A Mature Spirit Medium

—One of the most common requests Detective Agencies received was "finding lost pets."

These cats had all been caught and brought back after receiving the requests.

After Jiang Xia arrived, the Amuro Detective Agency did indeed have more clients than before.

But the jobs he received were still finding cats and dogs, as well as keeping an eye on mistresses.

Jiang Xia did not hand the cases over as Amuro Tooru had instructed.

He wanted to keep them to build his reputation and connections.

Therefore, Jiang Xia passed all the pet-finding requests on to his group of rowdy friends.

At first glance, the delinquents looked cool and busy. But in reality, they often got bored.

Street racing and playing video games every day got old easily, so many of their group activities were actually just a bunch of people gathering together, spacing out for a while with fierce expressions on their faces, going through the motions.

Then, when the time came, they would all go home.

But now that they had the novel task of finding cats and dogs, their formerly boring wandering through the streets suddenly became exciting.

Not to mention the generous pay.

No one turned down money, and delinquents had to make a living too.

—Motorcycles needed repairs when they broke down, messy hair needed perms, and the Game Arcade owners were not going to let them freeload... In short, they worked exceptionally hard.

However, Jiang Xia did not set the pet drop-off location at the Detective Agency.

Because he still remembered the background story he had made up when he first came to Amuro Tooru looking for a job.

Something about thugs smashing up the store where he worked...

What if, one day, the innocent delinquents came to deliver a cat, only for Amuro Tooru to mistake them for people there to wreck the place... That would be very bad.

So the recovered cats and dogs were sent directly to Jiang Xia's home, and Jiang Xia would then bring them to the Detective Agency.

Pet cases were easy to handle.

But cases involving following mistresses concerned client privacy, so Jiang Xia did not outsource them and could only do them himself.

Fortunately, he had been very free lately.

Besides, if he wandered around outside a little more, maybe he would run into a Murder Case.

Jiang Xia carried the cat into the Detective Agency and called to notify the client to come pick it up.

After sending several cats off, Jiang Xia sat waiting for clients to bring ghosts to his door.

Unfortunately, the calls he received were still all pet-finding requests.

Jiang Xia stared at the newly received stack of glamorous cat and dog photos and sighed. The delinquents were probably just too efficient at finding pets, and word of mouth was starting to spread their reputation...

Unable to get any worthwhile cases, Jiang Xia flipped through the request forms and planned to go photograph a mistress that afternoon.

But before he could leave, Amuro Tooru suddenly sent him a message.

Jiang Xia opened it and found that the Part-time Emperor had something come up, so he was asking Jiang Xia to cover one of his part-time jobs for the day—delivering packages.

He still had to accept work from his boss.

Give and take was how one built a harmonious, stable relationship between tool users and tools.

Jiang Xia got up and headed out.

As he closed the Detective Agency's front door, he hung an Appointment Book outside and looked at it expectantly.

"You're already a mature notebook. You need to learn how to attract clients harboring Killing Intent on your own."

A gust of wind blew past. The notebook rustled open slightly, then closed again.

Jiang Xia took it as a nod.

Following the address Amuro Tooru had given him, Jiang Xia found the Logistics Company and received a map, a delivery manifest, and a vehicle.

With a whole vehicle full of goods, he spent several hours making deliveries.

The part-time job was not difficult.

But throughout it, Jiang Xia's mood kept sinking.

—Every client who came to sign for a package was utterly ordinary: no Killing Intent, no ghosts, and no sign that their lives were in danger.

By evening, Jiang Xia had delivered the last package and returned listlessly to the vehicle.

He was just about to head back to the company to report in.

But then the Ghost Infant, who had been sleeping groggily on his shoulder, suddenly woke up and excitedly poked him.

Jiang Xia froze.

He listened carefully to the Ghost Infant's muttering, then got out of the vehicle and followed the direction it pointed, turning through several corners.

After passing through a gloomy alley, he stopped in front of a somber Western-style house on his right.

The house had several stories, and its yard was large.

Yet it had not been properly maintained. The entire building was gloomy and eerie, the yard overgrown with weeds, and the walls covered in wildly spreading ivy that seemed to press down on the eye.

Combined with the overcast weather that day, at first glance, there was only one fitting word to describe it.

—Haunted house.

Jiang Xia walked up to the Courtyard Gate and peered inside through the rust-speckled Iron Fence.

Then, somewhat surprised, he noticed two people lying in the messy grass of the yard.

They were two children, around six or seven years old. Their eyes were closed, but their chests rose and fell slightly. They were probably not dead yet, merely unconscious.

Both children had rather unusual builds: one was fat like a triangular Rice Ball, while the other was skinny as a reed.

This gave Jiang Xia a strong sense of Déjà vu. He quickly thought of two people—Conan's classmates, Kojima Genta and Tsuburaya Mitsuhiko.

Those two, along with the little girl Yoshida Ayumi and the brains of the group, Conan, made up Teitan Elementary School's "Detective Boys."

Jiang Xia: "..." Since Genta and Mitsuhiko were lying here, today was probably the Detective Boys' first group activity:

A haunted house adventure.

Jiang Xia shifted his gaze away from the two children and looked up at the Western-style house beneath the dense clouds.

This "haunted house" had been abandoned for several years.

It was said that a brutal Murder Case had once taken place here. Ever since then, the house had often produced wind that sounded like the roar of a wild beast, making it very famous in the surrounding area.

But in reality, Jiang Xia's fake "precognitive ability" told him that there were no ghosts here at all, only a mother and son hiding inside.

—Five years ago, the male owner of this Western-style house angrily berated his son, only for the son to shoot him in the head and kill him.

After discovering this, the mother disguised the crime scene as a "Burglary and Murder," then hid with her son in an underground secret room, intending to wait out the Statute of Limitations before returning to society.

Later, the son gradually became unable to bear this rat-like existence and wanted to turn himself in, but his mother refused. She locked him in the dungeon, insisting on waiting until the Statute of Limitations expired.

The "wind that sounded very much like roaring" heard by the people nearby was actually the grieving roar of the son underground.

And today, the four first-year Elementary School Students of the Detective Boys had entered without knowing the Inside Story, intending to embark on a "haunted house adventure."

At that thought, Jiang Xia looked at the two children in the yard through the Courtyard Gate.

As things stood, the Detective Boys' adventure was already nearing its end.

—Genta and Mitsuhiko had suffered a K.O., been knocked unconscious, and tossed into the yard.

Meanwhile, Conan and Ayumi were probably still inside the haunted house, struggling to survive.

Jiang Xia thought for a moment, took out his phone, and skillfully called the police.

Then he lightly vaulted over the Railing, landed in the yard, and quickly made his way around to the Side Door of the Western-style house.

Jiang Xia remembered that this was where the Detective Boys had infiltrated the haunted house.

But when he Reached Out and twisted the handle, he found that the door was locked from the inside.

"..." It seemed that after the mistress of the house had thrown out the two brats who had broken into the haunted house, she had taken some defensive measures and locked the breach.

As an organization member, Jiang Xia felt that he ought to take out his tools and, with a few quick clicks, neatly pick the lock.

But Lock Picking was not his specialty.

And a Spirit Medium ought to act like a Spirit Medium...

Jiang Xia withdrew his hand and stepped back half a pace.

Two Paper Shikigami emerged from beneath his feet out of nowhere, silently slipping into the house through the Door Crack.

Very soon, behind the door, the two Shikigami overlapped and gradually expanded, forming a puppet like a "White Clay Man."

This kind of puppet had no Mindset. It was entirely controlled by the Spirit Medium.

If he put a Ghost Fetus into the puppet, it could be shaped into an exquisite puppet resembling a human.

But for merely opening a door, there was no need to make it so refined.

Jiang Xia sensed the Clay Puppet's location through the door.

A moment later, the "Xiao Bai" inside slowly straightened up, felt around, and extended its hand toward the back of the door. Click—the Door Lock turned open.

Its task complete, the little puppet silently collapsed, changing from clay back into Paper Shikigami invisible to ordinary people.

The Paper Shikigami instantly returned to the Mark Space at Jiang Xia's heart.

Jiang Xia Reached Out again.

This time, he opened the door without trouble.