Chapter 25: Retrieval

The people Ma En had met over these two days were all interesting — this bookshop manager included. The same intelligence kept surfacing, as if something were deliberately herding him in one direction. And yet, in actual conversation, none of it carried a whiff of malice. Ma En was not the type to reach for conspiracy theories first. At moments like this, he always thought of the subordinates he'd had back at the Mainland's post office. He never learned what, exactly, those people had been through. They didn't speak of it openly. But in private conversations, they invariably analyzed others from the worst possible angle — defaulting to suspicion, assuming hidden agendas. Ma En was perfectly aware that human nature had its dark side; he'd never operated under the illusion that people were fundamentally upstanding. But watching his subordinates jump to the worst interpretation of every situation had always struck him as excessive.

They were all geniuses more capable than himself, of course. He couldn't deny their dedication or their talent, and he believed any one of them could have done at least as well in his position. But if he was being honest, Ma En didn't care for the lens through which they viewed people and the world — even if that lens couldn't exactly be called wrong.

Ma En was perfectly capable of looking at people from the worst angle. That didn't mean every situation that smelled faintly off required tinted glasses. Take the present case: he found it interesting, nothing more. He had no intention of treating Tetsuzou Yuuzou as a suspect. And if he were going to be suspicious — then what about everyone he'd crossed paths with in the last two days? Were they all compromised?

His role as a civil servant had been to keep the pipeline flowing — information, materials, logistics. His focus was the process, not the people. He wasn't a field agent tasked with investigating specific cases. It was those subordinates of his who always seemed like caged animals straining at the bars, muttering about being deceived, being exiled to backwater posts, itching to do something earthshaking.

Ah — and it was only now, in this moment, that he could sit back and critique those people freely, with no pretense of fairness. The thought brought a mischievous grin to Ma En's face. When he'd resigned, the handover hadn't gone to any of those brilliant subordinates. The higher-ups had air-dropped a brand-new leader instead. Ma En had submitted his evaluation reports in full — every subordinate profiled in thorough, meticulous detail, his own management experience included. If the new leader decided to temper those geniuses a bit — and of course they would; new officials always started by lighting their three fires —

"...Ma En-san, are you alright?" Tetsuzou asked, puzzled. Something had shifted in this newly acquainted Ma En-san's expression — a flash of something almost sinister. He couldn't pin it down. And yet, oddly, it didn't feel like the expression of a bad person.

"It's nothing. What you said reminded me of some interesting old business," Ma En said.

"Old business? Related to Sanchoumoku Park?" Tetsuzou had clearly gotten the wrong idea.

"No." Ma En glanced toward the shelves and changed the subject. "I'd like to go browse for a bit."

"Oh — of course, please." Tetsuzou seemed on the verge of saying something more, but swallowed it at the last moment. "Should I call a staff member over? They know the layout better than I do."

"No need. I don't have anything specific in mind yet." Ma En tapped his black umbrella lightly against the floor and headed for the shelves the young manager had indicated.

The bookshop used color-coded shelving to sort its inventory — clusters of same-colored shelves dividing the floor into distinct sections. The manager had mentioned three shelves dedicated to the occult and supernatural, lined up side by side in the far corner. But against the end of one shelf, a tall stack of books had been piled up — several dozen at least — topped by a prominent promotional placard reading "Manager's Recommendation." It advertised a new horror novel. The blurb made clear the book was newly published, but the author was no newcomer. Pen name: Otsuji.

Ma En hadn't heard of him. He'd been in Japan all of two days; his knowledge of Japanese literature was limited to the handful of classic masters — most of them dead. He'd read supernatural fiction before, but those had been older works. He picked up the display copy of the "Manager's Recommendation," turned the cover and obi strip over in his hands, scanned the foreword, the blurbs, and the table of contents, then found the author biography. A young novelist, as expected — only in his thirties. But he'd already published extensively and was apparently hailed as a genius of horror fiction.

Ma En flipped through. The story was compelling: a group of children, brutalized and tormented, escape from a cult and ultimately help the adults bring the cult down through courage and ingenuity. What caught Ma En's attention was the author's particular vision of evil. This cult didn't inflict direct physical violence on its victims. Instead, it operated through meticulously manufactured "coincidences" — guiding targets toward predetermined outcomes. Its purpose and methods bore no resemblance to the stock image of a blood-soaked religious conspiracy; it wasn't about seizing money or power, wasn't about satisfying any of the appetites people ordinarily associated with corruption.

Certain details were written with a vividness that made you wonder whether this author, Otsuji, had been one of those children himself — whether the novel was autobiography dressed as fiction.

The book described the cult's sacred token: a peculiar rhombohedron, its surface engraved with "line patterns twisted into something resembling a pentagram." The object was "saturated with evil" — and yet, within the story, it had actually saved several lives. Only one of those people survived to the final pages; the rest died in ways no less horrific than anyone else. But they had lived longer. By the novel's end, the strange token fell into a deep ravine during an accident and was never recovered.

In Epilogue 2, the author wrote:

This world contains many quiet dangers. They exist in plain sight, yet we instinctively overlook them. We lack the capacity — and subconsciously refuse — to draw connections between those coincidences. And this is precisely our good fortune. We do not need to think of them. We do not need to look at them. More than that: we must never do so.

The moment we become aware of their existence, they pursue us without mercy. When we believe everything is over, their reverberations linger far longer than we expect — because they have not truly died. We have merely refused, once again, to acknowledge that they exist. And even so, they are like the air we breathe, like the moisture flowing through our bodies, like... an inseparable part of what constitutes us.

Ma En recognized the passage for what it was: the author's conceptual summary of the "evil god" that the cult worshipped but that never fully revealed itself within the novel. And yet, any reader absorbed in the plot would forget all about the "evil god" and its cosmology — would lose themselves instead in the human conflicts. The struggle between people, between justice and wickedness, between compassion and cruelty: these would always captivate an ordinary reader more than a deity that never showed its face.

He decided to buy the book. It was, after all, genuinely excellent.

Afterward, Ma En worked through the three shelves tagged for supernatural content and discovered they weren't what he'd assumed. These weren't simply modern entertainment reads. Mixed among them were publications over half a century old — antiquarian volumes, illustrated local chronicles, handwritten-looking manuscripts alongside commercial releases. Not all of them were new.

He found three books that mentioned Sanchoumoku Park by name. Separately, they covered the park's construction history, its human-interest stories, and the scattered folk legends attached to its land. Among them, references appeared not only to spiritualist groups but to genuine cults that had once used the area for activities they preferred to keep hidden.

In certain circles, Sanchoumoku Park had always been a place of peculiar fascination. Its location, the origins of its name, the history of that particular piece of land — all of it had been written up and published by people with a keen interest. And yet, for reasons no one could explain, the books never sold well. Nearly every volume Ma En found on those shelves that touched on Sanchoumoku Park mentioned this fact and treated it as one of the park's inherent oddities.

From what the books described, no deaths had actually occurred on-site. The land had once served as a cemetery, but only for the burial of those already dead. No murders. No suicides. Not even during the documented periods when cults operated freely in the area had anyone been killed there.

Every criminal who used Sanchoumoku Park as a base of operations seemed to be restrained by some shared conviction — the authors phrased it this way — a belief that prevented even the most vicious, most inhuman offenders from resorting to bloodshed within the park's boundaries. Violence of any kind was rare. The worst acts were committed only after leaving the park's perimeter. But those who were seized within Sanchoumoku Park with malicious intent reportedly suffered a different fate: extreme psychological torment. The specifics were never detailed. What was documented was the aftermath — victims who survived were left mentally shattered, sometimes for years.

In records spanning centuries, at least a hundred people had been sent to a place once called "Enchi Shrine." But the shrine's actual location, its appearance, its very existence — none of this could be confirmed. Every source Ma En consulted came up empty. In official records and formal histories, no such shrine appeared.

The rumors surrounding Sanchoumoku Park were easy enough to find — anyone with an interest would stumble across something eventually. But according to the authors' own surveys, the number of people who actually cared was small. As for Enchi Shrine, the mystery was even more impenetrable, its existence seemingly a fabrication. The authors who did mention it had conducted their own investigations and concluded that the word "Enchi" likely didn't carry its apparent meaning at all — that it was probably a phonetic corruption, or else a later reconstruction from fragmentary traces of lost regional characters, rendered incorrectly.

Much of what Ma En found in these books was speculation and personal conjecture on the authors' part. The passages backed by hard documentation appeared to have formal archival sources elsewhere, and the elements the authors framed as mysterious tended to rely on suggestive, worst-case-scenario leaps of logic. For someone like Ma En — someone who didn't default to the darkest interpretation — much of it was unconvincing.

But none of that diminished the material's value. Back on the Mainland, when he'd chased bizarre phenomena in his spare time, he'd haunted used-book stalls and bought exactly this sort of thing — books drenched in their authors' subjective opinions, questioned by mainstream readers, yet containing perspectives genuinely different from the consensus. That difference was what made them worth owning.

Ma En took the books without hesitation.

He turned toward the magazine racks next. Asuka had been there for a considerable stretch of time. Whether she was agonizing over choices or simply reading for free, she drifted from one end to the other, then back again. She'd grab a magazine as if she meant to buy it, study it for a while, then slide it back onto the shelf. From where Ma En had been browsing, he'd caught glimpses of her passing the end of the shelves — five or six times now.

When he walked over, he understood why. A conspicuous majority of the magazine covers on display featured Terahana. Different publications, different genres — but the visual effect was unmistakable: if it had Terahana on the cover, it was facing outward. Magazines without her face were a small minority. Terahana was only a model, but she seemed to appear in a staggering number of publications. Still, Ma En doubted this arrangement was the shop's doing.

He pulled down one Terahana-cover magazine and found a global geography publication hidden behind it — a completely different category. He pulled down the next Terahana cover. Same thing. This definitely isn't the manager or staff's work. He glanced over at Asuka, still pacing back and forth.

Something in his gaze must have registered. When Asuka looked his way, Ma En made a deliberate show of setting a Terahana cover aside, revealing the non-Terahana magazine beneath it. Asuka emitted exactly the complaint he'd been expecting.

"What are you doing? People finally arranged them properly. Don't make trouble."

You're the one making trouble for this shop.

Ma En kept that thought to himself. He was surprised, though, that not a single staff member had come over to set things right. Were they really that lax?

Asuka marched over with the bearing of a general retaking occupied territory, snatched the Terahana magazine from Ma En's hand, and returned it to its frontline position. Every Terahana cover he'd removed went back over the magazines it had been concealing. When the restoration was complete, she gave a satisfied nod and fixed Ma En with a warning look. "Don't touch them again."

"You'll make people dislike you, doing that," Ma En said.

"Doesn't matter." Asuka's tone was breezy, sincere. "Only this way can the world properly appreciate Terahana-san's beauty. You walk into the shop and the first thing you see is Terahana-san — what's wrong with that?"

"Do the manager and staff know you've been doing this?"

"Probably... I think so. I mean, I pick my moments." A beat of hesitation. "And they haven't said anything, have they?"

Ma En scanned the area. Of the three staff members who'd been working the floor, only one remained — across the room, apparently checking an order list. The other two had vanished.