The Room 3 neighbor was emotionally volatile, inwardly sensitive and easily provoked, and his commitment to secrecy bordered on pathological. Ma En saw many qualities in him that made him a difficult candidate for collaboration — but.

In moments like this, Ma En had a habitual reflex: was there truly nothing good about this friend? Setting aside his practical usefulness — being at the center of the Room 4 Ghost Story — and looking at him simply as a person, as someone capable of mutual understanding, had Ma En really reached the point of finding him so tiresome that he couldn't be bothered to look for his qualities?

He disliked viewing people through the lens of "useful" or "not useful." Even at the postal service, even in situations where the stakes involved were greater than human lives, he couldn't bring himself to look at the people around him — or across from him — purely as instruments of commercial value. Of course, this kind of thinking had to stay entirely interior during actual work, and it left him deeply exhausted by the end of most days.

Even so, this stubborn refusal — which to his colleagues must have looked laughable and naïve — carried enormous weight inside him.

Even as he probed the neighbor with words and posture and small tactical gestures, Ma En was simultaneously watching himself.

This neighbor knew many secrets. He possessed an unusual angle of observation that gave him access to intelligence most people couldn't obtain. Of course, to most people, that intelligence would read as the raving of a madman. If Ma En hadn't lived through strange and bizarre things himself, he wouldn't be analyzing the man's information this carefully.

Especially when that intelligence implicated Hirota-san — his girlfriend, who occupied a disturbingly central position in it — his initial reaction was resistance. This had nothing to do with reason. It was simply that in seeing Hirota Masami as a wholly human woman, in relating to her as one, he'd been drawn to the human and feminine quality that radiated from her. That quality was so vivid and real and beautiful that it was hard to accept the claim that her fundamental nature was "monster."

Even as the neighbor kept asserting it, kept implying it — Ma En could see something in the details of how he said it. The man called Hirota Masami a monster, but without any particular malice directed at her. If anything, Ma En had a faint sense that in the matter of his relationship with Hirota, the one this neighbor was actually targeting was him.

The evidence: even when this neighbor vented his rage — and he had plenty of rage against "the Matchmaking God and the monsters" — he'd never once cursed Hirota Masami. He'd only stated the fact of what she was. Neither emotionally nor in the direction of his thinking did he treat the subject of Hirota's "special" nature as something that constituted "a problem that needed solving." His attitude toward Matsuzaemon was entirely different.

It was those details that made Ma En decide to set the question of Hirota aside for now.

The repeated probing had brought the neighbor's sensitive temper close to a limit. There was one moment when Ma En genuinely thought the man was about to lunge at him and beat him badly. Or worse — something more dangerous, like a criminal who'd lost their head and was about to act. Ma En didn't know the full extent of this man's abilities. But based on his build alone, and his self-proclaimed detective background, and whatever strange thing this room was hiding — without a weapon, it would be better not to meet him head-on.

"I'm sorry, friend — I've made a great deal of trouble for you. But there's no one else I can think of who could help." Ma En thanked him again. "I'm just someone with a little cleverness, not much courage, and a tendency to give people the benefit of the doubt — honestly, my flaws fill a list. But you'll help me, won't you?"

"Hm-mm, yes, I'll help you — you don't need to talk yourself down like that—" The neighbor's mood had softened, his voice dropping to something almost gruff with warmth. "At least you're smarter than the others before you. If it had been any of them, I couldn't have helped even if I'd wanted to. And I've been waiting such a long time. This feels like the only chance. Kid — we're friends, right?"

"Right. Friends." Ma En said it without hesitation.

"This time I help you — show you a wider world. Next time you help me, right?" The neighbor held Ma En's gaze, expression serious and immovable, with something that almost bordered on compulsion.

"Yes. You help me, I help you. Whatever you need next time — as long as it's within my ability, I'll do it." Even as he said it, Ma En had already thought through what kind of request was coming — almost certainly something to do with Matsuzaemon. In the most extreme case, the man might ask him to help kill Matsuzaemon.

Even so, his answer had been unhesitating. He understood clearly: whatever he chose when the time came, the answer right now could not contain even a flicker of hesitation.

"Then it's decided." The neighbor's eyes softened, radiating something that looked like joy — and even the outline of his face, buried in shadow, seemed to brighten slightly.

"Now. I'll take you to deal with the body." As he said this, the neighbor reached toward the body on the coffee table — but Ma En couldn't make out his hand. Only a rough outline of the arm; the hand itself was unreadable in the dark. With effortless ease, the body was hoisted onto his shoulder.

The young man, not particularly large, draped over the neighbor's wide, thick shoulder like a cloth doll stuffed with cotton.

The neighbor's nose twitched. He muttered: "Still that same unpleasant smell."

"The way he died is similar to the previous Room 4 tenants," Ma En said, choosing the moment carefully. "I did a quick check — no wounds—"

"And no weapon." The neighbor cut him off, as if he already knew what was coming. "There's no weapon to find. Because the weapon is inside his stomach — and the thing that fired it is in his brain."

"His stomach? His brain? I don't follow." Though he said it, Ma En already had some guesses.

"He ate something he shouldn't have."

"The mixed vegetables?" Ma En tested.

The neighbor gave him a long, measuring look. "Not necessarily mixed vegetables. Those things are like wild mountain herbs — they can be made into all kinds of foods. You ate Hirota Masami's hometown mixed vegetables, didn't you? Those are special... similar to her, in their own way." He paused, then added something in a tone that was secretive and oddly tender, almost as if showing off: "I've eaten them too." Then quickly, as if correcting himself: "Not made by that Hirota."

He couldn't make out the neighbor's expression clearly, but Ma En felt something warm move through the man — as though for just a moment he'd slipped into a memory, and that memory was a good one. In that moment, the enormous, formidable body seemed to soften. This was more genuinely human, more unguarded, than anything the neighbor had shown him in the conversation so far.

Like a piece of steel that had been bent out of shape, melting just slightly.

Ma En thought this without letting it show — he acted as if he hadn't noticed anything at all.

He felt that whatever person and story lay behind that moment was probably the deepest and most precious secret inside this neighbor — almost certainly connected to the Room 4 Ghost Story at a fundamental level, possibly the critical link. But to go digging now would only be counterproductive.

"We're heading out now? Through the front?" Ma En said practically. "The police might still be watching outside."

"If you thought of it, do you think I wouldn't?" The neighbor's imperious air snapped back into place. He made a sweeping gesture — and immediately Ma En felt something erupt from the sofa: from the cushion beneath him, from the backrest at his spine, from the gap behind his heels — things of varying thickness but extraordinary toughness, smooth and cool, winding around him like rope.

His instinct was to dodge — but he was still a step too slow. Or rather, the number of them and the speed at which they wound around him exceeded anything he could have prepared for; something this sudden would have caught even a trained soldier flat-footed. In the space of a lightning flash, Ma En made the choice not to resist.

He had to trust this friend. He could only trust him.

And besides — though in the dark he couldn't make out what the things were — the sensation on his skin produced a powerful, immediate familiarity. This was not the first time he'd been wrapped in something like this.

The more specific memory was like something scribbled over with a pencil until nothing remained legible. Before he could push through that blur and locate the origin of the familiarity, cool night air rushed into the room.

He turned instinctively — the living room window had been opened, though he hadn't noticed when. Beyond it was not the street outside the building but the open air above the apartment's inner courtyard garden. A delicate floral scent followed the night wind through. In the moment before his eyes adjusted, he seemed to see grass blades curling at the window's edge—

No — he caught himself immediately. That wasn't a hallucination.

The curtains were rising from both sides. Only now did moonlight enter Room 3 — and even the moonlight, which on ordinary nights would have been soft and atmospheric, now seemed to carry a tangible strangeness. In it, Ma En could clearly see: the tendrils and branches of some kind of plant, moving with the slow, heavy, deliberate undulation of lazy, toxic snakes—

The floor, the walls, the ceiling of the room — all of it was already covered in them. Concrete and wood showed only in scattered patches.

The faint scraping sounds he'd been hearing all along — this was it. The sound of the vines moving.

This time, he heard the dripping clearly: a sound of water, of moisture, filling the room all at once.

He looked toward the neighbor with something close to shock. The enormous body was almost entirely covered in vines. They were knotted, as though countless fine ones had tangled together — or perhaps a few very thick ones. Some had sunk deep beneath his skin. Half his body had become something like a part of the plant; half his face, most of his features, were already covered by the fine filaments of the root system, rooted into him, growing through him in symbiosis.

This was why he looked so vast and bloated — the vines filled him, distending the outermost layer of muscle and skin.

Liquid seeped from the neighbor's vine-filled body, dripping onto the floor in a slow pattering — something between muddy water and pus, looking filthy, but without a particularly unpleasant smell. Only a raw, vegetal oddness.

Ma En didn't know whether this was how the man looked all the time. But one thing was clear: without some kind of disguise, this form was not something that could walk out a front door.

Although — if he wore loose, oversized clothing, and didn't spend much time outside...

While these thoughts moved through Ma En's mind, his body was yanked into the air. What had wound around him was exactly this — the tendrils and branches of the same unknown plant. But he felt no pain; only the vast, overwhelming strength of the vines, leaving no space for struggle.

In the next blink, the enormous body vaulted out through the window — it was impossible to tell whether it cleared the frame or not; Ma En had the impression that the vast outline had shifted shape in the moment of passing through. Outside, it hung suspended in the air like a bird.

Before the neighbor could begin to fall, Ma En had already been pulled out after him through the window.

A single, swift jolt—

Ma En's field of vision cartwheeled — in less than a breath, he'd gone from the narrow, closed living room to open air, suspended in the sky.

A strong centrifugal force pressed against him. He was still moving along an upward arc.

The deep night sky above: countless stars, thin wisps of drifting cloud, and the moon moving with easy grace over the top of the apartment building.

The vast outline — vine-covered from head to foot, carrying the corpse, carrying Ma En — seemed to step on the air itself and leaped again, harder, upward, as if to vault directly into the moon, shooting toward a higher sky.

In the next moment, Ma En's vantage had already surpassed the apartment's roofline, surpassed every nearby landmark's summit — and from this wider, flatter perspective, he looked down over a city that almost never slept: neon and nightlife, the flow of traffic, shimmering lights mingling with the starlight above in a brilliance that answered itself.

An extraordinary experience, spreading out as a gorgeous night panorama — and Ma En couldn't help but hold his breath.

He was flying.

A half-man half-monster, a young man chased by the bizarre, and a corpse were gliding through the night sky of the city.