And finally, presuming S was indeed the perpetrator of the murders, the location of their upcoming eighth victim was said to be hidden in the line, “I’ll shut my ears to all your songs and fly from the brink to take your mind.” Proponents of this theory were absolutely convinced that a ninth killing would occur in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward, since Shinjuku was written with the characters for “new” and “dwell”—both used in the line “Don’t find me / Or you’ll be claimed / But first let me dwell / In a brand-new today.”
It wasn’t long before a man was apprehended by the police for attempted murder. He was caught in Shinjuku, and his name was Yuushou Kashiibara.
Kashiibara was made up of three characters, meaning “flower,” “beech,” and “plain.” That same character for “flower” was used in one of the lines in S’s “Composition #1”—“Never stopped to smell the flowers.” The character for “beech,” meanwhile, could in some contexts also be read as “spine”—as in, “Your heart hidden in your spine,” while “Windswept wastelands” contained the character for “plain.”
Finally, one of the characters used to write Yuushou—meaning “play”—could be found in the line “Do I play, be played, and throw it all away?” while the other character—meaning “chapter”—could be formed by combining three separate characters in the line “Can’t stand up ten times in one day.”
The culprit’s audacity had reached new heights. He’d hidden his own name in the song’s lyrics.
There was just one problem: The theory was wrong.
About one month after Kashiibara was arrested, a music video titled “Composition #2” was uploaded to the internet. Its creator was the very same S responsible for “Composition #1.” Stylistically, it was either made by the same S or by a third party who’d managed to perfectly imitate S’s style.
The lyrics of “Composition #2” referenced a mysterious case involving the deaths of seven people. And three days after it was posted, such a case really occurred in Sendai, the capital city of Miyagi Prefecture.
These deaths were all linked as well. Some called them the Yua Sudaka killings, after the person found responsible and sent to a maximum-security psychiatric hospital.
Once again, S was not the culprit. Neither “Composition #1” nor “Composition #2” were early warnings of crimes the songs’ creator intended to commit. But in that case, were they prophecies? Did S have the power of precognition?
Just who was S, really?
Rukana hummed along as she listened to “Composition #1,” then she opened up an online message board called Χ-fes. Χ-fes was a darknet website, meaning it could only be accessed by those using a very particular encryption protocol. Rukana quickly scanned the site’s latest updates. Her four-legged thing made use of its four eyes to find and pick out everything new for her, so it was a very easy process. It scrolled down the page, stopping only when it found a post worthy of her attention, which Rukana then read herself.
“…Another day with no new posts from Master S,” Rukana muttered.
Rukana’s obsession had started when she took a liking to S’s music videos and started digging into the creator’s background. It turned out that “Composition #1” hadn’t been uploaded to a video-sharing site at all—at least not at first. It had been posted as a freely downloadable file, and someone else had decided to spread it. When Rukana looked into the reuploader, she found a multitude of associated accounts on various social networks. None of them were heavily used, but they were a lead she could follow. Rukana and her four-legged thing dug deep and discovered that yet another individual associated with this group of accounts was using a darknet site called Χ-fes.
Rukana felt that S had led her to the truth. By uploading “Composition #1” to Χ-fes, S had laid out the threads necessary to find him. The logs from the time in question were still viewable in the site’s archive, and Rukana found that the initial upload had occurred thirteen days before it was posted to the video-sharing site. Another user had asked S for permission to share the video later on, and S had granted it. S had continued publishing his videos to Χ-fes ever since.
The majority of S’s posts were written in Japanese. His songs’ lyrics were in Japanese as well, and their predictions all related to events that transpired in Japan. It didn’t seem like a wild leap of logic to assume that he was Japanese. That meant he was out there somewhere in the same country as Rukana, predicting terrible occurrences and telling the people about them through his songs. Rukana had drawn one other logical conclusion as well: An incident in which people were murdered and had their brains extracted couldn’t possibly be an ordinary crime. A zingai had to be involved.
“…That’s enough. Let’s try Χ-lum next,” said Rukana. Her four-legged thing logged her out of Χ-fes and switched over to a different application.
Χ-lum was a whole different beast from Χ-fes. You couldn’t access it at all unless you’d received an invitation and worked your way through a very strict approval process. It was hidden by even more elaborate security measures than those of your typical darknet site—membership-based and kept an absolute secret.
Rukana hadn’t received an invitation to Χ-lum. Her four-legged thing, however, typed in a series of commands with frantic speed, and a white window soon opened on her laptop’s screen. A short string of letters were the window’s only feature.
X-lum
Rukana’s four-legged thing input another command in a separate black window, and the white window changed. Now instead of being featureless, it displayed a forum. Its users were currently discussing an unauthorized visitor. English seemed to be the de facto local language, but the sheer quantity of internet speak, abbreviations, and jargon made some lines very difficult to read. Missing a line or two here and there wasn’t an issue, though, and the rest, her four-legged thing rendered into Japanese using a translation program.
According to one of the forum’s users, an unauthorized intruder had gained access to Χ-lum’s servers and made off with confidential information. They’d managed to follow traces left by the intruder to pin down their location and identity, but since those clues had led them to an eighty-one-year-old man living in Eastern Europe, they’d concluded that the trail they’d followed had been falsified.
Rukana smirked. “Bingo,” she muttered to herself.
As the users’ discussion continued, they took to referring to the intruder with an English word: cipher. Apparently, it had several meanings, including “an individual of little significance,” “the number zero,” and “a code.” Encrypted text. The key to solving a puzzle.
A mysterious intruder. A cipher.
“Cipher,” Rukana muttered out loud. “I like it. Cipher. Cipher. It has a nice ring to it. Don’t you think?”
Rukana’s four-legged thing typed a message into the black window.
I am Cipher.
“Oh? I guess you like it, too, huh?”
Rukana rubbed the four-legged thing’s slick, fleshy head—Cipher’s head—as she read through the forum’s logs. Cipher quickly pulled up posts by a particular user—a user by the name of Sullivan.
“Wha…?”
Rukana absently pulled Cipher into a tight embrace. There was no doubt about it. She read the name over and over, and there could be no mistaking it: It was Sullivan.
“Master S.”
Apparently, the name was derived from a Gaelic word meaning “small, dark eyes.” Sullivan—a name with the initial S.
“Master S knows about me…”