[After that, you and Kiyotaka Ijichi quickly split up downstairs.]
[Looking grave, Ijichi took Tsumiki, who had fallen into an uncanny sleep, and drove at full speed toward the Private Hospital, which boasted extremely tight security and state-of-the-art equipment.]
[Meanwhile, like a phantom melting into the night, you headed alone to the place Megumi Fushiguro had mentioned over the phone.]
[Standing at the center of that desolate place, you slowly closed your eyes and expanded your sensory net outward like radar to its utmost limits, letting not even the faintest fluctuation of cursed energy in the air escape you.]
[Yet the result left you with a suffocating sense of regret and a chill of dread. At the scene where Tsumiki had inexplicably vanished and reappeared, you found no trace of curse activity. No cursed residue, no nauseating presence of wild cursed spirits. Nothing.]
[The air was so clean that it seemed someone had excised every impurity with a scalpel of the utmost precision. Of course, rationally speaking, you could not rule out the possibility that the cursed residue left behind had been so faint that, after an entire night of wind, it had completely dispersed into the natural environment.]
[But whatever the process had been, there was only one conclusion now: you had found nothing. The trail went completely cold here.]
[Just as you stood in the ruins with your brows knitted, the phone in your pocket gave a muffled vibration.]
[You answered, and Ijichi's slightly weary, tense voice came through from the other end.]
[The hospital's preliminary full-body examination results were in. Those precision instruments, representing the pinnacle of modern medicine, had reached exactly the same conclusion as your earlier examination using Reverse Cursed Technique. Although everyone knew perfectly well that Tsumiki's condition was anything but normal, all her