Mentioned Characters: Sanae, Kanako

"Moriya Shrine has deep ties to snakes and frogs, and since we're up in the mountains, I've always been pretty used to wild animals too. So I bet I wouldn't hesitate even for a second if I had to deal with one. Come to think of it, I feel like Lady Kanako once mentioned something about deer and the Underworld. I think it was about an old friend of hers or something." Sanae had never given much thought to the history of her hometown―Shinano, now called Nagano―or to the origins of Moriya Shrine. She'd always been more of a science-and-math person than a history buff, after all. Not that she hadn't heard the stories. She'd been told them plenty of times, and had seen and read about them too. It's just that if something didn't grab her interest, it went in one ear and out the other.

Prolonged Incidents According to one theory, incidents become prolonged because those trying to resolve them aren't strong enough. But the opposite can be just as true. Having too much power can backfire just as easily, sabotaging the very resolution it's meant to bring about. Every incident is believed to follow a set route to its resolution, and deviating from that route means the end is never reached.

The Prolonged Relinquished Ownership Incident When ownership of the land is relinquished, the spirits lurking around rise up and flood the area. he bond between land and spirits can be quite hard to understand, especially for people of the modern era. At best, most people are familiar with the idea of earthbound spirits, and nothing more. But the history tying spirits to the land runs deep, and it's still common practice to hold a ground-purification ceremony before constructing any buildings. Homes are built above the ground, but countless dead rest below it. Paying respect to ancestors, laying the dead to rest, and a family's prosperity are deeply intertwined. Moriya Shrine is no exception and has a history of its own. Sanae might run off to resolve incidents like it's nothing more than an errand, but her family's history runs just as long and deep.

EX Beings The "EX" stands for "Extended." Further research is needed into how a being acquires the EX Factor, and what specific changes it brings about. So far, it's known that hair, believed to hold a being's spiritual essence, tends to change first. Youkai, broadly defined as spiritual life forms, often undergo changes in physique as well.

Sanae Kochiya has never been much of a history buff, but she has always secretly liked it whenever Moriya Shrine came up in her school's local history lessons. Now that she was digging into it with that memory fresh in her head, she noticed all sorts of things that she'd never picked up on back when it hadn't mattered to her. One of her ancestors in the medieval period sounded like a true samurai or maybe a ninja. Either way, Sanae figured it was worth looking into further. If an ancestor of hers really had been a samurai or a ninja, that talent might have been passed down to her too.