Kamishima Kousuke. Gone. Matsuzaemon. Gone. Professor Mitarai. Gone. Room 3 neighbor friend. Gone.

They were different in every way — in status, in standing, in capability, in knowledge. Every difference imaginable separated them. And yet they shared common ground. One of those commonalities was that all of them had appeared in the story of the Room 4 ghost story, and the Matchmaking God — that mysterious and uncanny presence — was like an invisible thread running through them, binding them to each other. Whatever they were doing, wherever they had gone, everything they did would necessarily converge at some point. Professor Mitarai's connection to the others seemed thinner, on the surface — but Ma En still believed the professor would be drawn in. In the past, he'd been spared only because the ghost story had still been in its early, low-stakes phase.

Now? The core of all of this had begun to play for real.

Ma En didn't believe anyone could accidentally drift free of this current — but he still needed a confirmed fact to prove it.

Over the past week, he'd received nothing but bad news. Everything was growing more difficult, as though something was blocking him — but that invisible resistance only confirmed to him that his judgment was correct. He'd been thinking through a great many things during these days; he had a stack of ideas he wanted to test. But he'd been patient, because the Matchmaking God was simply too uncanny. Recalling his experiences in the nightmares and at Sanchoumoku Park, he couldn't be certain that the version of himself from before those events had been capable of effectively resisting that kind of mental assault.

His past self was certainly not weak — but every version of that past self had "died" in the process of pursuing the Room 4 ghost story. Those deaths were proof enough of the enemy's strength. If the past him had been something like iron, then the present Ma En needed to go back through the forge, to add new elements to the iron and emerge as an alloy stronger than steel.

He knew: if he "died" again in the same way, the next version of himself would have to spend time recovering lost ground — retracing leads, and more importantly, rebuilding self-knowledge from scratch.

Would the enemy allow him that? Ma En didn't know. But the evidence so far suggested the enemy hadn't moved fast enough to leave him no window at all.

In the midst of everyone else's activity, Ma En didn't feel that he was falling behind.

Where was the place with the greatest gravitational pull for archaeologists and folklorists in Japan right now?

The cracks and caves.

And those cracks and caves were clearly connected to the Matchmaking God — so what possible reason would those four figures, all of them suspicious in their own way, have to stay away from the cracks and caves? Their attention, their movements, would converge on the earthquake fault's cracks and caves at some point. Of course, the cracks and caves were distributed across several zones, and differences in timing and location might mean their paths diverged — but Ma En thought it far more likely that in an event this strange and uncanny, with this degree of uncanny directional pull, all persons connected to it would be unable to go their separate ways.

Including himself.

Put simply: going to the caves now carried a very high probability of encountering one or more of these four. And any such encounter must not be treated as coincidence — it had to be understood as an inevitable development in the Matchmaking God-centered chain of events.

—Is pursuing the strange and uncanny interesting?

—Of course it is. Why else would he never stop chasing it? Once he was certain such things truly existed, he could never give up looking for them.

—And also: not interesting at all — because there was always terror and disaster hiding in the fog and the dark and the unknown, beyond anyone's sight.

—The unknown was frightening. Traps everywhere. One misstep and you were dead; worse, you might drag the people around you in with you.

Ma En had once come across a theosophist who had written: "Whether you are a person or a god, whether you are a scientist or anything else — you must inevitably fear the unknown. Because no one knows whether, in the world they have not yet encountered, there exists some force capable of destroying them in an instant.

This has nothing to do with how much you know, or what truths and knowledge you possess — because as long as the unknown exists, all known power is relative. The possibility of being destroyed without warning, without any capacity to resist, is always present.

People may dream of a world in which science rules absolutely, imagining the vast power of scientific law. But so long as science cannot achieve absolute omniscience and omnipotence — so long as the unknown endures — then fear will always be the companion of those with wisdom. Only the foolish can live at peace with fate."

That theosophist had written those words to attack humanity's worship of science; the man was a religious believer. But having experienced the terror of the Matchmaking God, Ma En could now understand the truth in them from an entirely different angle. Perhaps, when the theosophist wrote this, he hadn't had such a deep experiential basis for it after all.

—Even more thrilling than the first time in bed with a woman.

Ma En was thinking exactly this when the door to Room 6 slammed open and his girlfriend, Hirota-san, came barreling out. One hand clutching her bag, the other holding a trash bag, a sandwich clamped in her mouth, she was trying to use her foot to pull the door shut behind her. With her hands full, she couldn't call out for the elevator — and Ma En, standing inside it, pressed the CLOSE button with unhurried ease.

Already moving toward the elevator, Hirota Masami stopped mid-stride. The door was sliding shut with quiet, steady purpose. Her eyes went wide with disbelief. By the time she came back to herself, the door had closed a third of the way — and then five fingers drove through the gap and pried it back.

Ma En stood in the elevator, leaning on his black umbrella. He removed his hat, held it to his chest, and gave a slight bow in the direction of the hallway.

"Good morning."

"Mmmf — mmMMMF!" She could not get a word out. Ma En stepped out of the elevator, reached down, and picked up the bag and trash bag she'd dropped in the hall. Hirota Masami, cheeks bulging as she crammed the rest of the sandwich into her mouth at once, marched into the elevator, waited for him to follow, and then stamped her foot at him. Ma En had already turned his body sideways.

Her heel came down on the elevator floor. Her weight shifted and she started to tip — Ma En caught her shoulder in one easy motion and steadied her.

Hirota Masami swallowed the sandwich with difficulty, turned, and punched him hard in the shoulder. She stared at him, trying to find the right thing to say, and then found nothing — she knew perfectly well this man was teasing her, and she was furious about it, and she also, somehow, couldn't bring herself to be truly angry. That was what infuriated her most.

"Idiot," she said, low-voiced, and hit him again — a second punch, harder on the outside but softer underneath, the anger already half-dissolved.

Ma En made no move to resist. He only drew her in by the waist and asked quietly: "Why are you running so late today?"

"Because of you." Hirota Masami started to raise her voice and then pulled it back down: "Last night you were so rough—"

Ma En shrugged with complete innocence.

"And then you sit there teasing me when I'm already about to be late." She glanced at his suit. "It's the weekend — you still have school?"

"Don't you have work too?" Ma En shrugged.

"My hours aren't as steady as a school's," Hirota Masami said. "And there's been so much going on lately — earthquakes, ancient caves, everyone chasing the excitement. I think it's boring, but if there's money in it, that's fine."

"...You're doing field interviews?" Ma En asked. "Will you be going inside?"

"No. We're not a TV station, and we're not archaeologists. We're doing an interview with a celebrity, then a feature column on the current hot topic." Hirota Masami leaned against him, taking in the familiar warmth of his body. "And in this heat, you're still dressed like that."

"Because it's real work, so I need to dress formally," Ma En said. "Don't I always dress like this for class?"

"Classes during break?"

"Make-up lessons. Falling behind, need to catch up," Ma En said with a small smile, leaving just enough ambiguity that the statement worked on more than one level.

Hirota-san apparently didn't catch the second meaning — or perhaps simply didn't connect it to anything else — and took it at face value as her boyfriend going back to tutor struggling students on a day off.

"Should I pick you up when I finish work?" she asked, naturally. Their relationship had grown steadily closer over these past days; whenever Ma En left the school now, she usually drove to collect him. They'd have a proper dinner out, take a walk around an evening market, then come back to the apartment, where Ma En would spend a while in Room 6 finishing his evening tasks before returning to Room 4 to keep working after she'd fallen asleep.

Because Ma En had returned to his regular work, they were mostly only together in the evenings. And lately she hadn't had the energy to prepare his breakfast anymore.

Not eating "mixed vegetables" was a relief, actually. But Hirota Masami felt guilty about it — she knew Ma En didn't like mixed vegetables, she'd stopped making them deliberately, but the idea that she couldn't prepare a meal for the person she cared about made her quietly unhappy. Ma En was beginning to see something in this: his girlfriend, at the core of her, was far more traditional than her clothes and appearance suggested.

He kept reassuring her. Every day, a good dinner out somewhere. The same as any ordinary couple, wandering around together, or driving out to the coast for an aimless scenic run.

Ma En had no real idea what made a good date. He had very little experience at any of this.

"Today I need to see how things go — I might be there late," Ma En said, deliberately vague. "If I finish early, I'll message you. Though you might end up working later than me."

"That's fair — it all depends on whether the copy comes together smoothly." Hirota-san shrugged with mild resignation.

The elevator arrived. Ma En loosened the arm he'd kept around Hirota-san's waist. She quickly straightened her clothes, then reached up and adjusted his tie — the tie was already perfectly straight, but she simply felt that she had to do it herself, or the morning couldn't properly begin.

She glanced through the elevator doors — no one in the lobby — and rose onto her toes and kissed him deeply, then took back her bag and walked out.

Ma En followed, holding his black umbrella and her trash bag. When he passed the collection point, he set the bag down.

They parted at the entrance of the building. One turned left, the other right.

Strong sunlight fell on Ma En's shoulders, but the hat seemed to absorb it entirely — the shadow beneath the brim blurred his face. When Hirota Masami drove her car out, she caught only a flicker of deep red before the surging crowd closed over it, and he was gone.

She found herself thinking, unexpectedly, of the first time she'd seen this man. One month — she couldn't quite believe it. He was supposed to be just a teacher, and yet everything about him felt obscure, slightly hidden, as though something was kept just out of sight. And she had, in the space of a single month, become this close to a man like that.

"Love-sickness, most likely," Hirota Masami said to no one in particular, and then the thought was already gone — the green light at the intersection was about to change, she spun the wheel, and drove toward work.

Twenty minutes later, Ma En walked into Ichiraku, Asuka's family ramen shop. Same as always, he let Asuka's father recommend the day's bowl. Since the conversation with Asuka, his visits here had increased. Her father, as the full-time ramen chef, knew Ma En from before as a regular — the sight of him coming more often had earned some gentle ribbing — and over time, familiarity had built naturally into something easy and warm.

Eight out of ten morning customers at this shop were regulars. Ma En had become one of them.

"So anyone can start a religion these days." A customer at the adjacent seat was already making his point loudly, rallying the attention of the room: "I was coming home on the train yesterday, stepped out of the station, and someone was handing out flyers. I took one — it listed seven or eight sect names I'd never heard of, laid out like a supermarket sale notice, each one with the full breakdown of membership fees. 'Join to be protected,' they were saying. I'm telling you, these people have gone money-mad."

"You'd be surprised — people actually join after reading those flyers." Someone else picked it up: "My coworker said so, told me a friend of a friend's stepmother's ex-husband dragged his current wife into one. Now they won't stop talking about astrology. Going on about how in August, when the stars align to the right position, a god will descend. What's that supposed to be, some kind of prophecy?"

"You don't even need to read star charts for that." Someone laughed. "I've got a friend at the planetarium — he told me there actually will be a meteor shower in August, along with some other astronomical events. The sky's been cleaner lately; apparently by August you'll be able to see a clear night sky and a big, round moon."

"Bigger than the Mid-Autumn moon?"

"Supposedly."

"So those people just got hold of astronomical data before anyone else and turned around and called it their prophecy."

—When the stars align to the right position? August?

Ma En found his attention snagging on this.