Where was Kikiou? In fact, he had secreted himself in a most unexpected location. An underground room made of stone. It resembled a warehouse. A mountain of wooden boxes and furniture lumped together with glass implements and machine parts of unknown origins or purposes.
At a glance, they clearly had nothing to do with the everyday life of ordinary folks.
What was this unordinary warlock doing there? He was building something. The result of which he held in his lips that—boldly, cautiously, delicately—moved and wriggled like no old man’s ever should.
He had lost both arms in his fight with Mephisto. Using only his mouth, he demonstrated a fineness of control a normal person could never hope to achieve with his fingers.
The shape of his creation was impossible to discern, a tangled mass of glass and steel tubes, odds and ends joined and connected with needle and thread, like the useless product of a child’s unbridled imagination.
And yet without hands or fingers, he finished delicately binding two bolts together with colored cords.
“Hmm,” he said, his eyes burning with evil knowledge. “This leaves just one more to join to the body. The deadline is tonight at midnight. Shall I check on the condition of the other?”
With these encouraging words, the great scholar and warlock shoved what appeared to be a pile of junk between the boxes with his feet, and then with a nimbleness that belied his years, proceeded to the door a good six feet above him and started up the stairs.
The door was made of copper. Through the door, a quite narrow hallway appeared. Compared to the vastness of the warehouse, the space was so confined as to make a visitor doubt the architect’s sanity.
Mumbling imprecations to himself, he made his way down the hallways and after a number of twists and turns, exited in another room. A room like a laboratory.
Among the antique instruments and generators were arrayed articles well beyond human imagination. The object Kikiou was after sat on a large lab bench. With no concern for his surroundings, he leaned forward and licked a protuberance wrapped with a coil of wire.
“Energy was injected through the Records. I don’t see a fundamental problem here. As was to be expected.”
His words evaporated into the air. He whirled around like a leaf struck by a brisk wind and hid behind a distiller.
The door opened a second later.
A fat, mountain-sized woman entered the room, followed by a small golden-haired girl. A strange vibe filled the still room as the residents of this house approached the same contraption that Kikiou had been working with.
The fat one twiddled with the same protuberance. “The one Doctor Mephisto made would appear to employ the same mechanism. My big sister wrecked the converter. There’s no sense trying to make it good as new, but if that alone is attached, it should work well enough.”
“I believe you are correct,” said the small girl in the satin dress.
Tonbeau Nuvenberg and the doll girl—they were in the basement of the home of Galeen Nuvenberg in Takada no Baba.
Hiding behind the steel distiller, Kikiou smothered a smile. Three days before, having been driven out of Mephisto Hospital, he had returned here on foot and snuck into this underground room.
The visitor identification device in the foyer, the intruder detection and prevention networks, the lethal, magic-powered weaponry—none of them activated or even clued into his presence—breaking into this house in broad daylight was the kind of trick only a four-thousand-year-old warlock could pull off.
He must have crossed paths with Tonbeau, who was visiting Mephisto Hospital at the time, leaving the doll girl behind.
Kikiou’s objective was a return route to that world. For a variety of reasons the usual methods would not work, making that particular device an absolute necessity.
Even in Demon City Shinjuku, this was the only place that could provide the tools and the raw materials and the workspace to make it.
Nevertheless, this was a high-risk endeavor of incredible boldness and daring, not to mention waiting for the doll girl to drop her guard so he could filch materials from this laboratory and complete his project in the dimly-lit warehouse. And without any arms to boot.
Not noticing this oddest of all squatters, Tonbeau easily picked up the device. “Nothing wrong with leaving it here, but it just doesn’t feel right. Let’s stick it in the warehouse. Heave ho.”
She tossed it to the doll girl, who caught it readily and without a stumble, though it must weigh a good two hundred pounds.
After the two of them left, Kikiou came out from behind the distiller, a cheerful smile on his face. The owners were carting the crown jewels off to the thief’s own lair. If this wasn’t a stroke of extraordinarily good luck, then nothing was.
However, after the two proceeded to the staircase to the warehouse and left for the upper floors, he hurried to the hallway, only to stop in stunned silence in front of the wooden door.
A white cross was affixed to the door. At first glance, it appeared to have been applied with masking tape, but the warlock discerned a design of considerably more enormity hidden inside it.
“The mark of the Yellow Emperor. There’s no underestimating that Czech witch. She got her paws even on this.” His hoarse voice crawled down the long hallways.
The Yellow Emperor was currently considered the most ancient of China’s dynastic rulers preceding the Shang Dynasty, hailing from the mythological era of the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors.
Five thousand years before the present, the Yellow Emperor give birth to Chinese culture and civilization, invented sailing, the wheel, musical instruments, the ten “stems” and twelve “branches” of the Chinese zodiacal calendar, and discovered a system of medical treatment using the qi pathways, recorded in a book known as the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon.
It was said that when he met the strongest of the opposing tribes in battle, led by the legendary “Flame Emperor,” weapons called “pestles” flew through the air and exploded on contact in the enemy camps, killing and wounding scores at once.
In order to defend against these attacks, the Yellow Emperor had his armies build ramparts miles into the sky. Although they began by simply piling earth and stone atop each other, the Yellow Emperor imbued these earthworks with the rigidity of an iron wall using bands of rough cotton provided by Qibo, the mythological doctor employed by the Yellow Emperor as his minister.
According to volume thirty-nine of the Canon, these bands were divided into fifty-five varieties, ranging from six inches to hundreds of yards wide. Steeped in a special chemical bath, they imbued the most brittle objects with adamantine strength.
The high technology, used on one hand to mend broken bones and on the other to construct cities, died with the Yellow Emperor. And yet here it was in the basement of a house in Takada no Baba, binding the feet of the great warlock.
“That bitch—” He ground his teeth. Not even his qi cannon could break through the impenetrably hard seal of the Yellow Emperor. “I’m powerless by myself. And while I sit here doing nothing, midnight approaches.”
He brooded darkly on his predicament. His spirits lifted almost immediately. His downcast face smiled broadly. An idea popped into his head, along with the name of the person who could cut through this Gordian Knot.
“Ryuuki, you are surely around here somewhere.”