Chapter 15 Profound Mystery

By now Ma En was hungry, and he had no intention of continuing to study the strange book and its strange characters. Until the job was settled, he couldn't think of anything urgent to do beyond adjusting to life in Japan. Before word came from the school, he could treat these days as vacation. The new position would demand real effort when it arrived — not as easy as this. He'd done well enough at the post office back home, but he wasn't naive enough to think that alone would carry him through a new job in a foreign country.

So rest was necessary.

He finished the cold water and poured himself a cup of warm water, but somehow felt no warmth from it. Not cold, exactly — just an absence of warmth. Before his mind could draw a line from that detail to the strangeness he'd been experiencing, he cut the thought off. He wasn't abandoning his imagination. He simply recognized that in his current state, paranoia would do more harm than good. He needed to rebuild a stronger mental defense — to make sure that when real crisis arrived, his psyche could bear the weight.

He'd prepared for this. He just hadn't expected to need it so soon. But facts didn't wait for expectations.

All those preparations that must have looked insane to anyone watching — they'd been the right call. Ma En thought this calmly.

Since finishing elementary school, he'd been testing and studying his own psychological development. Childhood science books had introduced him to the basics of psychological research; on his own time, he'd worked through the referenced literature, the expanded readings, the case studies. He'd had no formal training, no teacher. But professional psychologists built their frameworks for the general population. His framework served an audience of one.

The subject of the experiment was himself. The research target was himself. The application, the theory — all himself.

He couldn't say how many mistakes he'd made along the way, or how his skills stacked up against trained professionals. He had no interest in the comparison. What he had, after more than a decade of accumulated work, were ten diagnostic questionnaire sets designed to assess his own psychological, mental, and personality states — and ten corresponding correction sets to address whatever the diagnostics revealed. Self-examination, self-correction, entirely self-sufficient. All to keep his defenses above the threshold he'd set for himself.

Now was the time to use them. He'd just woken from a nightmare, stomach empty, body and mind at their weakest. That was precisely when the subconscious came through most clearly — when testing was most accurate and correction most effective.

He pulled the file folder from the bottom shelf. Drew one questionnaire set at random, like pulling a lot. The ten sets hadn't been designed with any particular sequence in mind; he didn't need to complete all of them. Even the choices he made while selecting and answering were built into the diagnostic framework.

Each set ran between two hundred and four hundred questions. The sheer volume was itself a test — what he could finish, what he couldn't, which questions he answered and which he skipped. All meaningful.

The judgment process and the correction process were complex — not something that could be done in a few hours. But rough preliminary adjustments could yield approximate results within an hour. That had been his assumption when designing the system. This was the first real-world application; the results would have to prove themselves.

Half an hour on the diagnostic questionnaire. Half an hour on self-assessment and selecting the correction set. Another hour completing the corrections. Then he put down his pen.

The process wasn't finished. The next step was solving several difficult math problems to verify that his logical thinking was at peak activity before tackling the remaining work. But his body sent a signal he couldn't ignore: he needed food. The final stage would be grueling, and attempting it on an empty stomach would only make things worse.

In his research, each phase — testing, correction, reconstruction — called for a different physiological state. In an ideal world, no level of precision would be too much. But conditions were never ideal.

Ma En didn't chase perfection. When the body spoke that loudly, ignoring it only meant more suffering later.

He straightened his clothes in the mirror, reached for his black umbrella, and turned toward the door. That was when the knocking started.

The sound hit him as wrong. Strange. It didn't spread the way knocking should — muffled and diffuse through a door panel. This sound moved. It crawled, snakelike, threading through gaps into the room, sliding along the walls with a trajectory that felt deliberate. Alive. He followed the path with his eyes and saw something outside the side window — a shadow. Shapeless, floating. Not quite the outline of any object he could name. It drifted like something that breathed.

As he watched, the shadow seeped through the glass. It crawled along the floor. And now the sound — what should have been knocking — seemed to come from it, from the thing on the ground. Ma En didn't believe that was really happening. It read more like an illusion, a trick of psychology. He searched his own calm and found not a trace of panic.

He stood still. Watched. And then the strangeness bled out of it. The shadow resolved into ordinary reflections — furniture, angles, light from the city flickering against glass. The knocking came again. Normal this time.

Why not ring the doorbell? The thought crossed his mind.

He shifted the black umbrella from left hand to right. Gripped it tight. Released the safety catch. He might be overreacting — he was aware of that possibility. But everything he'd experienced in the past few days functioned as a warning, and he couldn't afford to be careless. Tension gathered at the base of his spine, a cold current rising. Different from the quiet stillness with which he'd watched the shadow. Something had changed. This feeling reminded him of the atmosphere on nighttime streets and in pitch-dark stairwells after he'd obtained the Seven Transmutations of the Profound Mystery Records.

The associations flashed through his mind and were gone. He paused at the door for one second, then looked through the peephole.

Empty corridor. The fisheye lens warped the scene into something from another world. He'd looked through peepholes countless times in his life, but never with this crawling sensation across his skin. He still couldn't confirm that anything was out there. Part of him wondered if he was just scaring himself.

The corridor was truly empty. No figure, no living thing, no trace of anyone having come or gone. And precisely because there was nothing — it felt wrong. Someone had knocked. Ma En hadn't heard retreating footsteps. Was one second enough for a person to silently leave the peephole's field of view? He trusted his senses. He'd surveyed the environment on both sides of the door in advance. Two possibilities: either the knocker was genuinely that fast — or it wasn't a person.

Either answer was enough to rattle him. But he found himself hoping for the second.

The knocking came again. Ma En kept his eye pressed to the peephole. Nothing approached the door. And yet the knocking was definitely at his door.

He waited.

The peephole went black.

His vision lurched — something was blocking the lens. He didn't blink. The next instant, an outline resolved.

It locked eyes with Ma En.

Another eye. Flooded with red veins. The whites were grotesquely oversized, and the faintly luminous pupil reflected — his own back. Himself, standing on this side of the door, peering through the peephole. As though the eye were watching him from behind.

Ma En didn't flinch. Didn't turn his head. He could still feel that the eye was in front of him — outside the door, not behind him. If he turned, something bad would happen. He had no proof of this. Only instinct. And in a situation that defied all explanation, where he couldn't even be sure this wasn't a hallucination — instinct was all he had.

The innate sensitivity. The years of deliberate training. This was what they'd given him.

Now was the time to find out if any of it worked.

He held his ground, staring back through the peephole. His wavering pulse forced itself cold. And from beneath the chill and the fear — joy surfaced.

Catch it!

The thought detonated. His left hand shot out — covert, fast — and closed on the door handle. But the eye was already changing: in the pupil, his reflection vanished. Then the pupil itself disappeared, leaving only bloodshot whites. Then the whites dissolved, and there was nothing. Just darkness. A void.

Ma En abandoned the handle. He kicked the door open — hard — aiming to slam whatever was there with the panel. No impact. The door swung through empty air.

Outside: nothing. Just the corridor. Ordinary, vacant, lit.

— Gone?

He lowered his eyelids slightly and stepped through the doorway, scanning everything. Lighting — normal. Colors — normal. Surfaces — normal. Down the hall, the elevator doors hadn't closed yet. A woman in a skirt had collapsed against the door frame, body sliding weakly downward. Frightened. When Ma En's gaze landed on her, she let out a thin, strangled sound — not quite a scream. As if the voice were trapped in her throat, only a sliver escaping.

He recognized her. The neighbor from Room 6 — Hirota Masami, the office worker. She was badly shaken, but Ma En didn't think she'd seen what he'd seen. He'd already worked it out: she was startled by the commotion he'd made.

That was exactly what had happened.

One minute earlier, Hirota Masami had dragged her exhausted body into the elevator and pressed the floor button. When the doors opened, she stepped out with unfocused eyes, half-sleepwalking. Then a door in the corridor slammed open with a sound like a gunshot. Nothing like that had ever happened here. No one opened doors that way. Her mind went blank. Her nerves locked up. By the time awareness returned, she was already slumped against the elevator frame.

She'd been startled before. Never like this.

Hirota Masami shivered herself awake and saw a figure float from the open doorway. Not "walk" — "float" was what her body told her. The figure moved like a ghost: after that violent sound, in the corridor's sudden silence, it drifted out without a shred of human warmth.

Deep gray coat. Deep red tie. Two clashing colors dominated the impression; the rest was a large black umbrella. She could tell the shape was human — but in that first instant, it looked like nothing more than clothing and an umbrella suspended in midair.

Another beat passed. She realized the figure had turned its head. When that sharp gaze swept toward her, she felt the blood in her veins go cold. She couldn't fully articulate the sensation. It went beyond trembling, beyond fear. The outline — hair, face, straight posture — every physical detail was normal. The clothing was normal. But the play of light and shadow lent it all a quality that didn't belong to a person.

"Hirota-san?" She heard a voice calling her name. A human voice, unmistakably. And yet something about it felt faintly wrong — enough to make her afraid to answer.