Tokyo: Parasite

Chapter 425 195: The First Fragment

"This is?!"

Old man Kuroda widened his eyes as he watched the man in front of him break open the thickened glass cabinet he had specially built with his bare hands and take out the dagger that was placed along with the skeleton.

The man used this worn-out dagger to block the Iai Slash attack from his carefully maintained samurai sword.

He knew that this dagger was the weapon used by the owner of the skeleton.

It is said that back then, this foolish clan leader took this dagger, which he thought was excellent, and led his men to charge towards their iron cannon team.

His ancestor specifically told people not to shoot the man, and he pulled out the samurai sword bestowed by the emperor, knocked the dagger away with one blow, cut a gap, and then easily captured the patriarch who was full of disbelief.

"You are Ainu——"

No matter how stupid Kuroda was, he guessed the other party's identity. With a sense of mission all over his body, he didn't think about the unreasonable strength displayed by the other party, and stabbed again with his knife.

"Ancestors, the spirit of the earth, bear god - help me!"

The young man's eyes were fierce and bloodthirsty. In his hand was a dagger made of meteorite iron, with a bear toe bone as the handle and an obvious notch. He deflected the stabbing sword in Kuroda's hand, reversing the scene of that year and stabbing deeply into his chest with hundreds of years of hatred.

"Woo!"

Kuroda looked down in disbelief at the dagger that was stuck in his chest, then slowly stared at the young man's face. His mouth moved, but no words came out, only blood foam.

"Remember me, I am the new Bear Spirit. A vengeful ghost."

"You won't die so easily, believe me. There will be more people to accompany you. Kuroda, go downstairs and prepare some tea first."

"Guka."

The old man Kuroda fell to the ground powerlessly, and the door of the room was closed out of thin air. Then, screams like the sound of flesh being cut and mouths being covered could be heard from the room.

until,

More than twenty minutes later.

"Officer, this is it."

"Yes, please."

"It's okay, I'll leave first."

"Okay, thank you."

An ordinary car stopped at the door of Kuroda's house, and two armed police officers got out of the car with hapless looks on their faces.

They were the police officers who responded to the call immediately upon receiving the order from the sheriff, but who was so bold as to puncture the tires of all the cars in the police station. Even private cars parked near the police station could not escape the disaster.

It just so happened that Kuroda lived a little off the main road, otherwise they could have just run over here without having to hitchhike.

"The door is ajar." A police officer turned around and whispered.

The older-looking police officer nodded, drew his gun, and stood on the other side of the door.

Then, a police officer slowly pushed the door open, and the wind and snow rushed in impatiently.

"Strange. Why wasn't it blown open by the wind?" The old policeman frowned. According to his experience, if the door was half-closed to this extent, it would be blown open by the wind.

But he didn't think about it too much, just took the gun and followed his teammates into the house.

"There are so many things and no signs of a fight."

"The smell of blood, a strong smell of blood."

The two walked forward for a while, and the police officer in front suddenly stopped.

"What's wrong?" asked the old policeman behind.

The person in front didn't answer, but just trembled and pointed at the horrific scene in front of him. His eyes and mouth were wide open, filled with fear.

The old policeman, whose eyesight was not very good, took two steps forward. The increasingly strong smell of blood made his face change suddenly, and the scene in front of him quickly became clear.

On the carpet, a pool of flesh and skin that looked like a deflated balloon was shrunk incompletely to the ground, and only the shape of a human could be vaguely discerned.

The walls and decorations all around were stained with blood, distorting the nearby light into a dark red.

And right in the middle, in the most obvious position, was a pale white skeleton with blood beads and remaining flesh on the joints.

"Ah ah ah ah ah!!!"

After the two police officers let out horrifying screams, they rushed to the door, broke out, rolled all the way from the steps at the door to the road, and even half crawled and half ran to the other side of the road, then stopped, gasping for breath, breathing the icy and fresh air around them.

"vomit--"

A police officer supported himself on the ground with his hands and vomited violently.

Another experienced police officer couldn't stand it either. He covered his heart with his hands and looked uncomfortable. He felt that he was just one step away from being scared to death.

There had never been a murder in this remote place, let alone such a horrific one. My usual experience of finding dogs or catching petty thieves was of no use when faced with a scene like this.

"Please, request support."

The old police officer turned on the intercom with a distorted voice.

"The Kuroda family found a body! The death was extremely horrific!"

At this time, the young man who was the murderer appeared in a cafe like an ordinary tourist, dressed cleanly and drinking coffee.

Oh oh oh!
Several police cars whizzed past the street where his coffee shop was, attracting the attention of the people inside and the owner.

"Boss, there are quite a lot of police here." A tourist who was also here asked curiously.

"Well, after all, there are a lot of tourists here, and quite a few of them are from foreign countries. It's common for people to ignore advice and leave the main road to explore on their own and end up getting lost." The store manager replied expressionlessly.

Several tourists shut their mouths in embarrassment and silently put this store on the blacklist in their hearts.

“Are you making a travel guide?”

A female tourist saw a young man writing and drawing in a notebook with his head down, and she struck up a conversation with him out of curiosity.

The man raised his head and smiled from the bottom of his heart: "You can say that."

He silently crossed out Kuroda Masao's name, closed the notebook, and started chatting casually with the woman while drinking coffee.

"In the legend of the Ainu people, this is the end of the earth. The cold wind, forest, ice field, waves, cliffs, and volcanoes really fit people's perception of the end of the world." The woman was obviously well prepared and had done a lot of homework.

"Yes. Unfortunately, now even the end of the earth does not belong to the Ainu people." The man said calmly.

The woman was suddenly speechless, smiled a little awkwardly, and said nothing more.

The man didn't care. He slowly drank the coffee in front of him, paid the bill and left.

Next, it’s time to prepare for the next one.

"Captain Sato, I hope you still remember me."

"But before that, let you live in fear."

He said quietly, carrying his backpack, his figure gradually disappeared in the wind and snow. Looking at the direction, it was the protruding end of the Shiretoko Peninsula, Cape Shiretoko.

There is no forensic doctor in this small place of Rausu.

It would take several days to request the nearest medical examiner.

At the door of Kuroda's house, none of the police officers who had seen the crime scene dared to go up, and some even preferred to resign.

Some old police officers who had not taken it seriously at first went in patting their chests, and came out patting their chests as well, uh, vomiting.

So Inspector Sato had no choice but to ask a local veteran undertaker for help.

Clean up the pile of corpses first and wait for the forensic doctor to come and analyze them. "The technique is very rough, and there is a lot of flesh left on the bones. This is not a professional technique. But you said that the crime took only more than 20 minutes. It is incredible that it is difficult to completely remove the human skeleton in such a short time and keep the remaining flesh relatively intact."

The undertaker not only helped clean up the scene, but also provided some analysis for free.

Standing in Kuroda's house, looking at the empty glass cabinet in front of him, Sato, with a pale face, licked his lips with difficulty.

"Mr. Kishimoto, are the remains of Mr. Kuroda the only ones in this cabinet?"

The undertaker nodded with a strange expression: "Yes, but this shelf is designed very strangely, as if it was specially designed to hold a human skeleton."

Sato twitched the corners of his mouth and clenched his trembling hands.

"I'm really sorry to bother you today, Mr. Kishimoto."

"It's been a long time since a murder happened in our town. This time it's such a terrible case. Mr. Kuroda has always been a good man. He always contributes to the renovation of the shrine. Chief Sato, I'll leave the case to you."

"Don't worry, please trust us." Sato tried his best to smile.

After seeing off the undertaker, Sato's smile slowly disappeared. He lit a cigarette, smoked it silently, and then returned to the police officer.

"Sheriff, this is the surveillance video. Our cars all had tire blowouts for no apparent reason."

The surveillance video showed clearly that their car suddenly shook, and then the tires quickly deflated, one after another like dominoes.

Sato read it silently before saying, "Send me the information."

"Yes."

After a while, Sato quickly collected the information here and sent it to the Special Affairs Bureau, requesting to send an extraordinary person to investigate.

He knew very well what was originally placed in the display cabinet in the Kuroda family.

He had stood in front of the display case more than once, listening to Kuroda Masao talk about the glorious past and heroic deeds of his ancestors when they served as colonial officials in Hokkaido. Rausu Town was the northernmost point reached by the Kuroda family.

Kuroda Masao grew up listening to these glorious histories, so he vowed when he was young to guard the northern border for Japan. He then moved his family to Rausu Town to settle down in order to prevent the Ainu from making a comeback.

All in all, he has lived here for decades. These exhibits were all brought from his family, and many of them were collected after he arrived here.

Among them, the most important thing in Kuroda's eyes, apart from the samurai sword passed down by Emperor Meiji, is the skeleton of an Ainu chief.

Now both things are gone.

He had reason to suspect that this was some Ainu incarnation of a transcendental being, coming for revenge.

that he
No, no, he handled that matter very cleanly, no one should know about it.

Feeling uneasy, he decided to call his old friend in Tokachi.

"Hello, my name is Yasunari Sato, looking for me. I, I understand. I'm sorry, please accept my condolences. I will attend the funeral."

Sato hung up the phone in a daze and was unable to come back to his senses for a long time.

How did he die?

heart disease?
Is this a coincidence?
Sato didn't know.

"It can't be such a coincidence. It can't be such a coincidence."

He comforted himself like this, with a look of despair in his eyes that only he understood.

"Dragon scale. Is this a dragon scale?!"

Two days later, at the end of Shiretoko Peninsula, the ghost-faced fox finally saw the landform that most resembled dragon scales.

Obsidian-like jagged ridges rise from the seabed, glowing coldly in the sunlight, like the arched spine of a sleeping dragon. In the cross-section of the cliffs gnawed by the waves day and night, the blue-black basalt layers overlap like armor, and every time the huge waves hit the seaside, it is like the roar of a dragon about to be born.

The ghost-faced fox eagerly took out the scroll and spread it out. The Rubik's Cube pattern on the scroll, which had been silent, began to flicker slightly.

The closer she got to the terrain, the faster the cube flashed.

"It's close! It's close!"

The ghost-faced fox landed on a "scale", and at this time the flashing of the scroll cube was almost always on.

She looked carefully and soon found a narrow entrance passage from a pile of dark black rocks.

Transforming into a fox, she easily leaped into the passage.

Inside, there was a pitch-black natural passage, but at the end of the passage, there seemed to be a faint red light.

Following the red light all the way down, she soon saw the source of the red light.

It was a broken piece of a cube.

It has been floating in this space for who knows how many years, emitting a red light that is like a burning flame and also like rust.

"Can I take it directly?"

The ghost-faced fox tried to unfold the scroll.

Suddenly, a strong red light burst out from the cube fragments, and even the earth seemed to shake.

The ghost-faced fox in fox form was blown against the rock wall by this force and hit it hard, but it was not a big problem.

She got up again and saw that the scroll was trying hard to absorb the fragments of the Rubik's Cube, but the fragments were struggling and trying to break free as if they had life.

Wisps of red light can be seen being sucked into the scroll like gas, while the fragments of the source struggle more and more violently, trying to escape through the opening of the passage.

"Don't run away!"

The ghost-faced fox pounced forward and pressed the fragment into the scroll.

Finally, the fragment was unable to resist the combined force of the two, and it seemed to let out a sigh before being absorbed by the scroll.

The magic cube of the scroll flickered and disappeared. At the same time, the position of the fragment that had just been absorbed slowly lit up in a rusty red color.

"Success!"

The ghost-faced fox smiled.

Her efforts were not in vain. Although there were still six fragments to be collected, this was undoubtedly a good start!
Rumble.
The ghost-faced fox was startled and quickly picked up the scroll and escaped along the cracked passage.

dong dong!

The ground seemed to be shaking; there must be an earthquake.

The sound of waves approached, white light emerged, the ghost-faced fox leaped suddenly, turned back into human form at the entrance, then activated the ghost step, quickly flashed among the cliffs until it stood at the end of the broken wall.

The shaking of the earth showed no sign of stopping, and the magnificent dragon-scale rocks received no mercy from nature. They collapsed piece by piece and rolled into the sea with the waves.

Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle—white smoke came out of the ocean. It was the magma from the underwater volcano, which was quickly cooled by the sea water and evaporated.

"What on earth is this fragment?"

Looking at all this in front of him, the ghost-faced fox muttered to himself.

Bang!
A very distant voice came from behind. The Ghost-faced Fox slowly turned around and saw billowing black smoke coming out of a mountain in the distance.

Then came the second and third.
It was as if red cracks suddenly appeared on the earth, and the magma gushing out of the crater was like a molten gold waterfall hanging upside down in the sky, dyeing the clouds its own color.

Thick black smoke carrying sparks rushed straight into the sky thousands of meters high, and a huge, expanding scorching flower bloomed in the daytime.

Then, every few seconds, red-hot rocks would explode from the core of the flower and fall to the foothills like comets, melting the snowfields below and igniting the forest into a continuous wall of fire.

"Did I do this?" The ghost-faced fox looked around guiltily, and found a building in the distance that looked like a scientific research station or an outpost.

I shouldn't have been discovered.

(End of this chapter)