Putting everything else aside.
Let's just talk about that oil painting.
Although Five Rivers Kotori destroyed it immediately after she left.
Everyone knew.
She could paint even the Origin Spirit, as well as individual variants that existed only under special circumstances, as if she had seen them with her own eyes.
If you didn't know the truth about her... would you believe that?
Actually, anyone who had read the original work knew.
Spirits had a phenomenon called quiet manifestation.
In other words, they could greatly conceal their spiritual waves without causing a spatial quake, appearing in this world as silently as ordinary people.
Under such circumstances.
Unless someone had truly witnessed it with their own eyes.
Seen it.
Otherwise!
As long as they weren't wearing that gorgeous Spirit Dress.
They could walk openly down the street without any problem. Their identities wouldn't be exposed.
And nearly all Spirits, apart from Tohka Yatogami, who had evolved from a Spirit Crystal, were basically transformed from humans.
They also retained more or less of their memories from when they were human.
This led to...
Quite a few Spirits actually living in the human world all along.
They had simply hidden themselves well enough to avoid discovery.
Or they used other methods and kept moving around, making it difficult to pin them down.
That was perfectly normal!
Kurumi Tokisaki, for example, was one.
And Miku Izayoi was another.
Miku Izayoi in particular had taken advantage of the blind spot right under everyone's noses to the extreme! She was still attending high school openly, pretending to be an ordinary person.
She even occasionally used her Spirit powers.
It was fortunate that her spiritual fluctuations were relatively weak to begin with. Otherwise! Being that brazen, even if DEM didn't want to bother with her, they might