Chapter 37: Let's Play a Game

When she received the call, Kyoko Hirata could never have imagined that she would once again hear that name from the lips of a police officer.

Yes, her poor child, Yukinosuke.

Kyoko Hirata still remembered clearly. She remembered the sight of Yukinosuke’s body. Such a small body, lying there, lifeless. The world was far too unfair.

From an early age, Yukinosuke had always been a good boy. He united his classmates, helped the girls, always with the best of intentions. Yet those blind fools claimed Yukinosuke bullied them. Wasn’t lifting a girl’s skirt just harmless child’s play? Locking Yuji in the bathroom was only so he could eat his lunch in peace, undisturbed by others. And as for hitting Taro, wasn’t it because Taro was so unsightly that he affected everyone’s mood? Yukinosuke was so kind he wouldn’t even step on an ant—how could he possibly bully anyone?

She understood now. It must have been they who bullied Yukinosuke! Yes, the bullying never stopped, not even in death. The police and the courts all sided with that driver. He should have paid with his life!

Kyoko Hirata had gradually started to calm down, trying to recover from the grief of losing her son. Who could have foreseen that the police would call again? And this time, they claimed Yukinosuke had become a vengeful spirit, harming others?

Impossible!

Kyoko Hirata was furious. She berated the officer on the phone and then hung up.

But not long after, her husband, Hiroshi Hirata, received a call as well. He, too, could hardly believe it. How could their child have become a vengeful spirit? He was so gentle and good-natured.

Hiroshi still remembered one day after work, seeing Yukinosuke with a baseball bat, chasing away stray cats. When his son hit a stray cat for a home run, he felt as though he was witnessing an angel. Yukinosuke was so kind, working hard to protect the flowers and plants from those stray cats. He could never harm anyone.

But under police pressure, Hiroshi Hirata put on his clothes, took his angry wife, and drove out. After all, refusing to cooperate with the authorities might only lead to more trouble down the line.

Because of Kyoko's hatred for the police and the exorcists, they declined the offer to have a police car pick them up. Hiroshi drove, Kyoko sat in the passenger seat, and the two of them headed toward the accident site on the outskirts of Suginami Ward.

“…Impossible, impossible, Yukinosuke must have been framed!” Kyoko muttered as she stared out the window.

“It’ll be all right. The police must be mistaken. Our Yukinosuke has surely moved on, gone to paradise,” Hiroshi tried to comfort her.

It was the first day of Golden Week, but the highway leading to the countryside was nearly empty. Hiroshi focused on driving.

Suddenly—

“Daddy, let’s play a game!”

A childish voice came from the back seat.

Hiroshi jerked his eyes to the rearview mirror. Reflected there was a mischievous, familiar face—Yukinosuke’s.

“Yukinosuke?”

Kyoko seemed to hear it too. She turned around.

The back seat was empty.

Thinking it was just her longing for her son playing tricks on her mind, Kyoko turned forward.

A face stared back at her.

That face, bloodied, lips blue, skin deathly pale, was grinning.

“Mommy, let’s play a game.”

Screams erupted in the car.

Amid the screams, the car crashed through the guardrail, tumbling down the embankment. Flames roared skyward.

Beside the wreckage, in the sunlight, a little boy was laughing joyfully.

“Daddy, Mommy, let’s all play a game together.”

…

“A miscalculation,” Qiao Qiao murmured after listening to Superintendent Ito’s report.

It was five in the afternoon. The sun had not yet set, but the world was darker than night.

Superintendent Ito had received a call: Yukinosuke Hirata’s parents, Hiroshi and Kyoko Hirata, had been in a car accident half an hour ago. They had died.

Everyone immediately set out for the scene. Of course, with the road blocked, the car could not go fast. And the vengeful spirit was unlikely to approach a police car carrying three exorcists.

Upon arrival, spiritual communication revealed the accident’s true cause.

There was no doubt—Yukinosuke Hirata’s vengeful spirit had killed his own parents.

Although there was a procedural flaw—police had not insisted on accompanying the couple—the way the spirit operated suggested that even with a police escort, there would only have been more victims.

If only Mrs. Hirata had trusted the authorities more, and allowed the exorcists from the Bureau of Onmyodo to accompany them, perhaps disaster could have been avoided. But all of this was mere conjecture. No one could have foreseen that the vengeful spirit would appear in broad daylight, targeting that single car.

What struck Qiao Qiao as grimly ironic was that the wicked child Yukinosuke had caused several traffic incidents, but the first fatality was his own parents.

There’s a saying in China: A family should be together, complete.

Qiao Qiao said nothing.

Miko Fujiwara was at a loss. “Originally, we should have asked the Hirata couple to help resolve the spirit’s obsession. Now…”

Night was falling. As darkness gathered, the spirit’s power would only grow.

Yes, after a discussion, Masato Yukide and Miko Fujiwara had reclassified Yukinosuke Hirata’s vengeful spirit as a malignant one. This was no longer mere obsession—it had reached true evil.

Now everyone faced a problem. First, the malicious child’s area of activity was vast. Judging by the location of the accident, it controlled an area several kilometers in radius. This made pinpointing the spirit’s location extremely difficult.

As for exorcism, Qiao Qiao was confident that those present were more than up to the challenge. But finding and containing it quickly would be hard.

If the Hirata couple were still alive, perhaps…

Qiao Qiao banished the thought. There are no ifs in life. In short, finding the vengeful spirit would be very difficult.

Secondly, the malicious child’s method was to influence drivers and cause accidents. Though the exorcists and Qiao Qiao were here, safe from its reach, other police vehicles might not be so lucky—potentially resulting in a chain of crashes.

No matter how strong an exorcist’s spiritual power, their physical body was still ordinary. In a car accident, they could be injured or even killed.

Qiao Qiao had confirmed this. When he first mastered spiritual energy, he had tried to infuse bullets with it, and wondered: Why not infuse one’s body, to gain superhuman strength?

The answer was simple: it was impossible.

After researching, Qiao Qiao tried to use spiritual power to transform his body, but found, just as the texts described, that no matter how much energy he channeled in, his muscles did not become stronger, his vision did not improve, and he could not punch through a wall. Well, perhaps a well-trained person could punch through a wall, but at most, spiritual energy alleviated fatigue and kept him alert, allowing him to ace gym class. That was the extent of it.

So, seeing through a thousand miles, leaping to the moon, exceeding the speed of sound in a single step—such feats would likely never be within his reach.

Of course, every sect had its own body-strengthening techniques. Monks practice martial arts, shrine maidens learn archery, and as for onmyoji… they have shikigami, so they need not act themselves. Even so, their strength was only that of a well-trained person.

This was one reason for Qiao Qiao’s caution: exorcists, when killed, die like anyone else.

Based on the hypothesis that spiritual energy equals vitality, and experiments showing bullets infused with energy "flowered" on impact, Qiao Qiao formed a theory: the human body, or rather, cells, have a limit to how much spiritual energy they can contain.

It was through this that Qiao Qiao realized: humanity has limits; spiritual energy has limits. This was also one of the reasons he pursued his research.

His research had two directions: one, to find a way to use spiritual energy to enhance the body; two, to improve equipment, so that ordinary people could stand a chance against the supernatural. Both were pursued in parallel.

Previously, Qiao Qiao had focused on the second. But after hearing the tale of an exorcist from over twenty years ago, he wondered if the first might also be possible. Yet all records of those incidents had been sealed. He did not understand how the earthquake had been triggered. All would take time to study.

But that was a digression.

Because the malicious child could not simply be ignored, and because tracking it down quickly was so difficult, the situation at the scene had reached an impasse.

At this thought, Qiao Qiao suddenly had a bold idea.