The Japanese police never disappointed Xu Fu's expectations. As always, they only showed up after everything was over to clean up the mess.
Still, she could not be too hard on them. At least the police in the world of Detective Conan got to wrap things up afterward. This time, the enemy Xu Fu and the others had been facing was an evil spirit. It was already good enough if these police officers did not get in the way. Better for them to arrive after the incident was over.
Red Hood had already turned back into a doll. After all, she was the one who had actually killed Nagiko Shami, and as a doll she did not even have an identity she could report to the police, so it was hardly appropriate for her to appear in public.
As the "first discoverers" at the crime scene, Xu Fu and the others were naturally questioned by the police.
Even though the one who had really done it was Red Hood, and even though they had already gotten their story straight beforehand, Keitaro Gentoga and Eiko Hozuki were still nervous as hell when the police questioned them.
Luckily, the officers never grew suspicious. They simply assumed the two children had been frightened by seeing a corpse so suddenly. They never realized it was actually guilt.
What surprised the officers more was that Xu Fu and Yayoi Hozuki, who were even younger, had remained so calm.
There was plenty for the police to do—recovering the body, investigating the scene, setting up barriers to preserve the crime scene... Only a few officers were free to ask Xu Fu and the others for details.
After all, anyone who saw the wound on the victim's neck would never believe those four "children" had done it.
It was too clean.
The blade had slipped through the gap between the bones and cut through muscle fibers, blood vessels, and every other bodily tissue without the slightest hesitation.
A single cut so clean and beautiful it made the scalp crawl.
When the head hit the ground, the victim had probably not even realized she was already dead.
None of the officers believed those four "children" were capable of something like that. Leaving everything else aside, creating a wound like that would have required tremendous strength. Even they themselves might not have had enough force for it, much less those four children.
In their eyes, Xu Fu and Yayoi Hozuki were far too young—probably too young to even swing a blade properly. Eiko Hozuki was a girl, so surely she would not be very strong either. The only one who seemed remotely more suspicious was Keitaro Gentoga, but even that was only barely.
He looked soft and slender, after all. Even though he exercised regularly just to stay healthy, years of being tormented by curses and evil spirits had left him thinner than most people his age.
"We still have a few more detailed questions we'd like to ask. Would it be convenient for you to come to the station?"
Because of that single sentence from the lead officer, the four of them got back into the minivan they had come in and followed the police car all the way to the station.
Perhaps worried about frightening Keitaro and the others, both the officer leading them in and the one in charge wore warm, gentle smiles the whole time. After getting out of the car, they brought the group to an interrogation room.
Thanks to their deceptively innocent appearances, Xu Fu and Yayoi Hozuki were even given a few snacks by the police to eat while they waited.
Xu Fu had spent the whole way there thinking about what she should say while giving her statement, but in the end the police only asked her and Yayoi Hozuki a few questions before letting them go. Keitaro Gentoga and Eiko Hozuki, on the other hand, stayed in the interrogation room much longer.
Xu Fu felt rather helpless about it. She had made all sorts of preparations, and none of them turned out to be useful. She had even been planning to hypnotize the police if anything went wrong. But since they had let her off that easily, she was more than happy to take it easy.
Glancing at the milk candy in her hand, Xu Fu muttered under her breath, "Honestly, they really do think I'm a child, huh? You little brats—your grandfathers are probably younger than I am..."
Complaints were complaints, but the milk candy really was pretty sweet. For the sake of the candy, Xu Fu the Magnanimous would let the matter slide and not stoop to arguing with this bunch of little tots.
It looked like Keitaro Gentoga and the others would still be a while, so Xu Fu sat there and waited, and waited, and waited until she started getting bored.
She remembered a conversation once between a Chinese student and a Japanese student.
The Chinese student asked, "Are you allowed to bring phones to class?"
The Japanese student replied, "We can bring them, but we usually don't take them out at school."
The Chinese student asked again, "Why? Are the teachers really strict about it?"
And the Japanese student answered, "Because there are a lot more interesting things at school than phones."
Back then, whenever Xu Fu wanted to kill time, she would take out her phone and read novels, watch anime, or play games. It had always felt like she could never get bored of it.
But not anymore.
For her now, those methods no longer seemed all that effective at making time pass.
So Xu Fu stood up and left her seat.
"I'll go take a look around."
Yayoi Hozuki had been sitting right beside her, so there was no way she could have missed Xu Fu getting up to leave.
"Where are you going?"
"I'm not really sure. Just wandering around a bit, I guess?" Xu Fu turned and met Yayoi Hozuki's eyes. "This is a police station. It's not quite on the level of a hospital, but the people here still deal with the dead, with criminals, and with the belongings of the dead and criminal evidence. Stuff like that gets brought here all the time, so places like this can easily breed those things... If I don't take a look, I won't feel at ease."
Xu Fu said a lot, but Yayoi Hozuki still understood immediately.
"So... Xu Fu is going ghost hunting?"
The moment it came to looking for evil spirits, Yayoi Hozuki's skull-patterned eyes seemed to grow even brighter, starlight of excitement and anticipation glittering in their depths.
She hopped down from her chair as well and hurried after Xu Fu, hugging the doll of her newly subdued [Black Asura of the Eclipse] in her arms.
"Take me with you! Take me with you! I want to go too!"
Xu Fu was going off to play with evil spirits while leaving her behind to sit and wait? That would have been way too much.
So of course she had to go too. Hoarding all the fun for yourself was absolutely unacceptable.
Even after going through such a hard battle, Yayoi Hozuki's enthusiasm for running into ghosts had not diminished in the slightest.
Xu Fu felt that was a bit inappropriate.
"What about Keitaro and Eiko? When they finish giving their statements and come out, they'll definitely panic if they can't find the two of us."
"It's fine. Keitaro and Eiko are already university students, and there are police officers with them too. There's no need to worry that they'll get lost."
"...Objectively speaking, shouldn't it be them worrying that you'll get lost? You're still an elementary schooler who can't even take care of yourself."
Xu Fu only said that about Yayoi Hozuki and did not include herself in it at all. After all, there was absolutely no way Xu Fu could ever get lost. Even if everyone else in the world got lost at the same time, she still would not.
Yayoi Hozuki stared at her with dead-fish eyes and put on a deeply disappointed look.
"Xu Fu, when did you become someone so shallow and boring? Judging people by appearances? I thought you'd be the sort who cared more about my inner qualities. I never thought you were just as shallow as everyone else..."
"That's way too theatrical. Stop there." Xu Fu narrowed her eyes and quickly cut off Yayoi Hozuki's exaggerated performance. "You should know full well that what I said was a very reasonable assumption... Even if people as shallow as the ones you're talking about really do exist, I shouldn't be one of them. That would be Keitaro, Eiko, and the police here."
"Mm... can't argue with that." Yayoi Hozuki nodded thoughtfully. "I see. So Keitaro and Eiko are the shallow and boring ones..."
"Careful, or I'm going to record that and play it back for them later."
Yayoi Hozuki really did want to go. Xu Fu's words had done nothing to change her mind. After all, the most agonizing thing in the world was not having no game to play. It was when your buddy got to play and you did not. That only made Yayoi Hozuki feel horribly unbalanced inside.
"We... we could leave a note. Just saying we had something to do and needed to step out for a bit... We won't go far. We won't leave the police station grounds."
"That... should be okay... right?"
Even Xu Fu was not entirely sure whether that was really a safe enough approach.
Of course, the safest thing would still be to go quickly and come back quickly—before anyone noticed they were gone.
It was already quite late. Through the station windows, they could see the silver moon hanging high outside and the faint stars half-hidden behind the clouds. The fight between [Otogiri, the Soul Sucking Oiran] and [Black Asura of the Eclipse] at Old I Watergate earlier had taken an absurdly long time. Both of them had been like unkillable cockroaches.
By the time those two evil spirits were done fighting, it had already gone completely dark. The Flame Butterflies summoned by [Otogiri, the Soul Sucking Oiran] had actually looked rather beautiful fluttering through the night.
Unfortunately, those Flame Butterflies were more dangerous than killer bees, so nobody had been in any mood to appreciate their beauty.
Though it was already very late, the murder case meant the police had no leisure to rest. As Xu Fu and Yayoi Hozuki walked through the halls, they would occasionally see officers hurrying past with urgent expressions, not daring to slack off for even a second.
Xu Fu even felt a little sorry for them. After all, part of the reason they were stuck working overtime tonight was because of her, even if that had never been what she wanted.
None of the rushing officers noticed Xu Fu and Yayoi Hozuki passing right by them. Before coming out, Xu Fu had used [Taoism Arts] to reduce their presence to the absolute minimum. In other people's eyes, the two of them now had less presence than a small pebble by the side of the road.
It might have been a very basic concealment spell, but there was no denying how absurdly useful it was in all sorts of situations. Like when a teacher was calling on students in class to recite something or answer questions—at times like that, Xu Fu had always wished she could shrink her presence until it was smaller than an ant, just so the teacher would never notice her.
"Xu Fu doesn't seem to be wandering randomly. So you already have a destination in mind?" Yayoi Hozuki suddenly asked from behind.
Ever since the day she awakened her spiritual eyes, she had also gained an exceptionally high intellect, along with physical ability and bodily coordination on par with an athlete. Those things had all become weapons that helped her defeat evil spirits again and again, though the price had been the loss of most of her emotions, leaving her cold and detached.
Xu Fu understood all that perfectly well, so none of it surprised her.
"If an evil spirit is going to be born, then someone first has to die. The more people die in a place, the easier it is for powerful evil spirits to arise there."
Battlefield ruins, mass graves, hospitals...
Places like those were the easiest places for evil spirits to grow. At the same time, evil spirits—driven more by instinct and desire, behaving more like beasts than humans—were even more likely than humans to fight each other, which in turn gave rise to even more dangerous spirits.
"So if we want to find evil spirits, then we need to look for the dead, or for things closely tied to the dead."
When she got to that point, Xu Fu turned deliberately to look at Yayoi Hozuki.
"Where do you think we should look for that kind of thing inside a police station?"
Yayoi Hozuki frowned and sank into thought.
"Mm... the morgue?"
"The morgue belongs to hospitals. I'm asking where inside a police station there would be dead people, or things closely tied to the dead."
At the mention of the dead, the first things Yayoi Hozuki thought of were investigators and coroners. And when it came to "things closely tied to the dead," what surfaced in her mind was...
"A storage room for the belongings of the deceased and criminal evidence."
Xu Fu nodded. Yayoi Hozuki agreed too: if there really was an evil spirit somewhere in this police station, then that would indeed be the most likely place to run into it.
She was so excited, so excited. What kind of evil spirit were they going to meet? What kind of adventure were they about to have?
That anticipation toward the unknown made Yayoi Hozuki's steps feel lighter, as though she were walking on clouds.
Naturally, a place as important as the storage room for the deceased's belongings and criminal evidence was not somewhere they would ever let unrelated people like Xu Fu and Yayoi Hozuki enter.
But the security measures set up at a police station could only stop ordinary people. They were useless against someone like Xu Fu, who was skilled in all sorts of Taoist Arts and sorcery. Getting in here would be easier for her than it was for Jade to sneak into Section 13.
This police station only had one small storage room. According to some of the older officers who worked here, before the station moved locations there had been an "H Mountain Annex" specifically for storing evidence, a place so large it could even hold wrecked vehicles and construction cranes.
And at night, the person assigned to guard H Mountain Annex would always hear voices coming from inside the completely empty building. Because there were so many things related to the dead kept there, people said the place was haunted.
Xu Fu would actually have preferred to go look at H Mountain Annex.
But under the circumstances, she would just have to settle for second best.
She had even been a little worried whether this place would have any evil spirits at all.
The moment she pushed open the storage room door, however, that worry vanished completely.
The wind blowing out from the tiny storeroom carried threads of black qi with it, along with a foul stench that made Xu Fu wrinkle her nose slightly and wave a hand in front of it.
"Let me see where the black qi is coming from..."
"Over there."
Yayoi Hozuki pointed to a corner of the room. Following the direction of her finger, Xu Fu finally saw it—a bloodstained chainsaw.
There was no doubt about it. A ferocious evil spirit was attached to that chainsaw.
"Something's off..."
Xu Fu swept her gaze over the room, her brows knitting faintly.
"There were other evil spirits here before, but... that thing inside the chainsaw devoured them all. It hasn't attacked us because it's still in the middle of evolving!"
Xu Fu was no Vegeta, the king of throwing the match away. She was not going to give an enemy time to grow stronger just to satisfy some pointless pride. A yellow talisman flew from her sleeve into her hand, and she was just about to kill whatever was inside the chainsaw—when all at once, the sound of a chainsaw starting up rang out behind Yayoi Hozuki.
"Dag... pag pag—!"
Together with that harsh, grating roar of the chainsaw, a burly, bare-chested man with a red cloth draped over his head stood behind Yayoi Hozuki like a stone pillar.
He raised the buzzing chainsaw high in both hands. The bloodstained teeth spun at terrifying speed, and the engine's frenzied roar shook the air thick with the smell of blood.
The instant Yayoi Hozuki turned around, the blood-soaked chainsaw was already coming down with the engine howling.