Chapter 44, Chapter 43: A Pink Encounter
Life punched me.
I took the opportunity to sleep all day.
When Zhuge Tongzhi opened his eyes from the silence, the sky outside the room window was just beginning to lighten, and the sound of even breathing filled his ears.
The short-haired girl, now dressed in a more comfortable outfit, got out of bed and looked around in the dim moonlight filtering through the curtains. She realized she was back at the hotel where she had stayed when she arrived in Osaka.
However, it wasn't her own room. She looked at the long-haired girl sleeping soundly beside her, scratched her head somewhat embarrassedly, and said that she had promised not to wander off, but in the end, she had troubled Sister Xiaolan to take care of her again.
After gradually regaining his senses, he began to complain of drought.
With a sore throat, Zhuge Tongzhi stealthily lifted the covers and jumped out of bed. He glanced at the clean tabletop, hesitated between drinking tap water from the nearby tap and going out to find bottled water, and finally followed his heart and pushed open the door.
A frizzy head peeked out from the half-open door, looked around, and then met the gazes of a large and a small boy who had turned around at the end of the corridor after hearing the noise.
"Zhuge, you're awake." Conan walked over with Hattori Heiji beside him. The elementary school student, who had been dressed in gray, was now wearing a clean hooded sweatshirt. He reached out and pressed the girl's forehead. "The fever is gone."
"I'm here to get some water." Zhuge Tongzhi pointed to his throat, then ran barefoot to the vending machine and started fiddling with the coins. After the crisp sound of the coins rolling, there was a muffled thud. The girl squatted down and reached into the vending machine to get a bottle of water.
“There’s running water inside.” Conan watched the girl gulp down more than half a bottle of water and said helplessly, “You always insist on drinking bottled water.”
"Ha! I'm so thirsty." Zhuge Tongzhi, having drunk his fill, put down the bottle, wiped his mouth, and looked at Hattori Heiji, who was yawning widely, and asked, "What are you doing here so early?"
Before the two could answer, she rushed back to her room to find her phone, muttering in a breathy voice, "What time is it? How long have I been asleep?"
The girl turned on the screen, saw the date, paused for a moment, turned around, put on a pair of hotel slippers, and gently closed the door to Ran Mouri's room with her phone in hand.
She turned to Conan in the hallway and gave him a silent scream.
Is this already her third day in Osaka?
“You had a high fever all night, so it’s normal that you slept all day. You woke up earlier than the doctor expected,” Hattori Heiji said, rubbing his sleepy eyes. He then beckoned to the two children. “Let’s go inside and talk. It’s the middle of the night.”
Conan and Zhuge Tongzhi followed the dark-skinned high school student into the room that was originally where Kaito Kid and Conan slept together. After Kaito Kid returned the jewel and ran away, the room, for which they had paid for three days' rent, was occupied by Hattori Heiji.
Zhuge Tongzhi took a cup of hot water, wrapped himself in the blanket that was handed to him, sat down on the sofa, looked at the two people who were inexplicably active in the early hours of the morning, and asked, "What were you talking about just now?"
"My train ticket back to Tokyo is tonight, which means today is my last day in Osaka." Conan took out a familiar half-empty bottle of mineral water and placed it on the table, but Zhuge Tongzhi quickly recognized from the boy's solemn attitude that it was the half-empty bottle of baijiu (Chinese liquor) that had been given to him.
"Hmm, so?" she replied, puzzled. "If you're in a hurry, you can try going to Professor Agasa's house when you get back to Beika Town tonight."
"Kazuha and the others are going to visit Osaka Shrine together today." Hattori Heiji sat cross-legged on the bed, his black hair, which was messy, had been removed from his baseball cap. He sent a message to the girl who had been sleeping all day: "They said that I, you, and Kudo are all in danger this time, so we want to go and pray for everyone."
This did coincide with her earlier casual remark. Zhuge Tongzhi blinked, but what did this have to do with Lao Baigan?
Was there some special situation requiring Shinichi Kudo's appearance? She felt a slight tension rise within her. Had the Black Organization discovered something amiss? Were there other members present at the time?
"Ran feels guilty, thinking she didn't recognize that Kid was impersonating me in time, and that she didn't keep a close eye on you," Conan said in a deep voice, his eyes focused on the half-empty bottle of liquor on the table. "You've been running a fever on and off, and in the text message she sent me yesterday, she said she was very worried."
"Ah..." Zhuge Tongzhi felt relieved upon hearing this, as long as it wasn't a matter of his identity being exposed. "Do you want to turn back into Shinichi Kudo and go pray with Ran-nee?"
"Will doing this put her at ease?" She tilted her head and thought for a moment before asking, "But you're right next to her. You could talk to her at breakfast and comfort her. Besides, I'm awake now."
Everything is getting better, and the thriving atmosphere will soon lift people's spirits.
“Ah, that’s what my reason tells me.” Conan gave a faint smile, his eyes filled with complex emotions she couldn’t decipher, and said softly, “But the sense of security that ‘Edogawa Conan’ can give her is completely different from that of ‘Kudo Shinichi’.”
Zhuge Tongzhi paused for a moment, then subconsciously picked up the slowly cooling hot water in his hand and took a sip. With gulping sounds, the atmosphere between the three of them quieted down.
“Go if you want.” Hattori Heiji broke the silence, suggesting in a relaxed tone, “If you’re worried that people from that organization are still around, Kazuha and I can take you to a more secluded shrine.”
"No." Zhuge Tongzhi put down his water glass, shook his head and denied, "It's not that there are people nearby, but that I'm almost certain I'm being followed."
When Furuya Rei helped her up, she overheard bits and pieces of his conversation with Morofushi Kagemitsu. So it was quite obvious who fired a bullet at Ireland that threatened their safety on the rooftop that night.
So Morofushi Kagemitsu not only saw her grow larger, but also seemed unsurprised that she was Elju.
Instead of immediately killing her upon meeting her, Furuya Rei repeatedly confirmed her self-perceived 'identity' before choosing to lend a hand and help her, who was unable to move, leave the place.
Although she couldn't quite figure out the two people's attitudes, she was certain that having grown bigger and smaller and had direct contact with other organization members, she was now definitely on the list of people under close observation.
So, what are the chances that Conan and Heiji Hattori, who are facing Ireland with her, will be easily moved out of the observation range and be able to travel freely without any attention?
The answer is probably: zero.
"Conan, if you don't want to expose your identity, it's best not to appear as Shinichi Kudo for the time being." Zhuge Tongzhi lowered his eyes to look at his reflection in the cup, his dark eyes staring directly at his mirror image, as if trying to see something from the dim water.
The girl, dressed in a loose bathrobe, had a pale face after her fever subsided. Her eyelashes, like folded bird wings, covered her downcast eyes. She said, "If you don't intend to tell Sister Xiaolan everything, then believe her."
"I believe in her resilience, courage, and strength."
Zhuge Tongzhi exhaled, disturbing the surface of the water in his cup, and looked at Conan, who was also looking up at him. "If you can't do it, then tell her everything, or do you not trust her to keep your secret?"
"Of course I don't distrust Ran." Conan rested his head on his hands, leaned back on the sofa, and looked out the open window at the sky where the morning glow was gradually appearing. He said, "I just don't want her to worry about me. Even if I told her all this, it would only make one more person worry about me."
"And if she finds out, she'll definitely want to help me gather clues without even realizing it." He closed his eyes and smiled. "That idiot who's never good at lying will definitely get himself into trouble."
"What an arrogant decision," Zhuge Tongzhi coldly commented. "In that case, don't rush to drink the baijiu. Gin and the others may not have left here yet."
“Kaito’s gone didn’t help you play Shinichi…” she said, shrugging, but her voice suddenly stopped when she turned her head and saw Hattori Heiji scratching his cheek. After thinking for a moment, she added seriously, “At least I can’t be as similar to him.”
"I feel like you're implying something." Hattori Heiji revealed his crescent-shaped eyes as he looked at Zhuge Tongzhi, and the girl immediately shook her head like a rattle-drum.
I wasn't talking about you.
I'm talking about a guy who tries to look like Shinichi Kudo by whitening his skin, but then his Kansai accent gives him away when he meets someone!
"Well, don't worry, Kudo." Heiji Hattori casually looked away, glancing at Conan who had already put the liquor back into his backpack, and said confidently, "I will definitely help you protect your identity."
Ah, right, right, right. Zhuge Tongzhi picked up his water glass and drank, covering his strange expression. He thought to himself, "I'll call you 'Kudo Kudo' every time we meet, you little elementary school student."
She could already foresee the daily routine of the two detectives working together in the future.
This is probably a real-life offline practice of "One Hundred Interpretations of 'Kudo' and Homophones".
It's a good opportunity for her to learn how to use Japanese flexibly.
Zhuge Tongzhi put the empty water glass on the table, jumped off the sofa, and barely managed to lift the kettle with his two weak arms. He only managed to lift half of it before Hattori Heiji took it from him with his long arm and neatly filled the water glass for the sick child.
"Thank you." She took the water glass and thanked him politely.
"It's nothing. I should thank you for carrying me all the way back then." Hattori Heiji looked at the elementary school student in front of him, who was quietly drinking water with his head down, and felt that the other person was now very different from the image of the burly man who had been kicked down that night.
"It's okay, if I don't go to rescue you, it'll be Conan who does." She waved her hand dismissively. "The only difference is that I'll be able to rescue you faster, don't worry about it."
None of those present were particularly concerned with etiquette, and the life-or-death moment they experienced together that night was simply glossed over verbally, but deeply buried in their hearts.
"Looks like I woke up pretty early, since we're going to the shrine tomorrow." Zhuge Tongzhi changed the subject, saying, "If we have enough time, are there any large churches in Osaka?"
"Are you going to visit all the gods and Buddhas?" Conan thought of the other party's 'dirty' remarks and didn't understand why Zhuge Tongzhi was so insistent on the fact that he had memory problems.
"No, that's not it, but it doesn't conflict with my wish to go pray for blessings." Zhuge Tongzhi spread his hands and explained, "Didn't I tell you that I saw some fragmented images?"
"Hmm." Conan's expression turned serious when it came to the memory of ale.
“Do you remember the color chart I showed you before? I still don’t know what it’s used for.” Zhuge Tongzhi gestured a square shape in the air with his hand, then drew a huge circle in front of his eyes and said, “But yesterday I saw a very, very large circular stained glass window.”
"Although the two may not be related, at least the colors are equally rich." She thought of the magnificent visual impact she had at that time, and the disorientation brought about by the overlapping colors.
"Those giant stained-glass windows that you'd find in Gothic architecture are now mostly found in churches."
The short-haired girl said to Conan and Heiji Hattori, who were deep in thought, "I want to investigate the nearest church. The church staff would probably know more about this."
"Yes, you're probably talking about rose windows, which are usually only found in churches." Conan, who wasn't familiar with Osaka, looked at Hattori Heiji, who was raising his head beside him. This guy was from Osaka.
After staring at the ceiling for a while, the dark-skinned high school student looked down at them and said, "I remember there's only one Gothic church in Osaka, and it doesn't have the kind of giant stained-glass window you're talking about."
"It's nothing, I just wanted to try my luck, maybe I'll discover something." Zhuge Tongzhi said that he didn't even know what the color card meant, he just connected them according to his intuition.
"Then let's go to the shrine with Kazuha and the others first, and then go to the church later." Hattori Heiji made the final decision and flopped back onto the bed, yawning widely. "Can we go to sleep now? It's still a long time before we have to get up."
"Then I'll head back now." Zhuge Tongzhi pulled the blanket off his body and put it back on the sofa. As he pressed the doorknob, he thought for a moment, then turned back to Conan and said, "When I drank baijiu and grew bigger, my heart hurt so much that I felt like I was going to die. It was the same when I turned back."
"Just to be safe, don't drink it secretly." After saying that, she pressed the doorknob in her hand, slipped on her slippers, and quietly walked through the empty corridor back to Ran Mouri's side.
However, after sleeping all day, he was not sleepy at all. Zhuge Tongzhi turned over and shrank into the quilt. Just like when he was a student and secretly played on his phone to avoid his parents, he slowly took out his phone.
After checking her email inbox, which was filled with spam messages, she was unsure whether to feel relieved or uneasy that Morofushi Kagemitsu hadn't texted her. She could only suppress her guilty heart and swipe away from the message page.
After the other party returned from the United States, they even told her not to wander around.
Sigh, this is so difficult. Zhuge Tongzhi sighed silently in the warm blankets, casually pressing buttons to flip through the application interface, when he suddenly found an unfamiliar application he had never seen before in a folder.
The software icon is a simple line drawing of a retro-style ship.
Illuminated by the dim light of the phone screen, his dark eyes squinted. He pressed a button to log into the software. The phone screen switched to a new page, displaying a verification question above the moving waves.
"Who are you? "
Zhuge Tongzhi entered her full name and pressed the enter button, but an error message appeared. She thought for a moment and then entered her surname and given name separately, but the error message still appeared.
What about the ale? She stared intently at the changes on the screen and pressed the enter button, but it was still an error.
What the heck? Zhuge Tongzhi was speechless for a moment. Did she have some other hidden identity?
The girl, who had tried everything to get through the game, pouted, moved her finger to the exit button, logged out of the software, and started trying to uninstall this strange software.
Unable to uninstall; the delete key is unselectable. Zhuge Tongzhi pressed the grayed-out delete key several times in a row, but the system remained unresponsive.
After trying refresh, restart, and tapping the phone to no avail, Zhuge Tongzhi reluctantly opened the page again, only to find the same problem reappearing on the screen:
"Who are you? "
"I answered correctly when Bourbon asked me, but that answer doesn't seem to suit your taste," the girl, sweating profusely under the covers, thought to herself. As she pondered this, a female voice suddenly rang in her ear:
'Tong. '
Huh? Zhuge Tongzhi gripped his phone tightly for a moment, trying to dig deeper into his memories, but found nothing.
Well, let's give it a try.
She typed the Romanized form of the character "桐" on her phone's keypad and then pressed the Enter key to confirm.
As several Roman letters were transformed into a single word, the input box closed and disappeared like a long scroll painting, and the regularly repeating waves behind the screen became turbulent, with electronic waves splashing against the screen.
The data points formed a line of black text that appeared in the center of the screen, written in English:
Noah's Ark, set sail.
The black text quickly collapsed into a bunch of data points and fell into the sea, while a retro-style giant ship with a considerable waterline slowly sailed into the center of the screen, making the small phone screen look cramped.
Zhuge Tongzhi blinked, watching a speech bubble appear above the vintage-style giant ship. Inside, written in Japanese, was: 'Good evening, Tong, this is Noah's Ark.'
The text filled in the speech bubble was quickly broken down into data points and then reformed into new text:
"I'm so glad to see you've recovered. I've already processed the CCTV footage from the day before yesterday, so please don't worry."
Hiroki asked me to give his regards to Sister Tong.
Wow.
Zhuge Tongzhi rubbed his eyes, crawled out of the thinning blanket and took a few deep breaths before quickly pulling them back in. His hands began rapidly typing on the buttons.
In the quiet room, time ticked by silently, and the light filtering through the curtains grew brighter. The first group of people to go out and buy breakfast gradually appeared on the street outside the window.
The early morning has passed, and the morning sun is rising high in the sky.
…
After washing up, packing, meeting up, and storing their luggage, the group, led by Hattori Heiji and Toyama Kazuha, went to the nearby Osaka Shrine.
Ran Mouri held Zhuge Tongzhi firmly with one hand and Conan tightly with the other. She was in a very light mood after talking to Shinichi Kudo on the phone. She turned around and chatted with Sonoko Suzuki and Kazuha Toyama.
The two fake children, under tighter supervision, reluctantly followed Ran Mouri's steps, walking with the girl under a series of bright red torii gates. Zhuge Tongzhi looked at these novel buildings with curiosity.
As she was examining the thick red lacquer on the wood, which had become increasingly heavy with the passage of time, two distinctive male voices suddenly entered her ears.
"Jinpei, let's go pray for good fortune together with Kenji-chan!"
The speaker spoke in a light, cheerful voice with a hint of coquetry, and the distinctive way of addressing the speaker immediately revealed the speaker's identity.
"We haven't returned the amulets from last year to the shrine yet, have we?" The voice that responded was very magnetic, with a hint of helplessness and a sigh. "Didn't we agree to come back after the New Year this year?"
"Hey, Officer Hagiwara and Officer Matsuda?" Ran Mouri let go of one hand and waved at the two figures in bright pink shirts in front of her.
Wearing matching casual shirts, Kenji Hagiwara and Jinpei Matsuda stopped and turned around. They saw a large group of people walking towards them. They were a little surprised to see familiar faces and raised their hands in response.
"Are you two officers here for a vacation?" Ran Mouri asked with a smile as she walked up to the two officers in regular uniforms, holding the hands of her two children.
"It's not exactly a vacation," Matsuda Jinpei said, one hand in his pocket and the other scratching his head. "I was transferred here for a special mission."
"The specifics must be kept secret, Ms. Mori." Kenji Hagiwara put a finger to his lips and winked suggestively at the group. "But we are indeed on vacation right now."
Ran Mouri nodded in understanding.
Are they here on a mission? Conan quickly connected the unusual scale of the explosion that night and immediately understood the job duties of the two police officers on the field.
That night, one evacuation route was not affected by the bomb, which is why the evacuation was completed quickly.
He exchanged a glance with Zhuge Tongzhi, who was also deep in thought, and looked at the two excellent riot police officers. It must have been the public security officers who made the arrangements.
Kenji Hagiwara was already chatting happily with Ran Mouri, talking about which attractions they had visited yesterday and sharing some photos he had taken with everyone.
The Matsuda Jinpei figures inside are particularly, well, brightly colored.
After looking at the photos, Zhuge Tongzhi couldn't help but glance at Matsuda Jinpei, who was dressed in bright pink.
"What bright colors!" Ran Mouri smiled happily and praised, "The photo is very beautiful."
"Right, right? But Jinpei really dislikes it." Hagiwara Kenji pretended to wipe his eyes and looked reproachfully at Matsuda Jinpei, who was speechless beside him.
"Ha, entrusting my suitcase to you to pack because of a mission was the worst decision I ever made," Matsuda Jinpei said coldly. His sullen face, even with its grumpy expression, completely suppressed the cute colors of his outfit, giving him a cool look that was different from Hagiwara Kenji's cute and relaxed style.
It's a different style of Matsuda Jinpei, and it looks good.
After thoroughly appreciating Hagiwara Kenji, Zhuge Tongzhi secretly gave him a thumbs up, thinking to himself:
Well done, Yan Er Jiang!
-----------------------
Author's Note: Zhuge: What, Noah's Ark?
Let me study it carefully.
…
Q: What happens when Matsuda asks Hagi to pack his suitcase?
A: Then you'll be infected by the "Second-Year Graduate Student Virus"!
…
Lots of irrigation, hehehe
happy!
Mwah————
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