The Legend of Tokyo Taoist

Chapter 57 Urban Legend
On a Tokyo street at night, two men were walking one after the other. The former was holding a compass in his hand and seemed to be looking for something, while the latter was pushing a scooter and following dejectedly.

"Speaking of which..." Inuyama Heita asked helplessly while pushing the electric bike, "Could it be that this is fake again? Or have they not found the ghost domain?"

Qian Xiaoyi said, "It's not certain that an incident has occurred. How can it be so easy to find a special ghost area? This is an urban legend. How many legends are true? Keep walking forward. It should be in this area. Let's finish this section first."

"But we've been looking for three days, right?" Inuyama Heita complained, "We haven't even seen a real urban legend monster. Isn't it too difficult to find?"

"Got it!" Qian Xiaoyi cheered up.

Inuyama Heita also became excited and asked, "Found it?!"

"We sell oden here, come and have a bowl." Qian Xiaoyi put away the compass and happily ran to a stall selling oden on the street. He bought two servings of oden as a midnight snack before the stall closed.

Inuyama Heita took the oden and said sarcastically, "Is this 'got it'?"

But I have to say that it feels good to eat a bowl of hot oden on a somewhat chilly night after the rain. Smelling the fragrance wafting from the paper box, Inuyama Heita seemed to have been redeemed.

After obtaining information about the location of urban legends from Kawasaki of the Supernatural Department, Qian Xiaoyi and Inuyama Heita got ready that night and headed to the location where Kawasaki wanted to conduct his next "experiment". One purpose was to allow Qian Xiaoyi to verify his hypothesis, and the other was to eliminate any danger in advance so that Kawasaki would return empty-handed.

Every night, the two of them would ride around the city on Qian Xiaoyi's newly bought scooter. This scooter is similar to the electric vehicles in China, but it runs on gasoline and has a displacement of 50CC. The advantage is that it is easy to obtain a certificate, and only requires answering a written test. Basically, you can pass the test as soon as you go there. The disadvantage is that the law stipulates that the speed cannot exceed 30 kilometers per hour, it cannot be used on highways, and it cannot carry passengers.

But Qian Xiaoyi didn't care about that. It was night anyway, so as long as he didn't run into a patrolman, he would drive as fast as he could, and he would never leave the car empty-handed if he could take Inuyama Heita with him. He was a daring and lawless criminal. There was nothing he could do. If it was too late, the train would have stopped running. He hadn't passed the driving test yet, so he could only make do with it.

Having said that, the maximum speed of this thing is only about 50 to 60 kilometers per hour, which is enough for getting around the city. If you want to go outside the city or somewhere too far away, you have to take a tram or a long-distance bus.

"Oh~ If I have money in the future, I must buy a car." Qian Xiaoyi sighed while eating oden.

The two put the scooter aside and squatted on the deserted road to eat. Inuyama Heita turned around and asked, "You haven't answered my question just now. When will we find it?" Qian Xiaoyi poked the radish in the oden with a wooden stick and said, "Be patient. Didn't I say that not all rumors will become monsters in the ghost domain? In addition to people's own cognition, the right time and place are also indispensable, which means that it depends a lot on luck. So no one knows where a stable ghost domain will form. I have never dealt with monsters in urban legends. You ask me, who should I ask? By the way, I have nothing to do now, so I will teach you some common sense."

They ate and talked, Inuyama Heita listened carefully. Qian Xiaoyi said, "Maybe the Lucky Mutual Aid Club gave you an illusion that supernatural events are very common. In fact, in our industry, the number of commissions that actually involve ghosts is less than 1%. Of course, I'm talking about our side. The probability here should be higher, but it's probably not much higher."

"Huh? Why is that?" Inuyama Heita asked in surprise, "If there were no ghosts, why would those people waste money to come to us? No one wants to waste their money in vain, right?"

Qian Xiaoyi said, "Let me tell you something that happened to me personally... Don't worry, don't show that expression, this is not the beginning of a ghost story. - This happened about ten years ago. Although it was a long time ago, it still left a deep impression on me. At that time, I was still in school and had nothing to do during the winter vacation, so my master always took me with him whenever he had business and asked me to help out. In addition to handling various funerals, the residents near the Taoist temple who knew my master's abilities would also ask us for help when something strange happened to them. The incident I want to tell you happened in an apartment building in the city..."

Qian Xiaoyi's story made Inuyama Heita listen with great interest. He did not forget to eat the oden in his hand. Qian Xiaoyi forked a piece of hot fish ball into his mouth and ate it, then continued to narrate:

"That's a household on the 8th floor. They are a newlywed couple who got married not long ago. This room is their wedding room. After living in the apartment for a while, the couple woke up one morning and found many new shoe prints on the balcony outside the house. The shoe prints were probably the size of a two or three-year-old child's feet. Usually, a child of this age can run around. But the problem is - they don't have children, and this is the th floor! So, where did all these messy shoe prints come from?"

Inuyama Heita also showed a look of doubt when he heard this: "Huh? Footprints of a child on the eighth floor? Maybe the child next door climbed over the fence and ran to their balcony?"

"The newlyweds thought so too." Qian Xiaoyi smiled, and then continued with a gloomy expression: "So they found the neighbors next door and started asking them if they had any children. But guess what?

None of the residents on the entire eighth floor have children around two years old at home. The youngest one is eight or nine years old and lives at the other end. It is impossible to walk to their home through the balcony unless the child is Spider-Man.

But at this time, a resident told them that a few years ago, there was a tenant upstairs from them. That family had a two or three-year-old child. One day, all the adults went out and left the child alone at home. The result was a tragedy. Because the doors and windows were not locked, the child ran to the balcony to play, slipped and fell downstairs and died. The family moved away afterwards..."

"So what's next?" Inuyama Heita couldn't help but ask, "This sounds like a complete ghost story. Is it really not a supernatural event?"

(End of this chapter)