My Scourge Wife can't be this Cute

Chapter 5: The villa on the mountain slope

An hour later, Hikaru changed into more practical clothing, slung his pack over his shoulder, and left the shrine. Inside the bag: ritual implements, talismans, cinnabar, a soul-calming bell, and a handful of other necessities.

Hashira's car was already waiting at the foot of the hill.

The driver was a man in a black suit who said nothing from start to finish, offered a single bow, and held the door open.

For the duration of the ride, Hikaru sat with his eyes half-closed, looking like he was resting. He was not. He was quietly sorting through everything he had gathered so far.

If his read of the situation was correct, Hashira was concealing a great deal.

And yet the Wraith of Nakamoto was powerful enough to manifest in full daylight. That meant the circumstances of his death were almost certainly not natural.

But one point kept nagging at him the more he turned it over.

Even if Hashira had genuinely wronged Nakamoto in some way, a man who had died only recently, and who had been unconscious at the time of his death, should not by any ordinary logic have been able to become a Wraith powerful enough to hold solid form under the midday sun.

To reach that level, either his obsession before death had been extraordinary beyond all reasonable measure, or someone had deliberately cultivated the resentment inside him after he was already gone.

Hikaru slowly opened his eyes.

Outside the car window, the scenery was retreating quickly. The dense rows of city buildings thinned out and gave way to stretches of green that spread along the rising slope. Further out, the shape of a mountain emerged faintly through the thin evening haze.

And in his jade-colored eyes, a cold light flickered once, then sank without a trace.

This commission was not simply a matter of guiding one Wraith to rest.

There was a strong possibility it also involved the living.

The car drove for close to another half hour before it stopped.

When Hikaru stepped out, the first thing that struck him was the scale of the villa: it was so large it was nearly a small castle.

Tall iron gates painted black. Elaborate fencing. A fountain. Flower gardens. Stone sculptures. Everything about the property exhaled money.

This land alone was probably worth enough to restore his crumbling shrine from the foundations up, and then several times over.

A middle-aged housekeeper in formal dress approached and gave a slight bow.

"Onmyoji Hikaru-sama, the Lady is waiting for you inside."

Hikaru nodded and followed her in.

The interior of the villa was even more lavish.

The ceilings were very high, crystal chandeliers hanging in tiers of pale gold light. The carpet underfoot was thick enough to absorb almost every footstep. Paintings, porcelain vases, bronze sculptures: every object placed in every corner carried the quiet weight of wealth accumulated through money and influence over many years.

But Hikaru had no particular interest in any of it.

From the moment he crossed through the main gate, he had sensed that something here was wrong.

The Yang energy inside the villa was too weak.

No, that was not quite accurate enough.

It was more that a heaviness seemed to be seeping slowly outward from the walls themselves, from the pillars, the corridors, the staircase. As though something had been quietly coiled around this place for a very long time.

Hashira was seated in the drawing room.

When she saw him, she raised an eyebrow slightly.

"You arrived earlier than I expected."

Hikaru replied without any particular inflection.

"I would rather not arrive late and spend the evening collecting someone else's remains."

Hashira laughed at that, a brief and lovely sound. Her smile was light and beautiful, but beneath the gentleness there remained something faintly reminiscent of a blade kept inside silk.

She dismissed every servant in the room with a single gesture.

Within moments, the spacious drawing room held only the two of them.

Hikaru did not circle around the subject.

"Where is your bedroom?"

Hashira looked at him for a moment, then stood.

"Follow me."

They passed through several long corridors before stopping in front of a door paneled in dark wood.

Simply standing outside it, Hikaru could already feel the temperature here was several degrees colder than anywhere else in the villa.

Hashira rested her hand on the door handle, lowering her voice.

"These past few days, he has been appearing in this room most frequently. At first, he would stand just outside the door. Then at the foot of the bed. Now... sometimes I open my eyes and he is standing directly beside me."

Hikaru looked at her.

"Hashira-san. You are still sleeping in here?"

Hashira let out a cold, short laugh.

"What else would you have me do? Abandon the entire house and run?"

She pushed the door open.

The moment it swung inward, a wave of cold Yin Energy struck him full in the face.

The bedroom was large, the furnishings expensive, but everything inside was smothered under a layer of oppressive stillness. Heavy curtains. A wide bed. A vanity table. A fur rug. A hanging lamp. None of it looked wrong on the surface.

But the moment Hikaru stepped inside, his eyes found something on the far wall directly across from the bed: a faint dark stain.

It looked like a scorch mark.

But it had not been made by fire.

It was Yin Energy that had condensed in one place for so long it had begun to eat into the plaster.

Hikaru crossed the room and pressed his fingertips lightly to the mark.

The moment he made contact, a current of cold energy crawled up from the point of touch along his skin, and he narrowed his eyes slightly.

But what caught his attention was not only the Yin Energy.

It was the smell.

Damp earth. Rotting earth.

Not the ordinary smell of mildew that settled into large houses left too long without enough people inside. Not the cold, stagnant odor of long-accumulated Resentful Energy.

This was the smell of soil freshly turned from below a grave.

Dark.

Cold.

Carrying a quality of death-energy that pressed uncomfortably against something deep inside the soul.

Hikaru's pupils drew in slightly.

He rubbed his fingertips slowly across the dark residue, then raised his hand and examined it closely. Black powder clung to his fingertips, and when he looked very carefully, he could make out tiny particles of earth mixed through it.

His expression settled into something heavier.

Behind him, Hashira's voice came low.

"Found something?"

Hikaru did not answer immediately.

He straightened up slowly and turned to look at her.

In the pale gold light of the bedroom, the woman before him was beautiful to a degree that felt almost unreal. The brown hair she had worn pinned up since that afternoon had loosened somewhat, a few strands falling along her cheekbones, and the effect added fatigue and something quietly sorrowful to the cold composure she always carried.

Her face was as striking as ever. But beneath all of it, Hikaru had the sensation she was like a camellia blooming in cold darkness: beautiful, silent, and impossible to know what lay buried under its roots.

He raised his hand so she could see the dark powder on his fingertips, then spoke at an even pace.

"This is not only a trace of Yin Energy. There is soil mixed in."

Hashira's eyes shifted fractionally.

"And what does soil mean?"

Hikaru held her gaze for a few seconds before answering.

"Ordinary soil means nothing. But this kind... it smells like grave dirt."

The room seemed to go one degree quieter.

Hashira did not reply immediately. She simply stood there, her tall and slender figure lit softly by the lamp, beautiful and unreachable all at once.

After a moment, the curve of her lips shifted into something slow and unreadable.

"Onmyoji. From just this much, you have already drawn all of that?"

Hikaru did not smile.

"I am not drawing conclusions. I am only looking at what is plainly in front of me."

He did not press further.

Because he understood: with a woman like Hashira Maruhi, if she had decided not to speak, he could ask until morning and receive nothing but words that were half truth and half something else entirely.

Hikaru scanned the room once more, committing every point of Yin Energy concentration to memory, then stepped back toward the door.

"This room doesn't need to be touched yet."

Hashira raised an eyebrow.

"You're not setting up a formation?"

"Not yet." Hikaru answered evenly. "Sealing one room alone would be no different from pressing a piece of cloth against a wound that is still bleeding. I need to understand whether this thing is attached to you, or to this villa, or to the entire mountain."

Hashira looked at him. In the depths of her eyes, something passed through that was difficult to name.

"Is this how you always work?"

"How do you mean?"

"You're different from the others before you. They all came in immediately declaring they would erect altars, perform exorcisms, chant sutras. You look more like someone hunting something."

Hikaru glanced at her sideways.

"Because if you don't know where the nest is, any exorcism is just lying to yourself."

He shouldered his pack and walked out.

Hashira was quiet for a beat, then followed.

The two of them moved through the corridors, from the bedroom down to the rear courtyard, then made a full circuit of the villa's grounds.

Along the way Hikaru stopped at intervals to examine corner walls, tree roots, stone sculptures placed throughout the garden, and even the ornamental pond beside the west corridor.

But beyond the vague, pervasive heaviness that lay over the entire property, he found nothing with a clear trail.

No suppression talismans.

No talisman scripts used to feed Resentful Energy.

No sacrificial objects.

No trace of a failed exorcism ritual.

Everything was clean in a way that was not natural.

And it was precisely that cleanliness that unsettled him most.

Hashira's villa had been built on the slope of a low mountain.

The surrounding vegetation was exceptionally dense, green in deep, rolling layers down the gradient like a wave of living things. Thick grass. Old trees with interlocking canopies. Even the clusters of wildflowers at the edges of the footpath grew more vigorously here than they would have anywhere else.

A place like this should by nature hold strong Yang energy. Enough, at minimum, to suppress some of the Yin Energy circling the villa.

But in stark contrast to the lush growth covering the mountainside, the peak directly above was bare in a way that stood out immediately.

Looking up from here, Hikaru could see it clearly: almost no large trees grew near the summit. There was only a stretch of dull, dark earth sitting motionless under the night sky, as though someone had deliberately stripped every trace of life from that one spot.

Hikaru stopped.

Hashira, walking behind him, followed his line of sight.

"Is something wrong up there?"

Hikaru did not answer right away.

A feeling he could not easily name had risen inside him.

Not quite unease.

More like something was lying on that summit, watching the entire villa from above, cold and patient.

"I'm going up to look." He said abruptly.

Hashira went slightly still.

"Now?"

"Right now."

He did not wait for her to respond. He was already moving toward the footpath that wound up the mountain.

Hashira stood watching his back for a few seconds. In the end she did not call after him. Perhaps she had recognized that when Hikaru wore that particular expression, anything she said would make no difference.

The path up the mountain was not long, but it was steep.

On both sides, wild grass and dense shrubs pressed in close. Here and there, old roots pushed up through the surface of the trail like ancient serpents curled and waiting in the dark.

The higher he climbed, the colder the wind.

The sound of insects from the lower slope faded away entirely. In its place came only the faint, dry rasp of leaves brushing against one another.

Hikaru moved quickly, but with each step, his expression grew heavier.

Because from the midpoint of the slope upward, the Yang energy had begun to thin.

Not from any natural cause.

More as though something had been drawing it out, slowly, one small measure at a time.

After another ten minutes of climbing, Hikaru finally reached the top.