Yamiyo no Hotaru

Chapter 28

The Inner Capital of Fuso-kuni... which is surrounded by the spacious and luxurious residences of court nobles, feudal lords, wealthy merchants, and exorcists, at the same time serves as a fortress to protect the Inner Capital in case of emergencies.

A young man was walking around one of the samurai residences near the western part of the Inner Palace. He looked around the residence, and finally, as if he had given up, he stopped in front of a room and said through a sliding door.

"Murasaki, are you here? Answer me."

In a flat, emotionless tone, the young man calls out to the person who might be on the other side of the sliding door. But...

"...I'm going to open it. Is that alright with you?"

After a hundred counts and not even a single response, the young man finally offers to open the door. After counting to ten, and again receiving no answer, the young man opens the sliding door without any choice.

Unexpectedly, there is no sign of boundary or technique, and the young man succeeds in entering the room easily. Normally, an exorcist's daughter would have set up some kind of trap to prevent a man, even a family member, from entering her room unannounced, but... it seems that the owner of the room does not have the personality to think about such a thing.

Now, the young man turns his head to check the room. The tatami-floored room was completely different from one side to the other, separated by a wall hanging in the center.

Looking from the wall hanging to the east, there were swords decorated with layers of armor with various sorcery spells, a Go and Shogi table, and a bookshelf filled with books of strategy and various folklore and knowledge about Youkai. Typical of the room of exorcists who mainly use weapons as their main armament.

However, when the young man turned his eyes to the other side of the room, he found a completely different world from the one on the east side.

In the center of the room, there was a bamboo blind (御簾), and behind it was a beautiful folding screen. The walls were decorated with vivid Jūni-hitoe (a style of formal court dress first worn in the Heian period by noble women and ladies-in-waiting at the Japanese Imperial Court(十二単)), a large mirror stand, and on the karabitsu (six-legged Chinese-style chest/唐櫃), there is a gilded lacquered and expensive clothes, then on its second floor, there is an igiri (incense burner), a kagu chest, and a kikuchi (bowl) on which the furnishings are kept. All of them were covered with dust.

"......"

In silence, the young man looks around the room, takes a glance at the room, and makes an assumption based on the information he has gathered so far. There are no maids or servants assigned. A horse is missing, and above all, the youkai sword that was given to her is nowhere to be found. The only possibility was that she had gone out, which made the situation very peculiar.

The problem was that it was a horse, not an ox cart or a carriage. This means that she was not visiting some residence. And it was obviously different from usual, especially when she didn't say a word to her family.

"...get a map and a pendulum."

"Yes, sir."

One of the men standing by the young man's side responds to his order with a bow. Immediately, a map showing the entire capital and a pendulum is placed in the young man's hand.

He performed this in a wide garden area. There was any number of catalysts that could have come from her. If it had been his father or his eldest son, or if she had been two or three years older, he would have respected her free will as much as possible and would not have pried into her affairs to monitor her every step of the way. However, she is still 13 years old, and he is the fourth son who is relatively overprotective among his siblings, and above all, she had just recently caused a problem in someone else's house, which is a different story. Therefore, the young man used the searching technique, and in a sense, he was "right" in his decision.