CHAPTER 2: SILENT DESIRE

♉ Taurus – Victim suffocated in gold – "Took nothing, left only an empty ring."

1

The room was so cold that Rei's breath turned into pale clouds in the air, despite the mild sunlight outside. But it wasn’t the weather — it was the gold.

The entire room seemed gilded: golden walls, a dappled reflective floor, even the toppled chair was coated in a thin gold layer. A world unmoving, dazzling like the dream of someone obsessed with material things — or consumed by them.

In the center of the room, a middle-aged man’s body leaned against a wide-open safe. His face was purplish-blue, no visible wounds, but his hands were clenched — as if unwilling to let go.

> “Suffocated by inhaling heated metal vapor. But the furnace has no residual heat. It’s as if… it operated just for a few minutes, only to kill,” the investigator whispered before stepping away, leaving Rei alone.

He looked around. Everything was unnervingly still.

Nothing was stolen from the room. The gold was still here — even more ostentatiously displayed than usual. And the only thing not made of gold… was a ring lying on the floor, near the body.

Rei knelt, using tweezers to pick it up. The ring was hollow — no gem, no name. Inside, a small symbol burned into the metal in charred black ink:♉Taurus.

2

That evening, Rei sat in a small café in Ebisu. He opened his laptop and reviewed the victim's data: Watanabe, a veteran goldsmith and jewelry store owner, famed for his ability to "feel metals" as if they were alive.

No wife or children. No close friends. No debts.

He suffocated in his own vault of gold — a room with no camera, no second exit, and no sign of struggle.

“Not robbed. Not tortured. No escape.”

“Just forced to… die with what he loved most.”

Rei opened the metal case retrieved from the scene. Inside: the hollow ring.

He raised it to the light. Something about the outer edge...

Using a magnifying glass, he spotted a faint, spiraling inscription nearly worn away:

欲と静 (Desire – and – Stillness)

An old hypnotic technique. A curse conveyed through symbols.

3

Near midnight, Rei returned to the golden room. He asked the police for the infrared heat map logs. Only one burst of heat had been recorded — lasting three minutes — from the safe.

He carefully examined inside the safe. There was a small crescent-shaped indentation, like a spot where a gem had once rested in the ring.

“The killer didn’t want to steal — they wanted to return something.”

“A gift, perfect, yet missing its soul.”

And now, the one who kept that gift had been consumed by the very thing he’d accumulated all his life.

Rei glanced one last time around the room. Gold covered everything — but the human heart had been hollowed out.

4

Back home, Rei pinned the Taurus ♉ ring onto an inverted Zodiac map on the wall. Two symbols now glowed: ♈ and ♉.

Just as he placed the ring down, his phone vibrated.

An anonymous message, like before:

“True value lies not in the hands of the holder. ♉”

He clenched his fingers slightly. The chill of the metal still lingered. As if something was seeping in — not from the outside, but from within.