Related Cases (13)
Related Novels (8)
Related Chapters (9)
The Forty Faces
Words: 3156 · Source Novel:: God's Abandoned Shadows
Three more bodies surface across Veridion, each killed during different carnival performances—a puppeteer's show, a masquerade ball, and a fire-dancing ritual. Every victim was a prominent figure in the city's financial elite, mirroring the original Deaton v. Stephens securities fraud case. Graves develops the radical profile: the perpetrators are not a single killer but a temporary collective—ordinary citizens who, when submerged in the carnival's ecstatic atmosphere, enter a shared dissociative state where individual morality dissolves. He names this phenomenon "the Forty Faces," after an old Veridion folk tale about a demon that wears the faces of an entire crowd. Marchetti is skeptical, but when a witness describes participating in a murder without conscious memory, the profile gains terrifying credibility. Graves realizes he is no longer hunting a person but a psychological contagion.
The Erased Man
Words: 2984 · Source Novel:: Data Abyss
Ryo Takeda, once a star quant at a Shin-Yokohama asset firm, now lives in a cramped studio after being convicted of insider trading—a frame job by his former boss, Kenji Kuroda, who now runs a secretive US-Japan hedge fund. Ryo’s plea for reinstatement of his financial analyst license is rejected by the Securities Commission, confirming his “status” as a pariah. That night, he learns that his only friend from the old office, a junior trader, has jumped from a bridge after heavy losses. Ryo salvages the friend’s encrypted trading logs and finds anomalous timestamp clusters—the first thread of a manipulation scheme.
The Architect of Ruin
Words: 2247 · Source Novel:: The Ghost of Phoenix Fund
Hana’s ghost infiltrates Ren’s dreams, feeding him leaked documents and secret recordings. Driven by profound sympathy for the dead woman, Ren publishes a series of damning articles against Daitō Securities, triggering public outrage. Hana watches with cold satisfaction as the firm’s executives squirm. Yet, the ghost notices that every time Ren’s compassion for her swells, she becomes more solidly tethered to the living world, unable to move on. A rival financial analyst, Koji Samejima, seems immune to the sympathy trap and begins investigating Hana’s own past, uncovering a hidden act of complicity.
The Indigo Ledger
Words: 1783 · Source Novel:: The Ghost of Phoenix Fund
Hana Okuda, the late CFO of Yamato Foods, speaks from a liminal void. She recounts how Daitō Securities sold her company the Phoenix Infrastructure Fund, guaranteeing absolute safety. When the fund collapsed, Yamato Foods faced ruin, and Hana was found dead in her office—an apparent suicide. Now a disembodied voice, she claims she was murdered by the firm’s lies and vows to use a young journalist, Ren Ishihara, to expose the truth. But her narration is laced with contradictions; she remembers dying twice, and the readers’ pity begins to form a palpable chain around her spectral form.
The Mouth of the Whale
Words: 2956 · Source Novel:: Scents of the Fraudulent
Dawn brings no rescue, only a foghorn that announces the arrival of a boat. The killer descends, now limping heavily, and attempts to burn the villa. Hoshino follows the reek of gasoline to the boathouse, where the final confrontation unfolds. He delivers a monologue—not of justice, but of masculine reckoning—detailing how Shinmyo Securities groomed entire pension funds, how the Financial Supervisory Service’s inspectors became mules for false documents. The killer, revealed as Park Tae-seop’s fixer, laughs and admits the murder was just a “cleaning cost.” Hoshino, gripping a boat hook, uses the echo of the lapping water to strike precisely, impaling the fixer’s shoulder. As police sirens finally pierce the fog, Hoshino kneels by the dying man and inhales deeply, memorizing the scent of confession mixed with seawater. He knows the true mastermind, a shadowy vice minister, will smell this death on him and come calling.