“That’s Echizen washi for you! I hear it can last up to a thousand years.”

  “Wow, you know your stuff.”

  “Well, Echizen washi is the only paper from around here I could think of,” Miyoshi responded with a grin.

  “Oh boy...” I put a palm to my forehead. That’s an awfully flimsy analytical basis. Though kudos to Miyoshi for knowing anything whatsoever about where Japanese paper is produced.

  “Back in 2010, Suntory and Domaines Barons de Rothschild celebrated one hundred years of growing grapes at the Tomi no Oka Winery by releasing a special commemorative wine, and the label was made from Echizen washi.”

  “Ugh, of course it always comes back to wine!” I groaned, then picked up the proper first volume of the priest’s notes and started glancing through the pages. Worried at first that it was going to be written in horribly messy archaic chicken scratch, I thumbed through the pages and soon breathed a sigh of relief. The handwriting was much better than I had expected.

  “So the woman drifted ashore here during the sixth year of the Keicho period, meaning in 1601,” Miyoshi stated, repeating what we had determined earlier.

  Apparently, a fair-skinned woman with radiant hair and clad in red clothing showed up there inside a boxlike container. When the villagers saw her, they started calling her Lady Tsubaki—maybe because her red dress combined with her blonde hair reminded them of the tsubaki, a flower also known as a camellia.

  “It says here she called herself...Camulia?”

  “That’s an odd way to spell it,” Miyoshi said as she picked up the seventh volume.

  The end of the last volume had a section written by “Camulia” herself—something must have happened to the priest. It was written in English in elegant cursive, most likely using a bamboo pen. At the end, it was even signed—

  “Camrllia?” I said, blinking.

  “Nothing in English is spelled with the letters ‘mrll’ together like that, I’m pretty sure.”

  “Huh. Maybe the ‘r’ is actually an ‘e’?” In cursive English handwriting, ‘r’ and ‘e’ could look similar when casually written out. If it was an ‘e,’ then her name was Camellia, which could’ve easily been misheard as Camulia. Either way, the name was clearly referencing the tsubaki flower.

  At that point, though, something started to feel off to me—but I wasn’t exactly sure what.

  Miyoshi rubbed her chin as she read over my shoulder.

  “It sounds like the priest was fixated on her like a man possessed.”

  The entries for the dates after the woman was found described her in excessive detail. At first she could only speak the language of the West, but once they arranged for an interpreter, she learned to speak Japanese in nearly no time at all. She had a frail constitution and a skittish personality, and she had a lock set up on her bedroom door so nobody could come inside while she was asleep. Also, she was an extremely light eater, possibly due to her having been adrift at sea for so long. Apparently the only thing she consumed in a day was a single cup of ‘xocolatl’ after she got out of bed in the early afternoon.

  “Xocolatl?”

  “They have to mean ‘chocolate,’ right? Back then it was more similar to a cup of cocoa.”

  “No, no, no, Miyoshi. Chocolate didn’t make its way to Japan until the very, very end of the 1700s. If she was actually drinking chocolate, that would mean it came into the country almost two hundred years before history teaches us it did.”

  “The Jesuits brought it back to Spain from Mexico in the early part of the 1500s, didn’t they? It wouldn’t be that odd for it to show up here.”

  “Maybe in tiny, tiny quantities. According to this, though, she was drinking it every day!”

  “Hm, what else is bitter and sweet like that... Maybe it was dandelion coffee with sugar?”

  “That wasn’t a thing until the 1830s, and it was in America,” I pointed out.

  “In that case, maybe someone went out of their way to bring chocolate over here from Latin America for whatever reason?”

  “Like as a trade good? Hmm... Maybe she just wanted it that much...”

  As I mulled over the huge discrepancies between dates, I suddenly realized what had been bothering me earlier.

  “That’s it! Camellias are native to Japan!”

  “Wh-What? Where did that come from? Besides, they have camellias in Europe too, don’t they? What about The Lady of the Camellias?”

  “Listen, it was the middle of the 1800s when the lovely Marguerite was strutting her stuff around the demimonde wearing either a white camellia to mark her availability, or a red camellia during her menstrual cycle.” In fact, it was also the same general time period during which Alexandre Dumas fils wrote the story itself.

  “Think about it,” I went on. “The camellia was given its name in the West by Carl von Linné, who named it after Georg Joseph Kamel. Meaning—”

  “—it wasn’t named that until the 1700s!” Miyoshi said, looking up. Even she knew during what century the famed von Linné was active.

  The camellia flower was first introduced to Europe by botanist Engelbert Kaempfer, but it was Georg Joseph Kamel who brought back the first seeds. Both of these events happened during or after the 1690s. In tribute to those contributions, von Linné, a renowned biologist known as Carl Linnaeus before becoming a noble, immortalized Kamel’s name by making it a part of the flower’s scientific nomenclature. Von Linné, though, lived during the 1700s.

  Either way, the English name for the flower, camellia, was one of the few examples of a proper name being turned into a regular noun. And we’re supposed to believe that the English name was somehow being used in Japan in 1601? Yeah, right.

  “So what about the weird spelling we saw earlier?” Miyoshi asked.

  “Maybe we didn’t misread it after all,” I mused.

  After the woman’s arrival, ships from Europe began to visit occasionally. With those visits came prosperity for the village, but at the same time, strange teachings began to spread among the fishermen, which apparently caused the priest a great deal of distress.

  “Strange teachings...?”

  “The first thing that comes to mind is Christianity, of course.”

  Hideyoshi Toyotomi issued the Bateren Edict in 1587. However, he also aggressively promoted trade with the West, so he didn’t ban the religion itself, only missionary activities. The edict banning Christianity as a whole wasn’t issued until after the San Felipe incident in 1596.

  However, Ieyasu Tokugawa, who took over after Hideyoshi, was indifferent toward Christian missionary work, and even promoted trade with Holland after the Liefde drifted ashore. Under him, Christianity was mostly unregulated until the whole Okamoto Daihachi incident in 1612. Due to that, by some estimates there were up to 750,000 Christians in Japan by 1605.

  “From a Shinto standpoint, it must have been a really unusual religion,” I pointed out. “After all, it only has one God.”

  The original building for the hotel was supposedly built by a craftsman who had been visiting from overseas at the time. Even after that, the shrine priest apparently continued to pretty much worship Camulia.

  “Look at this. ‘Just as heaven is eternal and the earth endures, her beauty is unfading as the years go by and the ages sail on.’ Get a life, dude!” Miyoshi exclaimed.

  Quoting Lao Tzu and Xunxi, huh. This priest was a bona fide erudite.

  “It’s almost like she was immortal or something.”

  “C-Cut it out, Kei. How can you even say that with a straight face?”

  During that time, apparently some epidemics had occasionally ravaged the village.

  “There is that whole story about how people like Francisco Pizarro wiped out the Incas by unknowingly introducing smallpox. If there was trading in the area, it’s always possible they ended up importing a few diseases.”

  It seemed that the priest struggled greatly, stuck between those who believed in the new religion and adherents to the traditional Shinto faith. In his writings, he likened it to the fight between Hikohohodemi-no-Mikoto and Hosuseri-no-Mikoto.

  “You mean the whole Umisachihiko versus Yamasachihiko story?”

  “The new religion spreading among the fishermen was Umisachihiko, representing the Hayato people, and the current religion of the farmers was Yamasachihiko, representing the Tenson people.”

  Perhaps overburdened by so many worries, the priest apparently grew weaker by the day, and the frequency of his entries decreased. He wrote that the epidemics, which seemed to strike the villagers in periodic bursts, caused people to gradually grow sicker and paler, sapping their strength bit by bit until they either went missing or wasted away and died.

  “Went missing?” Miyoshi asked, perplexed by the wording.

  “It sounds like they lost a lot of people. Still, I feel like I’ve heard this somewhere before...” I mused.

  “Apparently the disease got to the priest in the end too. It says his coffin was so light, it felt like it only had a few twigs inside it.”

  “So he just up and withered away, huh?”

  “Whoa, Kei! Look at this!” Miyoshi showed me a rather small, thin book, titled The Origin of Tsubaki Shrine.

  In addition to the standard writing, there were two alternate ways to write “tsubaki” in kanji. The version written on the thin book used the characters for “ocean pomegranate,” while the other, sometimes pronounced “sancha” instead, uses the characters for “mountain tea.” The fact that all of them somehow referred to the same plant, the camellia, was kind of incredible if you thought about it.

  “This thing was crammed into the bigger book like some kind of bookmark. But look, look here!” Miyoshi pointed to a section that discussed how the shrine came into existence.

  “‘There was a sea hag oni on the hill that deceived the people’?”

  “I wonder what a sea hag oni is?”

  “Who knows? Sounds like some demonic old lady who comes up out of the ocean.”

  In the house on top of the hill lived an oni from the ocean who loved to deceive the villagers. The oni was very beautiful, so the villagers didn’t realize what it was at first. However, as the years passed and they noticed her walking around the hill looking as beautiful as ever, rumors began to spread among the people.

  Even after the oni’s caretaker vanished from the people’s sight, she continued to wander the hill alone, and eventually began to snatch the villagers away.

  “Snatch?”

  Overcome by fear, the villagers hired some skilled soldiers, and used their superior numbers to “xx” her. Yes, that was exactly how it was written.

  I could only stare.

  “What the hell?”

  “What do you think ‘xx’ was supposed to mean?” Miyoshi asked.

  “Probably some kind of taboo word. They must’ve done something pretty unspeakable.”

  After the deed was done, the villagers were afraid the oni would come back to life and curse them, so they erected a shrine to try and appease her soul. Instead of the typical sakaki trees around the main hall, they planted camellia flowers, which were her symbol. And that was the origin of Tsubaki Shrine.

  “So,” Miyoshi began, “does that mean it’s actually a tutelary shrine, and the deity enshrined there is Camulia herself?”

  “If what’s written in this book is true, then I guess so, yeah.”

  “But I didn’t see anything remotely close to that story in any of these volumes of the priest’s personal notes!” she exclaimed, flipping through volume seven again. “And anyway, the hotel employee we talked to said there was a kotoamatsukami enshrined there, didn’t he?”

  He had indeed. For some reason, a shrine built in the taisha-zukuri style housed a kotoamatsukami. And Camulia was enshrined there.

  “You know, Miyoshi, in this absolute mess of mismatched clues, there’s actually one thing that feels rather familiar.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The spirit messenger for the kotoamatsukami was a wolf.”

  “And...?”

  I proceeded to say something that sounded so ridiculous, I was almost concerned for my own sanity.

  “I can think of another immortal with wolves for servants.”

  Just then, we saw a bright white flash pierce through the darkness outside the lobby windows. A few moments later, it was followed by a thunderous boom—which happened to be accompanied by a notification sound from someone’s cell phone.

  “Wha—?!”

  Startled by the noise, Saito shot up from her sleeping position, then pulled out her cell phone. A garbled message appeared on her phone—and when she saw who had sent it, her face went white.

  “This... This is from Haru...”

  “What?!”

  So she still had her phone with her? If so, we should be able to track down her location using GPS.

  We ran over next to Saito and tried to take a peek at the message. Just as we did, though, a particularly huge burst of lightning struck, causing the ground to rumble beneath us and the entire building to lose power.

  Panicked by the sudden darkness, Saito let out a shriek and grabbed on to me. Miyoshi immediately started scanning the area to see what the problem was. Glas had popped out from Miyoshi’s shadow and stood at her feet in a protective stance.

  After a while, the emergency lights came back on, giving us a vague glimmer of hope among the dark shadows.

  “It looks like there’s some kind of issue with the power lines, probably,” Miyoshi said as she peered down toward the village at the bottom of the hill. “It’s pitch-black in town too.”

  “What about us?”

  “Seems like we have some kind of emergency generator here.”

  “Wait, we need to do something about Mitsurugi!” I shouted. “If she has her phone, we can call—”

  “We don’t get any signal out here,” Miyoshi reminded me.

  “Then how did we get a message from her? Wait... Wi-Fi!”

  The only way she could’ve sent us a message was if she were still in range to connect to the hotel’s Wi-Fi. That meant she had to be somewhere within a few hundred meters’ radius. I whipped out my phone and tried to send her a message, but the moment I hit send, I was greeted with a cruel, cold “cannot connect” error.

  “What the hell’s wrong?!”

  “If there’s an issue with the power lines, then the phone lines could also be acting weird. We might be able to connect to the hotel’s modem, but if there’s nothing for it to connect to, then we still won’t get any signal,” Miyoshi reminded me.

  “But if we’re all connected to the same access point, that’s pretty much the same as being on a LAN together, isn’t it?”

  “Wi-Fi routers nowadays come equipped with network isolation functionality, to prevent the devices on the network from connecting to each other.”

  “Then we can access the router and turn that feature off—”

  “We don’t know the password!”

  “If we do a factory reset on the router, it should go back to the default password, shouldn’t it?” I pointed out.

  “Some models might still have reset buttons, but every router has a different initialization method. Not only is that an unknown, we also don’t know what the default password will be. Same with the username—sometimes it’s root, sometimes it’s user, sometimes it’s neither, and we have no way to look it up...”

  “Because we can’t connect to the internet... Lovely,” I grumbled.

  “Forget about that for now. We actually got a message from Mitsurugi already, remember?”

  That’s right. What if she was asking for help? What am I supposed to do?!

  “About that...” Saito murmured.

  Maybe Mitsurugi had been pressed for time, because the message she sent was quite short and strangely garbled. Thankfully, we were still able to get the gist of what it said. It was something along the lines of “I’m not sure exactly where I am, but I should be fine until the day after tomorrow at least.” Nothing in the text indicated she needed any help.

  “The day after tomorrow?” I read out loud, furrowing my brow.

  Miyoshi blinked.

  “Does that mean something to you?”

  “Well, I’m not sure if it’s even related, but when I was heading down to the lobby earlier this afternoon, I heard the staff mention the day after tomorrow. Something about whether they’d be able to get things ready by that day, I think.” They were talking about needing to take care of something. I just hope that “something” wasn’t a person...

  “Anyway, Kei, who was that immortal with wolf servants you were talking about earlier?”

  Hearing that brought up again, I gave a tiny, pained smile.

  “Well, it’s nothing major, really, but you remember that weird spelling for Camulia we saw earlier, right?”

  “Oh yeah, ‘Camrllia,’ right? That was bizarre!”

  “Well, it happens to be an anagram for ‘Carmilla.’”

  Carmilla was a novella written by Sheridan Le Fanu and published in 1872. In the story, there were women named Mircalla and Millarca, who both actually ended up being the titular Carmilla, who was bound by some kind of mysterious rule stating she could never change the letters in her name, only the order.

  Having said that, I think everyone would’ve agreed it was far more realistic to assume that one or more of the hotel employees had hatched some kind of nefarious scheme to kidnap Mitsurugi and use her for whatever they were planning to do the day after tomorrow. Suggesting that some creature drifted ashore here four hundred years ago, and it just so happened to be a vampire, was pushing squarely into the realm of the absurd. I must be suffering from a case of dungeon-itis.

  “Kei... Le Fanu wrote Carmilla in the 1800s.”

  “I know. Strictly speaking, it’s even more unlikely than the Camellia theory. But you’ve got to admit, the descriptions we read of Camulia have an awful lot of overlap with Carmilla’s behavior in the novella.”

  The way vampires acted in ancient folklore had always typically been completely different from the way they acted in literature since the 1800s, anyway. This case would be leaning way too hard in the literary direction.

  “Speaking of which, isn’t it speculated that Le Fanu used Elizabeth Báthory as a model for Carmilla?” Miyoshi asked.