Innocence of the Sea's Roar - Episode 1: The Closed Door of Shiomi

This story is a sequel to the previous volume, 'Nocturne Under the Moon'.

Shiori Tsukimi was continuing on a new journey. Her detective skills were no longer limited to just solving 'mazes of logic.' She had taken on the role of an Adjuster, someone who probes the 'distorted tuning' hidden deep within people's hearts to release the true timbre of the truth.

The next stage she chose was 'Shiomi,' a closed-off port town that stubbornly refused interaction with the outside world.

The name 'Shiomi' is said to come from the wisdom of ancient fishing villages, which accurately gauge the ebb and flow of the tide. However, the moment Shiori stepped foot there, what she felt was not the freshness of the tide, but a stagnation of time that covered the entire town like a thick fog. The old houses lining the coast stood eaves-to-eaves, crowded together as if supporting one another. Yet, that connection also looked like an impregnable fortress, rejecting any intrusion from the outside.

The scenery of Shiomi strongly reminded Shiori of a 'C-mute.' That 'sound of silence' that Kyoko Hayami finally released. Shiomi town was deathly quiet, as if the entire town had muted the truth of an unsolved case that occurred thirty years ago, swearing never to let the sound ring out again.

Shiori had come to this town because she sensed some kind of 'distortion of sound' in the disappearance of 'Shiori, the lighthouse keeper's daughter,' who had vanished into thin air thirty years ago.

Shiori was seventeen at the time. She had been engaged to the son of the next head of the fishermen's union, which was controlled by the town's influential figures, but she disappeared without a trace on a quiet night before the festival. The police investigation dismissed it as her 'running away from home,' but everyone in town knew of the 'secret chord' hidden behind it, yet they kept their mouths shut.

Shiori checked into 'Shiokaze-tei,' an old inn run by the only outsider in town. The landlady showed blatant wariness toward Shiori's sharp gaze and her out-of-place, modern attire.

'Where are you from, miss? It's rare to have tourists in this town at this time of year,' the landlady asked in a low voice without stopping her hand from grilling the fish.

Shiori answered quietly, 'I am a tuner. I have a bit of an interest in the old timbres of this town.'

'Timbre, you say? Nothing but the roar of the sea rings in this town. Any beautiful sound that an outsider might go snooping for has long since disappeared.' The landlady's reply was a sharp, rejecting tone that grated on the nerves.

Shiori felt that the landlady's words were a mixture of two emotions: deep 'fear' regarding the disappearance case and a 'devotion' to protecting that secret. It was a logic of blood ties and community, different from the distorted logic of dominance and perfectionism that Soichiro held in Kyoko's case.

Shiori reported the insularity of Shiomi town to Detective Saeki over the phone.

'Uncle. This is a [[phN_open]]locked room[[phN_close]] in a different sense than Tsukikage Manor. Tsukikage Manor was a physical locked room, but Shiomi town is a locked room of collective memory, woven with thirty years of time and the web of blood ties. Logic alone won't open the door.'

Saeki sighed on the other end of the line. 'Old towns hate outside logic. The influential figures are the fishermen's union and the generations-old net owners. If they buried the truth of the case, it will be a formidable wall.'

Shiori gathered information on the central figures of the town at the time of the incident and stumbled upon one name. Iwakura, a former police officer who was in charge of the investigation at the time and processed the disappearance as a 'runaway case.' He continued to live in Shiomi town even after his retirement.

Shiori visited Iwakura's old house. Iwakura was an old man tending to his fishing gear, and when he saw Shiori, he made no attempt to hide his wariness.

'Stop it. That was thirty years ago. I processed the case completely as a runaway. Don't dig up anything more than that,' Iwakura threatened in a low voice.

Shiori read in Iwakura's eyes that a 'sense of guilt' toward the missing Shiori and a 'self-deception' to protect the town coexisted within him.

"Mr. Iwakura. On the night Shiori disappeared, you must have seen three unnatural times recorded in the tide logs. They were cracks in logic that even the town's fishermen ignored."

At Shiori's observation, Iwakura's complexion changed. He was stunned that this young tuner had seen through the secret he had kept sealed deep in his heart for thirty years.

The place where Shiori was last seen was the old "Ryugu Lighthouse" overlooking the sea. The lighthouse's light has continued to shine over the sea of Shiomi unchanged for thirty years.

That night, Shiori headed to the Ryugu Lighthouse alone. The interior of the lighthouse was damp, and the smell of salt was intense. As she searched for the diary left behind by Shiori's father, who had been the lighthouse keeper, her eyes caught an old tide table posted on the wall.

In the corner of the tide table, written in special ink so that no one would notice, were numbers and symbols. While they were numbers indicating the ebb and flow of the tide, they also looked like numbers indicating piano pitches.

"17... 5... 1..."

And next to those numbers, in small letters, was this addition:

"The Ryugu echoes twice."

Shiori was convinced that this code was the "logical key" to opening the massive locked room that was the entire town, which Shiori had left behind at the end. Amidst the sound of the tide, the tone of the "innocence" buried thirty years ago was now beginning to resonate once again.

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