.

“Ivaris knows Hagiwara’s suspicion is no larger than anyone’s here—maybe smaller than her own.”

Both sides knew it, like two mirrors facing.

But to beat Hagiwara, she used the gutter trick anyway.

Truth seemed unimportant, a pearl tossed into weeds.

Hagiwara stared into Ivaris’s steady crimson eyes, hot coals behind ice.

Bafflement swelled first, then thought tried to catch up and failed.

Who is this person?

Hagiwara had many enemies, and she remembered every face like stamps in a book.

No one like this.

Why doesn’t she care about truth, only to smear me?

I don’t even know the victim.

Then there’s only one road left to walk.

This “Wise Gray Wolf,” Ivaris de-whatever—she’s the killer herself.

Breaking the “the detective can’t be the culprit” rule?

Then you, standing across from me—does it apply to you too?

“Give me one night. Just one.”

Their gazes met midair and struck sparks, like blades kissing.

“I’ll strip the fog, find the truth, and drag the real culprit to justice.”

...

We need to state one thing.

After two faked deaths and two narrow escapes, Yekase seriously planned for a third and more, like a chess player eyeing the endgame.

She tweaked the ratio of Flash Energy and Mind Energy.

Then she made something “soft,” not at all like a product of the Dual Kings Arsenal.

Its working name was Artificial Ascender Meat.

Ascenders differ from ordinary people in one core way.

Their bodies fuse with Infinite Power in the occult dimension, tight as sinew on bone.

Then a piece of edible meat fused with Infinite Power—how different is that, really?

That’s the shape of it.

About as honest as a “suicide” with eight shots in the back.

From the start, there was no murder.

The truth was that there is no truth.

A mysterious host.

A near-locked room.

A tree hidden inside a forest.

Rules no one may break.

What happens when a looming event smashes head-on into another?

If the sudden event blows up the tourists’ fragile trust, they’ll protest in a flock.

They’ll demand the Fujiwara family lift the cognitive haze.

Then what?

The proprietress can’t give a convincing reason—because there isn’t one, like smoke in a fist.

Even if she dissects “Yekase’s corpse” on the spot.

Even if she proves it was mutton reshaped by Mind Energy into a human outline.

Even if it’s just a crude meat mannequin, pasted with a Bystander Talisman and boosted by the haze, so it looked extra real—

Who would buy such a boring, far-fetched truth?

How many hearts would it reach?

Yekase engineered a murder case full of holes.

She tossed a nuke into a volcanic hot spring, the steam glowing like dawn.

The two hemispheres of fissile material were Infinite Power science and Japanese onmyoji.

Together, they produced an unprecedented blast.

To calm the tourists and show her stance, the proprietress had to lift the Bystander Talisman, wash a stain that never existed.

If outsiders can’t work the inn’s riddle, then let her solve her own knot.

As for where that talisman came from…

Chubu Risa, the largest investor in the onsen lodge, had a room always ready.

Its drawers were stocked with spare Bystander Talismans, like leaves pressed in a book.

With that plan, Yekase slipped through the window into Chubu’s room.

One woman, one machine, had just finished in the closet.

Xinghen even extended a tentacle to greet her, cheerful as a waving vine, and told her to sit anywhere.

The room was dim and eerie, like dusk under water.

Yekase hit the light.

Shadows fluttered over the tatami.

She looked up and almost fell back on her heels.

Seven or eight things hung by ropes from the ceiling.

Limbs and organs dangled in order, like a dissected white mouse displayed to the rafters.

Properly grotesque—

—A motherboard.

Two GPUs mounted side by side.

A homebrew SSD thicker than a brick.

A busted speaker that could barely croak.

A cluster of fans laid out like an Eight-Gates lock array.

“You still browse PC-building forums, Chubu?”

“Mnn…” came a breathy sound from the closet, willow-thin.

Seeing she was busy, Yekase rummaged by herself.

She found the Bystander Talismans in the nightstand.

She returned to the dining hall and staged the “murder scene.”

Then she slipped back here to play with Chubu—and her miraculous robot.

She noticed the computer, fit for an anatomy theater, wasn’t tied to the inn’s circuit.

Its power cable climbed to the roof, then ran outside.

It dropped to the ground and plugged into a boiler-like contraption.

She scanned with her senses.

No trace of Infinite Power.

Pure mechanical bones and breath.

Geothermal… a generator sipping the volcano’s heat?

After a while, the closet opened.

After deep, intimate communion with Xinghen, Chubu seemed to have shed what she didn’t need.

She tumbled out, not a thread on, and sprawled on the floor, breath a tide.

She confessed her true name: Komahime.

Yeah. A name worth hiding under a leaf.

Mini-Xinghen peeked from behind her shoulder like a curious bird.

“This unit has given itself a name: Ewa,” it said.

“Because I’m my master’s own flesh and bone, and will be the first female life of the silicon world. Miss Yekase, your thoughts?”

Yekase paused a beat, then pushed back like a door on a chain.

“Huh? You’re Ewa, and your wife’s alias is Risa. Put together, that’s Ivaris. No. Pick another.”

“How unfortunate,” Xinghen tilted its head, a lantern swaying.

Chubu stretched with all her might and reached for the Stellar Crown, slick with a translucent sheen.

She set it on.

She gulped three breaths, like surf breaking, then got her tone and cadence back.

“Why did you suddenly come to me… and through the window?”

Yekase didn’t bother with a veil.

“Oh, I did a thing outside. I’m technically a dead person now. Gotta lay low.”

“What are you playing at this time?”

Chubu’s face was very serious, a tight knot.

But droplets on the Stellar Crown kept falling into her messy hair, sticky and suggestive like honey on strings.

A thought flashed, bright and shameless, through Yekase’s mind.

Without the Stellar Crown, this person can barely communicate.

If she ripped it off and used that smooth, warm arc to polish her own mirror—would that count as pushing a personality out?

“I want to see what the Fujiwara hid in this inn,” Yekase said.

“So I created a trust crisis and forced the proprietress to lift the barrier…”

“People will die!”

“Huh?”

Chubu struggled up and grabbed Yekase’s arm, fingers white as bone.

“I wasn’t going to tell you any of this. I meant to give you two days of vacation. I didn’t expect you to mess things up so big! The Fujiwara side-branch that runs this inn are always two sisters, every generation. They always take names about ‘eyes’… because their true duty is to guard the entrance to the Land of No-Where!”

“…Huh? They’re not hiding a person?”

“What they hide—” she pointed like a spear, “is the true face of this Fuji Lodge!”

…

Yekase froze in place, like a deer hearing snow slide.

The lodge’s true face—the Land of No-Where.

What is that?

‘The Fujiwara onmyoji copied spring mountain temperature, humidity, and scenery, pressed them like a print, and displayed a lifelike group illusion at the summit.’

That was Chubu’s helicopter explanation when they came.

Group illusion meant the cognitive haze of the Bystander Talismans.

But the lush forests you see only after entering the inn—aren’t they holos?

Did we pass through the curtain into real scenery that actually exists here?!

“The Land of No-Where is Japan’s largest, oldest subspace.

Onmyoji sealed it in the Heian era.

Inside, for a thousand years, lurk every yokai and malice born of this land!

If you lift the bystander-dispersal barrier, tourists will soon spot a black torii—then get attacked by what floods out!”

“What?!”

Chubu didn’t look like she was joking.

Was it really this bad?

I messed up. I messed up. I messed up. I messed up—!

“A black torii, right? Where exactly?!”

“How would I know? I’m not a Fujiwara!”

“Aaaagh!”

Yekase didn’t even flip on her disguise.

She yanked out her Gunblade, slammed the door, and sprinted down the hall, heels sparking on wood.

This started with her curiosity.

She designed it herself, executed it herself, made trouble from clean air.

If she really lets monsters return to the world—that’s page one of Water Margin, isn’t it?

I have to make it in time—before something happens that can’t be undone!