"No… no… nothing like that…"
Kagome's voice was soft. She was like a sleepwalker; although she was moving, even she didn't seem to know what she was doing.
"…I just suddenly felt… maybe… maybe I can do this?"
She raised the pink jewel high. Following Kagome's movement, a sudden burst of light erupted from the stone. The yōkai showed two diametrically opposite reactions upon touching this light.
Some yōkai suddenly ceased their frenzied behavior and went still, while others let out agonizing pleas for mercy. Reversing their previous intent to get closer at any cost, they turned and tried to flee in the opposite direction.
But no matter how they struggled, how could they outrun light?
The yōkai were gradually disappearing, as if being assimilated by this gentle, seemingly mild white light. They faded, dissolved, and vanished…
"You saw it too?" Squinting, Sū ěr asked in a low voice.
"Yes," Jibril nodded. "The energy those yōkai turned into was absorbed into that stone… It feels like it would be a very precious collectible, doesn't it?"
"A collectible… let's ensure safety first," Sū ěr said, somewhat speechless. Although Jibril seemed to have broken her habit of collecting heads, her obsession with collecting rare things hadn't diminished much; if anything, since she couldn't collect heads anymore, it seemed the obsession had simply shifted.
Finally coming out of her daze, Kagome lowered her hands. The pink jewel that had just emitted infinite light went quiet, looking like an ordinary stone again.
"The yōkai… are gone?" Kagome murmured, as if unable to believe it.
She gradually realized a fact: those snarling yōkai… had been purified by her own hands?
No—even though she was still ignorant of supernatural matters, Kagome had a vague but clear intuition. It wasn't so much that the yōkai had been completely purified from existence as it was that the jewel in her hand had followed her will. It ensured the yōkai wouldn't die, yet they could no longer cause harm to this world.
The ancient well opening, which just a moment ago had been crowded with slaughtering yōkai, was now suddenly silent and quite empty. Aside from the ground soaked in dark-purple demon blood and stripped of grass, all evidence of the yōkai had vanished. Even the breeze blowing through felt refreshing.
"…Grandpa is going to be so angry," Kagome stared blankly at the well opening. What should have been four wooden crossbeams was now practically bare. She began to worry about how to explain this to her grandfather.
Something passed down for centuries was just gone. This counted as destruction of a cultural relic, didn't it?
Recalling things she'd learned in school, Kagome turned a pleading gaze to the translucent, large-chested female yōkai. She knew these barriers were set up by her, so… uh, could she help restore it?
However, Think had no time for her. Think already knew the intellectual levels of Sū ěr and Jibril by heart—not that she looked down on them—but professional matters should be left to professionals. Right now, analyzing exactly what had happened and detecting subtle energy changes required her expertise.
"Let's just use that," Think flew to the edge of the former well opening. After peering down for a long time, she said with a frown.
"Ah? No more testing?" Jibril looked uncharacteristically hesitant. "Even though we aren't using spirits [Elementals], if we pour in this much spiritual energy… I don't mind, but if a huge explosion happens, Sū ěr will have quite a headache, won't he?"
The pink-haired Flügel kept glancing at Sū ěr.
"…Why would it explode? And exactly how much power are you using for this spell? Is it the one you two were working on together recently?" Sū ěr felt his eyelid twitching violently. "Can you try to make it not explode?"
"In any research, unexpected accidents are normal~. Don't be so nervous," Think waved her hand nonchalantly. "Rest assured, I am a genius. It'll be fine—throw it in."
The last words were directed at Jibril. Think made the decision effortlessly, and Jibril earlier hesitation was clearly just a… modest way of speaking?
In any case, seeing her throw the crystal sphere—crammed with massive amounts of precision spells—into the well without a second thought, it was clear she had been waiting for this moment. Jibril had wanted to see the effects of her hard work for a long time.
Kagome wanted to protest this behavior of tossing things into her old well, but her protest was clearly useless. Ultimately, under Sū ěr repeated signals, she hid behind the group so she could make a quick getaway if something truly went wrong.
"…It's fine, right? Right? It really won't be an issue?" Sū ěr couldn't help but confirm one last time.
The pitch-black well erupted with cyan-green electric light after Jibril threw the crystal. Vessel-like patterns extended from the ground, looking like the veins of a leaf, tracing all the way to the massive Goshinboku and climbing its trunk.
Finally, the core of the Goshinboku became a brilliant light source. Cyan-green veins pulsed along its deeply furrowed bark, brightening and dimming in sync with the ancient well.
"Assuming that whether we came to this era or returned to the past, we relied on that energy that exists between the tangible and intangible, then if we need these abnormal reactions to occur more frequently, we simply need to increase that energy."
Think squinted with satisfaction at the changes. As someone who could control the entire spell and understand what every shift in the patterns meant, she could already detect the energy Jibril had mentioned—the kind only she could see before.
"If you can't understand it, just imagine it as a high-powered catalytic spell."
She summarized with a simple explanation. As Think words fell, Sū ěr clearly saw cloud-like mist billowing out from the well.
Within this illusory mist, he saw a scene completely different from the surroundings—a dense, thick forest.