What was stolen?
Gold?
Information?
Or perhaps—a name?
A legendary thief and a brilliant hacker of the present day.
When the two meet across the centuries, a secret comes to light.
Who is the thief?
Shirō Amakusa.
Francis Xavier.
One by one, the dead have returned to the modern world.
Almost no one knows exactly what the technology called HANGON AI is doing.
The next person Gensai Tsuchimikado chooses to summon is—
Ishikawa Goemon.
The legendary master thief.
To receive Goemon, Gensai seeks out a living man.
A genius hacker of the modern age.
He despises authority, laughs at rules, and cannot resist looking beyond any locked door.
To him, information is not something anyone should own.
If there is a lock, open it.
If there is a wall, cross it.
Just as Goemon once broke into locked storehouses, this man has broken the invisible locks of modern society.
Gensai chose him for a simple reason.
They were alike.
Their eras, their words, even the things they stole were different.
Yet something deep inside the two was uncannily similar.
And then—
the HANGON process begins.
Goemon’s memories pour into the man.
Places he should not know.
An age he never lived through.
Names he has never heard.
All of it settles within him as though it were his own memory.
At last, he opens his eyes.
But—
Here, one fact is revealed.
HANGON AI does not give a body to the dead.
It overlays the dead upon a body that already exists.
A vessel. A yorishiro.
A living human being becomes the host, and the dead person summoned by HANGON AI is anchored within them.
This is what Gensai calls—
“MAKAI TENSHO.”
Then what of Shirō Amakusa?
What of Xavier?
If they stand before us in those bodies now—
Having completed his transformation, the man looks into a mirror.
His face is no different from the one he had before.
But his eyes are smiling.
Is he Ishikawa Goemon?
Or a hacker who has acquired Goemon’s memories?
The man himself no longer feels any need to distinguish the two.
If there are two thieves, there is twice as much to steal.
But another question remains in this experiment.
Did Goemon steal this man’s body?
Did this man steal Goemon’s name?
Or—
Were they both stolen by Gensai Tsuchimikado?
[To be continued]