Chapter 75: The Sixth Wish
“So, I was wrong,” she thought, the admission a cold, hard stone in the pit of her stomach. “Ōkawa Terakado was not the suspect. He was, it seems, another victim in a much larger and far more complex game.”
Back in the sterile silence of the villa, Yomikawa Tsuko, having showered, sat before her computer, methodically organizing the new intelligence she had gathered that day.
“The person hiding in the villa on the night of June 11th… it was likely not Ōkawa Terakado. If that’s the case, then… was it really Senpai? Was she the ghost in my house that night?”
“But that doesn’t make any logical sense either. If it were Ōkawa, there was at least a plausible, if unproven, method for him to have obtained a duplicate key. But Senpai… I can’t conceive of any possible, rational way she could have gained entry after the locks were changed.”
She frowned, her brow furrowed in concentration, but the puzzle remained stubbornly, infuriatingly, unsolved. She was forced to resort to wild, almost fantastical speculation, a process she despised. Could Senpai have, through some unknown, manipulative means, obtained a key from Ōkawa Terakado himself?
“On June 10th, my face and voice had already been… reallocated… to Senpai, and hers to me.”
“At that point, Senpai would have been unable to approach Ōkawa Terakado in the guise of the villa’s owner and demand a key, would she? The deception would have been impossible.”
“Unless… unless she had prepared for this eventuality, far, far in advance.”
Yomikawa Tsuko opened her laptop and began a quick, targeted search. It was, she discovered, theoretically possible during a video call to replace one’s own live video feed with a pre-recorded, deep-faked video. If Senpai had, before June 9th, somehow predicted that after the face-swap, she would immediately have the locks changed, and had therefore pre-recorded several videos of herself to use in a deceptive video call with the unsuspecting locksmith… it was a convoluted, absurdly complex theory, but it was, just barely, plausible.
“But even if one accepts the premise, the practical execution would be incredibly difficult, wouldn’t it? How could Senpai have known which locksmith company I would choose from the dozens available? And how would she have obtained that specific technician’s personal social media account information in order to initiate such a call in the first place?”
“And even if she had made all these meticulous, almost prescient preparations, what if the person I had hired was an old-fashioned tradesman, someone who didn’t use a smartphone or a computer? That, too, is a very real and highly probable possibility, isn’t it?”
“Or… what if Ōkawa Terakado had known Senpai from long before?
“No, that’s not realistic either. Senpai could not have been certain which company I would call. To attribute it all to a string of impossible coincidences… that would be even more far-fetched, even more pathetic than Ōgami Yōsuke’s most outlandish, and frankly, embarrassing theories.”
“If I cannot solve it now,” she decided with a grim finality, “then I will set it aside.”
Closing her laptop, Yomikawa Tsuko stretched languidly. Tonight, Hanako’s sixth wish would be fulfilled. And the thought of what might happen, of what new, unknown transformation awaited her, filled her with a faint, but persistent and deeply unwelcome sense of unease.
“Damn it. This… this baseless anxiety. There is nothing to be afraid of. It is just a wish. A simple transaction. I have already endured the first five, have I not?”
She could feel her heart beginning to beat faster, an unwelcome, uncontrolled rhythm that she despised. She gritted her teeth. She remembered reading, in some dry, academic article, that the greatest, most primal of all human fears is the fear of the unknown. At the time, she had scoffed at such a sentimental, unscientific notion. But now, tonight, she was beginning to taste the true, terrifying, and deeply corrosive power of the unknown.
“What else is there left to exchange? After just five wishes, even my DNA, my very biological essence, has been completely swapped.”
“Could it be… memory? But if our memories were exchanged, what difference would there be from a complete and total replacement of a person? If I were to lose the memories of Kagehara Tetsuya, and gain the memories of Senpai, would I not, for all intents and purposes, become Senpai? And if that were the case, then the grand, insane plan for godhood that Senpai and Lord Mask-Taker have so carefully concocted… it would be rendered impossible.”
“Speaking of which, that creature, Lord Mask-Taker… is it possible that it is an ancient yōkai, one that has used this ‘plan for godhood’ to live like a parasite from ancient times until the present day? If so, it could be thousands of years old.”
“It’s even possible that the current Lord Mask-Taker is the original Hanako from the legend. That she was never executed by Natsuhime’s father, but was secretly hidden away. Perhaps Natsuhime’s father, the Chief Priest, even… used her terrible power for his own ends.”
“Or, perhaps Hanako escaped on her own. Bribed a guard, and slipped away into the night. And the Chief Priest, upon discovering her escape, though incandescent with rage, was forced to conceal the truth, to protect his own authority, the precious honor of his family.”
As she thought this, more and more possibilities, each more disturbing than the last, began to bloom in Yomikawa’s mind. She lay back, staring up at the ceiling, her mind a whirl of dark, frantic speculation. After a long while, she shook her head. It was useless to think about it any further. Tomorrow morning, she would be one step closer to the truth.
To ensure that she would be able to quickly and accurately identify what, precisely, had been exchanged, Yomikawa Tsuko began a grim and rather surreal process. She began to systematically collect samples and data from her own, borrowed, body, meticulously recording everything with a cold, clinical precision.
Height: 163cm.
Weight: 48kg.
Fingerprints: All ten digits, pressed firmly onto a sheet of clean white paper using a black ink pad.
Blood: A single, crimson drop, from a sharp pinprick on her finger, collected on a sterile cotton ball and carefully sealed in plastic wrap.
DNA: Several strands of long, dark hair, plucked directly from her head, their roots intact, sealed in a small, airtight plastic bag.
Body Surface: She stood before the full-length mirror, completely naked, and, using her phone’s high-resolution video function, recorded every inch, every detail of her body, from every possible angle. The resulting video file was then heavily encrypted and transferred to a secure folder on her computer.
Handwriting: Without attempting to imitate anyone else’s script, using only her own natural, ingrained, and masculine writing style, she wrote down several words on a clean sheet of paper.
…
Yomikawa Tsuko, with the cold, methodical precision of a crime scene investigator, collected and recorded every possible sample and data point she could think of. She worked until nine-thirty at night. The collected items, she noted with a detached interest, now filled an entire, shoebox-sized container.
Looking at the plain, featureless box on her desk, she suddenly remembered something. On the morning of June 10th, when she had been searching the villa, she had discovered a clean, dust-free patch on the wooden table in the basement storage room. She had surmised at the time that a box had been sitting there, and that Senpai, when she had returned to the villa to leave Ōshima Masaki’s severed head, had taken the box, along with some old school notebooks, with her.
She had never known what was in that box.
“Is it possible… that Senpai also performed a similar, meticulous collection of her own physical samples and data? And that, just like me, right at this very moment, she stored them all away for future reference?”
Yomikawa’s eyebrow arched. It was a distinct and deeply unsettling possibility. And if one accepted that premise, it led, with a chilling, inexorable logic, to another, even more disturbing possibility. That this was not the first time Senpai had swapped faces.
“The real, the original, Yomikawa Tsuko… perhaps she was transformed into someone else by the power of Lord Mask-Taker long, long ago. And perhaps she is now living a quiet, unassuming life somewhere, completely, blissfully unaware of her own true identity.”
“And the ‘Senpai’ that I knew, the one who became Lord Mask-Taker’s willing assistant… she was just an imposter. Someone who had stolen the identity, the life, of ‘Yomikawa Tsuko.’ And then, for reasons as yet unknown, she was forced to pass that stolen identity on to me. And the reason she took that box… it was likely to erase all traces of her own, previous life, her own, original identity, before she became ‘Yomikawa Tsuko’.”
“If that is the case, then who was she, before all of this? What was her real name? Her real face?”
Of course, she could not come up with an answer. Not yet. But she filed the terrifying possibility away, a new piece of the ever-expanding puzzle.
She sealed the box tightly and placed it under her bed. Then, she took two of the painkillers that had a convenient sedative side effect, and, just as she had on the previous two occasions, set up her phone and computer to record the night.
Having done all this, a scientist preparing for a strange and potentially horrifying experiment, she finally lay down on the bed.
A heavy, unnatural drowsiness came over her, swift and overwhelming. She relaxed her mind, her body, and slowly, allowed herself to drift away, into a deep, and dreamless, sleep.
The next morning, at precisely 6:35 AM, she opened her eyes. And was surprised, deeply confused, to find that, after a whole night, she seemed to have undergone… no change at all.
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