Yuu had been around now for several days, and things weren't getting any easier.
"What do you mean, you want to visit temples outside the city?" Korin said, tiredly. "I can't leave the city. And to tell the truth, I wouldn't want to even if I could." It was late afternoon and his library shift was over. If the other two had noticed that the new assistant librarian's shifts coincided with Korin's, and that they never saw him without Korin around, they hadn't mentioned it.
After that disastrous attempt to tell Rou what was happening, Korin had decided not to let anyone know. It did sound fantastical, when you thought about it. He couldn't really blame Rou for thinking that. He hadn't raised it again, but neither had he denied it, or laughed it off as a joke. Something stubborn inside him didn't want to lie to Rou. When they'd passed each other in the corridors a couple of times, Rou had shot Korin that same worried look. Korin didn't know how he was going to fix that.
A side effect of having Yuu around was that he was getting more sensitive to people approaching. After the first person who had asked him point-blank if he was talking to himself, he became a lot more careful. If he heard footsteps, he didn't reply to Yuu's remarks. A couple of times he had thought he felt or heard someone coming, but when he had turned there was nobody there - and sometimes, he wondered if Yuu's presence was making him more sensitive in other ways. But he dismissed that as ridiculous. He didn't have any natural connection to the spirit world; it was just Yuu, and that only because of the pearl in his chest.
At least here, in his rooms, they could talk without people thinking Korin was insane. "How far will the connection let you go?" he said, absent-mindedly turning a page of the book he was reading. "You could probably reach a couple of the nearer ones before you have to return."
