Vermouth caught that faint, hidden sense of wrongness and suddenly found herself unable to sleep.
She stared at the pitch-black ceiling for a while, when a bold guess suddenly popped into her mind.
—Could it be that Uzo had created so many complicated murder cases not just for entertainment, but because he wanted to verify whether ghosts truly existed in this world?
...Was playing with the living not enough for him? Did he want to bring even the dead completely under his control?
Vermouth: "..." Right, when she had first arrived in Japan and investigated information related to Uzo, she had indeed found borrowing records from when this high school student had checked out books about "ghosts" and "mediums" from the Library.
At the time, she had only assumed that the high schooler was going through a chuunibyou phase, or that he missed his deceased parents.
But thinking about it now, in Uzo's case, perhaps it had never been ordinary "longing"—perhaps his parents' sudden deaths had left him shocked and intensely curious. So now, he was trying to catch their spirits and get some answers. And in turn, he had extended that sort of interest to every other dead person as well.
And then there was Uzo's usual mental state...
Vermouth suddenly realized, belatedly, that scenes which looked harmonious and normal to everyone else might, in the eyes of the young man beside her, be filled with howling yin winds and countless wandering spirits.
Come to think of it, where Uzo's gaze landed was sometimes very strange.
At that thought, though the blanket was clearly warm, Vermouth's hand gripping its edge stiffened, and a chill she could not suppress ran through her body.
Vermouth pressed her lips together. "..." Strange. She was clearly not afraid of ghosts, nor was she