"If that's the way things are now, then the time is ripe for Hijiri to be released. It sounds like she's still sealed away, but if we freed her, maybe she would finally be allowed to preach her message in peace."

"There's hope again, Murasa. All we have to do now is get out of here!"

"If there's anything we can do to be of assistance, then the Hifuu Detective Agency would be happy to help." Renko replied. Cooperation and helpfulness was all well and good, but I wish Renko wouldn't sell our services so cheaply or get us involved in things that had no business being addressed by detectives. We weren't an excavation company.

"I knew it! Humans and youkai really can work together. Mother Hijiri was right about everything."

"Well of course. I count youkai among both my friends and my clients."

"Oh you truly are a gift from the Buddha. Praise be to mother Hijiri for showing us the way!"

Ichirin stepped around the desk and over to Renko, scooping her up in a tight hug. Renko looked a little shocked but rose to her feet and patted Ichirin on the back. I don't know how she does it. Renko must have some genetic mutation that makes her emit pheromones that make youkai want to be her friends or something.

Ichirin released Renko and stepped back, regaining control of herself. She turned to Murasa, who now looked at her with a serious expression.

"Before we were trapped here with no way out and no hope that even if we returned to the surface we'd ever be able to stay there," she said.

Murasa nodded. "Right. Even if we could get the ship up to the surface, we thought we'd never know peace and releasing Mother Hijiri would be all but impossible. Now though..."

"If we can just find a way to get the ship out of the Underworld..."

There seemed to be some unspoken understanding between them. Nothing more was said, but they nodded in agreement, then turned to us. "Alright then. Merry, Renko, thank you for this news. I can't tell you how overjoyed we are to hear it. We have some preparations to make to get the ship ready to go, but all we have to do is find a way to get it out now. Ichirin and I should get started on laying in supplies. I'll have Unzan fly you back down. Thank you for coming to see us. I hope that the next time we meet, it will be on the surface."

"Yes, thank you both. We have lots to do now, but if we can ever be of service to you in the future, please come find us. Renko, Merry, please consider yourself both as family to us now. I see you and anyone else who helps us to free mother Hijiri as kin."

With that the two of them bid us farewell and the nyudo flowed out of the room and onto the deck, once more flattening out like a sheet to carry us. As we stepped aboard, he brought us gently down to the ground, then, forming himself once more into the features of an enormous and stern-looking, but slightly handsome face, he lowered his eyes, bowing in place before streaming back up to the deck.

"Both the captain and that nyudo look kind of scary, but they're actually pretty nice," I commented to Renko.

"Hey, if we're both kin to them now does that make you A-Merry-kin? Yeehaw, partner."

"That's terrible, Renko. Are you still drunk or do you just have the mind of an elementary school student?"

"Maybe a little of each. That oni sake hits hard. I can manage though. Let's see if we can find Yamame."

-.-.-.-.-

As we were chatting, I spotted Yamame and Kisume walking towards us, coming from the direction of the tunnel we had taken to get here from the Lake of Blood.

"Ah, are you done hearing their sob story? They're a pretty odd pair, aren't they?"

"I wouldn't think of them as 'odd.' It was an interesting story they told us. It makes me want to cheer them on," Renko said happily.

"Cheer them on? You really think they can get that thing to the surface? It's a pipe dream, isn't it? I helped them rebuild it, but just because it's an interesting thing to build. I never thought their plan would go anywhere."

"Well, it got down here from the surface, so it stands to reason there must be some way to get it back up. Maybe if we get back to the surface we could find a way to excavate it. Dig a mine and brace the tunnel walls as we go down or something. I would be like discovering buried ancient ruins."

"Digging your way down to Hell is quite the archeological expedition. I don't think a human could possibly excavate something like that. Even I would need help from a few other tsuchigumo to do it," she said as she turned, taking hold of Kisume's bucket and starting to walk in the direction of the tunnel leading back toward the Lake of Blood. We quickly followed along behind her, as, other than a few lanterns hanging from the mast of the ship, the light Kisume held was our only way of seeing down here.

"It hardly matters though," she continued, "since I don't expect you'll ever be going back to the surface. For now though, didn't you come down here to talk to someone about the earth spirits? Now that I've introduced you to Murasa, maybe if I take you to the Palace of the Earth Spirits, then Yuugi will let me eat you when she gets done knocking heads together." She said that cheerily and then proceeded to walk straight into a wall.

The tub holding Kisume had been the first thing to hit the wall, and had in turn smacked into Yamame, knocking her down so that she landed roughly in a seated position, exhaling a huff of air. I suppose even fearsome, man-eating youkai can have clumsy accidents.

"Ow ow ow. Ugh, Kisume, are you okay? What did I hit?" Yamame asked, rubbing her nose. Kisume was looking up at her with tears in her eyes, with hands rubbing both the front and back of her head.

Renko was walking ahead of me, just a bit behind Yamame and now ran up to her. "Are you both alright? What did you run into, exactly?

"That wall right there," I said, raising my arm to point.

"Eh? What wall?" Yamame asked, standing back up.

I looked at her quizzically, still pointing. "The one right there."

Renko walked over to the wall and, extending her arm, placed a hand against it. "Whoa! There's an invisible wall here! Merry, can you see it?"

"Of course I can see it. It's right there. Are you still that drunk, Renko?

"Hey Merry, come here and touch this, maybe you can find a way through. It was strong enough to knock Yamame over, so it must be a powerful ward."

"There's no way through that, it's solid stone. It's not even a ward. Is this a bit, Renko? It's not nice to mock Yamame like that just because she walked into a wall."

"I'm not mocking anyone, there's an invisible wall here, come touch it!" she demanded, patting a hand against the smooth stone.

"You're hallucinating Renko. There's nothing there."

"That's exactly it! There's nothing here! It's invisible!"

"What?"

"What?"

We stared at eachother for a moment. I felt like I was trapped in the middle of some old TV comedy routine. That or Renko had finally gone crazy.

"Alright," Renko said, laying her hand on the wall. "What is this?"

"The wall."

"Okay, and what is this?" she asked, walking a meter to the left and slapping the wall again.

"Still the wall, Renko. What's the point of this?"

"Those two look the same to you?"

"Of course they do, its the same wall. What else would it look like?"

"It's a tunnel, Merry! The same one we used to get down here!"

"The tunnel is over there," I said, pointing to a spot about 30 degrees to the right of Renko's position. The opening was about 5 meters from where Renko and Yamame were standing.

Renko followed my pointing finger and looked over toward the side. "Where? There's nothing over there, Merry."

"What are you talking about, Renko?" I walked over the tunnel entrance and took a few steps into it.

"Whoa! Merry! Come back!"

I shot Renko an incredulous look as she turned toward me, a worried expression on her face. "Merry!" she hollered, cupping her hands to her mouth and bellowing directly at me from two steps away.

I scowled and walked forward into her, brushing her hands away. "I'm right here, Renko. Don't yell like that, it echoes in here."

"You just walked through a wall, Merry!"

"No I didn't. This is the tunnel, the wall's over there."

Renko looked incensed and was about to reply, but when she glanced back at the spot where her hand had rested on the wall before she did a double-take. "Whoa, wait a minute, that's just a wall!" She said in amazement, looking at the solid, unmoving stone.

"Of course it is, Renko, it always was."

"And that's a tunnel behind you!"

"Yes, you've mastered the identification of basic objects. Was there a point to all of this?"

"Merry, it didn't look that way a second ago. Not to me, and not to Yamame either." Yamame nodded in agreement. "I can see it now, but there must be something in here that was projecting a fake image. Your eyes saw right through it like you did with Nitori's camouflage or Reisen's phase shifting, but to everyone else those two were in the opposite places until just now."

"If it weren't for Yamame, I would still think you were just being an idiot on purpose, but I don't think she'd bonk Kisume like that just for a joke. It doesn't look like either of those things though. Reisen and the kappa's suit both look like distortions to me, like someone has taken a picture of the real scenery behind them and then put that picture in front of them, with a weird lens over it or something. I can't see them when they use it, I can just see something fake."

"And what did you see here?"

"Nothing. Or rather a tunnel over here and a wall you were both walking into, probably about the same as you're seeing now, I imagine. There was never any illusion here, as far as I can tell."

"Oooh I know what's going on here," Yamame said, still rubbing her nose. There's a yokai down here who does stuff like this, like some kind of prank. Hey! Show yourself, you coward!"

"Really? Who is it? What kind of youkai can do something like that?"

"I don't know. I've never seen them, but I was with Yuugi one time and she mistook her sake cup for a rice cracker and bit it in half."

"Ugh, that sounds painful."

"Not half as painful as it was for the oni who laughed at her over it. Whoever it is doing this doesn't usually follow people around though, so it's best to just leave. You said the tunnel was over here?"

"Yes, right here, can you still not see it, Yamame?"

"No, that looks like a wall to me." She balanced Kisume's bucket on her hip with one arm and reached the other out, into the mouth of the tunnel. "Oh! You're right, there it is."

Now that she could see it properly, Yamame lead the way, with Kisume and her lantern carried before her once again. Before long, the overwhelming stench of the Lake of Blood once again assaulted our nostrils. As before, I held my nose and squinted, which helped somewhat, but the air was so saturated that the smell of blood still coated my mouth and throat. As we drew closer and the light of Kisume's lantern was reflected by the pool, I thought for a moment I saw the figure of a young girl standing alone by the shoreline.

"Eh? Who's that?" I muttered to myself. When I blinked my eyes, her figure vanished entirely. I looked up and down the shore from where she had been as we marched along, and a moment later I saw her again in my peripheral vision, only to lose her when I tried to look at her directly. I stopped walking and strained my senses. There were definitely footsteps here that weren't Renko's or Yamame's, falling at a slower rhythm, with a hint of telltale wet slap. Someone else was down here with us. A young girl wearing an elaborately ruffled, mustard-colored blouse with emerald green trim and a stylish black hat. At least that's what I kept thinking I almost saw out of the corner of my eye.

"Who's there?" I called out, louder this time. The sound of footsteps stopped -both Renko's and Yamame's and the ones from the shore.

"Uh, Merry? Who are you talking to?" Renko asked, turning to look at me.

I didn't answer, instead trying to remember where exactly I had last seen the girl's image. I took a step toward the Lake of Blood.

"Who are you?" I asked the empty air.

All at once there was a sensation of something brushing past me and a quick patter of footsteps as something disappeared from the shoreline and dashed up toward the tunnel leading back to the city.

"Wait!" I called, chasing after her. I passed by the others, but as we were all headed in the same direction, I was sure they'd be following.

"Hey Merry, wait up!" I heard Renko call from behind me.

I sprinted on, heedless of her words, into the inky darkness of the tunnel, chasing after the sometimes-there, sometimes-not image of the girl in front of me. If you asked me to explain my actions at the time, I'm afraid that even now I couldn't. I simply felt a strange, inexplicable compunction to chase after her, as if my subconscious mind had decided it was critically important without bothering to explain to me as to why that would be.

"Stop! Don't run off!" I called into the darkness. My voice echoed off of the stone walls, coming back at me sounding like someone else's. The reverberations of the footsteps stopped once more, however. I squinted into the gloom. Behind me the lantern was slowly approaching, allowing a little more light into the narrow tunnel. At the edge of the darkness, I thought I could almost make out a the girl's shadowy form. It was almost like she was two dimensional. She didn't look flat of course, but if you weren't looking at her dead on she had a tendency to slip out of your sight. You had to think about her in order to know she was there. If I looked away, even for an instant, as I did when Renko, Yamame and Kisume rounded the corner to catch up, she would vanish, disappearing until you concentrated and looked at precisely the right spot. Only then could you realize you were looking at her again. She was a girl with very little presence, but she was definitely there.

Looking back at me with wide, luminous green eyes that glimmered in the darkness, she spoke.

"...can you really see me?"