Conan ignored him. He knelt by the water and saw it: a second rope, frayed, leading deeper into the pond. Attached to it was a stone lantern—and tangled in the chain, a man’s glasses.
He was thinking about the Kappa .
“What’s going on here?!”
The mist over the pond began to lift.
Conan’s mind raced. The Kappa legend said the creature pulled victims into the water by their ankles. But the ropes told a different story. One rope to anchor a body. Another to pull a trap.
“He was already in the rain when he wrote this,” Conan murmured.
Or rather, the man who had claimed to see one—and then vanished. Detective Conan Episode 377
Conan’s breath caught. His hand went to his watch.
The rain over Tōno City didn’t fall so much as seep—into coats, into cobblestones, into the very legends that clung to the valleys like morning mist. Conan Edogawa stood at the window of the small ryokan, watching droplets race down the glass. Behind him, Ran and Kogoro argued about dinner.
But Conan wasn’t listening.
The smears were uneven. Some letters had bled more than others. That meant they were written after the page had gotten wet.
“No,” Conan said quietly. “It’s the living who do that.”
The victim was a folklorist named Kenji Tono. He had been researching local yōkai legends, particularly the water imp known as the Kappa. Three nights ago, he had told his wife he was going to the pond to “record the truth.” He never came back. Conan ignored him
Suzuki lunged—but Conan was faster. A dart from his watch. The detective slumped, and moments later, Kogoro’s voice boomed from the shadows (drawn by Ran, who had followed Conan).