Natsume Chikei pushed open the front door.
What greeted him was the stuffy, stagnant air unique to a tiny three-tatami room—thick with dust and the scent of old wood.
When the windows stayed shut, staying in this cramped space always brought a tight, suffocating feeling to the chest.
The furniture inside was old.
Everywhere you looked, there were traces of time.
The walls were mottled with uneven patches of discoloration.
The tatami mats had several light-brown patches where they’d been hand-stitched back together.
Even this shabby three-tatami apartment cost 60,000 yen a month in rent.
And that price was already one of the cheaper options Chikei had been able to find in Shibuya.
He knew there were only 40,000 yen left in his wallet.
If he didn’t work hard, next month’s rent would have nowhere to come from.
“I’m home.”
“I’m home.”
The siblings’ voices rang out almost at the same time, echoing in the empty room that offered no third reply.
It had become a habit.
Ruri bent down and slipped off her small black leather shoes.
Her delicate feet, wrapped in pure white cotton socks, stepped onto the cold tatami.
She efficiently unpacked everything from the shopping bags one by one.
Discounted vegetables, limited-time sale bentos, buy-one-get-one boxed milk… and the brand-new bracelet her brother had given her.
First, she carefully organized the ingredients and put them all into the tiny mini-fridge.
Then she placed the discounted bentos into the microwave, clicked the timer on with a ka-chak, and set it for five minutes.
Once that was done, she opened the packaging of the new bracelet with barely contained excitement.
“Wait!”
At that exact moment, Natsume Chikei rushed forward and stopped her, his voice full of alarm.
“What are you doing so late at night?”
Chikei had been planning to go out tomorrow and buy an identical bracelet so he could secretly swap it out and take back the special “equipment” currently in his sister’s hands.
He never expected her to want to put it on the second they got home.
This had completely caught him off guard.
Ruri’s long eyelashes fluttered.
“I’m putting on the bracelet.”
“…I’m asking why you’re suddenly putting on a bracelet so late at night for no reason,” Chikei coughed.
“You just bought a new bracelet.
Of course I have to try it on,” Ruri said lightly, with the small, calculating tone unique to teenage girls.
“If it doesn’t fit right, I can always exchange it or something.”
“…That makes sense.”
Her reasoning was airtight and impossible to argue against.
Natsume Chikei was momentarily speechless.
Alarm bells were ringing in his head, but he had no excuse to stop her.
It looked like there was no way to collect this special equipment for the time being.
Fortunately, the bracelet was with his own little sister.
There were always more solutions than problems.
As long as he was patient, he would get his hands on it soon enough.
“Big brother, how does it look?
Does it suit me?”
Ruri shook her fair wrist.
The crystals on the bracelet sparkled brilliantly.
Her voice carried a trace of excitement and anticipation.
“It looks great!” Natsume Chikei nodded with a helpless smile.
Ruri’s face lit up with joy.
She couldn’t help but let her thoughts drift back to the past.
In her eyes, her brother used to be quite gloomy.
He would hole up in his room playing games all day, and his grades were terrible.
Even though their father had signed him up for all kinds of lessons—piano, calligraphy, painting, everything—he never showed any real talent.
You could say he was useless at everything except spending money.
That was when their father had basically given up on him.
He just sent money every month and let his son coast through school, planning to find him some position in the company later.
What Ruri never expected was this:
After the family went bankrupt and their father passed away, her brother had suddenly become mature—and a lot more handsome, too.
Now he was even going out to work part-time to support the household.
She never would have imagined that before.
Ding—
The microwave timer went off.
Ruri snapped out of her thoughts.
Wearing oven mitts, she carefully took out the two heated bentos and placed them on the table.
“Big brother, the bentos are ready.
You eat first.
If it’s not enough, you can have my portion too.
I’ll just make some instant noodles for myself.”
“No need.
One bento is plenty for me.”
Natsume Chikei took the bento and started eating.
While he ate, his left hand flipped open the special equipment he had obtained earlier—The Boy’s Sorrowful Diary.
He skimmed the first page and was surprised to find that the novel was actually handwritten.
Calling it a diary wouldn’t be wrong.
He just didn’t know why it had ended up in a second-hand bookstore.
The book wasn’t very long.
Natsume Chikei sat quietly in his seat and finished it in less than two hours.
The diary told the story of a high school student trapped in a small town by countless troubles.
He desperately wanted to break free and chase his dreams in Tokyo.
But the tangled web of human relationships and endless setbacks kept him firmly rooted in place.
In the end, his weak and indecisive personality wore down his will.
He could never escape the shackles of fate and was forced to accept his circumstances in despair.
He became part of the town he hated most… and became the kind of person he despised.
Reading it made Natsume Chikei feel deeply uncomfortable.
No wonder it was called The Boy’s Sorrowful Diary.
But thinking about it, he felt puzzled.
He couldn’t understand why The Boy’s Sorrowful Diary and The One-in-a-Thousand Bracelet counted as special equipment while everything else didn’t.
Was there some kind of pattern here?
For now, Natsume Chikei couldn’t figure it out, so he didn’t dwell on it.
There was still plenty of time.
Maybe he would understand later.
[The Boy’s Sorrowful Diary]
[Effect: After use, you can precisely recall a portion of painful memories and will never be able to forget them again.
(2 uses remaining)]
[Synthesis Condition: Requires at least three pieces of equipment of the same type]
[Description: That small town was the boy’s abyss, and the root of all his suffering.]
Chikei thought about it.
Although The Boy’s Sorrowful Diary could only be used to recall painful memories, with a little creativity, it could become a key that let him perfectly retrieve memories from his previous life.
After all, the entertainment in this world—novels, movies, anime, music—was very different from what he remembered.
He might be able to use this equipment to “reproduce” those unforgettable entertainment works from his past life.
And among the stories he remembered, there were quite a few classics with gripping plots and intense emotions.
The Devotion of Suspect X—that phenomenon-level bestseller that had once caused a massive sensation—was one of them!
When he tried using the diary’s ability, he was overjoyed to find that every single detail of the novel surged clearly into his mind, as if it had been welded into his brain and could never be forgotten again.
In that moment, he was incredibly excited.
In Japan, very few novels managed to break a million copies in sales.
And that was even rarer in the already niche mystery and suspense genre.
Yet Keigo Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X had broken through all of that and become one of the pillars of Japanese mystery fiction.
The moment it was released, its tightly woven, gripping plot exploded across the market.
Sales kept climbing.
It was quickly adapted into a popular TV drama and movie.
Even the overseas rights were fought over by foreign companies, leading to multiple different film and television adaptations.
Even across different cultural backgrounds, the core of The Devotion of Suspect X never lost its impact.
The adapted works achieved huge success in various countries.
To this day, the novel still felt fresh.
Its profound themes and complex, tangled plot still made readers’ hearts clench and left them sighing in regret.
Its enduring charm was proof of how extraordinary the content was.
The original author, Keigo Higashino, had used this single novel to win both the Best Mystery Novel Award and the Naoki Prize—two of the biggest honors in the field.
Winning those two awards meant he had received full recognition from professional readers and critics.
In Japan’s mystery community, those two awards were already the absolute pinnacle.
Even now, very few novels had managed to win both at the same time.
That alone showed just how popular this book was.
Natsume Chikei looked around the simple, cramped three-tatami room.
If he were living here alone, he could still endure it.
But he wasn’t alone anymore.
He and his sister were depending on each other.
The two of them squeezed into such a tiny space—it was unbearably stifling.
He wanted to give his sister a better life.
He wanted to redeem their old house.
He wanted to buy back the company that had gone bankrupt.
And to do any of that, he needed money.
If he published The Devotion of Suspect X, one book alone could probably let him achieve financial freedom while he was still in high school.
Even if he couldn’t buy back the company, he would definitely be able to redeem the old house that had once been worth over 100 million yen.