Satori made no response to the accusation. Renko waited only a moment to give her a chance to speak, then continued on, undaunted.

"Since coming down here to investigate the source of the vengeful spirits, I've had the pleasure of meeting a lot of people, and hearing about a lot of different issues. In this paradise of the despised we've seen a hashihime guarding the bridge leading in, a landlocked ship phantom and a nyudo-using sorcerer who are trying to find a path back to the surface, yourself, miss Satori, who seemed wholly unconcerned with the greater Incident and only interested in finding out about your sister and of course the hell raven and kasha who were the ostensible cause of the whole affair to begin with. As it so happens, the mountain god who gave the eye of Yatagarasu to your pet is a close acquaintance of ours and as such I began to see some patterns in the disparate and seemingly disconnected stories of all of these parties that didn't add up."

"On the surface, all of these issues appear to be separate, with the people involved in each of these stories acting independently according to their own motivations. Orin was worried for Okuu, you were worried about your sister because all the other youkai hate dealing with you, and Parsee and Yuugi had their own concerns. Once I found out that Koishi was making frequent trips to the surface and often exploring around above ground, I began to realize that things weren't as simple or as disconnected as they seemed. After I had a chance to talk to Kanako Yasaka, everything started coming together. All those separate little shards started looking like pieces of a bigger whole, and right in the middle of that new image that was forming was you, miss Komeiji."

"I thought you said you had a question for me, not just some rant you wanted me to listen to." The voice on the other side of the screen was completely emotionless, almost carefully so.

"Yes! Questions! I have plenty. First off, why would Okuu want to invade the surface world? If she wanted to create a new Hell, she could have done it right here, in the city. Or in some disused part of the Underworld. The Hell of Blazing Fires is the only place where earth spirits are being tormented right now, but there's nothing saying it has to be that way. She could easily have gone and lit one of the other hells on fire. She didn't want to do that though. There was also the question of what Parsee was doing on that bridge. I'd understand if she was there to keep youkai from leaving the city, but she seemed to have no problem with letting Yamame or Kisume out to play in the shaft, so that wasn't her purpose. She seemed to be watching for something there, and reporting to Yuugi. At first I thought it must have been the ship phantom and the nyudo sorcerer or maybe any of the earth spirits, but Yuugi told her to let those pass and there don't seem to be any earth spirits within the city itself. And of course the biggest question of all came from something you yourself told me, miss Komeiji."

"Me?"

"Yes. Our first meeting passed by so quickly that I almost didn't catch it at first, but you seem rather well informed about the nature of your sister's abilities. Which seems odd, given that you can't read her mind. Some part of that irked me. I knew it didn't make sense, but I couldn't figure out why."

On the other side of the screen I felt rather than heard Satori suppress a gasp. Renko's grin got a little broader.

"You told us 'Koishi has, rather unfortunately, placed herself in the realm of the unconscious. That makes her very difficult for most people to perceive, only rarely rising to a level detectable by the conscious mind.' How would you know that if you couldn't read her mind, I wondered? You also mentioned that she was wandering around thoughtlessly and suggested that she was unconscious herself. Again, that's something you couldn't have known if you couldn't read her mind."

From the other side of the screen there was only silence.

"At first, I thought you might be lying about not being able to read her mind. But the fact that you were asking us to find her for you suggested that you really couldn't do it yourself. So then I decided that it was your explanation of her powers that was the lie. So it wasn't that she had no mind of her own, or that she had become a youkai of the unconscious. The fact that she was so hard to detect had to have some other explanation then. I thought about it for a time, and then I realized it was simple. Koishi was vanishing because she was on the verge of ceasing to exist. Like you, miss Komeiji, Koishi is a satori, a youkai that is defined as a creature capable of reading minds. When she lost that ability, she lost the very essence of her nature. She lost the thing that made her a satori. Without that, she began fading away. With nothing to define her, she had nothing anchoring her to existence. Gensokyo can be a very cruel place in some ways, especially to those who don't want to play by its rules, can't it?"

Renko paused, giving Satori a chance to respond, but there was no sound from the opposite side of the screen.

"Just as a shrine with no worshippers becomes nothing more than a shack, and a youkai exterminator with no youkai to exterminate ends up growing tea for a living, those who lose the premise of their existence are transformed by this place. With that thought in mind I went and talked to the Yama. The same Yama who once recruited you to manage the earth sprits trapped here, as it turns out. She told me that Koishi had closed her third eye even before the two of you came here to the Underworld, and that you had asked the Yama to retrieve Koishi as payment for your service. That seemed odd to me, since clearly Koishi would just end up running away from you again, but then I realized that the point wasn't to confine her. The point was to change where she lived. By having the Yama bring both of you here and give the palace to you, you were changing a part of Koishi's nature. Changing her from a youkai who lived on the surface into a creature of the Underworld. That was part of your plan to save her."

"Hold on a minute, Renko," I interrupted. "That doesn't make any sense. If Koishi was on the verge of fading out of existence, how does being down here help her any? Youkai need human fear to survive, don't they? There's no humans down here to fear her."

Renko turned toward me with a smirk. "Quite right, Merry, there's no humans who live down here. And why is that? What were we warned of whenever we discussed the idea of coming down here?"

"That the Underworld is full of oni and other terrible, man-eating monsters..."

"Doesn't that sound like the sort of fear that could sustain underground youkai? All Koishi needed was to be recognized as one of those terrible monsters who lived in the depths and she'd be feared."

"Would something like that really be enough?"

"Well, people on the surface seem pretty scared of things down here. People in the village still think this is Hell, after all, or at least something close to it. Even other youkai don't like the idea of coming down, if only out of fear of transgressing against the non-aggression pact. It seems like it's enough fear to sustain the oni, tsuchigumo, hashihime and everyone else we've seen down here, at any rate. Even captain Murasa and Ichirin are able to make do with the fear invested in earth spirits. That might well be why Parsee told them they had to stay. The fact that Yuugi is trying to help them leave now suggests that something must have recently changed."

"Incidentally, that also explains why Suika left the Underworld too, assuming that I was right about her true identity at least. The oni are central to the existence of all of the youkai down here. They're what make this place seem like Hell to the villagers. My original theory was that Suika got pushed out of the Underworld because she was a human at some point in the mythic past. Now that I've met the other oni though, I think they're all like that. Humans who, at some point long ago, became so strong and so uncontrollable they left humanity behind. Humans who made their own rules and rejected the very concept of right and wrong in favour of the law of doing whatever they were strong enough to get away with. Suika had to leave because, as rowdy is she is, she's a little tamer by Underworld standards. She doesn't like to order other people around and she doesn't enjoy tormenting the weak. She just wants to live a carefree life and stay drunk all the time. That's enough to make her seem like an oni to humans, but amongst others of her kind, her sense of oni-ness was fading. That's why she had to leave. It's also why the oni are in charge down here. If anyone seriously became a threat to them, they'd be at risk of making this place not seem like Hell any more. If it didn't then the villagers might not think of it as being quite so terrifying. You can't displace the oni from the top of the food chain down here without endangering everyone, just like Yamame said, just not for the reasons she assumed."

I hadn't expected Renko to bring up a case from six years ago in the middle of this one, but to her the details seemed as clear as if it had happened yesterday. I closed my mouth and shrunk back in my chair.

Renko cleared her throat. "Sorry about that interruption, miss Komeiji. Let's continue. Now, as I was saying, you brought Koishi down here with you, making her into an Underworld youkai and guaranteeing that her existence would be maintained by the human village's fear of the creatures that live beneath the surface. That wasn't your only option, of course. Living on the surface as you did at the time, you could have done something to make the humans fear Koishi as she was. But you didn't have an easy time of finding her, and being as no other youkai would want to talk to you to help, you had to work with someone who was both willing to give you something and able to see her. That's a pretty rare combination of traits, so when the Yama made the offer, you seized the possibility."

"Just moving her down here wouldn't be enough though. After all, if no one knew she existed, it wouldn't matter where she was. So you asked the Yama to get others to move down here with you. You worked with her and the youkai sage to devise the idea of letting the oni live in the ruins of the Capital in the hope that you could create a stable existence for Koishi. As soon as the oni moved in, you sought out their leader and explained to her all about your sister's nature. How she might be hard to see but she was definitely around, and how she couldn't read minds like you, so she wouldn't be hated. In so doing, you created a new identity for her. She couldn't be a satori anymore, so she became a new kind of youkai, a 'Satori's sister' youkai, if you will. One that's hard to see, can manipulate unconscious desire, and has no conscious mind of her own. That way her current nature would become self-reinforcing. The very fact that she was fading out of existence would instead reinforce her existence. You even arranged for a hashihime who controls jealousy to be brought down with all of the other youkai so that you'd have someone present here in the Underworld that you knew would definitely be able to see her. So you could confirm that she was alive and well. It sort of looks like the Yama might have had to search around for a while to find someone who fit the bill for that request. In the end you got her though. Her and everyone else you needed to make this city into a place where your sister could continue to exist. By arranging the mass migration of oni and uncontrollable youkai from the surface, you became, along with the youkai sage, one of the major architects behind Gensokyo as it exists today!"

"Wait, I know Parsee seems like she might be foreign, but are you saying she's only here at all because she can see Koishi?"

"That's my theory, Merry. It's a pretty rare ability to come by. Other that yourself and a small number of human children in the village, only Parsee and the Yama seem to be able to see her with any regularity. Maybe Suika used to be able to as well, according to Yuugi. Despite that though, everyone here in the city knows about her. Yamame had heard of her, but never seen her, and she's been living here for about 120 years. Doesn't that seem odd to you? We know the Yama can see Koishi because everything's black or white to her. She exists, so she can be seen, even if she only just barely exists. For Parsee, she can see things that are jealous, so Koishi is clearly detectable. That kid back in town can see things that are about to be forgotten. Your ability seems to have grown to the point where you can see anything that's invisible, it seems. Suika's the only one who I don't get yet, but maybe she could see Koishi because she was in danger of fading out of existence down here herself."

"...I see," I said hesitantly, tumbling the possibilities over in my head.

"Sorry about that, miss Komeiji, but, as you can see, my partner asks the most interesting questions."

"...I don't mind. Please continue, if there's more to this accusation of yours."

"Thank you, there is. Now, as I was saying, you spread rumors about Koishi amongst the youkai living down here in an effort to change your sister's nature. Just as the youkai exterminators in the village went from being monster hunters to furniture sellers or tea farmers, so too was Koishi forced to change from being a satori to being what she is now. There was still the question of why you would spread the stories that you did though. Why designate Koishi as a youkai of the unconscious? Sure, it helps explain why she was disappearing and why you couldn't read her mind, which in turn helped to solidify her existence, but you also told us, along with others, that she had the ability to manipulate the unconscious mind. That's new, and something you entirely fabricated, I think -it has to be in fact, there's no other way you could possibly know it. I spent a long time trying to figure out why you'd do that, and I wasn't sure I had it until just today."

"You brought Koishi down here to save her, but what did she do the first time she got the chance? Go right back up to the surface, of course. In her wanderings it didn't take her long to find the shaft leading back above, away from all of the carefully setup support networks you had created to keep her from fading away. Onto the surface where no one knew she existed or what type of youkai she was supposed to be. Try though you might you couldn't stop her either. She wouldn't listen to you, you couldn't find her, most people couldn't see her, and Parsee wasn't strong enough to stop her forcibly. I imagine you must have been quite worried. You tried everything you could think of, but you couldn't do anything to keep her safe. But that's when Kanako Yasaka came to see you."

Still there was nothing but silence from the other side of the screen.

"There you were with an unsolvable problem and then along comes a goddess offering you a terrific power. It was the perfect setup for you. She had gone ahead and broken the non-interference pact on her own, so you didn't need to worry about if you were violating the agreement or not. All you had to do was get Okuu to do something big and noisy to get the surface world's attention and you could guarantee that someone powerful from the surface would come and stop her. Once they did, they'd be sure to come to talk to you, and then you could not only claim to be unaware of your pet's misdeeds, but use the opportunity to tell them all about Koishi, spreading the rumors of the vanishing, satori-like yokai she had become far and wide. Then it wouldn't matter where she went. You even anticipated that Okuu would forget that it was you who asked her to invade the surface, leaving you with plausible deniability. The only thing that didn't go according to plan was Orin releasing the vengeful spirits before your plan came to fruition. You hadn't anticipated that one of your pets would take the initiative and work to protect one of their friends, did you?"

Renko looked up at the ceiling and smiled faintly to herself.

"You know, now that I think about it, I should have picked up immediately that your reaction upon initially seeing us was strange. You weren't at all surprised that two humans had come down from the surface. You more or less expected that someone would, just not quite so soon. When you first looked at Merry, and saw from her mind that she had seen Koishi, I thought that you were surprised that someone had seen her coming to the palace. But you were actually surprised that anyone had seen her at all, weren't you?"

"After that, you asked us to find your sister -but you took great care to explain her condition first, even though neither of us had even thought to ask about why she was like that. You just volunteered that information. You didn't set a deadline or want a report or anything. Could it be that you didn't actually care if we found her or not? You just wanted us to return to the surface with the story of an unconscious youkai who's hard to see, didn't you?

Still there was no answer from Satori.

"Well, my theory's almost at an end now, and I still haven't heard any answers, so I may as well finish up. This last bit is a bit more speculative. I don't have any evidence for this other than the fact that it seems plausible to me, but I'd appreciate it if you could at least do me the favour of hearing me out and telling me if theory is wildly off base. It wouldn't be the first time such a thing has happened, and if you have a better explanation that fits all of the observed facts, I'd be happy to hear it."

Renko paused for a moment, centering herself, then took another breath and began. "It occurs to me that, if I'm right about everything I've described so far, what you've been doing is essentially using the power of Gensokyo to create and solidify the existence of a youkai that was previously on the verge of becoming non-existent. But being as a non-existent youkai would be very hard to perceive, you couldn't be sure if what you were doing would be solidifying a youkai's existence... or creating a youkai entirely from whole cloth. In fact, the only difference I can see between the two acts is that if you were to undertake your plan before your sister disappeared, you'd get a visible Koishi back again, whereas if you did it after she had already vanished, you might get an entirely different youkai. Unless, of course you had someone who had the ability to know the location and disposition of any given soul working with you, that is. When I spoke to the Yama, she assured me that Koishi was definitely real, but she didn't mention if Koishi had always been that way. I had wondered for a bit why you would agree to take this job -a job which seems to be exhausting for you, and which will presumably continue to be your responsibility for your entire life in exchange for the payment of a one-time act of finding your sister. Especially given that she could just run away again whenever she felt like it. I think I now know the answer."

"Miss Komeiji. I urge you again, to please tell me if I'm wrong, and if there's a better explanation then to let me know what it might be, but unless I hear a more convincing bit of logic from you, I'm afraid I have to ask. Satori. In exchange for taking on this life-long burden of watching over Hell's leftover mess down here in the bowels of the earth, was the price you asked the Yama to pay you the return of your sister's soul from the afterlife?"