``` [You did indeed find some missing-person reports in the records dated after you killed Kenjaku.]
[At first, there were not particularly many of these reports, only a scattered few.]
[If you excluded cases clearly involving unnatural disasters or ordinary criminal cases, the number became even smaller-small enough to be completely buried beneath the Metropolitan Police Department's ocean of daily files.]
[Yet as time advanced through the past two weeks and more, these seemingly insignificant disappearances began to show an extremely steady, discreet upward trend.]
[Although each increase amounted to only one or two cases, the data curve slowly climbing across the screen was like a tiny poisoned needle, striking your taut nerves with precision.]
[Your reason, tempered through countless cycles of life and death, coldly told you that this was clearly very abnormal.]
[First of all, this most likely had no direct connection to that old fox Kenjaku.]
[Both the condition of the ancient sorcerers you were currently encountering and the Million-Demon Night Parade, which had previously erupted in full before being quelled, indirectly corroborated one fact: their direct connection to Kenjaku had been completely severed the moment you utterly erased her.]
[Even conceding that Kenjaku really had left some special contingency or hidden curse before her death, with the demise of her own soul, neither cursed energy deprived of its source nor a seal left without an anchor should have been able to remain so stable for so long after being separated from her.]
[A curve displaying this kind of steady, stepwise growth was absolutely not the work of a dead person. Someone living had to be secretly at work.]
[If these disappearances had occurred only after the upheaval of the Million-Demon Night Parade, they could have been understood as incidents gradually coming to light under its influence,