Albert hires Kyouma to investigate the drowning of reclusive mystery novelist Shijuro Sakaki in his residence at a remote hotel on Lake Yasogami, infamous for ghost sightings. Mira becomes unnerved, seeing a ghostly figure though there is no matching record in her logs. Kyouma visits the dam and a memorial for those who died in the flooding of the artificial lake 21 years ago, while Mira scans the books in Sakaki's study — gruesome ghost stories which further unnerve her. Kyouma confronts Albert who reveals that protesting students took a Numbered Coil to demonstrate that the hydro-electric dam would soon be obsolete, and expeditions to recover the Numbers all met with death. Sightings and deaths stopped a decade ago when Sakaki bought the hotel, but now the ghosts have returned. Koorogi reconstructs a household robot's memory, showing spectral figures attacking Sakaki, and suggests their Dimension W materialization resulted in more data than could be stored, overwriting fragments in real time. Meanwhile, visually reconstructing Yasagami village, Mira finds herself trapped in a vision with the past layered over the present, and is attacked by a ghost. A journalist is found drowned in a hotel van, and three other guests kidnap Sakaki's grieving sister, Marisa. Mira is bound and looked over by Shiro Kamiki, who reveals that in Mira's present he called himself Shijuro Sakaki.