Ma En locked himself in the restroom.

The narrow space, with only himself inside it, finally let him exhale. The moment he did, the vomiting came — violent, convulsive, as though he were trying to turn his lungs inside out. At first he didn't look at what came up; he just let it happen. When the heaving eased enough for a breath, he peered into the plastic bag.

Blood — dark, clotted, in thick patches. And threading through it, fibrous strands and small round objects that looked like plant roots and seeds. It didn't look like anything he'd eaten. The rest of the contents were equally wrong — not what a human being should produce. He couldn't be certain it wasn't just his perception, but the overall impression was: this was not normal vomit.

He rinsed his mouth at the tap, then shoved two fingers down his throat and kept going until nothing more came. His legs were trembling. His body — always strong, always dependable — had never felt this wrung-out and hollow. But getting this material out of him had brought a distinct relief, as though something that had been threatening him from the inside had temporarily withdrawn.

After another fifteen minutes of rest, he noticed the broken pinky finger. He remembered why he'd done it — the reasons worked in both the dream and in reality. The pain from the nightmare so thoroughly dwarfed a broken bone that the finger barely registered. Against the full-body nerve agony that had followed him out of the dream, it was nothing.

This much was now certain: the Room 4 Ghost Story was not the urban legend he'd half-pretended it was. It was a fact — an outrageous, extreme, undeniable fact. It had been happening to him since his third day in Japan. His past self had pursued the bizarre and gotten his wish — and as his past self had always been prepared to accept, the danger that came with it had been more than human strength could resist. Within three days, before he'd even begun to understand what he was dealing with, he'd been taken down.

Time to organize what I know.

He told himself this and splashed cold water over his face several times. He was sure by now that he'd developed genuine paranoid ideation — even people he'd once thought couldn't possibly be involved, people he didn't want to suspect, were now impossible to trust. Every bizarre event that had struck in sequence made even innocence a dangerous assumption.

Including the three passengers sharing his compartment. They looked like ordinary people. That wasn't reassuring anymore.

From Tokyo to Kanagawa by local train shouldn't take more than ninety minutes. He'd boarded in the morning. It was now past nightfall, and the storm outside hadn't changed since he'd first lost consciousness. The solidly built man had clearly stated: this train was heading for Tokyo. If that wasn't a lie, then during the seven or eight hours he'd spent in the nightmare, his waking body had done things — or had things done to it — that he had no memory of.

He also clearly remembered all three companions saying they were going to Kanagawa. Now they were on a train back to Tokyo. Were they lying? Or had they, too, been altered without noticing?

He couldn't find a single inconsistency in the solidly built man's manner or expression. The man genuinely seemed to believe his destination was Tokyo. Just as Hirota-san, the tenants, everyone — they all seemed to genuinely be what they appeared to be.

The people around him looked entirely normal, but the outcomes were entirely abnormal. This wasn't the first time he'd faced that pattern. He could no longer fully trust Hirota-san. He could only hope she was like these three — an unwitting victim, a puppet who didn't know she was dancing. He hoped everyone he'd met this past month was the same: involuntary, ignorant. Not conscious participants leveraging their numbers to commit these terrible acts.

100,000?

If all 100,000 were conscious, willing perpetrators — the thought was too overwhelming to sustain. But even if the majority were passive, unknowing, manipulated into action — the effect was equally paralyzing. Ma En understood now, at gut level, what the Room 3 neighbor's "you can never escape" truly meant.

Whoever had orchestrated this — the mastermind behind a situation so bizarre it bordered on despair — was genuinely difficult to classify as human. The precision of the control, the fineness of the guidance, every person functioning as an eye, even during total war when every resource was bent toward mass mobilization — this would have been extraordinarily difficult.

And then there was the dream. Everything he'd experienced inside it pushed him further toward the conclusion: the mastermind did not operate through normal social structures or organizational forms. There had to be methods beyond imagining.

The first thing to examine was what he'd vomited — the root-like and seed-like material. The dream's vast forest ecosystem, the grotesque things he'd discovered inside the plants, made him wonder: was this a case of human-plant symbiosis? Some parasitic or mutualistic relationship between human bodies and alien vegetation? But even as he thought it, the idea felt too shallow. The nameless entity that had crushed his mind with its presence — it had radiated the quality of "an unknown natural law," but it hadn't felt closely connected to plants in particular.

If I take everything in the nightmare as necessary intelligence: what happened was a group of creatures performing a sacrifice — like primitive humans worshipping a deity that represented natural law. The entity might be their "god."

But historically, the deity worshipped in a sacrifice often has no direct relationship to the worshippers' own nature. More commonly, the worshippers project their own anomalies onto the deity, interpreting them as miracles.

Of course it's not entirely unrelated — but the connection is more indirect. Humans worshipped fire gods, but when someone chose to leap into flames and die, believing it would return them to the fire god's embrace — was that the fire god's command? Obviously not.

Unlike human "fire gods," what these creatures worship is something tangible, something directly perceptible — very different from the abstractions humans derive from observing nature.

So: is it possible that the creatures use certain plants to manipulate humans, and attribute this ability to the nameless entity they worship? Or — although evidence is still thin — under the hypothesis that human-plant symbiosis is possible, could both the anomalous plants and the symbiotic relationship itself be effects of the entity's presence? Not something the entity deliberately causes, but something its existence naturally produces — the way its presence creates conditions that others then exploit?

One theory after another surfaced in his mind. None had definitive evidence. Each felt as though the truth was still hiding somewhere deeper — as though he'd gotten something slightly wrong. Then again, the Room 4 Ghost Story's backstory was so deep and so opaque that people could spend years without finding purchase. The things they couldn't understand had been given the label "ghost story," and somehow that label made everything feel acceptable, explainable, settled. The things that defied understanding became things that didn't need understanding.

Perhaps that was partly why the word "ghost story" had been invented in the first place.

"The bizarre truly exists. But it's humans who cause human society's tragedies and disasters." He could only say this to himself. He didn't believe he could grasp the ultimate truth. He couldn't handle the entity — that vast, malevolent, natural-law-like thing was beyond him. But if he narrowed the scope to the human dimension, he might have a chance.

He knew this wasn't the best approach. It wasn't a root-cause solution. But it was the only thing he could conceivably accomplish. And even within the "human" scope, encounters with creatures were still highly likely — even if those creatures had once been people, fighting them with human methods would be difficult.

Falling into a hopeless impasse was imaginable. If he let himself think about the worst case, he couldn't even determine how bad it could get. So he chose to think only about what he could bear, and hope for the rest. He was certain the Japanese island government would not help him. Kamishima Kousuke's silence was itself a form of standing aside. And as Katsura-sensei had warned: the moment Ma En committed an actual crime, he'd be investigated, prosecuted, stripped of his social position, and locked away.

Even with Matsuzaemon as the prime suspect, direct violence was out of the question. Any private investigation of the man would simply become leverage for the other side. Hard or soft, every obvious approach seemed blocked.

But from another angle, this was predictable. When it came to executive power and the capacity for force, who could compete with a government? If Matsuzaemon were easy to deal with, the Japanese island government would have dealt with him already.

Kamishima Kousuke's move — placing Ma En on the board — had probably been a long shot from the start. This was Kamishima's nature: the man had considerable face, someone who managed relationships the way a spider wove its web. Only someone with genuinely deep ties to the homeland's postal service could have obtained Ma En's work evaluation so easily — that was not something achievable through ordinary Party comradeship or international-member solidarity. Not an expectation of success, but a gamble: in an impossible situation, the pawn might find a buried reserve of will, fight with his back to the wall, create enough chaos to generate an opening for Matsuzaemon's removal. Ma En was a sacrificial piece meant to produce a single opportunity. Nothing more.

Having thought through all of this, Ma En let out a long breath. The situation was grim, but understanding the shape of it was better than fumbling blind.

So — on this battlefield I can't leave: who could be a friend?

He needed allies. Even uncertain ones. Even just one. A friend could do what he couldn't, think what he hadn't, extend a hand at the critical moment instead of leaving him to fight alone.

Only someone who understood the situation and had the will to act qualified.

Which meant: the strange neighbor in Room 3 was the only candidate. But his mental state was visibly precarious. He'd already made clear that Matsuzaemon had to die — but did he have a viable plan? Ma En doubted it. If the neighbor truly knew the full story and had decided to kill Matsuzaemon, the decision was almost certainly not strategic but desperate — a forced gamble born of being cornered.

"Dangerous, dangerous..." Ma En murmured to himself, and pulled from his pocket the train ticket stub and the paper ball with its mysterious symbols.

The stub clearly showed the departure station, the destination, and the departure time. By this evidence, he'd boarded at a Kanagawa station bound for Tokyo, thirty minutes ago — but he had no memory of any of it. The paper ball bore no stains; the fact that it had appeared in his nightmare and apparently saved his life struck him as deeply strange. He couldn't remember its origins, but the conviction that it was important had grown until it was consuming. There should be clues in his room — materials, notes — that he'd never thought to examine before.

Everything he'd previously ignored might be exactly what mattered. The enemy had used some method to prevent him from paying attention to these things. But returning to Room 4 meant almost certainly encountering Hirota-san, and he could no longer accept what she provided — especially the food, the most likely vector for drugs. He didn't relish using a clumsy excuse to push her away, either. After all, thinking back on the past month, Hirota-san had been so natural in everything she'd done — he hadn't seen a trace of artifice. If she was like the others he'd encountered, swept up in something she'd never understood, acting without knowing why — then he still hoped, once the Room 4 matter was resolved, to pick up what they had where it had been left.

His past self would have had no trouble refusing her. He was certain of that. But for his current self, it was no longer such an easy thing. Something had changed somewhere inside him — what had once felt natural had ceased to feel natural at all.

If she was merely an unwitting tool, rejecting her harshly might not just hurt her emotionally — it might endanger her, if the puppeteer decided a useless puppet was disposable.

He still had two or three days before he needed to return to work. As long as Hirota-san didn't materialize in front of him the way she had at the station, he had time to think of a better approach.

Though I should prepare myself. Bunkyo District is the enemy's stronghold. Since I can't even leave, the moment I'm back, the people hiding in the dark will know. What they'll do — I can't predict.

But if there was any comfort to take: based on what he knew, as long as he didn't provoke a crisis before August, he might be temporarily safe.

Clinging to that — the only thing he could cling to — Ma En left the restroom and returned to his seat. The young woman and the older man had woken by now. All three passengers were chatting amiably — none of the awkward silence he remembered from before.

He sat down and asked: "Is everyone heading to Tokyo?"