Chapter 63 The Paper Ball

Ma En hid inside the filthy robe, and the grey fabric had become more than a disguise — it was a cellar, a crawlspace, the only thing between himself and exposure. Imagining what it would feel like to take it off was like imagining standing naked under an open sky. Yet this fortress was thin and light, and nothing about it should have inspired confidence.

If he could have, he'd have pulled it tighter — as if closing the empty space between fabric and body could somehow shore up his nerve. He knew this was irrational. His emotions were wildly unstable; his spirit was undergoing a torment he'd never experienced before. If this was the price of encountering the bizarre, his past self might have sneered at it, but the person he was now couldn't muster that kind of acceptance.

A month of stable, ordinary life — even if it had only been an illusion — had changed him more than he'd expected. The unexplained memory loss probably accounted for some of it, but Ma En felt the greater part was simply that his heart had gradually embraced the idea of a normal daily existence. It was strange, and he knew it was strange, yet it also felt entirely natural. Children were full of fantasy; plenty of people died at seventy or eighty still carrying childhood dreams. Ma En was only twenty-four, but after four years of work and the wrenching upheaval of leaving his homeland for a foreign country, the speed of his internal shift — abandoning the fantasy, accepting reality, achieving what people commonly called "maturity" — was possible. Not even unusual. Men or women, it made no difference: when familiar daily life took a violent turn, the shift in thinking could make a person seem transformed within a single month.

The bizarre was real. Set that premise aside, and everything he'd experienced was just ordinary human life.

On the other hand, judging how much the current version of himself differed from the past version was nearly impossible without someone watching from a god's-eye view. Who could know what his past self had truly been like? His clever colleagues wouldn't necessarily know — he'd never told a soul about his pursuit of the bizarre; all those activities had been hidden inside the nature of the postal service's work.

The postal service had been his perfect cover. He'd chosen the job precisely because he'd foreseen how wide a stage it would give him.

Back in the homeland, Ma En thought, the version of him other people saw probably hadn't been all that different from the person he was now: just a proper, ordinary man.

All the fear, the panic, the wavering he felt right now — all the blows landing on his psyche — were exactly what any ordinary person would feel in his situation. And in the face of the genuinely bizarre, this was the most dangerous state to be in.

Dangerous, but impossible to stop.

All he could do was stand among the thousands of creatures and wait for what came next. He could feel that if the drug weren't holding this dream-body steady — if this body weren't real enough for the drug to work on at all — his mind and his reasoning would be in far worse shape.

The people most likely to notice he'd "become a different person" were the ones he'd met in his first few days in Japan. And Ma En had already accepted the worst-case scenario: even if he survived this dream, there was no going back to who he'd been before.

The Room 3 neighbor had probably been watching since Ma En moved into Room 4. Hirota-san had built an intimate relationship with him over the month. But how much could either of them understand about the person shaped by twenty-four years of living?

Memory loss, changes in thinking and in the direction of thought — he'd lost the very standard by which to measure how much he'd changed. No one else could supply that standard, either.

No number of psychological adjustments, no amount of past research notes recovered, would ever restore him to one hundred percent of what he'd been. He had to face these shattering events with a civilian's mentality and a body only slightly above civilian capability.

The result of that, he'd now experienced firsthand.

If the Room 4 tenants had all been pulled into something like this, none of them would have lasted as long as he had. And yet they'd survived until August — which was practically a miracle. The only explanation: they had to die in August. The interval between the initial attack and the death date wasn't idle — during that window, the bizarre phenomena concealed the victims' altered state while also... not merely controlling the timing of death...

So that's it. The period from the first change to the death — it's necessary?

Under the crushing psychological pressure, the drug-sharpened mind accelerated past its limits. The ideas racing through him had reached the edge of logic, like a train about to leave the tracks.

Lost memories. Altered behavior and thought. The daily anomalies. The concealment of those anomalies. Every scrap of Room 4 Ghost Story intelligence he could recall, every experience he was living through right now — seemingly scattered and minor — was being threaded together by that racing, reckless thinking.

A terrible fact was lifting its veil in the midst of that absurd concatenation.

Ma En didn't know if he was imagining it, but once the seemingly unrelated, seemingly impossible pieces were connected, the deeper he considered them, the greater the dread became. A rational voice kept telling him: this isn't what's happening, you're scaring yourself. But the harder he tried not to think this way, the more irresistibly the thought pulled.

The changes in thinking were probably just side effects of the amnesia. The psychological and cognitive pressure was just background noise. The reason Room 4 victims could survive until August had a deeper explanation: every one of them was being adjusted, the way a cook pre-seasons ingredients before the actual cooking begins. He and all the other victims had been dosed, tuned, set in motion toward the inevitable changes — and now all that remained was to wait for August. The day of cooking.

— You're going to die, Ma En-san.

The Room 3 neighbor's words surfaced again, more emphatic than ever before. Not an exaggeration. A statement of fact. A warning aimed at "a Ma En already walking the enemy's predetermined track."

He'd always had some thread of doubt before. Now, regarding this single sentence, the doubt was gone.

Death was right in front of him — quiet, incremental, and already closer than he'd realized.

His breathing grew labored, but he didn't dare gasp. His heart hammered beyond his control, and he caught himself wondering if the creatures around him could hear it. He couldn't see their reactions; perhaps that was the only reason he still felt concealed.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

A spasm of pain shot through his chest. Without the drug, he'd have collapsed.

And yet — his body stood perfectly still, indistinguishable from the grey robes around him. Not a tremor. Not a shift. Breathing, limbs, every visible detail presented through the robe — all stable. Only when the wind blew did the fabric stir.

At the same moment his racing thoughts produced their conclusion, the creatures beneath their grey robes began to move — as though they'd received a signal.

First, a group separated from the mass. Roughly fifty, maybe more — Ma En's position didn't give him a clear count. The figures varied in height; differences in build were less obvious. They hadn't been standing together; they emerged from different parts of the crowd, indistinguishable from the others until this moment. Even now, the only difference was that they'd formed a separate column. Ma En wondered, deep down, whether these creatures truly had anything resembling a hierarchy.

The column's destination was unmistakable: the barren, flat center, the ancient stone shrine. As the column advanced, other grey-robed figures joined it. By the time it passed through Ma En's field of vision, it had grown to over a hundred.

They entered the barren ground and dispersed again, arranging themselves in concentric rings around the stone building. Although no one — no thing — had taken measurements, the rings were beautiful. Each figure was equidistant from its neighbors, as though following marks pre-laid in the earth. The visual symmetry was perfect from every angle.

Five rings in total, nested one inside the other. The closer to the shrine, the shorter the diameter, the fewer figures in the ring. The difference in numbers between inner and outer rings produced its own strange visual harmony. The stone building's irregular shape — rough, lumpy, unmortared — should have clashed with the geometric precision around it, but embedded at the center of the five rings, it instead produced a bizarre sense of rightness.

As though this was the complete structure all along.

Ma En's pulse spiked again. His body was reaching its limits — an ordinary person's physiology, in real-world conditions, would already be showing critical deterioration; fainting or death itself were not impossible. But he also perceived that every physiological symptom he was experiencing was psychological — the drug's performance inside this dream was remarkably effective.

He wrenched his attention from his own hallucinated symptoms and forced it back onto the creatures.

Those who'd entered the clearing and taken their positions around the shrine began to vocalize. It was somewhere between humming and murmuring. From this distance Ma En could hear it clearly, but what reached him was only a sticky, viscid sound — as though it had adhered to his eardrums. It was neither loud nor crisp; the syllables blurred into one another, and their rhythm and progression were so alien and so wrong that merely hearing them made him want to clamp his hands over his ears.

As before, in the forest march, he couldn't decipher what the ring-creatures were saying. He couldn't extract emotion, symbolism, or meaning from the inhuman cadence. But he sensed that while this was the same language, its content was profoundly different from the marching chant.

Human languages couldn't describe what these creatures' speech expressed — no familiar register of emotion or color applied. But if forced to characterize it, Ma En would say: what this language conveyed was material that no normal person could accept. It violated ethics. It violated instinct, both innate and learned. It described things humans were not built to understand. That was why it felt so nauseating, so venomous, so instinctively repellent.

He found himself thinking: This is a language that, by its very existence, laughs at humanity.

But that, too, was only an instinctive impression. He had no direct evidence.

He didn't want to listen anymore. He couldn't understand it, and on a visceral level, he didn't want to remember it, didn't want the impression stored.

This time the vocalization was brief. But the adhesive sound lingered in his brain long after the actual noise had ceased, reverberating on and on.

The barren clearing fell silent again. Ma En stared at the creatures and the stone shrine. Gradually, he perceived something — a translucent outline, shimmering and shifting — as though something had climbed out from inside the stone building and draped a vast body over it, distorting the shrine's silhouette from what he remembered.

In truth, he didn't believe his eyes had actually seen this. The sensation was closer to a vision forming inside his mind. But he couldn't drive it out. An intense, sourceless emotion was compelling him to look; a forceful, inexplicable logic was urging him to see. Before he could identify what kind of emotion or what kind of logic —

Something fell at his feet.

His attention broke. He glanced down instinctively and saw a paper ball — and recognized it immediately: the crumpled page with the twenty-four strange symbols. The one he'd never managed to throw away.

It hadn't been in his awareness during the dream. He hadn't felt it in a pocket or anywhere on his person.

And he hadn't moved. How had it fallen?

His thoughts began to orbit the paper. Then, without warning, a savage jolt of cardiac pain.

A colossal pressure — a wave of dread — came surging from the direction of the shrine. He didn't need to think to know: something had happened at the stone building. But he was staring at the paper ball, and something inside him — another self, screaming — warned him:

Do not raise your head. Do not look in that direction.

That is something that must never be gazed upon.

Even without looking, what was happening there had already made Ma En feel like a small boat in a hurricane — liable to capsize at any instant.