Ke Xue: I picked up a bottle of sherry at the beginning.

"Izumi explained to Miwako, "Besides, the factory manager didn't tell him about Yashima..."

"If Aoyagi Yuto knew this, he would probably feel better, but he might also hate the factory manager who shirked responsibility."

The car passed through the forest path and stopped in front of a country villa. The surrounding environment was quiet, with birds singing and flowers blooming. It was quite stylish, no worse than Qingliu's house.

Yoshinaga's family seems to be well off...

I rang the doorbell and a housewife in her forties opened the door in confusion.

She doesn't look old, but she has a haggard look that doesn't match her beautiful face, and it seems to be deeply imprinted on her face.

"We are the police," Quan Yi volunteered to explain, "We have already called before."

Miwako next to her quickly took out her police ID.

The housewife nodded. "My name is Yoshinaga. My husband won't be home until the weekend. He works as a consultant for several companies in Tokyo."

"Is Yoshinaga-san home?"

"exist."

Mrs. Yoshinaga led the two of them into the living room, and saw a figure sitting in a wheelchair with his back to the balcony in front of the garden.

Izumi was stunned for a moment and then saw Mrs. Yoshinaga turn her wheelchair around. Yoshinaga Tomoyuki, with a dazed look on his face, was sitting quietly, unable to even open his eyes and motionless.

"Youzhi, a guest is coming..."

"What's going on?" Izumi looked at Yoshinaga Tomoyuki who looked like a living dead in front of him, and was a little overwhelmed.

"He's still breathing," Mrs. Yoshinaga said with a gloomy expression, "but..."

"Is it because of the accident three years ago?"

Izumi and Miwako sat down on the sofa, and Mrs. Yoshinaga soon brought them tea.

"He's a very responsible kid. That day at the swimming competition, he was chosen as a relay runner. The other runners were all seniors, so he was worried he'd hold them back..."

Mrs. Yoshinaga's eyes welled up, and she wiped them with a sob. "I'll never forget that day. After the competition, the kid called me and cried, saying that he was really a burden to everyone... I didn't expect him to sneak into the swimming pool alone at night to practice..."

"Is that what the school said?"

Izumi thought of Aoyagi Yuto's concealment and took out Aoyagi Takeaki's photo. "Have you seen this person? He goes to Suitengu Shrine in Nihonbashi every month to offer a hundred paper cranes and pray for relief from floods..."

Mrs. Yoshinaga held the photo, shook her head, and seemed to have thought of something.

"Ms. Hanako... from Tokyo?"

"Do you know something?" Miwako's eyes narrowed slightly.

"I've been writing a blog," Mrs. Yoshinaga said, opening her computer. "It's a bit like a care diary for this child. People regularly leave comments. One of them is 'Ms. Hanako from Tokyo.' She divides a thousand paper cranes into ten offerings, and every month she visits Nihonbashi to visit the Seven Lucky Gods in rotation, praying for her friends... This started about a year ago..."

"a year ago?"

……

On the way back to Tokyo from Yoshinaga's house, a car sped past on the road.

Izumi and Miwako took Yoshinaga Tomoyuki's personal belongings with them, and there happened to be a list of players for the swimming competition three years ago, which the consultant teacher didn't even mention.

In addition to Yoshinaga Tomoyuki and Aoyagi Yuto, there were two other students.

"Sugino Tatsuya, third year, Kurosawa Shota, third year..."

Miwako looked at the announcement solemnly: "What happened back then might not have been an accident. The key lies in the other two..."

"Mr. Aoyagi started visiting the shrine six months ago, and also got an internet cafe membership six months ago without telling his family... It's very likely that Mr. Aoyagi had been secretly doing swimming training for six months, and his father discovered it and interrupted it. So, he suddenly behaved abnormally yesterday after learning about his father's actions."

Quan Yi accelerated his car, his mind racing, all the clues flashing through his mind one by one.

A middle-aged man staggering across Nihonbashi, straining his strength, the Edobashi underpass where the incident occurred, a cafe...

The two furniture stores where Fuyuki Yashima interviewed, the Kirin statue in Nihonbashi… the route home, the escape route after the incident…

Fuyuki Yashima saw Takeaki Aoyagi across the road... and immediately took a detour to catch up with him and rushed to the scene of the incident.

Aoyagi Yuto, swimming club advisor, Mrs. Yoshinaga... a lot of words merged into one in Izumi's ears, and returned to Aoyagi Takeaki's actions.

A few days before the incident, he called his counselor and went to a Nihonbashi coffee shop with someone on the day of the incident...

If this person is not the advisory teacher, it is very likely that he is one of the other two related students, and he has a close relationship with Aoyagi Yuto. Otherwise, even if the victim did not call for help, he should have left some information about the criminal.

The criminal must have committed the crime in a hurry and fled the scene without even caring about Mr. Qingliu's life or death.

The one who wiped the fingerprints with the cloth was Mr. Aoyagi himself...

"Miwako, contact the search team immediately and find the other two students! And the advisor!" Quan Yi gathered his thoughts and said, "The real culprit is very likely among them. If we check Mr. Qingliu's call records, we should be able to determine who it is. The source of the folding knife won't be difficult to investigate either..."

……

In Tokyo, Japan's Metropolitan Police Department, the meeting room was in chaos, and the search team officers hurried out.

"Have you found it?"

"We only contacted the teacher, the other two students have already left!"

"Sugino Tatsuya, there's a call coming to the Sugino family. Team A is investigating a folding knife..."

"Find them quickly!"

At the Nihonbashi Bridge, Tatsuya Sugino walked along the sidewalk in a daze, trembling slightly as he watched the email sent by Yuto Aoyagi on his mobile phone.

"We have something to discuss. Let's meet at the station this afternoon... Inspector Shiro and the detective are asking about Yoshinaga. It might be related to my father's case..."

He walked dazedly to the center of Nihonbashi, where there were still faint traces of blood on the base of the Kirin lamppost.

It's the blood of Aoyagi Yuto's father...

If Yuto knew, he would probably hate him.

But it's all over...

When he heard that Japan's most powerful detective, Shiraizumi Masu, had taken over the case, he had a bad feeling. However, the situation of the strange man, Fuyuki Yashima, gave him hope that he might be able to escape...

But it was just an illusion after all. The police actually found out what happened three years ago so quickly.

Yoshinaga Tomoyuki had an accident because of the three of them, and his teacher helped them to conceal it afterwards. Unexpectedly, after so much time had passed, Yuto's father discovered the problem and even specially asked him to meet using Yoshinaga's father's name.

Now thinking about it, it seems like a dream...

The painful truth

As night fell, Sugino Tatsuya struggled to climb up the stone bridge railing, facing the cold wind and standing next to the Kirin statue on the lamppost. The patrol shouts in his ears no longer mattered, as long as he took a step forward.

"call!"

His body suddenly sank, and Sugino Tatsuya closed his eyes immediately. However, the imagined feeling of weightlessness did not come, and his arms were tightly grabbed from above.

The veins on the back of Quan Yi's hands bulged, but he still met Sugino's gaze and said calmly, "Do you think you can escape like this? Life is not that simple. There are people waiting for you to redress your grievances!"

"Who are you?"

……

After a night passed, the sunshine on the next day seemed especially bright.

Tatsuya Sugino was arrested, and the director of the Kinseki Metal Factory was also under investigation by the Labor Bureau. Although the sensational Nihonbashi incident was still hotly discussed on TV, the grievances of Fuyuki Yashima and Takeaki Aoyagi were ultimately cleared.

Aoyagi's house, Aoyagi Yuuto's room.

"That day, because Yoshinaga lost the game, we secretly gave him special training at night, but it caused a drowning accident. By the time we reacted, Yoshinaga... the teacher found out and told us to leave immediately and not tell anyone, and just pretend nothing happened..."

Aoyagi Yuto sat in front of the computer with his head down, facing Izumi and the other person.

"The next day, the police came to school and questioned all the students in the swimming club one by one... The teacher helped us cover up the incident, saying that Yoshinaga sneaked into the swimming pool out of guilt and it was just an accident..."

"If Yoshinaga regains consciousness, he'll be exposed immediately... Of course, I still hope he can wake up, but I'm also afraid of him waking up..."

Aoyagi Youren paused, a little dazed.

"I never regained consciousness... A year ago, I stumbled across Mrs. Yoshinaga's blog. The Kirin classmate circulating online turned out to be my former junior, Yoshinaga, and he had become like that..."

"So you started helping to worship the Seven Lucky Gods a year ago?" Miwako asked.

Aoyagi Yuto nodded. "I know that even if I do this, I can't atone for my sins, but it's better than doing nothing... and maybe Yoshinaga will wake up from this..."

"Was it discovered by Mr. Qingliu later?" Quan Yi asked.

"My dad used my computer without my permission and saw it... I was so scared that I threw away all the paper cranes and stopped reading blogs..."

Aoyagi Yuto's lips moved.

"But when I went to see her yesterday, I didn't expect that Miss Hanako still existed in the past six months, and she is still offering paper cranes to me..."

"Your father must have noticed something, but he didn't know why you used a false name to disguise your identity. He only knew that his son had stopped praying because of his own situation," Miwako continued. "So he took the initiative to contact your junior's mother and continued praying on your behalf as Miss Hanako. At first, he might have just wanted to gain your understanding...

"Yellow, green, aquamarine, cyan... Six months later, he went to offer the purple paper crane, and finally only the white one was left. But before he finished folding, a photo of the swimming competition was uploaded to his blog. Mr. Aoyagi discovered that Yoshinaga Minoru had an accident on the day of the competition. His long-held question was finally answered...

"Why did my son use a pseudonym to do these things? Why did he give up swimming after that competition? Maybe... Yoshinaga's accident was related to my son...

"That's why he kept calling, even pretending to be Yoshinaga's father and trying to arrange a meeting with Sugino Tatsuya..."

Miwako solemnly opened a bag of white paper cranes.

"The Qilin originally had no wings. They were given wings to represent its desire to take flight. Qilin wings also represent courage... Your father, regardless of all else, went before the Qilin to atone for his son's sins against Yoshinaga. He also hoped that his son would stop running away and find the courage to face his mistakes..."

Miwako walked up to the sobbing Yuto and poured all the white paper cranes onto the table.

"I found these in your father's car. We're still about a hundred short. You should have decided what to do with them..."

Quan Yi didn't say anything until he left Qingliu's house.

Only by experiencing it personally can you know how serious a matter death is. It is not a number, not an insignificant piece of news, but pain and regret that can be felt personally.

For Yuto Aoyagi, even if he wanted to talk to his father again, he no longer had the chance.

but……

"Yuto Aoyagi received the message from his father, that's enough." Quan Yi looked back at the Aoyagi family that had fallen into silence, as if he could still hear Yuto Aoyagi's crying.

"It was just an accident back then, why did it end up like this?" Miwako sighed.

"Once you start wrong, everything that happens afterwards will be wrong. Avoiding the problem won't solve it. If the consultant had taught them to take responsibility instead of covering up and concealing the truth, Sugino wouldn't have been forced into a desperate situation, and things wouldn't have turned out like this." Izumi said calmly.

"Where's the teacher?"

"Still in the police station... Let's go, there's still a lot of finishing work to do..."

"I hate giving reports." Miwako felt a headache.

……

Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department.

Miwako went to Officer Takagi for help in writing a report, and Izumi entered the interrogation room alone, where only the swimming club advisor was present.

"Because you concealed the truth about the accident from the students, now they are committing suicide..."

"Hidden..." The teacher glanced at Quan Yi and lowered his head. "I was thinking about the children at the time."

"What exactly did Mr. Qingliu ask on the phone... Is the accident three years ago related to his son?" Quan Yi asked with his hands behind his back.

The teacher turned his head away: "I told him it has nothing to do with it..."

"If you had told the truth at that time, perhaps things would not have turned out like this."

"I, I'm doing this for the children's sake. I don't want to ruin their future because of this..."

"Don't be ridiculous! Their future is ruined because of you! Sugino became a murderer, and Aoyagi-san became a victim's family member... It's all because of you! You're not qualified to teach students!"

Miwako walked out of the interrogation room and was about to knock on the door when she heard Izumi's angry voice. She paused, put down her arms, leaned against the wall and waited at the door.

……

Midorio, Arakawa-ku.

Kaori Nakahara got off the tram holding the urn wrapped in white cloth, and walked silently through the bustling streets back to her apartment. Occasionally, passers-by looked at her curiously, but she didn't pay any attention.

When he reached the front of the apartment building, he suddenly stopped and looked at Quan Yi who was waiting at the door.

He stood in the alley carrying a bag of things and seemed to have been waiting for a long time.

"Officer White?"

"Yes." Quan Yi turned around, looked at the urn, and picked up the paper bag in his hand: "I'm here to return Yashima's personal belongings."

Kaori Nakahara nodded silently and took Quan Yi into the living room of the rented house.

"You should know about the case, right?" Quan Yi asked.