The morning sun broke over the Tokyo skyline, casting a deceptive, golden glow over the city. It bounced off the glass towers of Shinjuku and glittered on the surface of the Sumida River. But down in the basement morgue of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police
Department, the sun didn't reach.
The light here was artificial, pale, and clinical, buzzing with the low, maddening hum of fluorescent tubes that were on the verge of burning out. The air was scrubbed
and recycled, kept at a frigid temperature to slow the decay of the things that ended up on the stainless steel tables.
On the central table, a mound of white linen covered the remains of Councilman Ryosuke Takeda.
Even with the industrial ventilation running at full power, the smell lingered. It wasn't the
usual smell of death the rot and the musk of decomposition. It was something far more disturbing. It was a sweet, cloying scent. The smell of copper mixed with the terrifyingly domestic aroma of boiled meat. It coated the back of Kenji Sano's throat, a taste that no amount of cheap precinct coffee could wash away.
Dr. Kaori Sato stood over a microscope on the side bench. She adjusted the focus dial with trembling fingers, the plastic screeching softly in the silence. She looked exhausted.
Her skin was translucent under the harsh lights, dark circles bruising the skin under her eyes. She hadn't gone home. None of them had.
"I've finished the preliminary autopsy on Takeda." she said, her voice tight, barely
rising above the hum of the refrigeration units. She didn't turn around. She seemed unable to look at the body again.
Kenji leaned against the tiled wall, crushing an empty paper cup in his hand. He felt like he was made of sand gritty, tired, and ready to crumble.
"Give it to me.." Kenji said. "Don't sugarcoat it."
"The cause of death was systemic thermal shock." Kaori said, picking up her clipboard
and reading the notes she had written in shaky kanji. "His organs... his liver, his kidneys, even the outer layers of the heart... they cooked inside his abdominal cavity. The proteins in his muscles denatured, essentially turning to gelatin. But Sano... the precision is what keeps me awake."
"Precision?" Manjiro asked from the corner. The big detective looked green. He was hugging his own chest, keeping a wide distance from the table. "He boiled a man in
a hotel tub. That sounds messy, not precise."
"The water temperature wasn't random." Kaori turned to face them, holding up a thermal graph. "I analyzed the depth of the tissue damage. I checked the protein breakdown rates. The water in that tub was maintained at exactly 98 degrees Celsius."
She lowered the chart, her eyes wide with horror.
"Just two segrees below a rolling boil."
"Why?"
Kenji asked.
"If it were 100 degrees or hotter, the shock to the nervous system would have been
instantaneous." Kaori explained, her voice trembling. "The nerve endings would have burned off in seconds. He would have died, but he wouldn' have felt it for long. If it were 60 or 70 degrees, it would have taken hours,
and he might have passed out from heat exhaustion before the end."
Kaori swallowed hard, looking at the covered shape.
"But 98 degrees... it is the biological threshold for maximum pain reception without immediate nerve death. It was calculated. It was engineered to ensure he remained conscious for as long as possible while guaranteeing fatality. Takeda was alive, Sano. He was alive and feeling his skin peel for at least eight minutes."
"Eight minutes." Manjiro whispered, covering his mouth with a massive hand.
"He wanted him to feel every second."
"No," Kenji said, pushing himself off the wall. He walked toward the body, staring at
the contours of the sheet. "He didn't just want him to feel. He wanted him to understand."
The heavy metal door to the lab swung open with a hiss of pneumatic pressure. Chief Inspector Hideo walked in.
The Chief looked like a man marching to the gallows. His tie was loosened, his top button undone, and his eyes were rimmed with red veins. He carried the weight of the entire city government on his slumped shoulders.
"The Mayor is holding a press conference in an hour.." Hideo said, his voice flat and
devoid of hope. "He's declaring a State of Emergency. The riots in Shinjuku are spreading to Shibuya. He wants a name, Sano. He is screaming for a name. Do we have one?"
"We hav nothing," Kenji said, tossing the crushed cup into a biohazard bin.
"Nothing?" Hideo's voice rose, echoing off the tile. "We have three bodies! We have tags! We have a pattern! We have the most high-profile serial killer in Japanese history, and you tell me we have nothing?"
"We have a ghost, Chief!" Kenji snapped, his own temper flaring.
He walked over to the evidence table where the tagged items from the Park Hyatt were laid out in plastic bags the burnt wooden block, the stripped wires, the duct tape.
"We ran the DNA from the tunnel clean. We ran the prints from the hotel room clean. We checked thd security cameras at the Hyatt he knows exactly where the blind spots are.
He walked through a lobby with fifty cameras and didn't leave a single frame of his face. He doesn't exist on any database. He doesn't exist in the system."
"What about the Chiba connection?" Manjiro asked, trying to find a logical thread to pull.
"Kurosawa evicted hundreds of people. One of them must have a grudge. A farmer who lost his land? A son who lost his inheritance? Someone who snapped?"
"We checked them all." Kenji shook his head, frustration radiating off him like heat.
"I interviewed every farmer, every tenant, every activist who protested that construction site. I looked them in the eye. They're all accounted for. Most of them are just broken people trying to survive. They are old. They are tired. None of them have the training, the money, or the psychological profile to pull this off."
Kenji paced the small room, the sound of his boots sharp on the floor.
"This guy bought industrial immersion heaters that cost five thousand dollars a piece. He hacked a hotel key card system. He bypassed a Councilman's security detail
without raising an alarm. A farmer with a pitchfork doesn't do that. A ghost does that."
"So what are we dealing with?" Hideo asked, leaning against the doorframe. "A mercenary? A hitman?"
"Come look at this."
Kenji walked to the whiteboard mounted on the far wall. It was covered in gruesome photos of the three crime scenes. He picked up a black marker, the smell of the ink sharp and pungent in the sterile room.
"This isn't revenge, Chief. That's what we've been getting wrong. Revenge is messy. Revenge us emotional. Revenge is a crime of passion a knife in the dark, a gunshot in
the street."
Kenji tapped the marker against the board hard enough to make a sound.
"This? This is a routine. It's a ceremony."
"A ceremony?" Hideo frowned.
"Look at the methods." Kenji circled the three crime scenes with broad, angry strokes.
* The Pit (Suzuki – Greed)
* The Raincoat (Kurosawa – Oppression)
* The Boiling (Takeda – Theft)
"I spoke with Professor Yamashita at Tokyo University early this morning," Kenji continued. "The wooden tags. The specific nature of the deaths. They aren't random torture. They correspond to the Ten Kings of Hell (Ju-O)."
"The Ten Kings?" Manjiro asked.
"In Buddhist folklore, the dead are judged by Ten Kings, each punishing a specific sin. The punishment must fit the crime. If you steal, you are boiled. If you hoard, you
are buried. If you oppress, you are burned."
Kenji wrote the numbers 1 through 10 on the board.
"Our killer doesn't see himself as a victim getting payback. He sees himself as a King of Hell. He believes he is a force of nature. A divine wind sent to scrub the filth off the pavement."
"So he's insane," Hideo summarized, rubbing his temples. "We're chasing a lunatic with a god complex."
"It's worse." Kenji said grimly. "He's rational."
The room went silent. The hum of the fridge seemed to get louder.
"He has classified these men not as humans, but as 'vermin'—as rats eating the grain of the city. He doesn't hate them personally. He hates what they are. He's exterminating them with the same lack of emotion that an exterminator kills a cockroach."
"But the torture," Manjiro shuddered, looking at the autopsy photos of Takeda's peeled skin. "Why the torture? If it's just extermination, why boil him for eight minutes? Why bury a man alive?"
"Because to him, the pain is the cleaning agent," Kenji said. "He believes the modern law is too soft. It allows men like Takeda to pay a fine and go back to stealing. The Shogun is bringing back the Kujigata Osadamegaki—the old Feudal Penal Code. He's showing the city that if you act like a rat, you die like a rat. It's performative. He needs the audience."
"He has an audience." Hideo said, walking to the high window.
He yanked open the blinds.
Down below, on the street in front of the precinct, a crowd had gathered. It was larger than yesterday. A sea of people pressing against the police barricades. But they weren't protesting the murder. They weren't lighting candles for the Councilman.
They were chanting.
They held signs:
THE SHOGUN IS RIGHT.
CLEAN THE CITY.
BURN THE RATS.
"Look at them." Kenji whispered, stepping up beside the Chief. "They love him. He's tapped into their anger. They don't see a murderer. They see a hero."
"That's because they haven't seen his face," Manjiro said.
"They never will." Kenji turned back to the room, the glare of the sun silhouetting him against the window. "He wears a mask because he is the mask. He has stripped away his humanity to become this symbol."
Hideo let the blinds snap shut, cutting off the view of the cheering mob. He looked at the
team scared, exhausted, out of their depth.
"I'm authorizing the full Task Force. Sano, you're the lead. Tenken, you're his second. But Sano... look at the board."
Hideo pointed a shaking finger at the list of numbers Kenji had written.
"We have three bodies." Hideo said. "Suzuki. Kurosawa. Takeda."
Kenji looked at the numbers.
1. Suzuki (Dead), 2. Kurosawa (Dead), 3. Takeda (Dead)...,remaining seven slots are empty in board.
"If there are Ten Kings..." Hideo whispered, the realization draining the blood from his
face. "If he intends to complete the ritual..."
Kenji stared at the seven empty spaces on the whiteboard. Each blank space represented a man who was walking around Tokyo right now, breathing, eating, laughing, unaware that he was already a ghost.
"Three down." Kenji said, his voice heavy with the terrible math of the situation.
He capped the marker.
"There are seven sins left."
Chapter 8 Ends - Search begins?