Chapter 42: Moonlight Island

Early the next morning, Ji Yi boarded the ferry bound for Moon Shadow Island.

People, ever since they started working, always feel like they never get enough sleep.

Ji Yi leaned against the railing and dozed off the entire way.

Moon Shadow Island was not very far, and the boat arrived shortly.

Upon reaching the community center, he found a group of people sleeping in the same room as a corpse.

Quite impressive. Even now, after having seen so much, Ji Yi still couldn't bring himself to sleep in the same room as a dead body at night.

It wasn't that he was scared; it was simply a matter of disgust and physical discomfort that made sleep impossible.

Of course, the only ones actually fast asleep were Kogoro Mouri and the island's elderly police officer.

Conan, Ran, and Seiji Asami recounted what had happened previously.

Basically, on the preceding day, Hideo Kawashima, a wealthy island resident running for mayor, had been drowned and then placed upon the legendary cursed piano.

At the same time, the killer had left a sheet of musical score at the scene.

Ji Yi felt a bit helpless because he was utterly terrible at deciphering codes.

This wasn't false modesty; he was genuinely hopeless at it. In his view, cryptographic puzzles were matters of pure luck.

If you happened to guess the exact codebook the creator had in mind, then congratulations; if you didn't, there was zero possibility of success.

Ciphers were never anything particularly high-tech. Despite how mystery novels loved to feature cryptographic themes, in reality, unless the perpetrator deliberately left clues about the codebook, cracking a cipher was as difficult as ascending to the heavens.

Turing had already proven that human effort alone is utterly helpless when it comes to breaking unknown ciphers.

Therefore, Ji Yi had no intention of wasting time on this musical score puzzle. If he remembered the solution, perhaps he would bother to interpret it, but unfortunately, he didn't remember a single thing.

However, does a lack of the killer's code mean the case cannot be solved?

Ridiculous.

The forensics unit finished inspecting the body, and their findings matched Seiji Asami's earlier autopsy results.

Seeing the medical examiner wrap up, the rest of the crew prepared to call it a day.

Ji Yi: ?

I only went out to rest for a few days, and you people are already slacking off? Give you three days without discipline and you'll be tearing down the roof tiles, is that it?

Is your salary really that easy to earn? Your crime scene investigation stops at just checking the body?

However, considering that Conan, Ran, and the others were genuinely exhausted and needed sleep, he held back his roar. Instead, he simply glared at the forensics team, who were getting ready to coast, and forced every single one of them back to inspect the piano and its surrounding environment.

Not long after, an officer who had crawled underneath the piano let out a startled cry, frightening the sleeping people nearby.

"Inspector! It's diacetylmorphine!"

Conan instantly snapped to attention. What on earth?

"It seems the Mouri family has gotten themselves tangled up in troublesome matters once again," Ji Yi said, looking at Kogoro.

Kogoro Mouri also turned serious. An ordinary murderer was one thing, but anything involving addictive substances was an entirely different ballgame.

As everyone knew, people dabbling in that trade were ruthless thugs.

"In that case, it seems the enduring legend about this piano being cursed was probably just a convenient cover for them to conceal narcotics," Ji Yi remarked.

Conan began to ponder: could this be an internal conflict within a narcotics smuggling syndicate?

Yet, that didn't make sense. Which drug ring engaged in internal purges and then purposely sent letters inviting detectives to the scene?

Wasn't that just increasing the difficulty level for themselves?

Confirming that the clues in his memory were correct, Ji Yi gave Seiji Asami a deep look, saying nothing for the moment.

First of all, how did this person manage to look so ambiguous between male and female?

Secondly, was what he doing really wrong?

Actually, if this were a different world line—say, the world line of the Chicago Police Department—Ji Yi would 100% support letting Seiji Asami walk. After all, nobody maintained a 100% clearance rate; if asked, the official answer would simply be that the killer was never found.

But this was Conan's world, and most importantly...

He remembered that after finishing everything, Seiji Asami had no desire left to live.

The author really loved shaping these "righteous" avengers focused solely on revenge in his early works to leave readers with lingering emotional grief. Fortunately, by the middle and later stages, clearly due to growing older and softening his heart, most killers weren't designed to evoke quite so much empathy.

Agatha Christie was truly the best—her murderers dutifully played the villains and almost always chose the promising, highly practical motive of killing for money.

Still, the necessary investigations had to be carried out.

Thus, at the Moon Shadow Island village office, Ji Yi summoned all thirty-eight villagers who had participated in the memorial service at the community center the previous day.

The interrogation work was, of course, outsourced to his subordinate stooges. Since he already knew who the killer was, why shouldn't he slack off?

Even so, he still needed to listen in. After all, while he only knew the identity of the murderer, the full truth of the drug trafficking operation was a bit hazy in his mind, and since he didn't want to solve riddles, he naturally had to rely on other methods.

"What did you say? Narcotics were hidden inside that cursed piano?" The current village chief, Tatsuji Kuroiwa, sprang to his feet upon hearing the news. "But, that's... that's the cursed piano..."

"Indeed. That's precisely why we're very eager to find out who started spreading the rumor about the piano being cursed, using it as a pretext to conceal narcotics," Ji Yi said, staring at the pointy-headed, bald man. With this level of political cunning, he was dabbling in drug trafficking? A little bit of pressure and he was already leaking?

This psychological fortitude wasn't even as good as a teenage gang delinquent from the other side of the ocean; those kids could easily walk into a police station and keep their mouths tightly shut.

Perhaps this was just the matchmaking ranking system of different servers?

As everyone knows, during an interrogation, if you demonstrate that you possess a fragile psychological threshold, you cannot blame the police for relentlessly pursuing you.

He pulled up a chair, sat down very close to Tatsuji Kuroiwa, and stared fixedly into the man's eyes. "I heard this piano once belonged to the late, famous pianist Keiji Aso, is that correct? And it wasn't until two years ago, when the former village chief Isamu Kameyama collapsed on the piano and died of a heart disease, that rumors about the piano being cursed gradually began to spread."

"I... I don't know..." Tatsuji Kuroiwa didn't dare meet his gaze.

"Well, I suppose not," Ji Yi said, acting as though he had given up, and stood straight up.

Before Tatsuji Kuroiwa could even release a sigh of relief, he heard Ji Yi instruct an officer, "Go bring Mr. Nishimoto in. I have some questions for him."

Tatsuji Kuroiwa drew a sharp breath, his footsteps stopping involuntarily, but a moment later, regaining his senses, he hurried out of the makeshift interrogation room anyway.

Ji Yi had already asked Conan about it: the previous day, upon hearing the Moonlight Sonata and discovering a corpse, this fellow had been in a state of absolute panic.

Clearly, he either knew the inside story or was a participant in the conspiracy. Either way, he was terrified right now.

Fear was a good thing; once someone was terrified, it became easy to extract a confession.

"Mr. Nishimoto," Ji Yi deliberately leaned in close to him, "I'd like to give you an opportunity right now."

"What opportunity?" Nishimoto looked at him nervously, his lips trembling.

"You still have a chance to confess everything," Ji Yi paused intentionally. "Why don't we start with the cursed piano from which addictive drugs were just recovered?"

Nishimoto accidentally locked eyes with Ji Yi for a fleeting second.

*He knows? How does he know?*

Nishimoto panicked.