The nameless thing he'd seen in the nightmare was called the Matchmaking God? For a moment, Ma En couldn't connect the word "god" to anything that resembled that. Whether in his homeland or in Japan, every depiction of a deity he'd ever encountered was humanized — even gods representing natural law were given features, outlines, some recognizable characteristic from human experience. But the nameless thing in the nightmare defied description even in language, let alone image; trying to close his eyes and simply picture it was impossible.

Every image that surfaced was immediately recognizable as wrong. Every analogy he reached for collapsed into something laughably wrong — not even in the right family of things. Every attempt to explain it through what he knew produced only absurdity; it shrank in the attempt into something mystifying and insubstantial, a hallucination from a bad dream.

Even now, recalling the nameless thing still brought fear — a heavy, dense pressure crushing his head, the nerves there aching dully. The pain and pressure were not only psychological. They were physical too. For a person without the means to regulate both body and mind, that suffering would cling like a curse.

It was the drug he'd taken in the nightmare — the Nanke Zi — and the corporeal pain the drug had left behind, that had given him some relief. That full-body agony, more direct and more definite than the other kind, had covered over the entity's pressure. But that was all it had done: one pain masking another. The pressure and suffering the nameless thing had pressed into him had never actually receded. It had only been buried. Once the drug's effect faded completely, he would have to face that fear again without cover.

The reason he could still think and act normally right now was simply that his endurance, like everything else about him, ran higher than most.

"The Matchmaking God..." he murmured. "Calling that thing a god." He said it, but he understood perfectly well why ordinary people would. If a person genuinely entered that nightmare and encountered the nameless thing, they would be afraid — and most, half-believing, half-desperate, would reach for the category of "deity" — because the accumulated weight of life's suffering and longing, of every prayer and ordinary assumption, would shatter under the impact of something too large to bear. And in the crater left behind, a "god" would form.

He'd always believed this had little to do with how much science a person knew. The key was simply whether they were omniscient — which they weren't, which no one was. The pursuit of science gave a person better tools for resisting the shock of the unknown, it was true. But once the unknown exceeded whatever knowledge and time a person had available, their philosophy, their sense of what life meant, their entire inner world — all of it would still take the blow.

Every discovery brought joy. But each time a person reached for understanding and was turned back — turned back again and again, until all the time they had was gone — something in their thinking and spirit would be bent out of shape. This wasn't just theory: Ma En had actually looked into it, tracing through history the final spiritual destinations of those who'd devoted their lives to science. The patterns he'd found were surprising. Many scientists, by the end of their lives, had landed somewhere other than science.

In the end, it wasn't that science lacked power. It was simply that the time a single person had to pursue it — to grow, to hold their mind at its peak — was far too short. From that angle, he sometimes thought: science was a truth that suited humanity, not a truth that suited a person. Someone who loved science must love humanity — or some great portion of it — because the truth of science was only fully visible at the species scale, not the individual one.

Setting all of that aside — Ma En had no intention of doubting whether the Matchmaking God existed, and no interest in investigating its fundamental nature. Whether it was real or imagined, the fear and suffering it produced were real. And in theory, if someone — experiencing that pressure, that pain, that fear — came to see it as a deity and proceeded to build some form of religion around it, there would be nothing remotely surprising about that. In Japan, even a purely fictional thing with no real influence could be magnified into a deity through the crudest application of psychology. What about something that genuinely created pressure, pain, and fear — something that could be directly experienced in a dream, that left a lasting impression, and defied all description?

Precisely because the nightmare was real, and the entity's effect on people was tangible, any cult that formed around it as a "god" would inevitably be more stable than an ordinary cult.

Ma En had already been forming some thoughts about a possible cult organization during this morning's conversation with the neighbor. Now that the man had explicitly identified the nightmare, had given that nameless entity its name — the scattered fragments in Ma En's mind locked together, forming a complete outline around the concepts of cult, deity, and fanatical belief. The enemy, which had been drifting formlessly in shadow, suddenly had a shape that a beam of light could illuminate.

He could see it clearly now. What he was up against was not a political faction, and not a criminal network built from corrupt officials. It was a cult, and its earthly representative. The enemy's real power didn't lie in political channels or the machinery of government. It lived in the hold that a malevolent belief had over people.

The bizarre events on the train to Kanagawa, the body left in Room 4 — none of it had been the enemy's real strength. None of it was even their best method.

He'd tried, via the staggering claim of at least a hundred thousand people, to imagine the enemy's full strength and the way they truly exercised it. Now he had confirmation: what he'd feared most, and what the Red Party itself was most skilled at — mobilizing the masses. No. They were a cult. The correct word was bewitching the masses.

The Red Party used psychology and sociology, and a penetrating understanding of human relationships, to subtly and gradually draw out a different root of human nature from a non-capitalist angle, and built something genuinely effective at moving people. But this cult's method must be malevolent and direct. It wouldn't give people warmth. It would simply give them fear. It would simply make them ignorant. And that was precisely the method the Red Party would never use.

The Red Party's information control tended toward concealing certain political realities — but it was not a rejection of knowledge itself. The Party actively encouraged people to learn, to sharpen their minds, to investigate the nature of things — including the nature and history of the Red Party itself. In his homeland, this kind of civic education had been part of the curriculum since fifth grade. The Party wanted people to understand — clearly, on their own terms — what a nation was, what an army was, what politics and parties and class meant, and what kind of organization the Red Party itself was. Only then to voluntarily join its cause.

Citizens were expected to think critically about every Party decision, to notice the problems those decisions produced in society, to scrutinize the Party's own flaws — and in this way to provide genuine accountability. Individual opportunists within the Party might dislike being watched. But the Party as an organization welcomed it. By contrast, followers of a cult would never be permitted to know the cult's plans, its true nature, or its internal problems. A cult would never allow its members to scrutinize it. That was the point.

The comparison crossed his mind in an instant, but he didn't linger on it. It was an instinctive thought, and in reality, a cult and the Red Party couldn't even be placed in the same category for comparison.

"So Matsuzaemon," Ma En said, turning back to the neighbor, "is essentially a cult leader?"

"You could put it that way... hm-mm... but he is no ordinary cult leader. He has power. The cult has power. And the Matchmaking God has power. They are not the kind of rabble who swagger by sheer numbers and blind belief." As he said this, the enormous body began to tremble. "The Matchmaking God is a terrifying deity. That power — what is it, exactly? I can't understand it. I truly cannot understand..."

"You mean the Matchmaking God grants this cult some form of actual substantial power?" Ma En had entertained the possibility — that the enemy possessed abilities outside ordinary explanation — but he wasn't fully convinced. Because if you looked at what had happened: nightmares, memory loss, contaminants in vomit, strange outcomes that made victims doubt reality, sustained psychological pressure on targets — all of that could theoretically be achieved through ordinary, scientific methods. Unusual tools, perhaps, but the category of the bizarre didn't have to be invoked. Everything he could remember suffering through in the Room 4 Ghost Story — if you were determined to explain it — could be forced through a scientific framework. Whether such methods actually existed, whether anyone had the tools for them, was a separate question entirely.

He was certain there were genuinely bizarre elements. But "bizarre" was his own standard, not anyone else's — he was well aware that his definition of that word wasn't universal. And he had no particular interest in how others classified what was bizarre and what wasn't.

If the Matchmaking God in the nightmare could truly grant people power beyond ordinary possibility — abilities they hadn't possessed before — then the Room 4 Ghost Story would be something considerably more concentrated in its bizarreness.

He noticed he was becoming a little excited. He'd assumed the present version of himself would only feel burdened by the bizarre — that encountering genuine strangeness would be purely a problem to manage, something dangerous and complicated. He'd assumed his sensibilities had shifted from what they'd once been.

But the excitement seemed to be telling him otherwise — that the old self had never left. Ma En laughed at himself quietly. Of course. He'd only lost his memories and rebuilt his worldview from scratch. His past hadn't been erased. It had only been a month. How far could the old him possibly have gone?

The old self had never left. That was the correct answer.

"Yes. Actual, substantial power..." As the neighbor spoke the word, the enormous body gradually settled — the trembling of fear quieting, his eyes recovering their brightness, his voice becoming animated, almost excited. "You'll see it. I'll take you to see it."

Then Ma En heard it — voices and footsteps in the corridor outside. Someone had come up in the elevator: five or six people, footsteps deliberate, making no effort to muffle themselves. They paused briefly near the elevator. Ma En's mind supplied the image — the figures scanning the corridor — and though he'd never seen any of them, in his mental picture they were all in police uniform. Of course, that was only imagination.

He had no clairvoyance. He could not see through walls.

In his imagination, the officers reached Room 4 quickly. A few fanned out to Room 5 and Room 6 — but no one knocked on sleeping residents' doors.

"...Yes, the locks on both have been forced." Someone said.

"What? Forced?" That was the building manager's voice — she'd come up too. They must have woken her. Even for a reported homicide, the police couldn't enter the building on their own authority. Even with a search warrant, they'd have to explain themselves to management first.

He knew perfectly well that the building manager took her responsibilities seriously. She would keep an eye on them and stop them from crossing lines — whether she'd succeed depended on how hard the police pushed.

Under Japan's two-party system, though, the constraints on the police were significant enough that even in an ordinary homicide investigation, officers would not casually trample the privacy of tenants who appeared uninvolved. They'd need stronger evidence and a cleaner argument to issue additional warrants.

But now there was no body to find. What the scene looked like — after Ma En's work — was a burglary, not a murder. And a burglary of two rooms at once.

He was actually curious: if they pushed hard enough, would they do anything about Room 5?

As far as his memory went, Room 5 had always been empty. And yet he couldn't shake the feeling that something about it was off. Maybe that wrongness was something the old him had known — something buried with the lost memories.

Ma En and the neighbor sat without moving, listening. After a moment, one of the officers proposed investigating Room 5. The manager said nothing — but another officer cut in sharply, telling the first to keep his priorities straight.

"But... the locks on both rooms seem to have been forced the same way. There could be a connection." The young officer pushed back, not ready to let it go.

"We'll talk about that when we have a body." The other officer shut it down, voice flat and steady. "Let's go inside."

"A body in Room 4 — I tell you, that is complete nonsense." The building manager's voice was irritated, but she was grumbling rather than confronting. "You're not here because of that room's ghost story, are you? I'll have you know we had the best spirit medium perform a ritual. Nothing is going to happen this year."