Everything has its Dao—

Now that you know, can’t you shut up and just gather evidence? Is tomorrow’s second hearing ready?

The tourists had scattered back to their rooms, and the “corpse” lay parked in an unused storeroom, like a moth pinned under glass. Ivaris sat in the dining chair with one leg crossed, her gaze cold as winter water while Hagiwara Ichihime hunted through shadows and drawers.

Ever since Hagiwara slammed down that oath like a stone on a drum, they’d kept this pose for half an hour, and Ivaris discovered the woman really could ramble—like a sparrow pecking at gravel, no rest, no song.

She wasn’t Yekase’s kind of genius grandstander, whose bragging still carried a sliver of meaning, just a sliver. She wasn’t the lost-in-logic murmur of a mind that didn’t connect. She talked the way people pace for no reason, proving her vocal cords were still alive, wind whistling through a hollow reed.

Not a speck of charm in it.

Ivaris had seen that breed long ago, court ladies with nothing to do under chandeliers, living like lilies in a greenhouse.

Back before she ran from home, they ringed her round and gossiped every day—whose young lord and lady traded glances in the corridor, which maid or valet blundered and got their palms smacked by the etiquette tutor—an archive of nothingness, smoke curling with no fire. And at the end of each petty tale they’d ask Ivaris’s opinion, because the “princess” sat highest at the table, a plume in still air.

Nobles and royals, besides burning their lives and the taxpayers’ coin like opium in velvet bedrooms, what else do they do? Why do some have the right to float while others slog through mud?

Thanks to that, Ivaris’s tolerance for dead weight was forged early, steel tempered in dull heat. Hagiwara, this island country’s rustic lady, was a small wave compared to that palace tide, barely a ripple—and she was at least moving her hands.

Though Ivaris had seen the spoiler and knew the labor was a beautiful waste, petals drifting nowhere.

You don’t have much time to strut free. A perfect crime can’t exist—I’ll find the threads and stitch them into the equation that leads to truth!

Yes, perfect crimes can’t exist—if there was a crime at all. The thought glinted like a fish beneath the surface.

Ivaris watched with a smile tugging at one corner as Hagiwara crawled under the dining table, then tore open boxes, then clicked pantry doors, then peered out the window—the way a fox circles a henhouse, caught between scent and shadow.

…Huh? The sound popped like a bubble in quiet air.

Oh? Found something?

There… when did a torii appear there?

Ivaris leaned, gaze slanting like moonlight through blinds.

Outside the restaurant window, in the small courtyard, a rustic dirt path had surfaced like an old bone in a field, and a black-painted, ancient torii stood with no deity plaque hanging at its brow. In the cold moonlight it looked serene and uncanny, a lacquered doorway set in frost.

Not the sort of scenery you should find in a lodge built inside a volcano’s mouth. The wind carried sulfur, yet the gate breathed cedar.

When did it take root there?

The ward has come down, Ivaris murmured, like dew realizing it’s sunlight.

A ward against idle feet? With a stride toward truth, Hagiwara’s face tightened, a drumhead pulled taut. The spring air on our skin and the green woods to our eyes weren’t the landlady’s illusion, but something that actually stands in soil and time… so where is Wisteria Lodge built? Are we still on Mount Fuji’s crown?

No—are we even in the world that common sense names? The question rose like mist over a ravine.

If this forest is a whole domain, the lodge on the peak and the lodge in the woods might be two planes laid like paper on glass. The ward’s collapse let the blurred forest plane bloom clear, like ink saturating rice paper.

The killer could’ve hidden in the overlapping lodge, waiting for a slit in the veil—

Hagiwara held her breath, a bird under a hawk’s shadow.

She stood by the window, cracked open for a peek, with the right half reflecting the room’s light like a pond. In that glass, the restaurant looked wrong—no cake or milk in the cabinet, the counter split, tables and chairs thrown about, a crack sketched like a scar across the wall.

Then Hagiwara saw a woman in a kimono.

When did she slip in there?

The woman stood before the food cabinet, hands hanging with long black nails like lacquered thorns, face erased by hair falling like wet ink.

Wh— Her throat clicked like a bead in a bowl.

Only visible through the window’s reflection. A stance before the cabinet. Nails that could poke blood-holes through skin.

Gears meshed, cold teeth biting.

It was you, you killed—

What are you talking about? From Ivaris’s angle the cabinet didn’t reflect; she saw only Hagiwara freeze like a rabbit in headlights.

The thing in the mirror gave Hagiwara no gap to escape. It raised both hands and lunged, a shadow pouncing out of polished water.

Aaahhhh?!

Ten black nails sheathed in a red-tinted ghostly miasma cut down, whipping wind like blades.

Help—hel—

Hagiwara squeezed her eyes shut; her mind went white, snow covering tracks—

Clang!

Layered lies toppled into truth by a crooked throw—moderate contrivance can still weave a fun tale. The voice was dry as summer straw, amused in its crackle.

A tall woman in a graphic tee and baggy shorts stood in front of Hagiwara like a lamppost in storm. The words [Flat Chest] sprawled across her shirt; the dark gray shorts’ drawstring hung long and swayed like a tail. Her style screamed lazy street, no aura of a powerhouse, no thunderclouds at her shoulders—her right hand tucked behind her back, while her left reverse-gripped a sheathed longsword across her chest, parrying something unseen, air ringing on steel.

Ivaris had never met her, but the name rose on instinct, like a fish rising to a fly. You’re… Jixia?

Wait wait, from Yekase’s tone and stories, she’d thought Jixia would be a floaty, worldless old Longlifer, an immortal in hemp robes. Their brief chat had that misty feel. Why show up in a T-shirt and shorts like a vending-machine surprise at a foreign hot spring?

Is this the random spawn of a generic elder immortal, refreshed beside eucalyptus steam?

Mm. Jixia’s answer was a small sound, like a pebble nudged. The sword’s hilt flipped half a turn from the hand behind her back; she caught it neat and let it dip to the floor, quiet as rain.

Run, little miss.

Ah—ah! Thank you— Hagiwara, snatching back a life like a fish gulping air, scrambled from the window and tucked behind Ivaris, abandoning her earlier suspicions like shed skin.

Only then did Ivaris catch the attacker’s outline—a smoldering knot of Mind Energy, ember-red under soot.

She stared at Jixia, surprised, a gull catching a bright shard. Why are you—

Jixia ignored her. She slid her right hand into the ghost woman’s chest, fingers vanishing like smoke into fog.

Let me see… The person is gone, the obsession stays. A sad story, a reed humming after the river’s passed.

Ivaris had seen plenty of Longlifers through Yekase’s eyes. Aside from their general scatterbrained charm, their fighting bite wasn’t necessarily stronger than modern folk—Sandryon, for instance, a butterfly pinned more by beauty than brute force. But Jixia felt different, like winter sun that doesn’t warm yet lights everything.

If others lived a tale stretching across centuries, she wasn’t simply three-times thicker. She was the reader at the desk, turning pages like leaves in wind.

It wasn’t a gap in power. Even standing at the event’s center, taking Yekase’s spot to crash in like a protagonist and save the day, she carried a dense, gentle aloofness, as if the patch of space she stood in had been lifted out of this world and shelved elsewhere.

And look at those street clothes. The contrast was a brushstroke on blank silk.

Go, now. Don’t harm people anymore.

Jixia flicked her hand like brushing ash, and the knot of Mind Energy drifted apart, dispersing like fireflies at dawn.

The Land of No-Where. I used to get haiku from onmyoji; in my memory it’s a fine mountain. If you feel up to it, go inside and take a look, treat it like a spring outing.

Hagiwara shook her head hard enough to rattle beads.

Ivaris felt a prickle of interest at first, but then pictured an old mountain full of demons and ghosts—nothing there to savor but danger—and shook her head too, a fan snapping closed.

Jixia didn’t press. She clasped her hands behind her head and stretched like a cat after sun.

Mm—fun’s spent here. Back I go. Do poke your Yekase to finish the special solution to the phase-transition balance equation. I’m not her advisor; I won’t hover over her draft.

Uh, okay. Thank you for your timely help, comrade!

The equation meant nothing to Ivaris, math ink swimming on water, but “your Yekase” she understood. Her favor for Jixia jumped thirty percent on the spot, like a heatwave hitting a cold front.

A lift of the hand. If fate allows, next time.

In the flicker between blinks, with no warning or prep, Jixia vanished on the spot, like a candle snuffed without smoke.

Meanwhile, what was Yekase doing—the culprit who almost opened Pandora’s box and earned a place in the bad annals?

She’d lit her flight spell to the stops and shot headfirst through the torii, like an arrow into a painted gate.

Like a warrior slamming shut the dark door, alone on the cold, broken far shore… not quite that tragic. She could feel, in the Cosmic Bubble, several presences with terrifying Mind Energy and Soul Power, like thunderheads stacked on the horizon. But the dimensional veil to the main world felt rock-solid, more fortress than tent—so solid the builders couldn’t break it, so they sealed it instead, like a boulder tied with rope.

Passing the first torii, the scene snapped and shifted. Dirt gave way to neat stone bricks; forest to corridor; black torii duplicated and pasted one after another, a paper-cut pattern stretching to a vanishing point.

Yekase summoned her flying bed and sat, drifting forward like a gull on a blue current.

She watched for a surge from within, but none spilled outward; her nerves unclenched, the bowstring easing. Then she started her autopsy of choice and mistake—how had things swerved into danger so fast, so sharp?

At bottom, Yekase had driven too hard, pedals slammed, dust veils up.

She sensed a secret under the hot spring’s surface and dove in—that part was fine, a swimmer entering cold water. But Akano Souu’s betrayal, as expected, built a kind of inertia in her bones, and the landlady’s surname was Fujiwara. In her gut she decided there was nothing left to talk about, so she went in wolf-first, teeth out—strategy as bleach, stripping the room of any air for words.

Yekase had peeled back too many secrets; the filthy truths always repeated like stains. In the end, she, the one who should’ve believed in people, had denied the chance of kindness, like slamming a door on a thaw.

… I’ve worn down too, haven’t I.

The flying bed finally broke free of the torii corridor and burst into open sky, like a kite clearing a grove.