Chapter 68 Room 3's Friend

Ma En felt his heart seize, then abruptly lurch into high speed — as though the only sound left in the room was his own heartbeat.

Ba-dump. Ba-dump—

For a second, maybe two, Ma En stared at those dead eyes under the bed, and every thought in his head locked up — jammed, like a mechanism with nothing to engage. Carrying that blankness with him, he gathered the books and papers scattered nearby, stood up, and stacked them on the desk. Then the jammed thoughts broke through like floodwater released from a dam — churning, cascading, raising great swirling chaos in his mind. And at the center of all of it: he was in serious trouble.

Yes, serious trouble. Whatever the circumstances, a body found in your room was an enormous problem — even if you hadn't done the killing. He knew perfectly well how deliberate this was — a body, in his room, at this hour, in these circumstances. The malice was unmistakable. He'd tried to imagine what the enemy's next move would look like, tried to prepare himself — and still, the method had caught him slightly flat-footed.

Who the body was — not important. Who had killed him — not important, not yet. What the intruders had done while they were inside Room 4 — beside the danger hidden in this moment, none of it mattered.

Someone may have already called the police.

That, Ma En thought, was the real threat. He moved quickly to the window and looked out at the street below. Everything looked normal, which only deepened his urgency. If the enemy had called the moment he entered Room 4, the nearest Bunkyo District station would already have the report. Dispatch to scene: ten minutes at minimum. Factor in a Superintendent like Matsuzaemon and that window only narrowed. Add travel time—

Either way, he had very little time. He needed to deal with the body now. He organized his thoughts and his composure in the same motion, stepped away from the window, pulled food storage bags from the refrigerator, worked them over both hands, and dragged the body out from under the bed. From the feel alone, he could tell: the man had been dead less than an hour.

His instinct: the dead man was connected to the intruders. And they'd been most active during the window when he'd been watching the apartment from the hotel — seeing nothing, noticing nothing. Had Room 4's darkened windows hidden them? Or had Hirota-san's light in Room 6, burning late into the night, lulled him into complacency?

During that same stretch, had none of the other tenants noticed anything happening in Room 4?

These thoughts kept surfacing as he dragged the body clear. This move — compared to every bizarre and uncanny tactic the enemy had used before — was the one that gave him the most genuine headache. One misstep, whether he ended up labeled a suspect or an actual perpetrator, and the pressure on him would no longer be only the bizarre. It would be the direct, institutional force of human social order — and the few people who might have been inclined to help him would consider themselves lucky just to keep their distance.

At that point, he would truly be fighting uphill on every front.

He gave the body a quick once-over. A young man. Faint impressions of glasses on the nose bridge and ears, but no glasses on his face now. Casual shirt, jeans, average build — and overall, the look of someone earnest and well-mannered, with the slightly unfinished quality of a student, or someone who hadn't been out of school very long. But would a genuinely good student really break into a stranger's room at this hour? Had he been lured here? Was he complicit? An accessory? Was he an innocent who'd been dumped here, or was this a falling-out among the intruders themselves? Or had this unlucky young man been chosen for this from the very beginning by someone truly ruthless?

No answers available right now. The body carried nothing to identify him — his pockets were empty.

Ma En spread his palm and pressed the young man's eyelids shut — eyes that, in death, had refused to close.

He'd already noted it: almost no wounds anywhere on the body. The one mark that could be called a cause of death was a ligature groove encircling the neck — but the groove itself was difficult to read; whatever had made it wasn't any ordinary rope. He checked the bedroom, living room, and every other room in turn. No weapon anywhere.

Five minutes gone. He couldn't keep searching. He went back to the desk — no time to inventory the books and papers scattered across the floor, no time to assess what the intruders might have taken. He only shoved the books he'd picked up earlier into the briefcase. A quick glance at them: all Twenty-Four Solar Terms material. Nothing about the Room 4 Ghost Story, nothing work-related.

That made him think, almost without meaning to, of the paper ball in his pocket. He reached in for it — and somehow, carelessly, the ball slipped from between his fingers and his pocket, tumbled to the floor, rolled a few times, and came to rest in the gap between the desk and the bookshelf.

He crouched to pick it up — and a thought struck him:

The old him had taken the bizarre so seriously, so carefully. He had no memory of that past self — but logically speaking, would someone that careful have been completely unprepared for this? Even the current him had thought to plant evidence trails. Would the old him really have done nothing? If the old him had acted, hidden something he'd considered important somewhere in this room — then where?

His fingers touched the paper ball — and the thought sent a shiver through his entire body. He hadn't even finished the thought before his body was already moving: eyes shifting first, then his arm rising, and he understood immediately what he was about to do, even before the decision had fully formed. He didn't resist the reflex. He went with it and slid the desk aside.

On the side nearest the bookshelf, he tapped the panel behind the desk drawer in a specific sequence — a sequence his hands knew without his mind knowing — and it came loose. Inside, barely visible: something hidden. It looked like a book.

When he pulled it out, every anxiety that had been suspended in him — the doubt, the groundlessness of the past month — settled back into place, like something that had been hanging in midair finally finding solid ground. This was something the old him had left for the present him to find. The book's texture was wrong — not like any ordinary paper — but there was no time to examine it now.

He slid it into the briefcase without hesitation and pushed the desk back into position.

After that, he left the rest of the intruders' mess untouched — better to preserve the scene as-is — and cleaned away only the traces he'd left himself since coming back. The young man's body had no blood. Not even the involuntary biological signs of someone strangled to death. That was good news, in its way. Maybe the intruders were attached to their peculiar methods. Ma En had always thought that killers who used ordinary means would leave him in far worse trouble.

Another five minutes gone. The police were probably close. He stopped working. With more time, he could have staged things properly — redirected the clues, turned the planted evidence against the people who'd planted it. But he had nothing.

He shouldered the body without effort, picked up the briefcase and a few small tools, and left Room 4. In the hallway, he used the tools to break Room 4's door lock. Then he went to Room 5 — always empty, and always, for reasons he couldn't quite name, unsettling — and broke that lock too, in the same way. He didn't step inside by a single foot.

He hoped the misdirection would buy him at least a little of the police's attention.

He checked the corridor — still silent, still empty. Standing under the lights with a body on his shoulder was uncomfortable, but unavoidable. He could theoretically have packed the body into a suitcase and left the building — but what would that accomplish? Outside, in the open, watched from every angle, the enemy would know immediately. There was no winning move in that direction.

Which left only one option: ask for help.

He went to Room 3 and kept his voice low. "Friend, I need your help." He could sense nothing from inside — no sign of anyone awake, no movement, the same dead quiet as every other room. But he'd stopped trusting his own senses so completely. In the middle of the bizarre, his instincts had proven right many times and wrong just as many. This time, he was operating on a different kind of reasoning: experience told him that the neighbor who'd been watching him all along was certainly on the other side of that door, watching him now — and quite possibly had already seen every last thing the intruders had done.

Bit by bit, he was beginning to sense what was genuinely unusual about this self-described detective. Whatever the man's methods were, they'd allowed him to pursue the Room 4 Ghost Story for years and still be alive. He'd been living here, directly across from Room 4, for a long time.

It was possible, of course, that the man was still the enemy's pawn, or even a knowing accomplice. But between that possibility and the one Ma En needed to be true, he had to choose. He had to believe that the Room 3 neighbor was, if not exactly an ally, at least someone who might help.

He understood the decision was something of a gamble — all-in with nothing held back. But the situation was genuinely this dangerous. The enemy had put a corpse in his room. Even if this move failed, their escalation would continue — until they'd cornered him completely, left him like a lamb waiting for slaughter in August. Or they might decide not to wait for August at all.

Something that controlled a hundred thousand people, wanting simply to kill one ordinary human — how could it possibly fail?

The enemy had never used methods this blunt and direct against Room 4's previous tenants — he was sure of that. They were doing it now because he'd forced them into it. Viewed from that angle: maybe the accumulated actions of "Ma En" — the ones he remembered and the ones he'd lost — had finally given the enemy a genuine headache.

He just didn't know yet whether, from their perspective, his resistance was a minor irritant or something that genuinely troubled them.

He understood it perfectly: he was walking a wire. He couldn't let himself fall into a truly hopeless position — but he also couldn't provoke the enemy too hard while probing them. Maintaining that balance alone, indefinitely, was nearly impossible — the entire foundation of balance was intelligence, and what he knew was still so thin. In most situations, he was stumbling around blind.

He didn't know how the old him had assessed the Room 3 neighbor, and he suspected the old self had never engaged with the man deeply, despite all the opportunities — there must have been reasons. But now, there was no choice.

Ma En stood outside Room 3 with the body on his shoulder and heard nothing from inside.

"I know you're in there, watching me right now." He pressed close to the peephole, keeping his voice low, letting the sincerity and urgency show on his face. "Please. Help me."

He felt no particular shame in making himself this small. He'd deliberately arranged his expression into something anxious and urgent — the face of a young man badly startled by a sudden corpse. Exactly the type who usually maintained such a composed, unruffled manner. That contrast made the fear on his face, right now, all the more convincing.

At the same time, he was calculating the neighbor's psychology. That the man had remained completely unwarped after years of this pressure — Ma En didn't believe it for a second. Someone who'd sealed himself inside under extraordinary strain, whose mental state was visibly compromised — even if genuine goodwill survived, some part of the inner landscape had to be distorted. He might even, after all these years of watching Room 4's tenants come and come undone, have taken quiet satisfaction in watching this particular arrogant young man fumble himself into this particular mess.

The entreaty on his face deepened into something closer to begging. His heart beat thirty times.

Then Room 3's door finally opened a crack.

Ma En glanced toward Room 6 — Hirota-san's door stayed shut.

Good. Staying inside was enough.

He eased the door open a little wider, slipped through, and pulled it shut behind him.

Room 3 was completely dark — not even the corridor light leaked through the gap under the door. Standing in the entryway, Ma En looked into the darkness and made out a vast, bloated silhouette. The neighbor's eyes gleamed — bright, sharp, smug with sly satisfaction — and the sound of his breathing reached Ma En clearly:

Hm-mm. Hm-mm. Hm-mm—