Chapter 16: Revelations
----------------------------------------
I spent the next hour recounting my encounters with Yuki in excruciating detail. Metalhead and Freckles didn’t stick around after their normal club meeting time ended. Now it was just the two of us.
Glasses, whose actual name I learned was Eugene, took extensive notes as he asked about every little thing. Not just information on Yuki, but myself as well. Even seemingly random nonsense. Everything from what I was wearing at the time, down to the brand of toothpaste I used was recorded in his notebook.
He had been a little skeptical at first, which is a funny thing to say about someone so obsessed with the paranormal. I guess it must be common for people with ghost stories to be attention-seeking fakes or scammers.
But once he heard the details, he believed me right away. Something about my description let him know I was authentic. That made me trust him more too. If he could tell real ghost stories from fake ones, didn’t that mean he was an actual expert?
At some point, he reached into his bag and pulled out a strange device. It looked like a cross between an electrician's multimeter and one of those metal-detector wands they use at airport security. As he scanned different places on my body, it made disconcerting clicking sounds reminiscent of a Geiger counter.
“What are you doing exactly?” I asked as I kept my arms held out straight in a T-pose.
Eugene waved his device over my chest, causing it to whine with varying intensity. “I’m measuring the magnitude of your ectenic force.”
I bit my lip, searching my memory for the meaning of the term, only to come up empty. “Uh, could you explain what that is? I’ve never heard of it.”
He paused to consider his words, placing a finger on his chin. “Are you familiar with the concept of ESP, extra-sensory perception?”
“As in like psychic powers? Sorta, but not really. I always thought that stuff was fake. Just cold reading and magic tricks con artists use to scam people. You’re saying it’s real?”
“Certainly, some espers are frauds, but not all. The extreme versions present in movies with telepathy and telekinesis aren’t real, obviously. True ESP is not some incredible superpower, instead think of it like a sixth sense weaker than the others. It manifests more like… hrm, a special kind of intuition or insight.”
“Insight…” I mumbled the word, lowering my head in consideration. That sounded awfully familiar. Is this what the system’s Insight stat referred to? Shit, maybe casually throwing a point in something I didn’t understand wasn’t such a smart idea.
As my stomach twisted with regret, Eugene continued with his explanation.
“Ectenic force is a type of oscillating energy emitted by the body. All living things have it to some degree. Increased levels have been shown to correlate with espers and those who frequently encounter paranormal events.
“The exact biological mechanism remains unknown, but you can think of it as being analogous to brainwaves. Some believe ectenic force is an external extension of the consciousness outside the body. Others hypothesize it comes from your soul’s resonance to a greater multiverse or a higher order of reality. Assuming such a thing exists.”
Well, I had personally experienced transmigration, so I suppose I could confirm the existence of a multiverse. And I even swapped into a new body while retaining my personality, so that suggests the existence of something like a soul as well.
Should I mention these things or just keep quiet?
Technically, I’m an alien bodysnatcher from an alternate reality. Eugene seems decent enough, but who knows if he’d tell some crazy paranormal researcher about me. I bet there’d be all sorts of people who’d love to dissect me and put me under a microscope.
It’s probably for the best if I just take the secret to my grave.
“Regardless, the greater your body’s ectenic force, the easier it is to see spirits and other such anomalies. Cases like yours that involve physical contact usually require an extremely powerful spirit. Even then, several external and environmental factors need to overlap. A personal connection to the individual when they were alive, a particular time like midnight during a full moon, a location with extreme negative energy, performing a seance or ritual, etc.”
I snapped out of my thoughts and returned my attention to the test. “So what does your thing say about my ec-whatever force levels?”
Eugene grinned like a gleeful child as he poured over the readouts from the device. “They’re high. Ridiculously, absurdly high. Way above baseline. It’s hard to tell exactly because you keep maxing out the meter, but I’d say you’re approximately a hundred times that of an average person.”
Unlike his smile, I wore an uneasy expression. “Is that… a good thing?”
“But of course! I could only dream of such a blessing. Most people are lucky if they encounter two or three paranormal events throughout their entire life. But you’ll stumble into such things without even trying. You’re practically a ghost-magnet!”
He might be excited by the idea, but he wasn’t the one who needed to live with this ‘blessing’. All I could do was sigh. “If you want to trade places and have Yuki follow you around, be my guest.”
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
“Ah, that reminds me,” Eugene adjusted his glasses and turned towards his laptop on the table. “I think I know who this spectral-admirer of yours might be.”
As he spoke, he pulled up an obscure database on the school’s network and scrolled through the files. They were scans of old paper documents. Archived, but no one had ever bothered to fully digitize them.
Eventually, he found what he was looking for. An issue of a local newspaper from decades ago. The front page story featured a yearbook photo of a girl with long black hair down to her waist wearing the academy’s uniform. I recognized her right away.
She was alive in the photo, her skin not as pale, and her eyes a lovely dark brown rather than a sinister red. Also, she was smiling and seemed happy. But there could be no mistake. Other than those minor differences, everything else about her was perfectly identical. It was Yuki.
I leaned in close to the screen and read the caption under her photo. Ikehata Yuki. The newspaper was from 1997. Nearly 30 years ago. She was 16 back then, a second-year student.
“Yes, this is her. I’m sure of it.”
As soon as I spoke, I got a notification chime inside my head. A small smile crossed my lips. I didn’t need to check to know it was the system informing me the quest had been completed.
I was tempted to immediately see what my reward trait was, but I resisted the urge. For now, I left it be. Better to investigate things related to the system when I was alone.
Glancing up to the article above the old photo, what I saw there dulled the excitement from finishing my first real quest. As I read the headline, my smile faded away completely.
Murder-Suicide at Rosemont. Jealous Student Kills Ex-boyfriend’s New Lover.
“I knew that the name ‘Yuki’ sounded familiar. Her legend used to be famous in the academy. It was one of Rosemont’s more violent incidents.”
Eugene tapped his lips with a satisfied smirk, pleased to have solved a mystery. He took no notice whatsoever to the ugly look that came over me, cheerfully recounting the tale.
“The story goes like this; 30 years ago there was a boy named Tyler Grant who was the most popular guy in his class. Excellent grades, a star athlete, good-looking.
“He was, of course, the most eligible bachelor. All the girls wanted to get with him. However, rather than dating an equally popular girl as you might expect, Tyler surprised everyone by going out with the quiet wallflower of the class.”
I squeezed my fist closed as I listened intently. “Yuki.”
“Precisely. I suppose it’s like they say. Opposites attract and whatnot,” Eugene shrugged before continuing on.
“Everything was fine between them for a couple months. Then for whatever reason, Yuki gradually began to change. Rumors about her spread.
“She was following him after school, going through his belongings, checking in on him constantly. Her grades slipped. She showed no interest in school, never talked to her classmates. Yuki became completely obsessed with her new boyfriend. So much so, she ignored everything and everyone else.”
The familiarity of the situation raised goosebumps over my skin. Wait no, what am I saying? I never agreed to be Yuki’s boyfriend.
“Tyler was understandably creeped out. He broke up with her and the rumors surrounding Yuki became even worse. She went from dating the most popular boy in class, to a leper people avoided. Total humiliation.
“Not long later, Tyler started dating another girl, Sarah Miller, but it was destined to end in tragedy. Yuki never got over her obsession even after the break-up. When she saw her ex together with his new girlfriend, something inside her snapped.
“One night, Sarah stayed out late at a friend’s party. She left sometime after midnight and never made it home. They found her body in an alley the next day. It was a brutal, bloody affair. She’d been stabbed 37 times in the chest and abdomen. Mutilated almost beyond recognition, but she still wore the charm bracelet her new boyfriend gave her the day before.”
I hunched over and cradled my head in my hands. There was nothing I wanted more than to hear this story was made up. That Yuki wasn’t really a murderer. That I wasn’t being stalked and sharing my dorm with the ghost of a girl who killed an innocent classmate.
“How could they be sure it was Yuki? No one witnessed it, so couldn’t it have been someone else?” I asked, just hoping there was some way it wasn’t true.
Eugene let out an amused chuckle and shook his head. “True, there were no witnesses, but no one ever doubted it was her. After the police asked around campus, they quickly narrowed in on Yuki as the prime suspect. And when they went to question her, they found that she had fled.
“A county-wide manhunt was called with hundreds of officers sent out to search. Two full days went by without a hint of her whereabouts. It was like she vanished into thin air. At least until the third day. Then they found her, or to be more precise, they found her body.
“Apparently, she never left and instead hid somewhere on campus. Somehow, she evaded everyone looking for her, until, perhaps out of guilt or regret for what she’d done, she hung herself.”
My thoughts swirled around in a tangled mess. I found myself unconsciously biting at my nail. When I noticed, I took a deep breath, trying to calm down and recenter. It worked for a moment, but not even a minute later, I was up and pacing around the room.
Wasn’t this what I always expected? I already knew ghosts were born from tragic events and deep regrets. It was obvious from our first meeting that Yuki was dangerous.
Then when did it bother me so much?
Eugene finally noticed my distress. He stopped to let me mull over what he’d told me. Eventually, he interrupted me from my minor breakdown. “Actually, the most interesting part is what happened after her death.”
I stopped pacing and met his eyes, desperate like a drowning man being thrown a lifeline.
“Tyler Grant went missing later that year. No notes left, no body found. He simply vanished without a trace.
“He was presumed dead when he never resurfaced even months later. Some think that he got in an accident and the two incidents are completely unrelated. But…” He tapered off, unsure whether to add more.
I urged him to finish his thought. “But what?”
“...But legend has it that Tyler was taken after his jealous ex-girlfriend returned as a vengeful ghost.”
Instead of being given some hope, I was crushed even further.
Both of us fell silent. For a while, the awkward air was broken only by the ticking of the clock on the wall. Finally, Eugene cleared his throat and sat up a little straighter. I couldn’t fathom what more could possibly be added when the story was already so twisted.
“By the way… The next time you interact with this Yuki, do you think you could snap a photo and take some atmospheric readings for me?”
I felt my eye twitch, glowering with equal parts disbelief and annoyance.