For anyone who may not have read all of my previous casefiles, you're probably wondering what any of that was about. I'll do my best to explain concisely. Three months ago, my partner and I ventured into the Underworld for the first time. Among many other adventures related to the so-called Vengeful Spirit Incident, we met captain Murasa and Ichirin there. After that Incident was resolved, Renko had turned her attention toward helping the two of them escape from their confinement in the Underworld.

The crux of their predicament stemmed from Murasa's nature as a ship phantom. Being the spirit of a girl who had drowned at sea, she was bound to haunt a particular ship and couldn't stray far from it for very long. Through various circumstances detailed in the previous casefile, that ship had ended up entombed in the depths of the earth, with no easy way to get it back out. The ship was also important to Ichirin, as it had apparently, at one point, been capable of transforming itself into a Buddhist temple at which both she and Murasa had long ago served as disciples under the tutelage of the living Bodhisattva, Byakuren Hijiri. The two had only ended up in the Underworld along with their ship after that temple had been burnt to the ground by an unruly mob and Hijiri herself was sealed in Makai, the world of demons, for the crime of aiding and sheltering youkai, including Murasa, Ichirin and Unzan themselves. That terrible sentence was said to have been passed down not only by the Yama but also the Hakurei miko of that era. Since then, our three companions had languished in the caves surrounding the city of Former Hell while Byakuren herself endured a thousand years of isolation and imprisonment.

Murasa and her companions had spent the millennium since being sealed underground slowly repairing the shattered and burnt ship, bit by bit, eventually restoring it to its original condition. In so doing they found that it contained a strong holy power, which they took to be a significant measure of Byakuren's magic, hidden by her before her imprisonment in the hope that it might someday be used to free her. The three of them were dedicated to their goal of rescuing Byakuren, but had no means of extracting the ship from the depths. That was the point at which we met them. By securing the cooperation of the tsuchigumo and the oni of Former Hell, Renko had devised her plan to lift the ship and its inhabitants out of the Underworld using an artificial geyser.

To create that geyser, she enlisted the help of several other parties involved in the previous Incident. Specifically, the two goddesses of the Moriya shrine - Kanako Yasaka and Suwako Moriya. The two of them had set the events of the previous Incident in motion when, in their search for a new source of power, they had given an eye of the divine messenger Yatagarasu to Okuu, a hell raven who dwelled in the remnants of the Hell of Blazing Fires deep within the bowels of the Underworld.

Okuu's acquisition of the eye had granted her control over the power of nuclear fusion -the divine fire of Yatagarasu. So empowered, she had been able to expand and intensify the flames of the smoldering remnants of the Hell of Blazing Fires, which had in turn caused a hot spring to erupt near the Hakurei shrine. The essence of my partner's plan was to harness the energy of a geyser created by that same heat to carry the ship to the surface. Breaking the ship down and carrying it, piece by piece to the world above would have been time consuming and arduous, and would possibly have constituted a breach of the non-interference pact struck between the oni of the Underworld and the youkai of the surface. Using this method though, Renko's plan was to conceal the freeing of the Holy Palanquin as just another unintended consequence of the Moriya shrine's visionary infrastructure plan.

Personally, I had been surprised that any of the parties involved -the Moriyas, the oni, or even the crew of the ship had agreed to such a reckless scheme, but Suwako had been intrigued by the idea. To her, creating, then later collapsing and concealing a shaft boring down into the mountain for the ship to travel through was simple enough. For the oni, it offered an occasion for a raucous and exciting party and for Byakuren's disciples it was an opportunity too good to pass up, even if the odds were long. Bound together by the skillful negotiations of Renko's tongue, a pact of co-operation had been forged with all sides gaining something they wanted. With the terms agreed upon, Suwako had begun shaping her tunnel well below the Moriya shrine, in a quiet and inconspicuous valley about a third of the way up the mountain. Far enough away from the Moriya shrine to allay suspicion and with no one living around it to notice her work. After the conclusion of the Vengeful Spirit Incident, it wasn't clear if the non-interference pact between the surface and the Underworld was even still in force, but after recent events, the goddesses saw no reason to test the limits of the Hakurei miko's tolerance of such things.

Thus, with the help of a goddess, a reviled and dangerous youkai from the depths of the earth, the leader of all the oni gangs dwelling in Former Hell and a youkai raven who had swallowed a sun, Renko hatched her mad plan to create an artificial 'coincidence.' A seemingly naturally-occurring event that could only come to exist through extensive planning and lots of hard work on many fronts. It was possibly the least serendipitous coincidence ever to occur, and yet the false cover story she and Suwako had concocted was perhaps the most believable part of the whole affair. After all, who would be crazy enough to intentionally sit themselves on top of a nuclear explosion?

-.-.-.-.-

Of course, if Renko's plan had gone off without a single hitch, then there never would have been an Incident requiring the involvement of the Hakurei miko. As such, while I might still have recorded a memoir of the events, there would be no grounds for a case file like the one you are reading, nor would there be any record in the writings of miss Akyuu of anything like a Treasure Ship Incident. Well, as they say, 'the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.'

But let me return to the point where I left off. If I proceed chronologically you will see soon enough just how far off course that plan would end up drifting.

-.-.-.-.-

In the seconds before the explosion, Renko had been sitting beside me, humming the theme to Space Battleship Yamato in the off-key, completely inappropriate way that only she could. Murasa was standing at the tiller, resting one hand on its length with a far off look in her eyes as Ichirin stood beside her, looking out over the deck toward the prow as the ship ascended into the shaft. There had been a split-second of intense light from below, casting strange, vertical shadows upward against the walls of the tunnel, then all at once all sense of sound and balance were lost as our slow, leisurely ascent instantly became a pitched rush as the ship rocketed upward on a geyser of steam and boiling blood. Renko and I were thrown into the bench and only able to struggle back to a sitting position after a few seconds, as the force of our upward acceleration pressed us down towards the deck with many times our normal bodyweights.

"Pretty bumpy, eh Merry?" Renko asked me. Even through the maddening vibrations that made everything appear to have a double-image around it, I could make out the manic curve of her grin.

"We're riding on a geyser, Renko! I feel like my teeth are going to shake out of my jaw!" I stammered through the vibrations.

"Try not to talk, you might bite your tongue," she said, still smiling.

Looking over, Murasa and Ichirin were still on their feet, but just barely, both clinging on to the tiller for support. Renko attempted to stand up and turn toward them, but as she did the ship bucked, turning slightly as the boiling blood battered the hull. The sickening twisting motion instantly threw us both to the deck, but rather than landing on the hard planks, we found our falls cushioned by Unzan's muscular form. Flexing slightly, the nyudo flattened out into a mattress-like plane with supports for our heads at one end. With a sigh of relief I nodded towards his eyes and brow, which were still visible poking out of the top of one end of the squarish cloud and relaxed my body, feeling the inertia press me further against his muscular back.

Looking out from the wheelhouse I cast my eyes over the deck. I had never realized how flexible the elements of a wooden ship might be in extreme conditions, but watching the mast sway, the movements of its uppermost limbs lagging a half-second behind the contortions of its base, I was struck by the intensity of the forces buffeting us.

"Don't worry, she'll hold together." Murasa assured us, her voice vibrating as she clung to the tiller's arm. As I turned to look at her though, a blur of movement from just outside the wheelhouse caught my eye. It had looked, for the briefest of moments, like a humanoid shape had run across the deck in front of the doorway -an impossibility as the entire complement of crew and passengers aboard this ship were all crammed into this same room.

I found myself rolling over towards the door and muttering "who was that?" without even thinking about it.

"What is it, Merry? What's wrong?"

"I could have sworn I just saw someone outside the door..."

"I doubt it, we were the only ones on the ship when we departed. There's no way anyone could have got aboard after that."

"What if it was someone like Koishi from the Palace of the Earth Spirits? She could have been aboard the whole time and we might not have noticed."

"I suppose that's true, but I don't think that there's too many other people 'like Koishi' out there. Do you think she would have followed you here? You haven't seen her in months, have you?"

Maybe it had just been my imagination. Even if there had been someone there, there was no way I could go looking for them under the current conditions. Even standing would have been near impossible. If there was anyone out there, that had to be true for them to. They couldn't possibly cause much trouble with the ship vibrating like this, I thought. The last thing I wanted to do was ask captain Murasa or Ichirin about it. No sense in ruining this long-awaited moment for them. Once we reached the surface, I'd have a look around then, and let them know if anything seemed amiss, I told myself. Looking back on events now, that one, momentary decision turned out to be fateful. If I had simply spoken to either of them about the question of a stowaway now, so much of what followed might have been avoided.

Suffice to say, the movement I had seen had in fact been a sign of the presence of another person on the ship, and, much to my surprise, they would indeed find a way to get up to quite a bit of trouble very soon.