These strange, human-like creatures moved through the forest without the vegetation slowing them in the least. Beneath the shuffling, dragging rhythm of their feet, changes in terrain seemed equally meaningless. They simply walked forward. Ma En could feel it clearly: they had a specific destination, a fixed objective, and this route was one they'd traveled countless times before.

He didn't know where the column he'd joined would finally stop. From the moment he'd disguised himself and fallen in, a difficult-to-describe sensation had taken hold — as though the flow of time had turned strange. Walking within the procession, time didn't run in one direction the way it should; it wasn't being left behind moment by moment the way people normally described it. Sometimes Ma En didn't feel like he was moving forward at all. Sometimes he had the distinct impression that time was running backward.

He didn't know how long this lasted. Immersed in this strange, frightening motion, he suddenly understood: what he was sensing was not linear time. Time's measuring scale had been dismantled — fragments, without fixed order, scattered everywhere. Each stretch of distance the procession covered seemed to carry them into a different shard.

But this was only his feeling, his imagination, his attempt to put words to what he was experiencing. He knew, deeply, that his best descriptions were still thin and flat compared to the actual sensations. His experience was richer, but the reality generating that experience was almost certainly more complex still.

He had no doubt: he was lost. If he left the column now, he could never retrace his steps. The path back might not exist anymore — or more precisely, within the range of what he could see, feel, and comprehend, the clues that would lead him back had ceased to be findable.

This was a dream, and strange things happened in dreams — shifts in time and space were par for the course. But this was also not the kind of dream people normally had. Walking with the procession, Ma En felt as though he were gradually leaving the dream behind and being drawn into a real world that exceeded his capacity to understand.

He still couldn't catch that darting insight. He still couldn't determine what this dream actually was.

Real and unreal alternated across his senses until he suspected he was in the state of someone dosed with hallucinogens — that he'd actually woken up and the enemy had injected something, and all of this was pharmaceutical delirium. His thoughts refused to organize. Every time he tried to string his intelligence together logically, he found the pieces scattered and disarranged, genuine and false hopelessly mixed, and his judgment insufficient to sort them.

If ordinary logical thinking were a necklace of natural pearls, strung on a fine thread, then the thread had snapped. Natural pearls and fakes lay mingled on the floor — thousands of them. To kneel and begin sorting was to know, rationally, that it could be done, while the emotions produced only exhaustion, pain, and an overwhelming urge to refuse.

Ma En felt sick. He clenched his teeth. His head was thick and heavy. In the murk, it was as though countless branches were reaching for him from every direction — he dodged, blocked, knocked them away, fought to stay lucid — only to realize that something had wrapped around his ankles, and in the next instant he was being dragged backward.

He no longer knew whether he was hallucinating, dreaming, or genuinely being attacked by formless things. He tried to shout. What came out of his mouth was not a shout — not even close. It was a fine, continuous muttering, whispered and rapid, and the pitch and cadence were nothing like his own voice. Less a cry than a kind of babbling — disjointed, arrhythmic, in no recognizable language or sequence. Something was using his mouth.

The sounds were crude, mocking, venomous. They dripped with spite. Even in his most disoriented moments, Ma En was absolutely certain he would never, under any circumstances, produce sounds this ugly and malicious. Which made the experience that much more terrifying and bizarre.

It was an extraordinary thing to go through. Listening to this voice — his own vocal cords, his own throat, his own lips — he could think of nothing else. Only a single, desperate impulse remained: to wrench himself free of this terrible mire.

He did it. The way a person who knows they're dreaming fights to wake — believing they're surfacing, only to find they're still inside; believing they feel their body, only to find they can't move it. His flesh had turned to stone and his soul was locked inside. Even so, he kept struggling — painfully, stubbornly — until some flash of alertness, origin unknown, carried his consciousness through the barrier.

His eyes snapped open. He felt they'd never closed. But only now could he perceive the things around him fully — as though a gift-box had been opened and the contents laid bare.

And with that, Ma En felt the overwhelming déjà vu again — and this time, in the first instant, he knew where it came from.

He had never been to this place. But he had memories of somewhere similar. The similarity wasn't in any specific object, any particular tree or plant — it wasn't in the overall shape of the landscape. It was in the light. In the sound. In the smell. In the humidity. In every sensory factor that combined to create an impression — everything his senses had gathered except sight — funneling into his brain and producing one blurred, approximate recognition.

These near-identical sensory factors left a single, crystalline thought in his mind:

Sanchoumoku Park's cemetery.

He wasn't actually sure the park had a cemetery. The word cemetery gave him pause. He knew he'd been to Sanchoumoku Park — it was a public space beloved by Bunkyo District residents of all ages, popular for rest and dates. Over the past month he'd gone with Hirota-san several times, seemed to have gone with other people as well, and had visited alone too. But where the cemetery was, exactly — that was vague and uncertain.

Yet the phrase Sanchoumoku Park's cemetery rang through his skull with a clarity and conviction that logic couldn't touch. He chose not to doubt it. Instead he chose to believe it was a fragment of erased memory, surfacing now as a foundation for understanding what was in front of him.

The long march, the winding column, the countless grey-robed figures that looked like people but were closer to monsters — they had stopped.

Ma En realized he'd regained lucidity at exactly this moment.

He was still in the dream, still in the bizarre dreamscape, with no sign of waking in reality. On all sides the ancient, primeval forest continued — high humidity, muddy underfoot, no proper path visible, no trace of the route they'd taken. No — there were traces. Ma En looked down and saw footprints. His own footprints. Apart from his, the column of thousands had left nothing at all — as though their feet had never touched the ground.

The figures that had formed the column had dispersed, spreading outward into the forest on all sides. They stood beside towering trees, partially obscured by rocks and undergrowth, and the limited visibility meant that in every direction he couldn't see, he could only sense that there were many, many more. And their attention — if attention was the right word — was fixed on a single point.

The sensation was uncanny. These human-like creatures were entirely shrouded in their robes; their faces, if faces existed, were invisible. The one Ma En had killed hadn't even had proper eyes — no iris, no pupil, just holes with tendrils inside. There should have been no way to determine where they were looking. Perhaps it was the orientation of their bodies — all facing the same center? Or perhaps their focus was so concentrated, so intense, that it could be felt without being seen?

Ma En had no answer, and didn't want to find a "rational" one. Inside a bizarre dream, encountering a bizarre assemblage of not-quite-human things — what was the point of fitting them into human-scale reason?

He did not, for a moment, believe these things were human.

He was no longer at the tail of the column. He realized he'd ended up somewhere in the middle of the crowd, surrounded on all sides by grey silhouettes. And the geometry of the terrain — the rise and fall of the land, the gaps between trees and rocks and brush — left, almost deliberately, a narrow corridor of sight through which he could see what lay at the center.

The atmosphere was bizarre. Silent. Cold. Heavy. Oppressive. Ma En could summon a hundred words for the feeling — every one of them negative, every one of them a synonym for dread. This place felt like a slaughterhouse where many had died. Like standing alone in the aftermath, watching the bodies, and overhearing the killers discuss who to murder next —

Ma En found a more precise comparison:

A concentration camp.

Yes. Like the camps from the world wars, built for no purpose except to gather people together and execute them. Whatever sounds such a place might produce — the helpless, anguished cries of the condemned; the involuntary, barely audible sounds of people too terrified to speak, too terrified to move, unable to stop themselves from whimpering; the executioners' footsteps, steady and measured; the begging, the sobbing — whatever sounds these might be, however they might weave together, the net effect was a single, devastating impression:

A silence like death.

Supremely horrifying. Negative. Deranged. A silence of death.

If Ma En could have stopped breathing, he would have. If he could have stopped his heart, he would have. Both felt like exposure — as though every breath, every beat, would give him away. He'd been through danger before — the kind that kills you if you flinch — but nothing that had ever made his heart want to stop, made him want to smother his own lungs. The body he'd trained for years, the willpower he'd called strong, the confidence in his ability to regulate his own mental state, the countless self-assessments and self-checks — in the face of this fear, all of it was as sweet and fragile as candy wrappers.

Everything he'd ever thought of as "above the ordinary human baseline" felt, here and now, like a clumsy joke.

Ma En understood that he was, in truth, very fragile. A fragility particular to being human. No matter who you were, as long as you remained human, placed in this situation, you would not — could not — respond any better than he was responding.

Under this colossal fear and pressure, standing among these not-quite-human figures, surrounded by them beyond count, Ma En looked through the narrow gap between bodies and objects — toward the center. From the moment he'd regained consciousness, the direction he'd been facing, and the direction every creature faced, was the same.

Deep in the primeval forest, ringed by the overlapping, shadowed silhouettes of the multitude, the single center stood bare of tall trees and all vegetation above knee height. The ground was flat and barren — earth and sparse grass, all of it a desiccated yellow-brown, as though every drop of moisture, every particle of nutrient, had been drained. It was a wound in the living forest: an ugly, raw-looking scar.

And in the middle of that scar stood a structure built of stone. Crude. Primitive. The stones were stacked without mortar, without any visible bonding material between them — just one rough, irregular stone atop another, their surfaces lumpy and angular in a way that should have made stacking impossible. But stacked they were, rising three or four meters high, a single story.

The structure could not hold people. Ma En couldn't imagine it housing even the smallest number of these creatures. None of them had approached it; they remained in the forest, gazing from a distance. Its form was primitive, its construction ancient, but it carried an unmistakable quality of symbolic significance. It reminded Ma En of a totem, or a temple — a structure from a tribal society. In the idiom of the Japanese islands: a shrine.

Not a place for habitation. A place for worship and sacrifice.

He could even sense something more specific: what was venerated here was a quality of nature and pattern — the way people worshipped the sun, the ocean, the mountains — rather than any ancestor or living being. The feeling was vast, weighty, and elemental.

So all of this — the procession, the thousands — was for a ritual?