After listening to Indou Ranko's explanation, Amamiya Rin was left with only one thought.
Underhanded! So damn underhanded!
Because human civilization had developed and fewer people believed in gods and buddhas, the gods and buddhas had been weakened.
But humanity's fear of the unknown would never diminish, and special creatures and phenomena truly did exist in this world. Children couldn't tell the real from the fake, and so ghost stories arose to meet the need.
And extreme negative emotions are always easier to sustain than extreme positive ones; ghost stories likewise need that sort of personality as a vessel, so the ghost stories born from rumor are, by and large, harmful to humans.
The white-clad beautiful boy capable of snuffing out the black-clad beautiful boy was no more than an exceedingly rare phenomenon, and one that tended to bloom and vanish in an instant.
To sum it up: the good ones never work, and the bad ones always do.
By unspoken agreement, no one carried the discussion any further.
Because the deeper one went, the more one could feel that bottomless, fathomless despair.
Amamiya Rin shifted his gaze away, turning it once more toward those rows upon rows of metal filing racks standing in silence.
"Those files—are they all paranormal incidents that the Police History Compilation Office has solved?"
Amamiya Rin asked curiously.
At a single glance, there were at least several thousand volumes of files here.
"Only investigated. Some of them we don't even know to be true or false, but just in case, we recorded them down even if they were only rumors. And there are some where we know exactly what's going on, yet are unable to resolve them."
Indou Ranko said.
Amamiya Rin nodded silently. Leaning on his cane, he walked over to the filing racks.
Every shelf of the rack was neatly stacked with kraft-paper file boxes, their sides marked with numbers and brief labels in black marker.
He skimmed over the labels.
[The Machida City Kishimojin Abduction Incident]
[The Hanamine High School Fox Spirit Incident]
[The Ota Ward Sewer Strange-Noise Incident]
[The Shibuya Ward Joint-Burial Train Incident]
[The Kanagawa Prefecture Satoru-kun Incident]
[The Hokkaido High-Speed Granny Incident]
[Ushikubi Village][Jukai Village][Inunaki Village][Minakami Village][Mount Hikami][Kinugawa]...
The contents were of every conceivable sort. Amamiya Rin spotted quite a few paranormal incidents he'd heard of, as well as places that had appeared in horror games he'd played in his past life.
"These files are roughly classified by chronological order, incident type, and the region where they occurred."
Kazumi Junya walked over, drew a thick hardcover notebook from the edge of the filing rack, and handed it to Amamiya Rin.
"This is the index. You can use it to get a general idea of the incidents."
Amamiya Rin took the notebook and flipped it open to look.
The pages had already yellowed, and the handwriting was in both fountain pen and ballpoint—clearly recorded by different people across different periods.
Amamiya Rin's gaze swept rapidly across it.
[Campus type (code CS)][Traffic type (code TC)][Religious type (code RN)][Mind type (code TG)][Residence type (code HE)][Regional type (code EN)][Ritual type (code CY)][Possession type (code AE)][Cursed-object type (code EN)]...
Far too many!
Whether by the number of paranormal phenomena or by their types, reading through every last one would take at least a week's time.
Luckily there was an index, and Amamiya Rin soon found his target—the files concerning the Dream World.
[Dream World type], code DM.
[DM-001: Mass Sleepwalking Incident (Kanagawa Prefecture, 1975).]
[DM-002: Precognitive Dream Incident (Osaka Prefecture, 1977).]
[DM-003: Monkey Dream Incident (Tokyo, Kita Ward, 1982).]
[DM-004: Aristus (behavioral concept).]
...
[DM-007: Dream-Person Incident (Chiba City, 1998).]
...
There weren't many files concerning the Dream World, because most ghost-type paranormal incidents possess the ability to give the living nightmares; excluding the dreams induced by ghosts, there were only eight purely Dream World incidents.
Two of them caught Amamiya Rin's attention.
One was Aristus, marked as a behavioral concept; the other was the Dream-Person Incident.
As for so-called behavioral concepts, Amamiya Rin had read an explanation in the index.
Put simply, so long as one believes and carries out the corresponding action, a special phenomenon can be formed.
Hanging a shimenawa rope on a shrine's torii gate to ward off calamity is one such case. Placing salt in the corner of an entryway has a similar effect.
These all belong to behavioral concepts.
As for Aristus...
Amamiya Rin pulled the DM-004 file from the rack; inside were only three thin pages.
The first page stated the effect of this behavioral concept—by whispering and conversing beside someone's ear while they were fast asleep, one could enter that person's dream.
The latter two pages were all real cases.
Amamiya Rin remembered this one; it seemed to be the one mentioned in "The Town Without Streets," which was also a work by Junji Ito.
Paranormal incidents involving the Dream World really were few—was it because they'd been subsumed under ghosts' dream-entering abilities?
He closed DM-004 and reached out to pull another file from beside it.
[Case number: DM-007]
[Case name: Dream-Person Incident]
[Time of occurrence: September 20, 1998]
[Location of occurrence: Inage Ward, Chiba City]
[Unit in charge: First Investigation Division, Criminal Affairs Department, Chiba Prefectural Police Headquarters]
The report's contents were very concise.
On September 20, 1998, a twenty-year-old woman named Igarashi Mari was reported missing. The last sighting on record was on the evening of the 12th of the same month, when she entered her boyfriend Hirano Yuji's apartment in Inage Ward together with him. After friends and relatives repeatedly failed to reach her, they called the police.
When the police first questioned Hirano Yuji, he stated: Igarashi Mari had not left at all, but had turned into his internal organs and was currently traveling within his dream.
The First Investigation Division suspected a cannibalism case stemming from mental abnormality, and upon examining Hirano's apartment found traces of a struggle. In the end they arrested Hirano Yuji on charges of murder and corpse desecration.
"Kazumi, this file—did Hirano Yuji really eat Igarashi Mari?"
Amamiya Rin turned his head and called out to Kazumi Junya, giving the file in his hand a shake.
Kazumi Junya walked over, took the file, and looked it over.
"This one, huh—I'm not sure either. I only became a police officer this year."
Having read through the contents, Kazumi Junya shook his head.
"This file is one of those whose truth or falsehood is unknown. There are quite a few of this sort—though there's no evidence to prove them, the Compilation Office still recorded a copy."
It should be true.
Before coming, Amamiya Rin had looked over his own notes and could recall the rough plot of "The Sandman's Room."
The protagonist recounts that the self within his dream wants to replace him; the heroine doesn't believe it, but after following the protagonist back to his apartment, she witnesses with her own eyes the sleeping protagonist's body turning inside out, and hurriedly wakes him.
Afterward she watches over the protagonist for several days without sleep or rest, yet in the end still fails to stop the protagonist from the Dream World from getting out.
And the process by which the Dream World protagonist emerges is the body's exterior and interior turning inside out; the heroine ties her own body together with the protagonist's, only to be dragged along and swallowed inside during the very process of that inside-out inversion.
____
👻🔥+40 ch: Walnut-chan🔥👻
🔥 New history: Naruto: Is it reasonable to beat up an Otsutsuki with Hamon, right?
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