Chapter 78: Not Dead?
Not far from Houjuo Academy stood a row of rental apartments.
The buildings were six stories tall, fitted with elevators, and surrounded by decent greenery. The environment was better than most cheap student housing, but the apartments had one obvious flaw: the rooms were packed tightly together, leaving each unit with limited space.
Still, for students, that was usually enough.
Small as a sparrow, complete in all its organs.
Bring a suitcase, sign the lease, and one could move in the same day.
In the past, most of the tenants here had been students from Houjuo Academy. Young girls came and went, chattering in the corridors, turning the area lively almost every day. The landlords had relied on that constant flow of students and earned quite well from it.
Unfortunately, business had become terrible recently.
Now the apartment row looked more like a cluster of abandoned buildings than student housing. The corridors were silent. Trash lay scattered on the ground. When the cold wind slipped through the empty spaces between buildings, it stirred up plastic bags and scraps of paper, carrying with it a lonely, eerie sound like distant ghost cries.
The cause was obvious.
The Wedding Dress Tree incident.
Since the supernatural incident at Houjuo Academy had been publicly announced, these apartments had emptied almost overnight. Not only the student tenants, but even many residents in nearby buildings had fled.
And the key person who triggered the Wedding Dress Tree incident, Kuda Mai, had once rented a room here.
"Miss Kotoko, Kuda Mai's room is here."
A somewhat gaunt middle-aged man led Iwanaga Kotoko into one of the apartment buildings with a large ring of keys in his hand.
He was the landlord.
Their destination was the fourth floor, room 405.
"Ever since the authorities and the Omnyo Agency jointly sealed this place, no one has gone in," the landlord said with a bitter expression. "There were only two keys. One is with me. The other was taken by the authorities."
He looked at the joint sealing notice pasted across the door of room 405, and the bitterness on his face deepened.
If that supernatural incident had never happened, his apartments would not have ended up like this.
Now the whole place might as well have been ruined.
He had no idea when business would recover. Every day these rooms stayed empty, money disappeared from his pocket like water poured into sand.
"Mr. Landlord," Kotoko said, stopping in front of the sealed door, "may I ask you a few questions first?"
She did not immediately tear off the sealing notice or enter the room.
The landlord straightened at once.
"Of course, Miss Kotoko. Please ask. If I know anything, I'll tell you everything."
He did not look down on Kotoko simply because she resembled a middle school student.
He knew her background.
An onmyoji from the White Fox Office.
A legitimate supernatural investigation office.
In the eyes of ordinary people, such offices were not to be offended. In this era of the Supernatural Revival, no one knew when they might need help from people like her. Besides, supernatural investigation offices possessed abilities beyond common sense, which naturally made people both fearful and eager to maintain good relations.
More importantly, the girl in front of him could make one phone call and have the authorities come open the place for her.
That alone proved that the White Fox Office behind her was not simple.
And, if he were being honest, he would never have dared come here alone if not for Kotoko.
What frightened him most was the reason she had come at all.
Had the previous supernatural incident not been fully resolved?
Or had something new happened here?
The more he thought about it, the more uneasy he became. He had already decided that he could no longer keep these apartments. Even if he had to sell them at a low price, he would do it soon.
Otherwise, the longer he held on, the more worthless the property would become.
"You know the tenant of room 405, Kuda Mai, correct?"
The landlord nodded immediately.
"How could I not? Even if I didn't know much before, I know plenty now."
"Before she disappeared," Kotoko asked, "that is, on the eve of the supernatural incident at Houjuo University Affiliated High School, did you notice anything strange about her behavior?"
During the initial investigation into the Wedding Dress Tree incident, they had only looked into Kuda Mai briefly. If not for Touma Kazusa, they might have taken longer to notice her at all.
Later, Gin had used Touma Kazusa as bait to lure out the Wedding Dress Tree and destroy it.
From beginning to end, the entire incident had been resolved in just two days.
Naturally, there had been no time to investigate every detail deeply.
But now they were digging again.
This time, nothing could be overlooked—especially Kuda Mai's daily life before her disappearance.
Perhaps some clue had been buried there from the start.
"Kuda Mai..." The landlord frowned in thought. "She was never very sociable. Narrow-minded too, and not good with hygiene. The other tenants in the building didn't like her much."
He gave an awkward cough.
"And more than once, tenants complained to me that she made strange noises at night. It disturbed people. At the time, I had already decided not to renew her lease once it expired."
He sighed.
"Who could have known..."
"Strange noises?" Kotoko repeated.
She thought for a moment.
Most likely, that had been the sound of Kuda Mai carving curses onto the walls—those words aimed at the friends she believed had betrayed her.
"What about behavior?" Kotoko asked. "Anything else unusual?"
"I don't remember much," the landlord said slowly. "Only that for a period of time, she kept muttering nonsense. Things like, 'It has nothing to do with me,' 'Everyone is dead,' 'It wasn't me'... that sort of thing."
The more he spoke, the more frightened he looked.
He was not stupid.
Connecting those words to what had happened afterward, it was very possible that Kuda Mai had already been possessed by some monster at that point.
Just thinking about it made his hair stand on end.
Kotoko pinched her chin.
So far, there was nothing truly new. Everything matched what Gin had previously learned through Touma Kazusa. There did not seem to be any additional key information here.
She was about to tear off the sealing notice and have the landlord unlock the door when he suddenly spoke again.
"Miss Kotoko, I just remembered something. I'm not sure if it counts as strange."
Kotoko stopped.
"What is it? Please tell me."
"It happened after Kuda Mai disappeared, but before the Houjuo University Affiliated High School incident became widely known."
The landlord lowered his voice unconsciously.
"At night, people often heard fox cries in the apartment building."
Kotoko's eyes sharpened slightly.
"Fox cries?"
"Yes. At first, everyone thought someone was keeping a fox as a pet. But as time passed, the cries became more and more mournful. They sounded like... like the fox was being abused."
He swallowed.
"And I don't know if it was just an illusion, but many residents said they could hear something human mixed into the cries."
"You investigated the source of the sound?"
"How could we not?"
The landlord gave a bitter smile.
"One night, I gathered a few people to look for it. We eventually traced the sound to the fourth floor. But as soon as we got close, the crying disappeared."
He glanced toward room 405.
"After that, we wanted to continue investigating, but then the Houjuo University Affiliated High School incident happened, and everything was interrupted."
"Mournful fox cries from the fourth floor..."
Kotoko silently committed the information to memory.
"Miss Kotoko," the landlord said uneasily, "if there's nothing else, then... may I leave first?"
He kept glancing at room 405.
The key figure of the Wedding Dress Tree incident had lived inside that room.
Who knew what kind of filthy thing might still be lingering there?
Kotoko understood the mindset of an ordinary person facing such a place. She did not force him to stay.
She simply took the key from his hand and smiled.
"Thank you for coming all this way, Mr. Landlord."
"No trouble. No trouble at all."
The landlord waved his hands quickly, exchanged a few more polite words, then hurried away from the building that made him feel so uneasy.
Once he left, Kotoko was alone.
The entire apartment building seemed to sink deeper into silence.
Even if there were truly nothing here, an ordinary person staying too long in this kind of place would probably scare themselves into a nervous breakdown.
Kotoko, however, merely turned toward room 405.
She tore off the sealing notice and inserted the key.
Click.
Room 405, sealed for nearly a month, opened.
The moment the door cracked apart, dust stirred into the air. A foul, sour stench rushed out—the smell of fermented leftovers, stale air, and rotting filth.
Kotoko frowned and covered her nose.
"Good thing I came prepared."
She took out a thickened mask from her pocket and put it on.
Then she stepped inside.
Room 405 was roughly fifty square meters, with one living room, one bedroom, and one bathroom. There was no separate kitchen. After the genkan at the entrance, the space led directly into the living room. Beside the living room was the bedroom door.
That bedroom was the focus of her investigation.
But the moment Kotoko entered, she noticed something wrong.
"No. Someone has been here recently."
The beige tile floor had accumulated a layer of dust after being unoccupied for so long. Across that dust was a series of footprints.
Someone had walked back and forth.
However, the tracks connected only the front door and the bedroom. There were no footprints leading into the rest of the living room or bathroom.
Whoever entered had not lingered elsewhere.
Kotoko crouched to examine the marks more closely.
"These footprints don't look human."
The shape was wrong.
Too narrow.
Too light in some places, too deep in others.
"More like a beast."
She studied them for a moment.
"Enlarged fox prints."
As expected, she soon found long grayish-yellow hairs near the tracks.
They looked slightly like cat hair at a glance, but Kotoko recognized them immediately.
Fox fur.
"So the mournful fox cries the tenants heard at night really did come from room 405."
Kotoko's expression turned thoughtful.
The Director's judgment had been correct.
Kuda Mai, the key figure in the Wedding Dress Tree incident, still had too many suspicious points around her. She was a valid breakthrough. If they were lucky, she might even provide useful information about the grotesque tree spirit incident.
Kotoko carefully recorded the footprints and fox fur before moving toward the bedroom door.
Kuda Mai's room.
The main target.
But the moment she grabbed the doorknob and prepared to twist it—
The door opened.
Kotoko narrowed her eyes.
"The bedroom door was already open."
Of course.
Something had entered before her.
Inside the bedroom, the curtains were tightly drawn, leaving the entire space dim and stuffy. The sour stench here was even stronger.
Trash covered the floor.
Leftover food had grown rotten and was crawling with flies and maggots. The sight was disgusting enough to make even a prepared person feel nauseous. The room was so messy that there was almost nowhere to step.
Kotoko paused at the doorway and looked around.
"Didn't go in?"
That puzzled her.
The scene before her did not seem much different from the initial investigation records. Aside from the leftover food becoming more rotten and foul-smelling, there were no obvious changes.
The walls were still covered with cursed words and a list of names.
You all deserve to die.
I curse you.
Be eaten by the Wedding Dress Tree.
Eat, eat, die.
Ayato Kyoko.
Tsukamatsu Ryoko.
Kamazuka Akiko.
The writing remained unchanged.
Kotoko chuckled softly beneath her mask.
"I doubt that thing came here for sightseeing."
There had to be something.
Some overlooked trace.
She began searching carefully.
First the trash and rotten leftovers scattered across the floor.
Then the cursed words carved and stained dark on the walls.
Then the moldy bedding in the closet.
Finally, in a drawer, Kotoko found a framed photograph.
It was a picture of Kuda Mai with her parents, taken in the courtyard of a farmhouse. In the photo, Kuda Mai and her mother were smiling brightly.
Her father, however, looked distracted.
Troubled.
As though something weighed heavily on his mind.
Aside from the framed photo, there was nothing else in the drawer.
Kotoko was about to push it closed when she suddenly stopped.
Something was wrong.
"The drawer and the photo frame are too clean."
A drawer could block some dust, yes.
But not entirely.
And the photo frame looked as if it had been wiped every day. Not a single speck of dust clung to it.
Kuda Mai had disappeared at least a month ago.
How could this be spotless?
"Don't tell me the suspected yokai came here just to wipe a framed photo."
The thought was absurd.
Then, in the next moment, the absurd thought was confirmed.
When Kotoko picked up the photo frame, she felt dampness on the back.
She turned it over.
Fresh blood stained the rear of the frame.
It had not even fully coagulated yet.
The blood looked as if it had been left there only yesterday.
And beneath it, lines of text had been carved into the frame.
Dad went mad first.
Then Mom went mad.
This is a curse.
It's almost my turn.
I'm starting to not recognize myself.
It's that hairpin.
It's the fox's curse.
Kotoko's eyes widened.
"This is Kuda Mai's handwriting."
The investigation during the Wedding Dress Tree incident had been too rushed.
They had missed something important.
Very important.
"Judging from the darkened blood in the carved words, this wasn't written recently," Kotoko murmured. "It should have been left during the Wedding Dress Tree incident."
Her gaze shifted to the fresh blood smeared across the frame.
"But whose blood is this?"
The suspected yokai?
Or Kuda Mai?
Kotoko fell silent.
"Or perhaps... they're the same."
A chill crawled through the room.
In her mind, a scene formed.
A dark, unknown figure standing exactly where she stood now.
It opened the drawer.
Took out the framed photo.
Gently wiped the glass clean.
But its hands were stained with fresh blood, and that blood smeared across the back of the frame.
If that suspected yokai really was Kuda Mai, then a new question appeared.
During the Wedding Dress Tree incident, Gin had broken into the Wedding Dress Tree's domain and found Kuda Mai, who had already been turned into a Wedding Dress Bride.
Afterward, she had turned to ash along with the Wedding Dress Tree inside the Fire Boundary spell.
She had died.
Completely.
Hadn't she?
Could she have revived?
Kotoko's expression turned serious.
"I'll record all the clues first. Then I'll return to the office and discuss this with the Director."
She immediately began documenting everything inside the room.
At the same time, she took out her phone and dialed an official number.
The call connected quickly.
"Hello, Kotoko-sama. How may we assist you?"
"Activate the White Fox Office's Level One authority," Kotoko said. "Investigate Kuda Mai's original family for me. Especially her parents' situation during the Wedding Dress Tree incident."
"As you command. Please wait."
The response was swift and respectful.
Kotoko continued collecting suspicious traces and information from room 405.
A short while later, just as she finished, the official investigation results were sent to her phone.
"As expected of the authorities," Kotoko murmured. "When it comes to population records, they move fast."
She opened the message.
Then her expression tightened.
"They all died strangely."
Her eyes moved further down the screen.
"And…"
.....
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