Chapter 89: Don’t Suddenly Add Your Own Original Setting

“Wait, Kirishiro. Please, just wait a moment.”

After hearing my declaration, Taketsuru clutched his head with a troubled expression.

The Sea God’s shrine maiden beside him wore a similar one.

“What am I supposed to wait for?”

“How did any of that lead to your conclusion? Let’s see—the sacred orb is a watermelon, the culprit is a ninja, and the motive is love at first sight? What does any of that mean?”

“Hmm. Do I need to explain each part?”

Honestly, even if I explained it, I wasn’t sure they would properly understand.

My deductions included a large measure of my own subjectivity and intuition.

Yet I could declare them to be the truth because, with problems of this sort, I’d never once experienced an answer I intuitively reached proving untrue.

Once the lines connected in my mind, that was the answer.

Sometimes, I only constructed the logic afterward when I needed to explain it to someone else.

In a sense, I thought that very intuition might be the ability most befitting an ordinary university student you could find anywhere.

Though I’d never missed when relying on intuition even through high school.

“I’m starting to feel like I won’t understand even if I hear the explanation, but can you give it anyway?”

“Very well. First, as a basic premise, do you understand that the Kikkōryū ninja clan shares blood with the same kind of beings as that Sea God’s shrine maiden?”

“No, I do not understand that at all.”

“What? I’ve never heard of that…”

I could understand Taketsuru not knowing, but why didn’t the shrine maiden know either?

No, this woman was only a little over two hundred years old. Perhaps the ninja story had taken place before she was born.

“So we’re behind even the basic premise… It can’t be helped. Taketsuru, the villa’s caretaker told us three legends connected to this area, didn’t he?”

“Y-Yeah, he did.”

“In fact, all three share the same root. The story of the man eating grapes, the stolen sacred orb, and the ninja bride-taking all originated with the Sea God and the Sea God’s shrine maiden. Everything fits if you interpret them that way.”

“Why are you so certain?”

Why was I certain, he asked?

“When the caretaker told us three separate legends, something occurred to me. Why had three legends survived in a town with absolutely nothing distinctive about it?”

If, like Fushijishi Village, people created “legends,” “ominous histories,” and “shrines” on the spur of the moment, then of course legends would spring up one after another.

The local deity there had enthusiastically joined in. If the residents had been acting like that since ancient times, three or four legends wouldn’t be strange at all.

But this place surely wasn’t like that.

I couldn’t imagine someone in the caretaker’s position telling me a story he’d invented himself.

If the stories weren’t fabricated, there had to be a reason the legends arose.

When I considered that, I recalled something the shrine maiden said earlier.

When I’d asked whether we could kill the sea serpent, she’d replied that even if the monster was killed, it would merely shed its skin and return to sleep.

If she knew that, then conversely, it was reasonable to assume something similar had happened before.

Only one legend featured a monster that was explicitly a monster from the beginning.

It told of a man who ate grapes, wandered into what sounded like a hidden house, and used a mysterious power to slay a monster in order to protect the woman living there.

But what if those grapes had been a substitute vessel for the sacred orb after the Sea God’s power entered them for some reason?

What if the monster wasn’t after the manor’s daughter but the Sea God’s power?

What if the hidden house was a stage the shrine maiden prepared to battle the monster, and she had “summoned” the man who possessed the Sea God’s power there?

“That creates the possibility that the legend recounts almost the same phenomenon now occurring, with only the stage having changed.”

In other words, it was practically identical to the circumstances under which Taketsuru had been summoned.

For the moment, I assumed this to be true.

That meant two of the three legends concerned those connected to the Sea God.

What, then, of the third—the story concerning the birth of the ninja clan?

It began with a samurai lord and a tomboyish princess, but I thought there was something more implied there too.

“From ancient times, people in power have had close relationships with gods. Judging from the characters’ social standing, the samurai and princess may also have had some connection with a deity.”

Female warriors occasionally appeared in Japanese folktales, but there was usually a reason: they carried an ogre’s blood or had received a god’s blessing.

If this town lay within the Sea God’s sphere of influence, the princess could naturally have possessed such a blessing.

However, something about her declaration that she would only marry someone stronger than herself bothered me.

Even with a blessing, was that really something she could proclaim so boldly? Or rather…

“Perhaps the princess had also used a substitute.”

“Don’t suddenly add your own original setting.”

“It isn’t original. One person in the legend is suspicious.”

The reason I thought so was the existence of the princess’s attendant, who suddenly appeared and became one of the brides.

The story’s characters were the samurai lord, the princess, the twin martial artists, and the princess’s attendant. Nobody else.

There was no information whatsoever about who this attendant was.

However, one thing was clear.

The twin martial artists didn’t fight over the princess while shouting, “She’s mine!” One quietly married the princess, while the other married the attendant.

If there had been a bloody conflict, surely some shadow of it would have survived in the legend.

But normally, would a “princess” and an “attendant” be placed on equal footing as prospective brides?

The possibility that the twins were men of exceptional character wasn’t zero, but normally, wouldn’t the second twin end up with someone of equivalent standing, such as the princess’s sister?

That question—who was this attendant?—caught in my mind.

Then intuition struck.

“In other words, the princess may have enjoyed a personal friendship with a being beyond humanity—for example, a Sea God’s shrine maiden—and left the matches to her. The woman remembered as an attendant in the legend may actually have been that shrine maiden. That was my conclusion.”

Of course, I had nothing substantial enough to call evidence.

There was no proof the princess had been connected to the Sea God and no proof she’d used a substitute.

But my intuition told me that was the answer.

So I forcefully joined the pieces and established it as my hypothesis.

I’d assemble the circumstantial evidence now.

“What do you say, shrine maiden? Among those who serve the Sea God, aren’t there stories about a senior shrine maiden who married a human?”

“Ah… That might be possible. We basically don’t meet anyone, so there’s a tendency to say, ‘If the person’s attractive, does it really matter if they’re human?’ If one of us was plied with alcohol and got drunk, I can understand her being unable to hold back… maybe?”

“With an attitude like that, it seems entirely possible the Kikkōryū ancestors descended from a Sea God’s shrine maiden.”

We would set aside which side had done the pouncing.

Speaking of ninjas, Meiko had once used some mysterious ninjutsu against Lady Goetheschwarz Sanzen Sanbyaku Sanjuuin—the illusion. Shadow Binding or something of that sort.

If that mysterious ninjutsu had roots in a nonhuman being, there was nothing strange about the Kikkōryū ninjas having similar roots.

Even if the connection was somewhat forced, once it was made, all three legends we’d heard became events related to the Sea God.

That left the legend in which a fisherman found the sacred orb, but there probably wasn’t much unusual about that one.

Someone really had stolen the orb.

A thief then stole the orb from that man—perhaps the thieves were the ninjas—and that part was probably true as well.

(If the ninja clan’s roots lay in the Sea God’s power, they might have sought to reclaim the sacred orb that housed it, or coveted it in hopes of strengthening their own power.)

At the end of the legend, the man who’d lost the orb transformed into a monstrous serpent, but perhaps a serpent monster had simply appeared in reality.

After a battle between the ninjas and the sea serpent, the ninjas were wiped out, but the serpent also failed to inflict major damage on this region.

Then the late-arriving Sea God wrapped everything up somehow, and they all lived happily ever after.

If there had been significant damage, the story would’ve probably become a fable about incurring the Sea God’s wrath.

“Conversely, if every legend arose from the truth, then since the Sea God actually exists, the events within them have a high probability of applying to the modern incidents too.”

That brought us to the spirit-power watermelon, the mysterious voice echoing in Taketsuru’s head, and the Meiko bride-duel problem.

If the Sea God’s power could accidentally enter grapes, it could also enter a watermelon.

The precise conditions that caused it were unclear, but this interpretation was the most straightforward.

And since the auditory hallucination had insisted it sensed a mysterious power called spirit energy, the likelihood was high.

The Kikkōryū desire for outside blood might also reflect the fact that the Sea God’s shrine maiden’s bloodline they once received had grown considerably thinner.

That was why the Kikkōryū clan head had panicked and sent a duel challenge unthinkable in modern times.

Put plainly, panic had driven him insane.

“But Kirishiro, even if all of those guesses are correct, how did you know that—”

“Why the young master fell in love with the Sea God’s shrine maiden at first sight?”

Everything I’d explained so far was essentially a description of the preconditions, based on the assumption that all three legends remained connected to the present.

Only now could I begin explaining what happened in modern times.

“To put it simply, the Sea God’s shrine maiden is beautiful enough to make ninety-nine out of a hundred people turn and look.”

“Huh?”

──────

Author’s Note:

Gouto isn’t so much the type who hears one thing and understands ten as the type who hears one thing, carelessly invents a hundred hypotheses, and then uses intuition to select the correct ten. The outcome is the same.

(Added note: If he isn’t in a hurry, he can also work his way normally from one to ten.)

And Kuwajima is the type who’s opening the refrigerator around now.