After Nishizawa left, the Master and I headed for the university. At the Master's suggestion, we decided it would be best to confirm whether the contents of this small bottle were actually water.
That made sense. Naturally, that meant finding a laboratory equipped to test liquids.
When I mentioned that I knew someone in the Faculty of Pharmacy, the Master shook her head.
"The Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Pharmacy are Yakumo's territory."
I figured since we were just asking a student, we didn't need to be that on guard, but the Master flatly rejected the idea.
"Let's go to the Faculty of Science. I know someone we can ask."
The Faculty of Medicine and Faculty of Pharmacy were on a different campus, but the Faculty of Science was on the same campus we attended. Since it was physically removed from Yakumo Pharmaceuticals' territory, it gave us a sense of security.
"Still, what on earth is this? Do you remember hearing the name 'C'?"
"Hard to say. I don't know the name, but I feel like I've heard rumors that some kind of weird drug has been quietly spreading."
"This is news to me."
I've lived a life untouched by drugs. Sure, there were idiots sniffing thinner in high school, but it wasn't a delinquent school, so even those guys were rare. At most, maybe they smoked cigarettes.
I had been surprised to hear that the Master had smoked marijuana before. Though, the explanation that she just tried it out of pure curiosity made a strange kind of sense.
When we arrived at the Faculty of Science building, we wove our way through students in white lab coats and visited the molecular biology laboratory. There was a male lecturer there whom the Master knew well.
The Master really did have connections across all sorts of faculties and departments. No, not just connections—she seemed to have key people locked down at all the right points.
The lecturer, who was watching TV while eating a banana in the lab, didn't look the part, but muttering "I'm busy, though," he examined the contents of the small bottle anyway. I expected him to drop liquid onto a slide and look at it under a microscope, but he used surprisingly grand equipment instead.
The result was water. Moreover, it was pure water—not tap water, since it contained no chlorine, and free of minerals like calcium and magnesium.
"Probably distilled water. They boil water and turn the steam back into a liquid. We buy it from suppliers for cleaning and as a solvent. A 20-liter tank is about 3,000 yen, I guess."
The lecturer explained while chewing the rest of his banana.
"Were there any strange components in it, even in small amounts?"
"Even if you call it 'strange'… if we had to test it that precisely, we don't have the equipment here, and it's impossible without money. But hey, we normally use this as pure water for experiments anyway. Even if something was in it, it's at a level that wouldn't affect anything."
That was his flat-out verdict. Since an expert said so, for the time being, we had no choice but to accept it.
Leaving the Faculty of Science building, we decided to hold a strategy meeting at our usual cafeteria.
"Munch, munch. Anyway, let's go sniff out the rumors. It'd be great if we could find someone who actually bought and drank it."
"But it was just water, right?"
"That's why Matsuura said so from the beginning. Besides, the guy drank it. The question is, if it's just water, why is it circulating like you're buying drugs from a dealer? And look at this. Munch, munch. A tiny thing like this is a thousand yen. A thousand yen. How many bowls of this curry can you buy with that?"
"Four bowls if it's a medium size."
"Three bowls if it's a large. Alright, let's split up and investigate."
We decided to separate and go around asking questions. I also took custody of one of the two small bottles. It was the one used for the test earlier, so there was a little less in it.
I went to my own lab first. I'd been hanging out with the Master lately and hadn't been showing my face around here, so it was a bit awkward, but it couldn't be helped. After afternoon lectures ended, I called out to the guys idling around.
"A drug called 'C'? Never heard of it."
That was pretty much everyone's reaction. Next, I headed to a club activity I hadn't visited in a long time for similar reasons, and it was much the same. However, there was one guy here who said he'd heard about it from an acquaintance. He said he wasn't sure if it was this exact drug, though. Since he was a junior in his first year, I promised to treat him to a meal if he introduced me to that person, and he somehow agreed.
When we met up at a family restaurant near the university, the acquaintance turned out to be his girlfriend. She was wearing a coat, but beneath it was a blazer, so I knew right away she was a high schooler.
This bastard, he's dating a high schooler? He was a spindly, bean sprout-like junior I hadn't talked to much, but looks could be deceiving.
"This, this. This is the one I bought."
The high schooler, a girl named Misaki, wore heavy makeup, which made it expected, but she seemed a bit more flighty compared to the average high school girl.
"Why did you decide to buy this?"
"Well, a friend at school heard about it from an upperclassman. Apparently, it's a drug that lets you have funny dreams. Sounds kind of fun, right?"
"Where, and what kind of guy was selling it?"
"Just like my friend said, I was wandering around Shiramachi at night, and there was a guy wearing a weird mask in a narrow alley. He was wearing a black cloak, totally looking like a suspicious person. I thought, 'Definitely this guy,' and when I called out to him, he said it was a thousand yen."
"You talked to him? Was it a man's voice?"
"We didn't talk. He just held up one finger like this. Index finger. No way it was 10,000 yen, right? Besides, I didn't have that much. When I handed him a thousand yen, he gave me this."
"What kind of mask was it?"
"Like the kind they sell at festival stalls. Some anime character. I don't watch anime, so I don't really know."
Anime… Hearing that, I felt a sudden sense of deflation. How casual. This didn't seem to be the thing the Master and I had imagined at all.
"So, what did you do after buying it?"
"I drank it. It tasted like ordinary water."
I couldn't believe she actually drank something she bought from such a shady guy. That was the impression I had, but I didn't call her out on it to her face. She was a valuable witness, after all. Just as I thought that, her boyfriend chimed in.
"It's dangerous. You shouldn't do stuff like that. I mean, wait, have you ever bought drugs before?"
"I haven't! Not even once. My friend just got me to smoke weed once."
"Wait a minute, weed? Marijuana? Is it marijuana? You can't do that, Misacchi, seriously, did you actually do something like that? No way."
"Shut up. Whatever, it's fine."
After being subjected to that back-and-forth for a while, I finally got to hear the rest of the story.
"I drank it, but nothing happened."
"Nothing? Didn't you have a dream?"
"Hmm, I'm not really sure. I think I had one, but I don't remember much. It must've been no different from the dreams I usually have. Seriously, I felt like asking for my money back."
And so, despite treating the two of them to a meal at the family restaurant, I didn't get much of a harvest. Still, I learned that such rumors actually existed, and that the person selling them was real. Just that alone was probably a step forward.
The next day, I went to the Master's room.
"I was able to talk to someone who bought it."
I shared my limited results, but the Master had hit the jackpot three times over. That's usually how it goes. I've never won against her in things like this.
Worse yet, the Master had one more small bottle than before.
"One person bought it but threw it away because it felt gross. Another person just left it lying around somehow. I got them to hand it over for a thousand yen. This is it. Same thing, right?"
"I suppose so."
I picked it up, and it was the exact same small bottle as the one Matsuura had entrusted to me.
"The last person said she drank it. She's a girl, and she had a fun dream about going to a resort on a southern island. She said she'd never had a dream where her wishes came true like that before, so she thought the rumor about dreams changing was true."
"Huh."
That was a remarkably cute dream.
"With that said, you—drink this."
The Master pushed the small bottle closer to me.
"W-Wait a second. Wh-What, I'm the one drinking this?"
"It's just water, so it's fine."
"That's why we went through all this grand trouble, because it might *not* be just water!"
"Believe the scientific test. The test results from the Faculty of Science that our alma mater is proud of. That banana lecturer, despite how he looks, recently rescued a drowning child and got an award."
"He didn't get awarded for his professional work."
"Just do it."
"If it's just water, there's no point in drinking it."
"Are you trying sophistry? Are you challenging me to a match of sophistry, punk?"
"It's common sense."
"Common sense, Sri Lanka, what does it matter?!"
…………
After an hour-long fierce battle, talked down and defeated, I made up my mind and drank the water from the small bottle.
It was tasteless. Unlike mineral water, and naturally unlike tap water, it had a taste that inspired no thoughts whatsoever.
"I drank it. This is water."
"Then go to sleep."
The Master started laying out the futon.
"Are we sleeping now?"
"Yeah. I'll sing you a lullaby."
"I can't sleep while being observed."
"You, back then you stared at my sleeping face all night while recording my sleep-talking, didn't you? Pervert."
"Didn't you order me to do that?"
With that back-and-forth, I lay down, and after listening to what seemed to be the Master's lullaby for a while, I fell asleep before I knew it.
I had a dream.
It was a dream of a stray cat napping in the sunlight on a roof. The view from my perspective as I watched it was shaking violently up and down the whole time. What is this, I thought, and when I looked around, every house in the neighborhood was vibrating slightly up and down, as if the whole town was shaking. People were walking through it all without noticing a thing.
Is the town shaking, or is my field of vision shaking? Which is it?
Wondering that, I woke up.
The Master's face was right in front of my eyes.
"Whoa."
"You awake?"
"What is it?"
"Your eyelids were twitching. You were having a dream, weren't you? I poked you to wake you up. You remember it clearly right now, don't you?"
"Ah."
I explained the dream I had seen. It was a weird dream, but to say it had no real substance to it would be accurate.
"Have you ever had a dream with that kind of pattern, where your field of vision shakes?"
"No."
"So your dream changed, huh?"
What a thoroughly underwhelming result. Was it worth a thousand yen? The Master also wore a grim expression.
"Catching the bastard selling them sounds like the quickest way."
The clock had just passed midnight. Since it was the perfect time, the two of us decided to head out to the bustling district called Shiramachi.
Ever since I stopped frequenting the club and the lab, I hadn't had much to do with drinking parties, so it felt like it had been a while since I last came to Shiramachi. Even past midnight, there were still plenty of people on the street, and already-drunk revelers were wandering around looking for their next spot.
This was also the place where I first met the Master. Back then, the Master was wearing a tracksuit and walking with a displeased expression. Marching in a line behind her were countless non-human things. You couldn't see a sight like that anymore. At that time, the Master was spilling glowing particles from her right cheek like tears. It was a breathless, fleeting light. The traces of it created a faint band of light like a river, and the spirits walked along it.
Had the Master changed somehow? I couldn't think of her back then as human, just like myself. She seemed that much like something out of a fantasy.
What about now? Closing my eyes, those droplets of light seemed to represent the power she was losing moment by moment. When that ran out, what would happen to her? I was terrified, and saddened, to think about it.
"Not here."
We walked for a while, but there wasn't a shadow of anyone resembling the target in any of the alleys. We explored quite far toward the outskirts, but the result was the same.
Shall we call it quits for today? Just as that mood settled in, the Master muttered:
"No spirits either. They usually gather around entertainment districts."
Now that she mentioned it, aside from when I first met the Master, I had witnessed spirits in this neighborhood many times.
Since then, I had repeated terrifying experiences with the Master, and my spiritual awareness had risen even further, yet right now I couldn't see the form of anything even resembling a spirit. Come to think of it, the Master had long been engaged in a bad-tasting little game called playing Diogenes—roaming the town carrying an unlit lamp and asking, "Are there any ghosts?"
By provoking them like that, she intended to summon spirits to her house. In fact, ghosts and strange things frequently came to visit the Master's house.
Lately, though, I felt like they had noticeably decreased.
"Maybe the Archer is going around taking them down."
I tossed out that casual remark, but the Master shook her head.
"There aren't many evil spirits that guy targets. Most of the ones around here are completely harmless. Just wandering around. Pitiful existences. And yet, they're disappearing like this. Why?"
As she said that and walked around looking this way and that, the Master spotted something in a narrow alley between an izakaya and a stationery store with its shutter pulled down.
"Hey."
I tensed up, thinking the masked man had appeared, but there was no such figure in the gloom. However, at the end of the Master's pointing finger, I felt like I could faintly see the tips of someone's toes. There was no human body riding above them. Only empty feet lingered.
I had heard from the Master before that things like this had been increasing lately. At that time, the Master had followed up with: "They're being eaten." I remembered that.
The Master crouched down in front of those toes that looked as if they might vanish at any second, staring at them intently.
I felt an indescribable sense of foreboding. Master. This really is bad. News flash.
I swallowed those words down. When I looked up at the sky, the moon was shining brightly. It felt as though that moon was looking down on us.
To be continued in "Poison, Part 1 (4/5): 'What was that just now? Ain't she cute?'"