Tangze looked around Beika Shopping Street and took out his phone to snap a picture.
It was a fairly famous location, after all. This peaceful street probably had no idea what awaited it in the future.
Never mind. He lived above the Polo Cafe, so he had no right to mock anywhere else for having too much sinister energy.
With a sigh, Tangze casually picked a clothing store and started browsing.
He really did need to stock up on clothes. The seasons here were rather unpredictable, so it could not hurt to prepare more everyday outfits.
There were quite a few clothes in his inventory, but they were all equipment with stat bonuses. Wearing them daily would feel strange, and they did not quite match his usual style.
He was not actually a high school student, after all. His style leaned more toward refined casualness, so he chose khaki and dark gray jackets, trench coats, and black, white, and gray inner layers.
It was just a shame his face looked a little too young to suit such mature clothing.
After perfunctorily finishing his shopping task, Tangze headed toward the newsstand to buy a couple of papers. He planned to first check up on recent criminal cases, see whether Shinichi Kudo had made any new progress, then decide where to go today and whether he should happen to run into the Shinigami Elementary School Student.
Just then, a figure suddenly toppled toward him from the secondhand shop by the roadside.
Tangze immediately pulled back his foot and assumed a boxing guard stance, only to discover that a gaunt middle-aged man had been shoved out of the shop and was staggering backward.
"Careful." Realizing no one was attacking him, Tangze caught the man, who was about to fall flat on his back.
"I told you to stop bothering us!" The chubby shop owner came out behind the clerk, hands on his hips as he shouted at the man. "The buyer has already settled on the sword. There's no way it's being transferred to you! How many times do I have to tell you?"
"But the mortgage term I agreed on with Maru Denjirou has not expired yet. You have no right to sell Kikuchiyo!" The long-faced man, with two narrow mustaches above his lip, argued red-faced. "This is a breach of contract!"
"You mortgaged it to him, not to me. What the hell does that have to do with me?" The owner's voice was far louder than his. "Take one more step into this shop, and I'll call the police!"
With that, the owner turned and went back inside, slamming the shop door shut behind him.
The man Tangze had caught glared at the storefront through gritted teeth, fists clenched tightly as his chest rose and fell. Violent emotion was clearly surging within him.
Seeing that he had regained his footing, Tangze naturally released his supporting hand.
Coming back to himself, the man noticed Tangze's curious gaze. He forced a smile and thanked him.
He turned and walked toward the intersection. Tangze watched his slightly bent back and his hanging hands clenched into fists, sensing that the man's suppressed emotions were becoming increasingly violent.
"Maru Denjirou..." Tangze repeated softly, pinching his chin between his thumb and forefinger in the most classic detective-thinking pose. "I feel like I've heard that name before. Probably some victim, or some murderer?"
Before Tangze could remember the details, the phone tucked in his pocket vibrated twice.
Strange. He had it set to ring.
Thinking that, Tangze took out his phone and stared at it, his pupils contracting.
At the center of the screen, the red-and-black Otherworld Navigator glowed as a window popped up.
"Name: Maru Denjirou"
A Palace? Maru Denjirou actually had a Palace?
No, he needed to find somewhere hidden. It would be quite a spectacle if he entered the correct information and suddenly vanished from the street.
Tangze raised his head and scanned his surroundings. After confirming no one was paying attention to him, he entered a narrow back alley between two shops.
As its name implied, the Otherworld Navigator was a navigation program that could enter another world.
In P5's setting, humanity's collective unconscious had a place where it was stored. When someone acquired a powerful enough desire to distort the people around them, that individual would become isolated from the public unconscious and form an independent personal space: a Palace.
Such people often viewed a specific place as something else. Based on that perception, the location in the Cognitive World would appear in a distorted form.
So the program could not simply be activated whenever one wanted. It needed an exact destination: who the Palace owner was, which place they had distorted, and what they saw it as.
Since the name Maru Denjirou had triggered a response from the app, it meant that this person had a Palace.
Tangze began carefully searching his memories for the name. Combining it with the argument between the man and the shop staff just now, he quickly identified the case.
Maru Denjirou had Conan's most dangerous profession: company president.
Despite being a wealthy man who owned a company, he had the peculiar hobby of loan sharking. He had also sold off many mortgaged items without authorization before the debtors had even defaulted. The man who had just flown into a rage should be the killer in this case, Suwa Yuji, a skilled kendo practitioner. After Maru Denjirou sold his family's treasured sword, Kikuchiyo, without permission, Suwa had stabbed him straight through the heart in a fury.
Still, what was more absurd than the cases in Conan were those gaudy dying messages.
Take Maru Denjirou, for example. He had been stabbed in the back and was practically dying, yet he somehow picked up the sword and carved the killer's name into a cabinet with slash marks. It was a cabinet as tall as a person! If he had enough strength to chop up a cabinet, he might as well have slashed the murderer once, or tried a little harder to crawl out of the room and get himself rescued.
Thinking it through carefully, Tangze's time was limited. Once Mori Kogoro received the commission and came calling, the Palace owner would be beyond saving under the radiation of the shinigami aura.
Having recalled the rough details of the case, Tangze tentatively entered a line into the second box.
"Location: Maru family"
No error appeared. It really was this case.
Only one final question remained: what did Maru Denjirou see his own home as?
Tangze tested several nouns in the destination field—places related to money, such as banks, vaults, and safes—but none worked. Then he tried entertainment venues such as clubs and bars, only receiving the same response that the location did not exist.
"Ah, blind guessing is still kind of difficult." Tangze muttered to himself and continued recalling the details.
Right, he remembered this family being very wealthy because they lived in a Japanese-style house with a courtyard and employed quite a few servants. That meant the master was either rich or powerful.
But since it was a Japanese-style house, perhaps it was some kind of traditional Japanese building?
Switching directions, Tangze tried a few more times. After pondering for a moment, he had an idea.
"Destination: Daimyo Mansion"
As the final character entered the box, a flat electronic female voice came from the phone's speaker.
"Location locked. Navigation activating."
His vision rippled almost imperceptibly. Tangze let out a breath and cautiously poked his head out of the alley.
Sure enough, the bustling shopping street outside was now utterly deserted. Everything was completely silent. Tangze observed for a while before stepping out of the alley, finally able to speak freely.
"A loan shark who thinks he's a daimyo. What a shameless bastard, Maru Denjirou." Tangze clicked his tongue twice, glanced at the Otherworld Navigator displaying a route map, and walked toward his destination.
What Tangze did not know, despite believing he had done everything without a sound, was that Shuichi Akai was staring fixedly at the alley he had entered from a building a hundred meters away. When no one emerged for a long while, Akai frowned deeply.
The confidence of a top-tier sniper allowed him to confirm that there was no one in the shadows at the end of the alley.
The target has left visual range. Are there other people deployed near the target?
Yes. All personnel have lost visual contact. There is a high possibility that the target possesses keen counter-surveillance awareness. The people assigned to tail and monitor him may have already been discovered.
Have them withdraw. He likely noticed us and evaded us; continuing the tail is meaningless. Leave the surveillance to me.
Shuichi Akai issued the order, but his brow remained furrowed.
How had Tangze completely shaken everyone off within just a few minutes, including him, a sniper watching from above?
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