The Troubles of Miss Nicola the Exorcist: Volume 3 [Parts 1 to 8] by Ito Iino

Author:Ito Iino
Language: eng
Format: epub

3

The duo had to the girls’ bathroom on the fourth floor, where the specialized classrooms were all lined up in one corridor.

Nicola wriggled out of her ballgown in the cubicle at the very back, where the last of the Seven Wonders was located—“Red paper, blue paper.” As she untied the laces that held her corset tight, she hurled a question at Char through the cubicle wall.

“Say... It was you who combined the school’s ghost stories together to make the Seven Wonders, wasn’t it, Char?”

Indeed, the tradition of counting Seven Wonders could be traced back to Honjo in Edo. These stories could manifest as urban legends or school ghost stories. In Japan, the phrase “Seven Wonders” referred to a form of supernatural tales.

When Japanese people talk of “wonders,” they did not put them in groups of four or six, but seven. They regarded the term as synonymous with ghost stories or phenomena that defied explanation.

Conversely, the concept of having Seven Wonders of the World also existed outside Japan. But the intended meaning was just a little different from what it was in Japan.

People always assumed it referred to seven colossal buildings from the ancient world, such as pyramids and temples. When this foreign concept of “wonders” was spoken of in Japan, it used a liberal translation of the concept of the idea were already familiar with. Yet it could have had a more direct translation like “stunning landscapes” or “things one should hold in awe.”

The Western concept of “wonders” differed from the Japanese concept of the Seven Wonders from the very beginning.

In other words, it wasn’t easy to imagine the schema Japan had in place of equating Seven Wonders with scary stories emerging all by themselves in a world based on the Western world.

For this reason Nicola thought someone versed in Japanese culture must have initiated a series of ghost stories called the Seven Wonders.

Char responded in the most casual manner imaginable.

“Hmm? Oh, yeah, yeah. I started spreading the rumor, saying, ‘You know, I’ve heard that this academy has a bunch of scary stories called the Seven Wonders. I’ve only heard the second one about a doppelgänger and the seventh, the story about red paper and blue paper. I don’t know the others.’ Something like that.”

The reason for the doppelgänger story was told so Char could rear his own familiar from zero. But he spread the “Red paper, blue paper” to keep people away from the rear cubicles in the fourth-floor bathrooms, where Char and Emma changed clothes to swap places.

Think that’s right, thought Nicola.

“Now, the reason I made it Seven Wonders.” Char continued, “If a whole bunch of scary stories spread as a result of the rumors I spread, cleaning up after them would be a real pain in the butt. On that point, there wouldn’t be any more than the upper limit of seven I set from the start, would there?”

It seemed the number had been the result of Char showing consideration toward Nicola, in his own way. But the form his consideration had taken was not quite up to scratch.

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