The Naruse Central Library became one of the few facilities where Akane entered precisely at nine in the morning when the doors opened. The night before, after returning to the Corpo Nagi office, Akane had barely slept. Not that she couldn't sleep—at least, that's what she told herself. But the three lines written across the notebook spread on her desk—"Eight bodies. Artificial restraint. White shadow."—remained burned behind her eyelids even after the lights went out. Whether that was what prevented sleep, or something else entirely, Akane made no effort to distinguish with precision. She judged that making such distinctions held no meaning now. The library's entrance was quiet in the morning light. Beyond the reception counter, a librarian typed something into a work computer. The building's air conditioning hummed at a low, steady pitch. Akane headed directly for the Local History Materials Room. The Local History Materials Room was connected to the main building by a corridor, a separate wing with a ceiling higher than its floor space warranted. Morning light poured through the skylights, mingling with the scent of old paper. That smell was deeply familiar to Akane. Whether at exorcism sites or during investigations, humans almost always found themselves standing before paper when seeking to know something. Before the shelves where bound microfilm volumes were arranged chronologically, Akane carried three volumes—covering 2013 through 2015—to the reading desk. The investigation procedure had been decided the night before. First, confirm the official announcement article about the closure, then cross-reference the figures with city council reports from before and after. Next, collect hospital-related articles in chronological order and compile a list of bylined reporters. That was all. Simple procedures sometimes exposed complex contradictions. She opened the microfilm for March 2014. The closure of Naruse Municipal Third General Hospital was reported in the morning edition of August 21st, 2014. The headline read: "Hospital Closure Due to Management Deterioration and Facility Deterioration." The article body was roughly one hundred eighty characters, with a single statement from the hospital director appended. Akane read those one hundred eighty characters three times. Each time, the same sensation returned.—This text was not explaining something; it was trying to end something. She opened her notebook and wrote out the figures. The hospital bed occupancy rate from the year before closure—a figure contained in the city council budget committee meeting minutes, which Akane had already confirmed in publicly available online documents the night before—was eighty-nine percent. For a public hospital in a rural area, that was not only sustainable but close to a healthy standard. For the explanation of management deterioration to hold, this figure should not have existed. The contradiction was confirmed. Next came cross-referencing the reporters. From autumn 2013 through summer 2014, a single byline appeared repeatedly in articles about administration and medical affairs within Naruse City. The name was "Mizuno Seiichi." The articles that followed bore the hallmarks of a local newspaper reporter—careful, densely researched pieces. City council budget deliberations, consolidation of medical facilities, regional aging countermeasures—all topics that circled around Third Hospital. That byline disappeared after June 2014. The articles hadn't been replaced. Only the reporter's name vanished, while articles in the same subject area continued under different bylines or without attribution. Whether reporter Mizuno Seiichi had withdrawn from the page for some reason, or had been withdrawn—it was a blank that could be read either way. Akane added this fact to her notebook and paused with her pen. Between the shelves, the sound of fabric rustling. Without turning, Akane had already noticed. Thirty minutes had passed since she entered the materials room before another person came in. From the spacing of the footsteps, she could tell the person was moving for work, not in any hurry. "Pardon me while you're reading," The voice was low and clear. Akane saw the person for the first time face-on—someone passing while organizing the shelves. Mid-fifties, perhaps, with white-streaked hair tied at the nape of the neck, a librarian's badge pinned to the left chest. Eyes narrow, expression unchanging. A staff member of this library. The nameplate read "Katakiri Eriko." Katakiri paused before the shelf next to Akane's, checking the spine labels. Her gaze caught faintly on Akane's hands—the open microfilm and the annotated notebook. "From 2014?" "Yes," A brief silence. Katakiri withdrew one binder from the shelf, checked it, and returned it. Continuing that motion, she said, "Naruse back then... there were many things that closed," That was all. She let the words fall and disappeared deeper into the shelves. Akane kept her pen still, listening to the echo of those words once more. "Many things that closed"—was she referring only to the hospital, or something else as well? The quality of the sentence's ending carried a weight closer to the latter than the former. Whether Katakiri Eriko knew something or not didn't need to be confirmed here and now. But there was meaning in keeping it in memory. Akane wrote "Librarian—Katakiri Eriko" in the margin of her notebook and drew a line beneath it. Past ten in the morning, Akane was bent over her notebook at the reading desk. Someone sat down in the adjacent chair without a sound. The chair made almost no noise as it was pulled out. The motion was slow, weight distributed carefully. Few people moved like this. Either consciously trained or developed through long habit. Without looking up, Akane confirmed the person in her peripheral vision. Mid-forties, probably late-forties. The dark gray suit was worn, its cuffs slightly frayed. Hair short, white mixed in at the temples. The face had a structure where fatigue and tension layered upon each other—not suddenly overlapping, but accumulated over long time. The posture was upright, gaze directed forward. The posture of someone trained to suppress emotion, characteristic of former police officers. The man offered no business card, no name. After a glance at the notebook, he quietly placed a single A4 sheet on the table. Akane stopped working for the first time. The paper was filled with numbers and abbreviations. Hospital bed occupancy data, patient admission trends for a specific period, and—values that matched exactly, down to the decimal places, with the figures Akane had been about to transcribe into her notebook. The meaning of possessing this information took Akane three seconds to process. It came from an internal city route or something equivalent. The number of people with access was limited. "Who told you?" Her own voice spread flatly through the quiet room. A question without emotional inflection, asked for confirmation. The man paused briefly, then said, "I have unofficial connections in the city administrative department. And—my name comes up sometimes in the field of spiritual consultation," The spiritual consultation network "Tamaki"—an unofficial information-sharing organization where spiritual mediums and paranormal researchers from across the country participated. Akane had been a member since 2016, and the number of her practical cases was somewhat known in those circles. If this man had picked up Akane's name through that route, his approach to the investigation was planned. "Tokano Shinichiro," The man said his name for the first time. Nothing more followed. He didn't offer a business card. The way he presented it was not as a self-introduction but as a matter of confirmation. Akane assessed Tokano along three axes. No hostility. There was anger—but it was directed inward, not toward her. Old anger. The information value was high, as the paper before her demonstrated. "Tell me about how you came to this investigation," Tokano nodded briefly, then began to speak. Ten years ago, he was still a detective with the prefectural police. Shortly after the closure of Third Hospital was announced, he had an opportunity to cross-reference death records of multiple hospitalized patients. It was a derivative task from a separate investigation, but as he proceeded with the cross-referencing, multiple records showed common findings that couldn't be explained by pathology. There was an unbridgeable gap between the recorded cause of death and the actual progression of symptoms. He submitted a request to continue the investigation. The following week, he was called directly by prefectural police brass. He was told the conclusion: "No evidence of crime." He was ordered to submit all related materials. He complied with the order. He submitted them. But before submission, he made copies of everything. "I don't believe that judgment was correct," Tokano's voice was flat. Neither self-defense nor confession. Simply a statement of fact. That manner of speaking confirmed something for Akane. This man's motivation was not justice. Justice had been broken once, ten years ago. What remained was what remains after breaking—precisely, an unresolved obsession with the fact of having been broken itself. Not a motivation worthy of trust, but a persistent one. A motivation difficult to collapse. Tokano withdrew an old file from his suit's inner pocket. A date stamp was pressed on the cover, but the ink had faded until it was nearly illegible. On the opened page, eight names. Handwritten characters in fading ballpoint pen. Three of them had fragmentary information appended beside the names. Address, estimated age, presence or absence of affiliation. Akane read the list quietly. The first was a medical student—early twenties, male, living alone in a rented room. The second was a middle-aged man receiving welfare benefits—his address record changed partway through, with traces suggesting he was admitted in something close to a disappearance. The third was a young woman—a missing person report had been filed but remained unsolved, the investigation closed. Akane quietly organized the common thread connecting the three. "People who wouldn't be systematically searched for if they disappeared," The moment she spoke the words, Tokano's mouth closed. His gaze fell to the file in his hands. The man whose expression had shown little change until then turned his face downward, just slightly—as if acknowledging something. The phrase "designed selection" took shape in the air between them. Neither spoke it aloud. But without speaking, what it referred to was understood. There was no need to voice that understanding. Silence continued. Only the low hum of the air conditioning flowed through the room. Tokano closed the file. "I want to continue sharing information," It was less a proposal than a confirmation. "What I have are routes that official records can't follow, and fragments of physical evidence. What you have is—a kind of information I can't reach," Akane didn't answer immediately. She confirmed once more why this man couldn't stop here. Not conviction. Conviction had been broken ten years ago. The fact of not having stopped became the reason for not being able to stop—as a structure, it was difficult to collapse. Not perfect as a quality to demand of a client or collaborator, but it satisfied the necessary conditions. "There's one condition," Tokano's eyes turned slightly toward her. "Don't interfere with my judgment about the investigation. Where to look, how to proceed—I decide that," Tokano said nothing. He didn't nod. He simply received it with his gaze. That was enough. There was no handshake. No words of confirmation were exchanged. They each closed their notebooks. Tokano put away his file and stood first. Akane returned the microfilm to the