Ma En switched off the television, moved to the desk, and reviewed the day's lesson plans.

He'd resumed teaching at the Academy of Peaceful Learning the day after the earthquake. Despite the shared concern between him and Katsura-sensei that Matsuzaemon's movements might disrupt the school's normal operation, the campus had remained quiet up to this point. Students attended class, teachers taught; everyone's schedule proceeded in orderly fashion.

The school Katsura-sensei had founded was still in its first intake. The quality of the student body was not high — the majority were high school graduates who had failed to meet the admission threshold for even a second-tier university. Most of them arrived at the Academy of Peaceful Learning in a state of confusion. During his classes, Ma En had asked them directly: what did they actually want for their futures? What did they hope to gain from the classroom? Essentially no one could give a clear answer.

On the first day of his first class, he'd told all of them: "Since you don't know what you want to learn, or how to learn it well — listen to me."

The students had looked at the podium with blank faces. In their eyes, Ma En saw no passion for learning, only a fog of bewilderment about life. He thought: they're probably here because they had nowhere else to go. But in Japan, high school graduates had the option to go straight to work — and these students had ultimately chosen to come to this school instead. Something in the depths of them still wanted to learn something, still hoped that these final few years might show them the path their lives should take.

Ma En looked each student in the eye, his voice crisp and clear: "First, I'd like to ask: did anyone find studying enjoyable in the past? And would anyone like to know how to study joyfully?"

Some eyes began to light up, and as scattered answers came in, the room started to come alive — it seemed everyone wanted to know a joyful approach to learning. Ma En was not surprised. He was not going to let these students' attitudes toward learning determine his own attitude toward teaching. From elementary school through university, he had never once met anyone who preached "joyful education" — and so he had no intention of transmitting a "joyful learning method" to these students either.

"Unfortunately," he told them, "I don't know the joyful learning method."

The room erupted — students who had only just begun to stir now let out a collective "What?" Some of them looked annoyed, as though the young man at the podium had made fools of them. Before they could start voicing complaints, Ma En's voice cut through their noise: "I'm twenty-four years old — not much older than any of you. If you want to know why I'm up here and you're down there, I can tell you: I graduated from a top-tier university at twenty, have four years of professional achievement, speak six foreign languages, and spent time as a hacker."

The room went quiet. The students watched as Ma En produced a stack of certificates and commendations from somewhere — all forged — enumerating various honors: academic and skill qualifications, achievements carrying the names of research institutes. Ma En stacked them into a tall pile, then tilted his palm gently, and they fanned across the podium surface, two or three sliding off the edge. Students in the front row came up, retrieved the ones that had fallen, studied them carefully, and set them back. The room was now looking at him in a way entirely unlike how it had looked at him before.

—That easily? Children.

Ma En thought this as he pressed his palms to the podium, letting his gaze move from one student's eyes to the next. If anyone looked down, he called out immediately: "You — yes, you. Why are you looking at the floor? Head up. Look at me. Look at my eyes." Ma En would not allow anyone to avoid holding his gaze.

"You think I'm showing off? You're thinking: here's another genius, here to mock us. You're angry about it — yes, I see that. You believe it's a gap in talent, the same as some people being born into wealthy families: luck determines the gap. Correct?"

"It is!" One student called out, glaring at him.

"Nothing wrong with that." Ma En met the student's eyes, steady and calm. "But I can tell you: there is a method that lets you partially close that gap."

Skeptical looks all around.

"You've all seen the evidence — I was hired by Katsura-sensei at this age for a reason. I'm not a fraud." Ma En idly rearranged the certificates on the podium. "I'm a man who understands education. I know how to turn someone with no aptitude into a productive member of society. Think about it: I'm a mainlander. If I didn't have this ability, if I were as young as I am, why would Katsura-sensei hire me at all?"

He let a pause sit in the air, deliberate. Below him, the students began to murmur among themselves — they were still strangers to each other, barely acquainted, but something was beginning to converge in the exchanges between them. Ma En allowed himself a small smile. It was not a warm smile; the students felt the room temperature drop, as if, in his silence, the air had drawn taut.

"My teaching method is demonstrably effective." He continued at last: "On the Mainland, my monthly salary was one hundred thousand yuan — with performance bonuses included, I cleared several million per year. Look at me —" Ma En stepped down from the podium and moved between the rows, passing each seat. "Look at me: I live in a premium apartment, wear premium suits, eat well — and every one of those good things came to me because I turned one failure after another into capable people. The more failures, the more I earn. So ask yourselves: how many failures do you think I've transformed to have accumulated that much?"

Silence. Ma En moved through the rows and saw no skepticism left in the faces turned toward him. They seemed to genuinely believe this young teacher had this ability, had made this money from it. They were not yet won over entirely, but compared to their blankness at the start, something had ignited in their eyes.

—Still just children.

Ma En couldn't help thinking it again.

"Now — do you trust me? Do you believe I can make you better?"

"Yes."

"Yes, sensei, I believe you."

"Can we be like you, sensei?"

"Of course. As long as you follow my method." He let the smile open further this time. And this time, the tight air in the room began to ease.

"Whatever you say."

"Tell us already — what's the method?"

Ma En gave a satisfied nod and addressed them all: "I don't know the joyful learning method. But I know the painful learning method."

A beat of silence.

"When you look back on your past, you tend to blame your mediocrity on the pain of studying — the pain of learning was what made you unable to go on. Wasn't it?"

"Isn't that true?"

"It's not true at all." Ma En said it in a voice that was even, uncolored by emotion, and somehow cold at the center, in a way that settled in the chest: "The reason you are mediocre is that you have not yet suffered enough. Whether learning is joyful or painful is what separates the gifted from the rest — not what separates the rest from each other. Look at the people around you who've made something of themselves. Are they all geniuses? Setting aside the so-called social elite, take the middle management in any company — are every one of them a genius? No. A genius is a genius precisely because geniuses make up only the smallest sliver of the population." He held his thumb and forefinger together in front of them, almost touching. "The majority of people are ordinary. The same as all of you."

The students thought for a moment, then nodded, one after another.

"They're all ordinary — and their learning is painful. So why do some rise and some don't?" Ma En continued in that same even, forceful voice: "Luck, social ability — both are indispensable. But before any of that, there is a prerequisite: those who rose suffered more than you. Pain is what separates one ordinary person from another. But not everyone knows how to use pain, and not everyone's pain is efficient. What I am going to teach you is the correct method of painful learning."

He said: "In Bunkyo. In Japan. No one understands this method of painful learning better than I do." He had exaggerated slightly, but what did it matter? Everyone was listening now, leaning toward him with open want.

Ma En's voice, Ma En's bearing, every detail Ma En had calibrated into his delivery — all of it pulled at these students. He had successfully transmitted confidence into them. Even if it only held for now, a beginning was enough for everything that followed.

He believed: if he could drive them toward "painful learning," they would reap more than they expected.

And so the lesson plans Ma En prepared looked nothing like those of any other teacher at the Academy of Peaceful Learning. He had evaluated each student carefully, analyzed their psychological and mental profiles — this was not difficult, it only required them to complete certain questionnaires. He didn't need to tailor instruction to every individual; instead, he sorted them by "bearable pain threshold" and designed his material to land precisely one notch above that threshold. After class, he kept the students who were in enough pain they wanted to quit — sat with them the way his father had sat with him, watching, pressing them to think rather than to answer correctly.

That was Ma En's teaching: not measured by correct answers.

Once a student's sustained pain fell within his evaluated range, he gave them a passing mark regardless of their score. In his curriculum, under his authority, the school's official "pass line" was meaningless. It was his course, his grading — he did it as he chose.

The subject listed in the course catalogue was computing and programming, but what he actually transmitted to these students was not the content of any textbook. He believed that even if they memorized every example in the book, they would have no prospects after leaving school. The history, grammar, canonical structures, and principles of programming languages were of course worth internalizing — but there were four years for the dead, fixed material to accumulate. What he truly wanted to teach was: how to rapidly acquire command of a new language; how to optimize an algorithm; how to think deeply about logic; how to teach yourself through suffering; and the habit of meeting difficulty head-on.

His father had shown Ma En the power of pain. Now he would transmit that power forward, in his own way, to more people.

After all — "the pain of being forced to study when you don't want to" and "the pain of wanting to study and finding no way in" were the same kind of pain. He had to ensure that every student who wanted to learn walked away from him having gained something.

None of it was easy.

Facing the terror of the Room 4 ghost story, there were so many problems demanding resolution; August's deadline was drawing closer one step at a time, and it seemed he should be clearing more space for it. When the strange and uncanny finally revealed its shape before him, the pursuit of it had stopped feeling like something faintly absurd — it was not merely a passion, not merely the dream he'd always chased. It was a responsibility, something with pressing, concrete meaning in the real world. And yet Ma En still believed, without hesitation, that the time he poured into lesson plans and these students was equally meaningful.

His postal service work had carried genuine responsibility and significance as well — but his past self had felt no attachment to it. That had simply been "something to do when there was nothing else." The only thing with meaning, in his past self's reckoning, had been the single dream: the pursuit of the strange and uncanny. So in fact, his past self had been doing only one meaningful thing.

But now? His present self was doing two meaningful things at once, and the fullness of that was something he hadn't felt before.

He wanted to do his best in both.

Pursuing the strange and uncanny was painful. The past pain had come from how it all seemed to dissolve like reflections in water; the present pain came from how it genuinely hurt. Teaching according to his own convictions was equally painful. The pain of it was in the grinding required to design "pain" for students — by his own assessment, no less demanding than the Room 4 ghost story itself. Preparing lesson plans again and again, he could feel his own capabilities being pressed to their limit. He had things to worry about here too, battles to fight in the domain of the mind — only the opponent was not the strange and uncanny, but himself.

In preparing his lesson plans, Ma En had to fully comprehend everything he was setting — including its content and its purpose. In that process, he was absorbing the same pain of learning and thinking that he imposed on others. The more he learned, the more he thought, the more he designed — the more he felt himself being calibrated, bit by bit, by a consistent and through-running force of pain. He was reshaping his students; and simultaneously, he was reshaping himself.

Ma En spent an hour reviewing the lesson plans, took a brief rest, and then, just before eight in the morning, drew out the psychological models he'd been building over the past week — the questionnaire data. Whoever had broken into Room 4 had taken a great deal of material related to the ghost story, but had not taken the questionnaire records connected to psychological analysis. His past self had compiled over three thousand questions in total, along with additional data he'd preserved before arriving in Japan. He used these to construct his models, re-examining the arc of his own changes, and at last confirmed: the changes were normal. No cognitive distortion, no deviation in perception. The only issue lay in the single gap: the self before the amnesia had known that the strange and uncanny existed; the self after the amnesia had believed it did not. That difference in belief had produced certain fluctuations in his thinking — but when the strange and uncanny had appeared before the post-amnesia self in its full reality, the difference had been eliminated. What had seemed, in those extraordinary forty-eight hours a little over a week ago, like a thorough rejection of his past self — when viewed against the data curves and threshold ranges — had in fact never cut "before" and "now" into two separate selves. It had only felt different. It had not actually been different.

And now? The consistent, through-running pain made him feel, more certainly than ever, that past and present were one unbroken line. He could accept everything from before and everything from now without reservation.

Pain made him feel good.

Ma En set down the pen at last. Nine days. The self-assessment was done.

The postal worker. The young man chasing a dream. The teacher standing at the front of the classroom. In terms of self-understanding, they had all converged into one — without a single contradiction left between them. He had never lacked courage, but only now could he say that the interior had recovered its equilibrium.

And only now did Ma En feel he could face the Matchmaking God again. What was truly frightening — was it Matsuzaemon? No. What was truly frightening was the Matchmaking God.

Ma En stood, went to the wardrobe. Hirota Masami had filled it with casual wear in a range of styles and colors, and he did wear them — but the formal suits were all the same. He reached for the formal suit, because he had real work to do.

Standing before the full-length mirror, he stepped into the trousers, fastened each button on the shirt, straightened the collar and the cuffs, and knotted the deep red tie. The shirt and trousers had been laundered and pressed by Hirota Masami — not a single crease. He pulled on the jacket, tugged the sleeve hem once, tugged the jacket hem once, reached for the deep red round-brimmed hat and settled it on his head, picked up the black umbrella, and looked at himself in the mirror.

"Good luck, Ma En."