A Small Coastal Town, California
Hahn Cliff was a good man.
This was not Cliff's boast, but the absolute consensus of many neighbors and fellow villagers in the coastal town.
He had lost his mother at a young age to depression and raised his younger siblings single-handedly after his fanatic father abandoned them. He experienced the harsh realities of life from a young age, but he possessed an indomitable will. He did the hardest, dirtiest physical labor on the docks, ensuring his younger siblings always wore clean and beautiful clothes to school.
He was basically illiterate, but his younger siblings were already excelling in their classes. He was a penniless middle-aged man who had given almost his entire existence for this broken family, to the point that he had never even dated or tasted the flavor of a woman in decades.
His only remaining life goals were to help his younger siblings get married, find his father, and give the old man a good, solid beating for abandoning them.
He looked into the decrepit, rotting cabin with a complex expression. This was the home his father hadn't returned to in ten years. And Yusaku Kudo was his only hope in finding the old man.
In fact, Cliff had sent requests and his meager savings to many private detectives across Los Angeles, but only Yusaku had accepted the case. Clearly, the other agencies knew that finding a homeless fanatic missing for ten years was nothing short of a pipe dream.
Similarly, Yusaku understood Cliff's deep feelings but couldn't make any absolute guarantees. No one knew if Cliff's homeless father had already been taken away by cartels for organ harvesting or had simply frozen to death. Homeless people were treated like stray livestock in the underbelly of the US. And livestock, naturally, lived a precarious existence; death at any time wouldn't be too surprising.
Yusaku stood in the center of the strange, rune-covered cabin. He turned to the first page of the heavy, human-skin book, raising an eyebrow slightly.
> [May my Lord in heaven open the doors.]
> [May the Kingdom of the Lord walk upon the earth. I will always keep the family oath. I will always remember the Lord's glory.]
Indeed. Cliff's father, Hahn Rasford, was undoubtedly a fanatic believer.
Several following pages were filled with Rasford's manic prayers and praises of the "Lord." However, one specific sentence particularly bothered Yusaku: "I will always keep the family oath." What did this mean? Was it a Hahn family precept? Or was Rasford simply embellishing his own image, fabricating a multi-generational vow related to a newly adopted deity?
In fact, using ancient deities to gain fame or legitimacy for one's own family was commonplace in Western secret societies. Today you claim you are God's chosen one; tomorrow you claim to be a direct descendant of a God. The pie of absolute faith was something every powerful person in Hollywood and Washington wanted a piece of.
> [Volcanoes, oceans, forests, and humanity will all be the Lord's lambs. I will dedicate everything to the Lord.]
Another very strange prayer. The more Yusaku read, the deeper his brow furrowed.
First came the oath. Then came the blasphemous, limiting words?
Volcanoes, oceans, forests, and humans are the lambs of God. But what about the sky and the earth? Besides humans, what about all other living beings? Besides the environment of Earth, what about the sun, the moon, and the entire cosmos?
The reason this was considered blasphemous in theological terms was because Hahn Rasford didn't seem to regard his God as an "Omnipotent God." This defied religious common sense. What mythology doesn't have a supreme God who is "omniscient and omnipotent"?
The most famous mythological example is the stallion-like God-King—Zeus. Initially the youngest of his siblings, Zeus shared the title of God-King with his two brothers (Poseidon and Hades), his authority and power incomplete. But through the relentless efforts of religious forces rewriting history generation after generation, the later iterations of Zeus were known as the "Omnipotent Supreme God."
Therefore, in Yusaku's analytical eyes, Hahn Rasford, despite being a devout believer, seemed contradictory. He worshipped a God with highly specific, limited domains.
"Well, Mr. Kudo? Have you found any useful clues in there?" Cliff's eyes were full of desperate expectation. He was slow-witted and was counting entirely on this clever city detective.
"...Sorry, Cliff. I need some more time to decode this."
Yusaku couldn't figure out anything concrete from the madness for the time being, so he could only take the human-skin book home to study it carefully. After searching the rest of the cabin for a long time without finding any hidden compartments or letters, he could only drive back toward Los Angeles under Cliff's intensely disappointed gaze.
Looking at the sky through the windshield, it was already close to dusk.
Tsk… This case is taking even longer than I expected.
Yusaku stopped his rental car halfway through the city, checking his luxury watch—5:43 PM. He didn't want to go back to his empty house hungry, so he planned to grab a quick dinner at a nearby diner.
But as soon as he stepped out of the car, a subtle change occurred in his expression. He seemed suddenly flustered, glancing over his shoulder. He quickly walked through the sparse crowd on the sidewalk and hastily entered a dark, narrow alleyway between two brick buildings.
After waiting in the shadows for a moment, a person wrapped tightly in a heavy black trench coat, with thick bandages wrapped completely around their face and a pulled-down black fedora, stepped into the alley, blocking Yusaku's path back to the street.
A mugger? Or some unexpected trouble related to the case? Yusaku's face showed absolutely no trace of his earlier panic; instead, it was unusually calm. As a world-renowned detective, even in retirement, Yusaku remained unafraid of most street-level villains.
"Friend, what do you want to do?" Yusaku asked smoothly. "Or perhaps, what does the person behind you want me to do?"
In the dim alley, Yusaku couldn't make out the person's facial details beneath the dirty bandages. Judging by their heavy physique, they appeared quite strong. Moreover, the bulky trench coat was a perfect place to hide a weapon.
Facing Yusaku's calm questioning, the bandaged man seemed completely unconcerned with conversation.
A hoarse, sharp sound—like the agonizing scraping of shattered glass against metal—rang out urgently from beneath the bandages.
"Give it to me."
"What?" Yusaku asked, his hand slowly drifting toward his wrist.
"I said... GIVE IT TO ME!!"
This is bad! This person isn't rational…
Yusaku felt a massive, instinctual sense of crisis. He knew the man was probably reaching for a gun inside the coat.
Yusaku quickly flicked his wrist, and the custom-built, miniature tranquilizer dart hidden in his watch instantly fired with a soft pfft.
However… Yusaku almost gasped in shock.
He dodged it? He just casually ducked, and he dodged it? Yusaku's high-tech firing rate was faster than a regular handgun being drawn from a holster.
No time to think! Yusaku hurriedly fired the miniature tranquilizer watch again. This time it was a rapid barrage of three consecutive shots aimed at center mass.
The man didn't dodge. The darts hit him perfectly in the chest.
But the bandaged man, completely unaffected by the military-grade elephant tranquilizer coursing through his veins, lunged forward with terrifying speed. He drew a heavy revolver and slammed the steel barrel brutally into Yusaku's stomach.
As Yusaku doubled over in agony, a maniacal roar, like a drug addict going completely mad, echoed repeatedly in the narrow alley.
"GIVE IT TO ME! GIVE IT TO ME!!"
BANG!
"Hiss..."
Yusaku woke up with a sharp intake of breath, his hands flying to his stomach.
He stared blankly at his surroundings. He was... sitting in the driver's seat of his rental car?
Who saved me? Instinctively, he frantically felt around his stomach and chest. But... nothing. He groped around silently for a while. There wasn't a gunshot wound. There wasn't a bruise from the barrel. There wasn't even a tear or a bloodstain on his expensive shirt.
This... how could this be...
His pupils glazed over, his brilliant thoughts frozen in absolute shock. A brain significantly smarter than his genius son's was completely unable to make sense of the physical impossibility of the situation.
What happened? Was I dreaming? Did I fall asleep at the wheel?
In an instant, his pupils shrank sharply. He hurriedly raised his wrist to check his watch.
5:43 PM. The exact same time he had "just" gotten out of the car to get dinner.
In a flash, a massive surge of primal terror welled up from his tailbone to his heart, making his already pounding chest tremble even more.
What on earth is happening...? Time reversal? Foresight? A stress-induced hallucination? Or something else entirely?
Suddenly, as if struck by a horrifying realization, Yusaku's gaze snapped to the passenger seat.
Resting innocently on the leather was the human-skin book he had taken from the cabin.
The deafening, glass-scraping roar of the bandaged man echoed vividly in his mind...
GIVE IT TO ME!!
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