Jiang Xia picked up the tea the maid had just refilled and smiled with a tolerance that made Conan's eye twitch. "Because on this day two years ago, you were still an ordinary person living in normal society. Murder was still a distant thing to you.
"Until you learned the true, horrific cause of your father's death—and watched a relative who had treated you fairly well fall to her death right before your eyes.
"Mrs. Yumi's sudden death shattered the boundary between life and death in your heart. In addition, your mother Haga Chinami's initial was 'C,' your father Dannjirou's was 'D,' and Mrs. Yumi's was 'E.' Together, they happened to extend into a passage in C major, giving you the inspiration for this serial murder case.
"Otherwise, as a normal person with a reasonably sound moral compass, you wouldn't have started with your most innocent third aunt. You should have killed your eldest uncle Choichiro first.
"But after Mrs. Yumi fell to her death, things changed. The most innocent of the five had died an unfortunate death, so you naturally came to think—if even Aunt Yumi, an accomplice on the fringes of the matter, had died, how could the other four, especially your eldest uncle and third uncle, go on living?
"So you decided to send the other four down as well, following the sequence of C major.
"And if you kept killing this way, the true culprit behind your father's death, the old family head Choichiro, happened to be the letter 'C.' You intended to make him watch those around him die one after another, to make him taste terror and grief to the fullest, before finally killing him—beginning with C and ending with C."
At that, he suddenly looked toward Takamori Masumi, who was trembling nearby. "When