The neighbor ran with Ma En and the body. The dense grass, the shrubs, the thick tangled root systems and spreading branches, the vines hanging in mid-air — everything seemed to clear a path for him. He moved through forest that grew denser the deeper they went, as if he were running through his own back garden — no hesitation, no pause, every turn instinctive, every route already carved somewhere inside him.

Ma En's body appeared to swing freely in the air through sheer momentum, but in reality the vines were constantly exerting force, continuously adjusting, preventing him from slamming into the surrounding trunks. The neighbor carried the body on one shoulder and never glanced back at Ma En, not even once.

Very soon, what felt like familiar ground appeared ahead — but the impression swept past like an illusion before Ma En could place it. When the neighbor came to a stop, the vines holding Ma En swung like a whip-cast fishing line, flinging him outward — and he was the fish that had taken the hook, launched from the water.

He landed hard. He ignored what the impact did to his body and fixed his eyes on the neighbor, who was clearly in some form of mental disturbance. That enormous shape was heaving great unsteady breaths, the liquid seeping from the vine-body dripping steadily from him like sweat, its odor increasingly distinct — not the smell of an animal rotting, but something more like the innate smell of plant matter, or of vegetation and earth mixed and left to ferment.

The exhaustion the neighbor was showing could not be attributed to the physical exertion alone. What was pressing on him mentally was far heavier than anything his body carried.

Ma En felt again the presence of the Matchmaking God — some inexplicable psychic reason, some suddenly erupting impulse, some factor so subtly inserted it couldn't be detected in advance, dragging both him and the neighbor in a malicious direction. Whatever they intended, the starting impulse was always good. And yet there always came a sudden rupture, some unexpected complication, that turned careful thinking into something riddled with holes. He'd heard that when a situation has a worse possible outcome, events tend toward that outcome — and in the bizarre encounters he'd lived through, he felt this was consistently true. He kept trying to redirect things toward a better course and kept falling just short, ending up in the same place regardless.

But to call it "the Matchmaking God deliberately working against us" — he didn't feel that at all. The description felt too human. Everything he knew of the Matchmaking God made that framing feel wrong, uncomfortable. He didn't believe for a moment that the Matchmaking God thought like a person, targeted people the way people targeted each other, acted with deliberate intent against specific individuals. If it did operate that way — if it was that fundamentally human, if it plotted and moved against human beings the way humans schemed against their own kind — then its ceiling was, in the end, just the ceiling of a human.

At only the human level, it wouldn't actually be that dangerous to humanity.

But what Ma En had encountered in the nightmare was categorically unlike any individual human or the whole of humanity — and he couldn't accurately describe even now what that quality had been. Only that it was different. Entirely different.

Even though the neighbor had told him not to take everything in the nightmare as real, the dream had left too deep a mark. He couldn't simply set it aside and redraw the Matchmaking God from scratch.

The neighbor caught his breath in bursts. As if venting, he slammed his vines against the ground — wet earth churned up with grass fragments and flew, some of it landing on Ma En's head. He turned his face instinctively, but a tendril immediately fixed his neck, forcing his face back toward the impact point. He ended up chin-down in earth soaked with the neighbor's liquid seepage. It felt almost deliberate. He thought this, but felt nothing negative about it. If anything, looking at his own condition made him more aware of the damage this neighbor had accumulated — the suffering that had nowhere to go, the emotions that had been trapped for years — and he felt something like sorrow for it, and concern.

He'd considered whether this neighbor might also have hurt others. He considered whether his own sympathy was simply too narrow — too focused on what was in front of him — and whether the emotions that appeared to grieve for another person were, at their core, nothing more than concern for himself. A very practical reality existed: this neighbor's mental stability was directly connected to how much room Ma En had to maneuver.

He had never aspired to be a great person. But he didn't want to become someone who cared for others only as a function of caring for himself.

He hoped that in his feeling — even a small portion of it — wouldn't be so calculating.

He didn't think the current situation was "not the time for this kind of thinking." On the contrary: being in genuine danger was precisely the moment for self-examination. If there were ever conditions capable of forcing the clearest view of oneself, it was this.

He wanted to survive. He wanted to examine himself. He wanted to resolve this — as cleanly and as well as he was capable of. He still had so many things he wanted. And he couldn't move, couldn't do anything except think.

Ma En struggled against the grip in pain. He tried to make a sound, and the vines immediately pressed against his throat, making him feel he was about to be strangled the way the Room 4 tenants before him had died.

He believed the neighbor in front of him was not the ghost story's accomplice. At least, in whatever remained of his humanity, he had no such intent. He was doing something wrong right now — but this was not his true will.

Because of this, Ma En told himself: he would not be strangled here.

Even if the Matchmaking God wouldn't operate from a human angle, from human logic — the surface force propelling this event was still "a human cult." As long as the visible driver of events remained that, he would not be strangled here.

He held onto this. Persuaded himself to hold onto it.

The neighbor finally went still, but the labored breathing didn't stop — only the liquid overflow from his body ceased. At this point, the vines finally loosened from Ma En. He couldn't get up immediately; the feeling of near-suffocation still lingered in his throat. He coughed violently, fought for air, coughed again, over and over, until his body uncurled gradually on the ground.

Ma En rose slowly. He breathed in deeply once more, loosened his tie, rolled his joints, and then took stock of his surroundings for the first time: trees had become sparse starting from roughly fifty meters out, and by the point where they stood, only two or three scattered trees remained. The grass and shrubs were thin here too. The earth was dry, a dull yellow. Only the ground immediately around the neighbor was damp.

This dry, desolate patch inside Sanchoumoku Park was jarring — but there were many scientifically reasonable explanations. Ma En didn't reach for any of them. He only noted that this felt very much like the ceremonial ground in the nightmare where the procession had finally arrived. No strange architecture here, though. Just a scattering of mounded earth and tombstones. Both the mounds and the stones had clearly stood for many years — weathered with a kind of disorder and roughness absent from the formal, regulated burial grounds of the modern city.

But calling it a mass grave wasn't quite right either, because the graves weren't random or tumbled. There was a degree of planning in their arrangement, and someone appeared to have maintained the site relatively recently — which wasn't unreasonable, given that even in his current memory, he retained something along the lines of "in the depths of Sanchoumoku Park there is a rumored place, said to have once been a cemetery."

Only the gossip said "said to have been." The evidence in front of him was rather unambiguous.

Because there were no trees here to block it, the moonlight fell across this barren ground. Even with only thin moonlight, the scene before him felt brighter, at least, than the heavy darkness of the forest — something visible, something to see. But the shallow light carried no hope with it. Looking around, he could see clearly: there was nothing here that could serve as a useful tool or weapon.

He made no move to run. Bare-handed, it would only provoke the neighbor further — and even if he didn't die, he'd simply be punished for it again.

"Look — the shrine is over there." The neighbor's voice came to him, more stable now, quite clear. But Ma En still didn't believe the man had fully broken free of whatever state he'd entered. If he had genuinely recovered, he would absolutely not be going through with the Matchmaking God worship — whatever form that took.

Ma En felt that the direction the neighbor had originally chosen when they arrived was not a case of "forgetting" the additional step. The true hesitation had been there from the start — a reluctance to come here at all. Only the promises he'd made, perhaps some deeper mechanism of compulsion, had forced his hand. Perhaps the moment he'd told himself he needed to show Ma En "proof," he had already made it unavoidable — and perhaps there was something deliberate in how it had unfolded. A sequence so interlocking and well-hidden it could only be called a trap. Though without having lived through it in advance, no one could have anticipated the way events would braid together with such apparent coincidence.

"The Matchmaking God is here... no, it's not here..." The neighbor's words were full of contradiction. He seemed uncertain even about what he was saying.

Ma En looked in the direction the neighbor indicated. There, among the tombstones, stood a small shrine — alone, isolated. Its placement seemed almost arbitrary. From Ma En's angle, a portion of it was hidden behind a tombstone, so he couldn't see it completely. But the part that was visible showed the weight of years: the erosion, the damage. The entire structure was a gray-black — wood, possibly, though the rot was extensive, large sections of it crumbling, the whole thing so structurally compromised that a single shove might bring it down.

In color, in luster, in condition, in shape — this shrine was unlike any he'd encountered in Japan. If the ordinary shrine expressed the concentrated hopes of human hearts, then this one communicated something that could only be called dark omen. It was difficult to believe an object like this had survived intact to the present without anyone destroying it.

If he'd stumbled across this alone while walking through a park at night, he'd have had nightmares for days.

Nightmares...

Ma En immediately connected the word to the people who had likely visited this place — connecting the shrine and its wrongness and the darkness of the cemetery to the question of what they might have seen when they slept. He recognized quickly: his own situation was probably not typical. Applying his specific experience to others was likely a mistake.

He found himself thinking: even within the general label "monster," there must be many distinct categories. The Matchmaking God seemed to be its own category entirely. The monsters who worshipped it, as the neighbor had described them, clearly subdivided further: Matsuzaemon, the neighbor himself, Miyano Akemi and Hirota Masami — each a distinct kind — and then the vast mass of them at the base who probably had almost no distinct monster characteristics, who were nearly identical to ordinary people in every observable way. Among a hundred thousand, only a small fraction likely possessed anything resembling obvious inhuman ability. The cult was structured like a pyramid. Viewed this way, Ma En found it easier to understand — the deepest and most numerous layer was almost certainly composed of beings indistinguishable from humans, and that was probably by design: each time they integrated into a host civilization, blending in completely was the most effective way to persist.

While he was thinking, the neighbor — who had been standing frozen, murmuring things Ma En couldn't make out — finally lifted the body back onto his shoulder and moved toward the shrine. But Ma En noticed a detail: every few steps, the neighbor's pace slowed. Not hesitation about whether to approach — more like hesitation about direction. As if even with the shrine in plain sight directly ahead, he wasn't quite sure of the right line to take.

Nothing in that behavior was random. The shrine was right there. Walk straight toward it. And yet the man couldn't.

Ma En could see the strangeness in it and form hypotheses, but even with hypotheses in hand, he couldn't find the reason for the hesitation.

When the two of them reached the shrine's position, Ma En discovered that the shrine sat atop a very gently sloping mound. This hadn't been visible from further back. Looking now, it was almost as though the shrine was the mound's grave marker — as if whatever lay buried beneath the mound was what the shrine was actually dedicated to. The ground immediately surrounding the mound bore far denser foot traffic than anywhere else in the cemetery.

Someone has investigated this place.

Ma En thought this immediately and almost laughed at himself. It had some reputation as a strange location — of course investigators had been through. That was entirely expected.

Even in the moonlight, he couldn't make out the inscription on the shrine clearly. He couldn't determine for whom it had been built. Was it genuinely honoring a deity? Or was it, at its root, a memorial to a person who had died?

"Friend — is this shrine really for the Matchmaking God?" Ma En asked it anyway.

"...Probably. I'm not sure... I feel like it should be here, but... it's not clear... I don't know..." The neighbor's face seemed to press into an expression of confusion — which only deepened Ma En's unease. This man was one of "them." He should have memories of this place that went bone-deep. Yet he couldn't say clearly whether this was the right spot, which direction to approach from, what his specific memories of it even were. Ma En thought of the memory suppression mechanism — the way experiences could be buried, the way understanding could be kept just out of reach — and filed this observation carefully.

The neighbor's confident forward momentum, which had been unwavering when they'd first come, had dissolved into bewilderment the moment they arrived at the destination. The neighbor didn't seem alarmed by the bewilderment. But Ma En didn't take any comfort in it. A bewildered neighbor approaching the Matchmaking God's ceremonial space was not a safer neighbor than a clear-headed one.

There's something else critical here I'm not seeing yet...

At that moment, the bewildered neighbor circled around the side of the shrine and took a few steps sideways — and immediately made a sharp sound of recognition.

Ma En moved quickly to the neighbor's side. From about three meters away, he looked in the direction the neighbor was staring — and saw it.

A large rock. Roughly human height. Its surface caked with earth, draped in moss and lichen — from a distance, indistinguishable from the other large stones scattered through the forest. But when viewed from this particular angle, relative to the shrine's side, the scale became apparent: in this entire cemetery, there was only one rock of this size. And its position was not random — only from this one angle, from this one approach relative to the shrine, did the rock become visible at all. Ma En felt the placement was intentional.

What made it impossible to ignore was what had been done to it: wound around the rock in a single circuit was a heavy rope, the kind used to mark the boundaries of sacred spaces in Japan. Hanging from the rope were strips of white paper, cut into a jagged lightning-bolt shape. It was a combination often seen at Japanese shrines — and precisely what should not have appeared in a cemetery, a place marked by impurity.

"Found it." The neighbor turned, and for the first time in a while, his voice was definite. He faced Ma En with certainty: "This shrine is dedicated to the Matchmaking God. The rope and paper mark the boundary — the god's domain lies behind that rock."

Sacred rope and paper streamers. Shrine. The Matchmaking God. The god's domain.

And this was unmistakably monster-made. Yet the further into it Ma En went, the more the whole thing had the atmosphere of Japanese traditional mythology and sacred geography. Monsters, shrines, divine domains—

Which made him think suddenly of someone he knew. Someone who would know these things — the mythology, the customs, the history. He cast around for the name.

It wouldn't come.

The name was there and not there — his mind reached for it and found the wire cut.