東方プロジェクト二次小説・オリジナル小説サイト
Chapter 1:Subterranean Animism

Before I begin talking about the Vengeful Spirit Incident, I would like to talk about one other event. This event occurred after Sanae joined our detective agency as a part-timer, but before the start of the earthquake incident, earlier that same summer.

That day Renko and I were visiting the Moriya Shrine, and were sitting in Sanae's room enjoying tea and snacks. Renko and Sanae were busy going over Sanae's high school physics textbook, discussing changes and advances in the field of physics in the time between modern day and the Scientific Century. I was sitting politely to the side, listening to the discussion and enjoying Sanae's collection of snacks.

The two were animatedly engaged in their conversation when suddenly Sanae popped her head up with a surprised expression, saying "Oh! A visitor just arrived."

"What? Merry, did you hear anything?" Renko asked.

"No, nothing. Are you sure, Sanae?" I asked as she climbed to her feet and headed for the door.

"I'm sure. It's not like I heard anything, I just received an omen from Lady Kanako."

"Is that like telepathy?"

"Not exactly, more like a feeling of something I need to do. It's a divine revelation!" She said, cheerily.

Personally, I thought it was rather mundane for a divine revelation, but I suppose in a world without intercoms it would be a useful ability to have.

"I'll be right out!" Sanae called, stepping into the hall and walking toward the front of the shrine.

After Sanae slid the door shut behind her, I looked over to see Renko looking at me with her usual troublesome grin. While neither of us had the benefit of telepathy or divine revelations, all I needed was one look at her to know that she was about to get up and snoop to see who might be coming to visit. With just my eyes I said to her "Even if I stay here, you'd still go, wouldn't you?" Instead of replying she stood up without the faintest bit of guilt or shame and moved to carefully slide the door open, peeking around the corner and down the hall.

I have to admit, even I was more than a little curious. Who would come all the way up to this remote location in the mountains? Most likely the visitor was a kappa or a tengu, but in that case I would have expected Lady Yasaka to have greeted them herself rather than sending Sanae out. Therefore, padding softly along the tatami floors, I followed Renko as she tailed Sanae, creeping to the door of the outer shrine and sliding it open a crack to peer outside. There we saw Sanae as she walked toward the torii gates to greet a visitor.

The person she was greeting wasn't anyone we recognized. It was a woman wearing something that looked like a cross between a typical Taoist Tai Chi uniform and the tabard-like drape of a cheongsam dress. More than anything else, it resembled the outfit Ran usually wore. Her red hair was gathered up into two small buns concealed under a pair of small silk caps, but the woman's most distinctive feature was her arms. Her right arm was pure white from shoulder to fingertip, and looked to be covered by a full length glove or sleeve of some kind.

Whoever this visitor was, Sanae seemed to be about to give her a tour, turning towards us and saying "Let me show you around." It was then that her eyes passed over the outer shrine and noticed the two of us.

"Oh! Miss Renko, Miss Merry. I thought you two were going to wait in my room."

"Ah, sorry." Renko said, rising up and walking out, rubbing the back of her neck in feigned embarrassment. "Call it professional curiosity. Is she a worshipper?"

"Ah, no." Sanae said, walking over towards us with her guest in tow. "Apparently she's a hermit who lives on the mountain. She's just come to pay her respects."

The woman smiled brightly as she approached and I got a better look at her. Her right arm, I now saw, was covered not in a long glove as I had initially thought, but rather it was completely wrapped in bandages. She seemed to have no trouble moving it though so it clearly wasn't the result of a broken bone but still, any wound that ran the whole length of her arm must have been a fearsome injury.

"Do you two work here at the shrine?" she asked amiably.

"No, we're from the village." Renko said, stepping forward. "I'm Usami Renko, chief investigator of the Hifuu Detective Agency, and this is my assistant, Merry. We're not here on business though, we're just friends of Sanae's."

"Ah, pleased to meet you. I'm Ibarakasen, or just 'Kasen,' if you prefer. I don't know if I'd go so far as to call myself a hermit. Just an ascetic Taoist and practitioner in training." She smiled pleasantly as she looked around at the shrine grounds. "This is a truly splendid shrine," she said as she took in the enormous shimenawa hanging at the front of the building Renko had just emerged from. "I had no idea the villagers had built something like this on the mountain. How old is this place?"

"Well..." Sanae said, hesitating. "The shrine itself is quite old."

"Really? I suppose I really have lost track of time, training alone in these mountains."

"Well for a hermit maybe it wouldn't really be that long ago..." Renko added.

"We've already been here for about a year though," Sanae whispered.

"Time passes faster as you get older." Renko replied with a shrug. "A year for a child is a significant fraction of their life, but by age fifty it's almost nothing. To a hermit a year wouldn't even be the blink of an eye. How old do you think she is?"

"Hmm... Is that why when you get really old you start talking about things in the past as if they were recent? Lady Kanako and Lady Suwako talk about the Taisho era as if it was last week."

"What are you two whispering about?"

"Oh, um. Nothing!" Renko laughed nervously as Kasen’s eyes moved from her to Sanae, who shrunk back under her stare.

"You seem like a human from the Outside World." Kasen stated. "This shrine must have come from that place as well."

"Oh, that's right! How did you know?"

"It's a simple guess. The tengu wouldn't have allowed humans to build something here and I would have noticed something like this being built anyway. Therefore, you must have brought it here across the barrier from somewhere else. As far as I know, the Outside World is the only place humans come from. Have you come here to try to gain more faith?"

Sanae's eyes went wide with surprise and she grabbed Renko by both of her shoulders. "Renko! It's another great detective! A rival Sherlock! Your detective agency is in danger!"

"Well that's fine, there’s no rule saying there can only be one detective."

"Oh, you're right! She can be the Heiji to your Conan! The Inspector Akechi to your Hajime!" She turned to me, excitedly. "Merry, is there such a thing as a hermit detective?"

I had to admit, I’d never read a novel with a hermit detective as a protagonist, even if we'd already met aristocratic, divine and armchair detectives in Gensokyo. Many fictional detectives are hermit-like in their habits, though.

"Um, I'm not sure what you're talking about, but I'd like to pay my respects to the gods of this shrine, if I may."

"Oh! Of course, please come this way." Sanae said, turning back to her somewhat baffled-looking guest. Renko and I glanced at each other, then followed along, keeping a few steps behind as Sanae led her to the shrine. Kasen prayed silently after which Lady Yasaka appeared and the two of them had a brief, hushed conversation off to the side. Renko seemed to be trying to listen in, but it would have been impossible to make any details out from their whispering.

After conversing with Lady Kanako, Kasen bowed politely, saying "Well then, thank you for the tour, but I must be off." As she said this, she looked toward the sky. As we followed her gaze, we saw what looked like a bird circling there. It turned another half circle overhead, then began to descend toward us. As it drew nearer, I was able to see that simply calling it a 'bird' would be doing it a disservice. It appeared to be an eagle of nearly unbelievable size. It swooped low and Kasen kicked lightly off of the ground, rising into the air and grabbing its leg as it passed, sweeping her along as it turned a huge circle overhead.

Sanae watched the pair in wide-eyed awe. "Oh wow! Where do you live, Miss Hermit?" She shouted up at the sky.

"About half way between here and the peak, on the west side of the mountain. Come visit me some time, if you like." With that, she kicked her legs, flipping herself acrobatically up onto the eagle's back and soaring away into the sky.

Renko watched her go, shielding her eyes from the sun as the eagle soared ever higher. "Huh. I guess there's more people living on this mountain than just tengu and kappa."

"Wouldn't a mountain full of youkai be the perfect place for a hermit to train? It's pretty far removed from mundane distractions," Sanae said cheerfully. "Oh, the newspaper lady said there's also yamabiko and yamanba living here too."

Renko nodded, her face still turned toward the place where the eagle had vanished, her fingers fiddling with the brim of her hat.

"I know that look, Renko. What are you thinking about?"

"Just wondering who that hermit might be. That bandage all up her right arm is a little suspicious."

"It must be a seal! I bet she only takes it off to release the Dragon of Darkness Flame!"

"The tengu made a big fuss when the Moriya Shrine arrived, so she must be pretty important to be allowed to live up near the peak," Renko reasoned, ignoring Sanae's outburst.

We knew from personal experience that the tengu guarded their territory fiercely. I wondered if perhaps that hermit might have been a tengu originally.

"Really? No one's going to say anything? You don't know 𝑌𝑢𝑌𝑢 𝐻𝑎𝑘𝑢𝑠ℎ𝑜?" Sanae whined.

"It's almost a hundred years old for us, Sanae. I think it’s considered a classic, but I've never read it."

"A classic? It was before my time too, but now you’re REALLY out of date, aren’t you?"

I suppose it’s only natural that there would be a generational gap in our knowledge, considering there’s an 80 year difference between Sanae’s time and our own. I doubt Sanae could be expected to be knowledgeable about the trends from 80 years before her own time either.

"Alright then," she declared. "Let’s try and get that generation gap filled in! I have the full set of 𝑌𝑢 𝑌𝑢 𝐻𝑎𝑘𝑢𝑠ℎ𝑜 at home. It's really good. I also have all of 𝑆𝑙𝑎𝑚 𝐷𝑢𝑛𝑘. You should read them!"

Renko and I could only look over at each other and laugh.

Thus, since then, our knowledge of the art and culture of the period between the 1980s and the early 2000s has dramatically increased. Admittedly though, our perceptions are probably a little biased, having been highly colored by what was available at the Moriya Shrine.

Surprisingly, Sanae told us that most of the manga she leant us belonged to Suwako and not herself. According to her, the goddess had been an avid consumer of manga and games back in the Outside World. That may be why Kanako had had the ready analogy of a networked application handy to explain the nature of divine spirits to us back then.


—2—


Now, I told you that story only so that this one would make sense. It was winter when the Vengeful Spirit Incident properly began.

Sanae, who had been pleased with her success in introducing Renko and myself to her particular flavor of subculture, had begun to evangelize the culture of the Outside World to other residents of Gensokyo. On this particular day, she had managed to capture a captive audience.

"What the heck is that thing?"

"It's called a handheld game console!"

What Sanae was holding in her hands was a small, square brick of purple plastic, hinged in the middle so that it could fold out into two connected segments. The ones staring at it as we gathered around the kotatsu in the main room of the rebuilt Hakurei Shrine were myself, Renko, Alice and Marisa, all of whom just happened to be visiting the shrine at the same time. Reimu was, of course, around somewhere too, but she was busy dealing with Suika's latest antics at the moment, so that left the five of us all huddled together. Sanae took the opportunity to bring the device out as a conversation starter.

"Oh, I've heard of that!" Renko said excitedly. "Is that a Nintendo DS?"

"Bzzt! Incorrect. This is the Gameboy Advance SP."

"It looks different than the one they used to have at Korindo," Marisa opined, eyeing the console suspiciously. "I thought those were bigger."

"Oh, that was probably the original Gameboy."

"These are a kind of toy in the Outside World, aren't they? What do you do with them?" Alice asked, poking at one of the buttons.

"Watch this!" Sanae said smugly, laying the console down on the table and flicking the power switch. Immediately a tinny chime rang over the speakers and a retro pixelated image formed on the small LCD. We all stared in wonder, though probably for different reasons. For Renko and I, something like this would be a museum piece. Although I had seen games of this sort before, seeing them run on the original hardware had a certain wondrous charm to it. For Marisa and Alice it was probably the first time they had seen a functional video display, much less a game running on one.

"What's it doin'? Why does it sound like that?" Marisa asked.

"Interesting. It's a type of projective grimoire, but the image seems to be trapped within this little frame. It's also a very poor quality image, isn't it?"

"It doesn't just show images though, you can control it!" Sanae said, moving around to the opposite side of the table and pressing a few of the buttons on the lower half of the device. As she did the characters moved about on screen and music faded in and out. Both Marisa and Alice watched over either of Sanae's shoulders, thoroughly engrossed. Since there are no video games in Gensokyo the concept seemed to be entirely foreign to both of them, and they regarded the console as something completely alien.

"That’s not all, by replacing the software, you can play different games." Sanae said proudly.

"So it's not exactly a grimoire then, but more like a magical tool?"

"Wait, what the heck does that mean?"

"Think of it like your hakkero. This device would be the trigram furnace and the software would be like your Spell Cards."

"Oh, I get it. So, do you have a game about magic?"

"A magic game? I guess you'd want an RPG then. This is a bit old, but you'll probably like it." Sanae flicked the switch again and the image on the screen vanished with a faint chirp. The two magicians watched with interest as she slid the hardware cartridge out of the device and pulled another out of her pocket. When she switched the device on this time, the title screen that appeared was one even I had heard of. A retro game from the golden age of home consoles. As a child, I had played it on my first phone, the sort of timeless classic in which the simplicity of the outdated graphics and mechanics seemed charming rather than old-fashioned.

"𝐷𝑟𝑎𝑔𝑜𝑛 𝑄𝑢𝑒𝑠𝑡 3!" Renko crooned.

"Mm-hm!" Sanae nodded happily. "This is the game boy color version."

"Oh, it's startin'!"

The opening cutscene played, followed by the title screen theme so classic that it instantly evoked a wave of nostalgia in me. "Here," Sanae said, placing the console in Marisa's hands. This is the story of a brave warrior who follows in their father's footsteps and sets out on a journey to defeat the Demon King."

Marisa accepted the console, but looked a little dubious at that statement. "Why do I hafta follow my father?" she muttered to herself. After a moment’s hesitation, however, she gave it her all. "How do I play this thing?"

"Um, well you just press the buttons to accept or cancel choices. You can select things with this. For now we have to start by entering a name. Like this... Sa-na-e the hero. There, see?"

"Huh, what's all this?"

"Oh, that's right. This game starts with a personality test. Your character's abilities change depending on how you answer."

"Wait, I'm playin' as you now. Do I answer for my personality or yours?"

"Don't use yours, Marisa, your character will come out all weird and stunted." Alice interjected.

The three girls huddled tightly around the small screen watching with wonder as Marisa made her way through the introduction. For Renko and I, there was no space to watch, but it wasn't nearly the same level of spectacle. Renko looked up at me and shrugged as we watched the three of them stare with fascination at the tiny handheld. I had known 𝐷𝑟𝑎𝑔𝑜𝑛 𝑄𝑢𝑒𝑠𝑡 was timeless, but who would have thought that its appeal could even transcend the Great Hakurei Barrier? Horii Yuji is truly a great talent.

The door to the outside opened then, admitting a blast of cold air as Reimu entered, scowling and rosy-cheeked, apparently released from tending to whatever mischief Suika had been pursuing. She slid the door closed and took a moment to look over the scene, with the three girls huddled in rapt silence over a corner of the kotatsu.

"What are you all doing?" she asked.

"Oh, by the way, Sanae, how did you manage to keep that thing charged?" Renko asked, ignoring Reimu.

Sanae looked up and smiled broadly, giving us a big thumbs-up. "I was hoping you'd ask. It's another triumph for the Moriya Shrine. We were able to generate electricity! Not a whole bunch, but we did it! We can use all the electronics at our shrine now. If you have any devices you want to recharge, come on up some time and you can see!"

Renko and I looked at each other in wide-eyed shock. Could this mean our cellphones, which had lain dormant for years as quaint artifacts of a future past might be revived? It took me a few moments to get my head back into the correct frame of reference to remember that even if they were successfully charged, our phones would need other infrastructure like signal towers and wifi to actually be useful.

"Sanae, how did you manage that?" Renko asked, in awe.

"Hey, what do I do here?"

"Oh, first you need to go to the tavern and recruit some other adventurers. You can pick warriors, fighters, clerics, mages, dealers, jesters, sages or thieves. You even get to name them all!"

"Since I'm playin' you, I'mma get a mage to be me then."

"If it's going to be you, you should get a thief, Marisa."

"Oooh thieves are really strong in this. That might be a good idea."

"Really?"

So Marisa is the thief and Alice is the mage. Two magicians would have been really unbalanced anyway."

"What are all of you even doing?"

"Oh, don't forget Miss Reimu, she can be your cleric."

"What? What are all of you even doing? Don't just decide what I am without me."

With all the commotion, Renko's question went unanswered. All we could do was shrug at each other as Sanae continued to guide everyone through the game. In the end, Sanae let Marisa take the Gameboy home with her.

"You know she's going to keep it until she dies now that you've let her 'borrow' it," Alice chided as we all headed toward the torii gates.

Sanae beamed innocently. "She'll have to bring it back once the batteries run out. That'll probably be in a day or so."

"Oi, Alice, you just died. Why are you always so useless?"

"What? Don't let me die, you're supposed to be protecting me. Heal me up."

"I thought you were tougher than that."

I never did manage to find out if the intrepid party of Sanae the Hero, Marisa the Thief, Alice the Mage and Reimu the Cleric was able to defeat the Demon King Baramos. In the end some questions will have to remain unanswered, I suppose.


—3—


"Ayaya, you two know about the generator at the Moriya Shrine?"

We had missed our chance to ask Sanae about the recent advancements that had allowed her to charge her Gameboy, but we were lucky enough to catch Miss Shameimaru in the village the next day, as she was delivering her newspapers to tea houses and bars.

"I was planning to write an article about that in my next issue. I can't go spoiling the details now, you'll ruin my scoop."

"Can you give us a hint, at least?"

"Hmmm, I might be willing to negotiate if you can give me a juicier story to chase down."

"Merry, you got anything?"

"Don't look at me."

"Why are you two even asking me?" Aya asked, tilting her head. "I thought you two were good friends with the wind priestess."

"I intended to ask her about it, but I actually wanted to get a non-human perspective on the idea of generating electricity. I would have expected the idea of industrial technology to be seen as a threat to youkai, but you don't seem alarmed."

Tapping the barrel of her fountain pen against her chin, Aya snorted. "Not all youkai are afraid of technology. The reason why the science of the Outside World is dangerous is because it destroys the fear that youkai are born out of. If a phenomenon that could be explained by the presence of a youkai is explained by something else, then that ends up being fatal to whatever youkai the situation might have otherwise created. We tengu and kappa aren't like that though. People here fear us already simply because of who we are, so technology isn't necessarily harmful to us."

"Besides," she continued, producing her camera from a shoulder bag, "some of these inventions can be quite useful." Aya had mentioned to us before that her camera was of kappa design. Even in Akutagawa Ryonosuke's 𝐾𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑎 from the beginning of the previous century, kappa had been portrayed as clever engineers.

"Scientific rationalism would still be a threat if it denied the existence of all youkai of course, but there's no need for us to worry about that in this case." Aya continued.

"Oh? Why is that?"

"Because these recent innovations are all the result of projects instituted by the goddess of the Moriya Shrine."

We nodded in understanding. It made sense: if Kanako was going to introduce science and technology that would lead to the widespread adaptation of the sort of rationalism common in the Outside World, that would lead to people denying the existence of the gods. Given that she and Suwako had come here for the express purpose of gathering faith, there’s no way she wouldn’t have taken something like that into consideration. However she was planning on making this technology available, surely she wouldn’t do it in such a way as to tie her own noose.

"I see. If she can find a way for technology to coexist with youkai, that certainly would be convenient."

Her words struck what was perhaps a unique chord with Renko and I, who, knowing the future history of the Outside World, saw our own Scientific Century as a natural outgrowth of and reaction to the close-minded rationalism of the previous age. It is in the inexorable nature of scientific inquiry that as the body of accumulated knowledge becomes more complex and sophisticated, it necessarily exceeds the bounds of what a typical person or even a scholar not devoted to a particular specialization can understand. As a result, people were deceived into believing pseudoscience and started to become distrustful of even legitimate research surrounding topics they didn’t understand. In short, the advancement of scientific rationalism had eventually become a religion in its own right.

It’s a well-established fact that it’s nearly impossible for anyone to thoroughly imagine what it would be like to be the sort of person who doesn’t understand the things that we do. The tragedy of this is that it leads to an ever-broadening sociological gap between the average person and those in possession of advanced learning. Relativistic Noology was created as a discipline in an attempt to bridge that gap between scientific rationalism and the need of the common man to take the teachings of science on faith alone. For my partner, who had always considered herself a scientific rationalist, the term 'Scientific Century' itself even had a self-deprecating connotation to it. The people who had learned to criticize other people for their lack of imagination, were themselves incapable of imagining the thought processes of those they were deriding. It begged the question of whether human imagination could even be said to exist at all. The whole philosophy of the Scientific Century was essentially a dark and bitter joke.

Anyway, while I was lost in contemplation of that heavy topic, the conversation had moved on.

"When it comes to any future technological advancements you may hear of from the Moriya Shrine, it's safe to assume that they're occurring with the cooperation of the tengu. We do have a treaty of friendship with the shrine, after all."

With that said Aya turned to leave but suddenly froze in position. She paused, standing perfectly still for a moment, as if listening intently, then turned east and sniffed twice. "Ayayaya, that smells like news!" She suddenly declared, and then without another moment's hesitation bolted into the sky, her raven-black wings emerging and propelling her upward in a streak of motion too fast to comprehend. In the space of a heartbeat she was gone, racing eastward through the air, toward the Hakurei Shrine.

Renko stood dumbfounded for a moment, then turned to watch her figure vanish into the winter sky. "What do you suppose that was all about, Merry? Did something just happen at the shrine? We should go check it out."

"I hope it hasn't been destroyed again."

And so, with a compelling lead like that, it wasn't long before we set out, on the road to the Hakurei Shrine, on the lookout for wherever Aya had disappeared to.

—

We made our way to the Hakurei shrine as quickly as two humans travelling on foot through the snow could. We ascended the stairs and came through the torii gates panting and sore. The shrine, which had been destroyed twice the past summer, had long since been rebuilt from the ground up and stood intact and in good repair. There was, however, no sign of anyone around. If not here, just where had Miss Shameimaru gone, and what had she seen that had made her rush off so quickly?

We trod through the crunching snow and toward the main shrine building, looking around in the isolated silence when suddenly Renko called out. "Whoa! what is that!?"

I turned my gaze to where she was pointing and immediately my breath caught in my throat. In the distance, in the deep forest just north of the Hakurei shrine, a plume of white smoke was dissipating in the air.

"Is it a fire?" I asked.

"I don't think so," Renko said, shaking her head. "It's too white to be smoke. Steam maybe?"

"Steam? Is there a hot spring over there?"

"Let's find out!" Renko said, proceeding toward the northern edge of the hill the shrine sat on. She plunged into the woods without hesitation. We wandered through the woods in silence, me praying that we wouldn't get lost and trying to keep track of which direction led out while looking out for stray youkai, and Renko forging ahead narrow-mindedly focused on trying to determine where the plume we had seen had come from. It wasn't long before we began to smell something. A somewhat unpleasant but wholly unmistakable smell.

"Is that sulfur?" I asked.

"Sure smells like it. You know what that means, Merry."

"A hot spring!" Could there really be a natural hot spring so close to the Hakurei Shrine? I had certainly never heard of one being there before.

I followed along behind Renko as we made our way through the undergrowth, walking over fallen branches and thin layers of snow as we followed our noses toward the source of the stench. It didn't take long to reach a place where a clearing had apparently recently been formed. A break in the forest was ringed by splintered and fallen trees and all hint of snow on the ground was lost along with much of the topsoil, revealing an open space dotted with bare rocks surrounded by a wide circle spattered with mud. No grass grew here and white steam was rising in a steady column from a hole in the ground. Standing before this hole, with their backs to us were Reimu and Marisa, with Aya circling above.

"Reimu! Marisa!" Renko called out as she emerged from the trees, waving her arm over her head.

All three figures turned toward us. Marisa greeted us. "Hey you two. You came at a good time."

Reimu's greeting was less friendly. She rested her fists on her hips, frowning at my partner. "What are you doing here?"

"I was about to ask the same of you, but with the smell and the steam, I think I can guess what happened."

Marisa grinned broadly. "Well your guess is probably right. Looks like the next one’s about to start."

The next instant, before Renko could respond, there was a deafening roar as a geyser of boiling steam rocketed out of the hole and easily a dozen meters into the sky, spattering messily over the bare rocks and releasing a long plume of mist that slowly drifted to the north. Aya snapped the moment of its eruption with her camera, having clearly been waiting for just such an event. The torrent of water hammered down a moment later in a fierce, hot rain as a miasma of sulfurous, tropically warm steam covered the whole clearing. The roar and clatter of the falling water slowly began to die off, letting us hear Marisa whooping excitedly somewhere in the dense cloud. Although we couldn't see even a meter in front of us any more, the skies above were clear and Renko and I sighed in awe as we watched the last of the spray high above us fade away.

As the steam slowly thinned out another sound arose, that of Reimu laughing to herself, a surprisingly deep and unnerving chuckle. She was staring down into the hole with an unusual gleam in her eye and an uncharacteristically wicked smile. "With a geyser like this, all I have to do is dig out a pool and I can turn it into an onsen. That'll bring in more visitors, and if I charge a fee to bathe, I can even double my profit. This must be a gift from the gods since my shrine was destroyed twice. Twice down, and twice back up again. The Hakurei shrine will finally be out of the red..."

I can imagine that the dual collapses of the shrine over the summer must have put a lot of strain on Reimu. Still, seeing her wring her hands expectantly while peering into the depths, her expression would have looked more appropriate on a tanuki.

"It makes no sense for a hot spring to suddenly come up here though, there's never been any signs of volcanic activity this far from the Youkai Mountain, have there?" Renko asked. "Reimu, did you bully the kappa into digging this for you or something?"

"Me? I didn't make this. The ground just suddenly exploded."

"It doesn't make sense for a geyser to come out of nowhere."

"Could it have been caused by the earthquake last summer?"

"I suppose that's possible..." Renko admitted, but she seemed unconvinced. For a geyser to suddenly erupt here, there would need to be a mass of water underground, something to heat it and a path for it to reach the surface. The earthquake last summer causing a crack in the layers of soil and giving the water a channel to flow through was the only thing I could think of that might make sense.

"Who cares why it formed? The important thing is it's here and I'm claiming it. Now I just have to find Suika so she can dig me a pool and stomp out a trail to here from the shrine. Or maybe I should go find Tenshi and make her build a proper onsen. Either's good, I suppose, the donations will come pouring in once this is done."

"Yo, Reimu, are you feelin' okay?" Marisa asked, turning toward her friend. "I get that this geyser is near your shrine an' all, but you sound like you've been possessed by a tanuki or somethin'." For the rest of us gathered around, watching her seem to count coins in her head, our reaction was much the same.

Reimu’s optimism at the time was predictably unfounded. All of us expected that turning this geyser into a profitable business wouldn’t be as easy as she might imagine. Had we known then what we know now however, her optimism would have seemed even more premature.

For as it turns out, steam wasn't the only thing that would end up erupting in a torrent from that geyser.