The evidence room was silent, save for the hum of the overhead fluorescent lights. Sato stared at the small boy, his brow furrowed as he tried to process the weight of the statement. The idea of an undocumented power source in a city as meticulously planned as Tottori was a direct challenge to the detective's understanding of his own world.

  "A source never meant to be documented," Sato repeated, his voice trailing off into a skeptical huff. "In a city with two hundred and fifty times the usual infrastructure? Hitori, every wire and pipe in this prefecture is mapped, logged, and audited. You don't just 'hide' a high-density power feed."

  Hitori didn't respond immediately. He reached into his coat and pulled out a pair of thin, white archival gloves, pulling them on with a snap of the wrists. He picked up a second shard of the alloy, turning it over to catch the light.

  "That is exactly why it was hidden," Hitori said. "The scale of this multiverse is its greatest camouflage. When you have ten thousand substations, no one notices the ten thousand and first. It becomes a needle in a field of needles."

  He moved to the computer terminal at the end of the table, his fingers flying across the keys with a speed that made Sato blink. Hitori wasn't searching the modern police databases; he was navigating the raw, underlying architecture of the municipal digital archives—systems that had been layered on top of each other for decades.

  "Look at the cooling requirements for a line of this gauge," Hitori commanded, gesturing for Sato to look at the screen.

  The detective leaned down, his face illuminated by the scrolling lines of code. "It would generate enough heat to boil a swimming pool. You'd need a massive heat sink or a constant flow of cold water."

  "Exactly," Hitori said. He tapped a key, and a map of the 1972 harbor appeared, overlaid with the current city layout. "In 1972, the Tottori Harbor fire happened during the coldest week of the year. The official report said the fire was uncontainable because the water pumps froze. But the thermal logs from the nearby sewers show a ten-degree spike in water temperature three hours before the first spark was reported."

  Sato’s eyes widened. "They weren't using the water to put the fire out. They were using it to cool the feed while they pushed it to the limit."

  "The extraction," Hitori whispered, more to himself than to the detective.

  He stood up, his small frame casting a long, sharp shadow against the rows of evidence lockers. He felt a familiar coldness in his chest—the sensation of a trail finally warming up after half a century of stagnation.

  "Someone was pulling energy out of this world," Hitori continued, his voice dropping into that flat, professional tone that lacked any trace of youth. "And they burned the harbor to erase the physical evidence of the connection."

  Sato rubbed his face, looking exhausted. "Hitori, this is... this is conspiracy theory territory. If you’re right, we’re talking about an illegal operation that’s been embedded in the city’s infrastructure for fifty years. Who has that kind of longevity?"

  Hitori looked at Sato. The question was a dangerous one. He could see the gears turning in the detective's head—the slow realization that the boy in the charcoal suit seemed far too comfortable discussing events that took place decades before his birth.

  "The kind of people who don't view time the same way you do," Hitori replied, his eyes narrowing.

  Before Sato could press him further, Hitori smoothed the lapels of his suit and picked up his yellow umbrella from where it leaned against the desk. The mask of the "prodigy child" was pulled back into place, the sharp edges of his personality softening into a practiced, vacant calm.

  "I need to see the original site of the boiler room," Hitori said, heading for the door. "The modern pier was built directly over it. If the conduit was as reinforced as this shard suggests, the anchor points will still be there, buried in the concrete."

  "Hitori, wait," Sato called out, but the boy was already through the heavy doors.

  As he walked through the precinct's main hall, Hitori felt the weight of the archive clerk’s suspicion and the fisherman’s ghost story converging. The logic of his cover was thinning. Every time he solved a piece of the puzzle, he revealed a piece of himself that didn't belong in the present.

  He stepped out into the rain, the yellow umbrella snapping open with a rhythmic click. He didn't mind the suspicion. In his experience, people were always willing to believe a lie if the truth was too impossible to grasp. He just needed to finish the investigation before the truth became the only thing left to see.

  Hitori reached the pier just as the evening fog began to roll in, swallowing the skeletal cranes of the industrial port. The area was deserted, the night shift not yet begun, leaving the massive concrete expanse to the sound of the churning tide. He walked with purpose, his yellow umbrella held low against the wind, until he reached a specific section of the western dock.

  He stopped. According to the 1972 blueprints he had memorized, this was the exact coordinate of the old boiler room's primary support pillar.

  Hitori knelt, oblivious to the dampness seeping into the knees of his charcoal-grey trousers. He set the umbrella aside and ran his gloved hand over the surface of the concrete. To a casual observer, the dock was a uniform slab of modern engineering. But Hitori’s fingers searched for the inconsistencies—the minute variations in density that told the history of the pour.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  He found it. A hairline fracture in the concrete, barely visible to the naked eye, traced a perfect geometric square.

  "The patch work is too precise," Hitori whispered to himself.

  The concrete here had been reinforced with a high-silica compound used to mask the vibration of subterranean machinery. It was a technique that hadn't been popularized until the late eighties, yet it was embedded in a foundation that was supposed to have been laid in the seventies.

  Hitori pulled a small, heavy-duty flashlight from his coat and shone it at an angle across the ground. The light revealed a faint, rhythmic scraping near the edge of the patch—not from a tool, but from the repeated opening of a heavy seal.

  "Investigator?"

  The voice was sharp and unexpected. Hitori didn't flinch, but he slowly pulled his hand back, his expression shifting from intense focus to a mask of mild curiosity.

  A patrol officer was standing a few yards away, his hand resting on his flashlight. It was the same junior officer from the morning, the one who had tried to shoo Hitori away from the yellow tape.

  "What are you doing back here, kid?" the officer asked, his voice echoing in the empty dock. "The site is off-limits. And why are you crawling around in the dirt in a suit like that?"

  Hitori stood up, brushing the dust from his knees with a sharp, professional flick of his wrists. He picked up his yellow umbrella and looked at the officer with a superior tilt of his head.

  "I am checking the structural integrity of the repair," Hitori said, his voice dropping into that flat, authoritative chill. "The seismic sensors in the district reported a micro-tremor. If the harbor foundation is compromised, the entire infrastructure of this sector is at risk."

  The officer blinked, confused by the technical jargon coming from someone half his height. "A micro-tremor? I didn't hear anything about that."

  "That is because you aren't paid to monitor the sensors," Hitori replied, stepping toward the man. "You are paid to secure the perimeter. Since you are here, you can make yourself useful. Inform Detective Sato that the anchor points for the 1972 fire have been tampered with recently. Not fifty years ago. Recently."

  The officer stared at the boy. He looked at the perfectly knotted tie, the charcoal-grey coat, and the cold, ancient stillness in Hitori’s eyes. The inconsistency was glaring. No child spoke with that level of condescension, and no child cared about the silica density of harbor concrete.

  "Who are you, really?" the officer asked, his voice dropping an octave. "I saw your uncle's file after this morning. Sato was talking about it. He said you look exactly like a man who worked a case here back in the nineties. But that doesn't make sense. You'd have to be... you'd have to be much older."

  Hitori didn't blink. He simply popped a lemon-flavored lollipop into his mouth and tilted his yellow umbrella back over his shoulder.

  "People often see patterns where there are only coincidences," Hitori said, his tone shifting back to a soft, hollow innocence. "It's a common psychological error. You should focus on the concrete, Officer. The past is very heavy, and if you aren't careful, it will pull you under."

  Hitori walked past the man, his small leather shoes clicking rhythmically against the dock. He didn't look back to see the officer’s bewildered expression. He had the confirmation he needed. The "backdoor" in the city's infrastructure was still being used.

  The mystery of the 1972 fire wasn't a cold case. It was an ongoing operation, and someone in the current Tottori administration was keeping the seam polished.

  Hitori reached the end of the pier and stepped onto the main road, the yellow umbrella shielding him from a sudden increase in the downpour. He needed to move quickly. The junior officer’s mention of the file meant the "uncle" lie was already being scrutinized by the precinct’s more curious minds. In a city of 250x scale, bureaucracy usually moved like a glacier, but personal curiosity was a far more volatile element.

  He bypassed the train station and headed toward a row of high-density apartment blocks. He didn't live in a police dormitory or a foster home; he maintained a small, strictly modest apartment under a shell corporation that had existed for sixty years.

  Inside the apartment, the air was cool and smelled faintly of old paper and cedar. There were no toys, no bright colors, and no television. A single desk sat against the far wall, piled with hand-drawn maps of the Tottori power grid.

  Hitori shed his dark coat and hung it precisely on a wooden hanger. He sat at the desk and pulled a leather-bound ledger from a hidden compartment beneath the floorboards. He opened it to a page dated August 14th, 1972.

  Extraction unsuccessful. The alloy stabilized at 4000 degrees. Had to vent the excess into the harbor cooling lines. Site 04 compromised. Initiated thermal purge.

  The handwriting in the ledger was identical to the notes Hitori had taken just an hour ago in the archives.

  He leaned back, his small frame swallowed by the shadows of the room. The extraction fifty years ago had failed because the infrastructure couldn't handle the load. But today, the city was 250 times more dense. The power grid was a massive, interconnected web that could hide a surge of that magnitude with ease.

  If they were reopening the seam at the harbor, they weren't looking for history. They were finishing what they started.

  A soft knock at the door broke the silence.

  Hitori froze. He didn't have visitors. He slowly closed the ledger and slid it back into its hiding place. He stood up, smoothed his vest, and checked his reflection in a small mirror. The vacant, wide-eyed look returned, a perfect mask of a sleepy child.

  He opened the door just a crack.

  Detective Sato stood in the hallway, his trench coat dripping water onto the linoleum. He looked down at Hitori, his expression a mix of exhaustion and a growing, sharp-edged suspicion.

  "I went to the address on your emergency contact form," Sato said, his voice low. "The woman who answered said she hasn't seen 'Investigator Hitori' in three years. She said she was paid to keep the phone line active but never met the boy."

  Sato leaned against the doorframe, his eyes tracking every detail of Hitori's face.

  "So I did some digging into the Tottori Harbor fire again. I found a witness statement from an old night watchman. He described a boy who helped him out of the rubble. A boy with gray hair and a yellow umbrella."

  Sato reached into his pocket and pulled out a grainy, black-and-white photocopy of a sketch.

  "That was 1972, Hitori. How do you explain the umbrella?"

  Hitori didn't look at the sketch. He looked at Sato’s pulse, visible in the vein of his neck. It was rapid. The detective was afraid, but his professional curiosity was winning.

  "Yellow is a very common color for children's umbrellas, Detective," Hitori said, his voice a flat, chilling calm that lacked any pretense of youth. "It's a safety feature. It makes them easier to see in the dark."

  He opened the door a bit wider, stepping into the frame with an arrogant stillness.

  "If you're here to ask about my family history, you're wasting time. If you're here because you realized the power surge at the harbor is happening again tonight, then come in. We have very little time before the grid reaches critical mass."

  Sato stared at him, the logic of the world fracturing in his mind. He looked at the child, then at the darkened apartment that looked like a scholar's cell. The inconsistency was no longer a crack; it was a chasm.