Chapter 28: The Matchmaking God

The uncertainties were piling up. Even granting that these traces were genuine clues — why had they appeared so directly in his path? If this was the only such site in the entire forest, the odds of stumbling across it in an area this vast were slim enough to warrant suspicion. The coincidences accumulating around Ma En were becoming increasingly deliberate, and that deliberateness, paradoxically, was more unsettling than randomness. He felt that by this point, even someone who'd started out indifferent — someone with no interest in pursuing the strange — would find themselves dragged along by the current, pushed forward by a curiosity laced with dread. From that angle, at least, the conspiratorial edge softened somewhat.

But if every clue laid before him had been orchestrated, then the picture turned genuinely chilling — because the only way it all made sense was if the people around him were the ones setting traps. Did he want to believe that? Did he want to look at the warmth he'd felt since arriving in Japan and call it a performance? No. He didn't want that, and he refused to think it.

Because following that logic to its end meant Asuka was suspect too. She'd led the way. She'd chosen the direction. Ma En would not look at this girl through the lens of a conspiracy theory that destroyed everything good.

"Is something wrong?" Asuka had been watching him examine the site, aware he'd found something but unable to see what. The confusion was starting to irritate her.

"Nothing, really. Just a bit surprised. Maybe farther in, there'll be more like this." He said it less as a prediction than a hope — if the marks weren't unique to this one spot but scattered throughout the area, he wouldn't have to think about "trap-setters" at all.

"More of what? Someone just broke some branches." Asuka still didn't see what he saw. To her, everything Ma En had found looked perfectly natural. Maybe someone had done it, but so what? "Kids run in here sometimes — carving and scratching on trees is completely normal. Everyone's done it."

"Mm, fair enough." Ma En relaxed the tension in his face and smiled.

"Or are you hoping these marks are abnormal..." Asuka seemed to think she'd figured him out. "Ah — I see. If there's some secret behind these marks — hmm, that actually might make good material." She crouched with interest and mimicked his examination of the scars. But the very fact that she'd said this proved she didn't believe a word of it.

"I didn't say anything." Ma En pulled her to her feet. "Come on — I need to be back by noon."

"...So boring. You're the one being paranoid," Asuka muttered under her breath.

They kept walking. Ma En took her hand without thinking about it, and Asuka made no move to pull away. The deeper they went, the more oppressive the air became — impossible to tell whether it was physiological or psychological. Asuka had thought about this before, during her solo trips: If someone were holding my hand, my heart wouldn't be hammering this hard. She'd imagined it, hoped for it. And now, walking with her hand in Ma En's, what she felt was simpler than she'd expected — just the relief of not being alone.

An environment like this actually exists inside a park.

Ma En had never encountered anything like it in any park in the homeland. It wasn't purely natural gloom — it felt more like a horror film's deliberately constructed atmosphere, a scene designed to foreshadow something. When he'd searched for the bizarre in the homeland, locations with this kind of innate feel had been rare, and they'd never appeared in parks or scenic areas.

This is really inside a park? The thought returned, heavier now.

His mind was far less relaxed than his expression suggested. He adjusted his hat for a better vantage and searched for traces along the route. But to his disappointment, the earlier marks seemed to have been a one-off. If only that one spot existed, Asuka's explanation held a certain logic. Even deliberate marks on trees weren't necessarily abnormal. And feeling suspicious might simply be the result of the preconception that "something is wrong in Sanchoumoku Park's depths" — a perceptual illusion.

With that thought, much of what had seemed suspicious turned ambiguous again.

When Ma En sank into thought, time passed quickly. He realized they'd been walking through the forest for longer than he'd expected. Then, in the next instant, he heard voices.

They didn't rise gradually from a whisper. They burst through the membrane of silence like a balloon popping — abrupt, immediate, startlingly close. The scenery shifted as if he'd stepped through a tunnel into open air. The dim, oppressive atmosphere that had persisted despite the sunlight lifted all at once.

Most of the view was still the same disorienting green. But in one corner, a clear marker emerged: a dirt path, vegetation sparse along its edges, wide enough for two people abreast. It looked unplanned — not built, but worn into existence by the passage of many feet over time. The voices coming from ahead grew sharper.

There's a path. Ma En was still processing this when he and Asuka, still hand in hand, reached it. The path didn't lead out of the forest. From where they'd stepped onto it, the right-hand stretch ran about twenty meters before the vegetation swallowed it again. The left-hand stretch extended onward. The voices came from that direction. He guessed immediately: the voices were coming from where they'd been heading.

"Sounds like quite a few people," Ma En said.

"That's unusual. Maybe the TV crew really is here." Asuka connected it to the taxi driver's words at once and tugged at him. "If it's a TV crew, it's almost definitely a supernatural show. Maybe we can be special guests."

Even as she spoke, the voices were moving toward them. Asuka didn't notice. Ma En heard them clearly — they sharpened in his ears all at once, every word distinct.

"...It's really The Matchmaking God?"

"The professor said so. Should be reliable, right?"

"I've lived here my whole life and I've never heard of it. This is a cemetery. Everyone knows it's a cemetery. How would The Matchmaking God be enshrined in a place like this?"

"Maybe from a very long time ago — it was already here before this area became a cemetery."

"Still hard to swallow. You're telling me something nobody's known about all these years, and this professor shows up and immediately figures it out?"

"He's a professor. Besides, calling this place a cemetery is only the last twenty years' version. Nobody thought to investigate properly, so the story just spread."

"Mm... true. Twenty years, when you think about it, isn't actually that long."

"Exactly. Those materials you read — local histories, folklore compilations — they're all from the last twenty years. Even if you go back fifty, a hundred years — so what? Enshrining a deity? You'd need to trace that back centuries."

Three men emerged from the path ahead. Young to middle-aged, each carrying an empty plastic bucket that swayed lightly in his grip. They spotted Ma En and Asuka, broke off their conversation, and offered friendly nods.

"Good morning," Ma En said first.

"Good morning." The three returned the greeting. "Are you two heading through? Sorry about this — we're with a TV crew, filming over there."

"A supernatural show?" Asuka asked.

"That's right — Ghost Stories Beside You, late-night broadcast. Ever seen it?" one of them said.

"I know it, I know it." Asuka nodded eagerly. "Four episodes a year. Every year I think it's going to be cancelled, and every year it's still going."

"And we'll keep going this year." The middle-aged crew member smiled. "We've had good luck this year — we've found some angles that are different from previous seasons. Please look forward to it."

Ma En gave Asuka's hand a quiet tug. She caught his meaning instantly.

"We can't go any farther?" she asked, her voice slipping into a register Ma En hadn't heard from her before — softer, more delicate. "My friend doesn't get to come here often."

"Boyfriend?" the crew member asked. Without waiting for an answer: "If it's just the two of you, no problem. We haven't started filming yet — go right ahead."

"You might even end up as guests — an on-the-spot interview or something," a younger crew member added, echoing Asuka's earlier fantasy.

"Are you two locals?" the middle-aged one asked.

"I am. He's not." Asuka pointed at Ma En. "He's from out of town — doesn't get to visit. I wanted to show him the site. It's a famous supernatural location."

"It is. Though you might be in for a surprise when you get there."

"What kind of surprise?" Asuka asked in that same soft voice. Ma En felt something prickle along his skin.

"There's a deity enshrined there." The crew member spoke with the ease of shared gossip. "Locals all know there's a shrine, but everyone's always assumed it was placed there to suppress the cemetery, right? Turns out it's a shrine to The Matchmaking God."

"The Matchmaking God...?" Asuka repeated, stunned.

"The Matchmaking God. We brought in an archaeology professor this time. He found something on the shrine that no one had discovered before — partially buried in soil. Time had covered it. Nobody had ever cleaned the shrine properly, so it just sat there, hidden."

Ma En had already heard the gist from their overheard conversation, but the claim still bothered him. The materials he'd read described investigators who had scoured Sanchoumoku Park's anomalous zones with obsessive thoroughness. The shrine was the most conspicuous object in the area — it would have been among the first things examined. How had no one ever cleaned it? And if someone had found something on it, why was there no record? Nothing in his files mentioned it.

"That does sound strange," Asuka said, frowning slightly.

"But the professor wouldn't be wrong about this." The same crew member who'd been questioning it moments ago now defended the conclusion without hesitation. "It's been so many years — rumors get distorted. Everyone talks about the cemetery. The shrine barely comes up."

"Anyway, you'll see for yourselves when you get there," the middle-aged one said. "We still need to fetch water. The professor says it has to be from a natural source — might have to go all the way back to the front of the park."

"Fetch water?" Ma En asked. "Specific requirements?"

"Natural water shows respect to the deity." The crew member shrugged. "Details, we're not sure about. We just follow the professor's instructions. He's the expert — knows things about The Matchmaking God."

"If you need natural water, there's a small pond that way." Asuka pointed past the end of the dirt path. "Follow this path about thirty meters and you'll see it."

Ma En stood quietly to the side. He'd stopped contributing to the conversation.

The sunlight here was bright. Not a trace of the forest's oppressive gloom remained. But the crew's words had settled something in his chest — a thin layer of dark cloud that hadn't been there before. He'd been telling himself not to fixate on coincidences that merely seemed deliberate. But at this point, the sensation was undeniable: all the strange threads were braiding together. That was an ominous feeling — the kind that quickened the pulse.

Ma En liked this feeling. He always had. But he didn't want Asuka walking any farther into it. He smelled danger the way one smells mist — diffuse, impossible to locate, but unmistakably present. Not the sense that something was about to happen, but the sense that a seed had been planted in fertile soil, and whether or not he tended it, it would germinate.

After the crew members said their goodbyes and left, Ma En turned to Asuka.

"Let's stop here today."

"What?" She was more shocked than before. Having come this far — the destination within reach — she hadn't imagined he'd say those words.

"I don't want to continue." He looked at her, and said nothing else.