The night wind moved across Ma En's body, carrying an unseasonable chill for June. What the neighbor was doing, he had no power to stop. It was hard to imagine what would come next. His head was stuffed with something dim and just out of reach — some knowledge that wouldn't surface no matter how he tried to pull it up. He knew that even if it surfaced now, it wouldn't help him through the immediate danger.

He had to do something, he told himself — and the harder he told himself this, the less he could identify what that something might be.

Getting anxious.

He said it to himself inwardly, and stopped trying to excavate whatever memory refused to come. Instead he focused on making his mind go still. He breathed, matching the rhythm of the night wind, searching for the smell in the air. He stared at the rock wrapped in its sacred rope, and when the tangle of grass-like thoughts finally died down, he looked toward the neighbor — who had already moved away from the angle where the rock was visible, and had carried the body back to stand before the shrine. Absorbed in whatever he was doing, as if he'd forgotten Ma En entirely.

Ma En deliberately reached for his broken finger and began loosening the bandage and splint that had been wound tight there. The process was somewhat painful, but he knew he might need considerably more pain before this was done. Thinking back over the strange things that had happened on this journey, the genuine bodily harm had been rare — what had been frequent and overwhelming was the formless psychological damage, the mental influence that arrived for no decipherable reason. And people were fragile things. Compared to physical pain, mental torment usually produced far worse suffering.

Most people — the vast majority of people Ma En had encountered — could endure physical pain without breaking down. Switch it to psychological torment, and the collapse came like an avalanche.

This led him to a recognition he'd always held clearly: human fragility was not only a matter of physical fragility. It was, just as much, a matter of psychological fragility.

And against psychological harm, humanity had never found a reliably effective solution. From ancient times to now, there had been no shortage of exploration into "methods for strengthening mental and spiritual resilience" — but how strong a human mind could actually become, or what the standard for "strong" even was, had never been precisely established. Every technique produced to strengthen the will remained impossible to spread to the general population.

The "strong" were always a minority. As if that minority's existence were itself the standard.

Even limiting the reference group to his colleagues at the postal service rather than all of humanity, Ma En didn't think himself in the top hundred, or even the top thousand. His self-assessment placed him somewhere just above average — and that was all.

Which meant that in the most dangerous, most helpless moments, the only tool available to him was this: the primitive, blunt instrument of making his body hurt. Pit the shock of physical pain against the encroaching psychological crisis.

He couldn't guarantee that what was coming next wouldn't affect him physically as well. But he could at least try to ensure that his mind didn't break — that his memory survived it. Because without that, even an unharmed body would be useless.

After all, humans were creatures that needed thought, spirit, and will to move themselves forward.

This hurts.

It really hurts.

Ma En pressed lightly on the wound and felt the pain surge along the nerves in waves. Even after releasing the pressure, the pain continued without interruption. He kept no expression on his face. The more he concentrated on the pain, paradoxically, the clearer his mind became.

Then — standing quietly behind the neighbor — he let a thin, ambiguous smile surface.

"What are you doing?" Ma En asked.

"Mmn, mmn... hm-mm..." The neighbor made blurred, indistinct sounds, setting the body down off to one side. "Feeling, feeling it — yes, this is the feeling... ah... ah, it's rising, there's a voice speaking in my mind. I can hear it. That voice, that voice... climbing out from inside me."

The vines on his body shuddered as if they'd lost direction, as if being guided by some other will, lashing and sweeping in strange rhythms and paths — sometimes light and flowing, sometimes forceful and sudden, like something dancing, the whoosh of displaced air serving as the primitive music accompanying the dance. Watching the vines move, Ma En felt a faint discomfort building in his own body — not strong, quickly suppressed by the pain in his finger.

He sensed that what was happening wasn't the neighbor acting. The strange plants — entangled through his body, growing from within him — were doing something of their own. He arrived quickly at the word "ceremony," but the scene was too peculiar, too hallucinatory for him to confirm it immediately.

The neighbor's enormous body dropped to his knees with a resonant thud. He fixed his gaze on the shrine. The liquid from his body began seeping like sweat, continuous and uncontrolled; his whole frame was trembling, as if bearing enormous external pressure. Yet Ma En, standing a few steps away, felt nothing comparable. Beyond a general physical and psychological unease — fixed on the neighbor's strange behavior — he simply felt bemused. No particular feeling arose at all.

Other religious ceremonies, in his experience, generated their own kind of contagion — solemn, malevolent, vast, joyful, releasing. Some quality that pulled even a nonbeliever into its atmosphere. What the neighbor was performing should also be a kind of ceremony. And yet it produced none of that. What it produced instead was a particular variety of discomfort that had no name — something that could not be accepted, something that sat wrong. A sense of absurdity. As if the ritual contained no meaning whatsoever. Too laughable. Too absurd. Too reckless.

Even the folk superstitions and feudal rituals of his homeland that had no actual effect — those at least knew how to set an atmosphere. What the neighbor was doing looked like nothing more than a private farce. And yet too many strange things had happened around the Matchmaking God to simply dismiss it.

Ma En widened his eyes and tried to find one or two signs that would convince him: something is happening here.

But the more he looked, the more confused he became. Drowsy. Eyes and body both beginning to ache and go soft — when he caught himself, the neighbor's ceremony hadn't even been going five minutes.

Think about that. Five minutes, and his body and mind were already softening.

Then the neighbor's murmuring grew louder — sharper — escalating toward something that was barely distinguishable from a scream. As if the chant was entering some incomprehensible phase. Ma En still couldn't understand a word. He thought back to the nightmare procession, the creatures who'd chanted as they marched — that had been quieter than this, less frantic, less shrill — though the fundamental quality of both sounds was the same: crude and ancient, entirely without human content, and yet unmistakably different in what they were saying.

He found himself confirming again: the neighbor was genuinely different within this group of monsters. Special. And the specialness was probably not just a matter of ability — it extended to position. Day to day, he looked like he was on the human side of things, his attitude toward monsters frequently critical or dismissive, his stance hovering between human and monster, tending toward human — like a defector, an unexpected dissonant note in the monster chorus. But within the monsters as a collective, what was his actual meaning? Was he truly just an accidental byproduct of some mistake?

If not accidental, but necessary — if the neighbor's apparently personal conflict with Matsuzaemon was something deeper than the residue of human grievance — was that struggle part of something inherent to the broader system organized around the Matchmaking God? Part of the original ritual cycle itself?

Cold sweat beaded on Ma En's forehead.

Because in human history, there were many examples of ritual structures in which figures of special status fought to the death as part of the ceremony itself.

The neighbor, Matsuzaemon, Miyano Akemi — was their entanglement truly just human drama? If it was determined by their structural positions, then Hirota-san — who seemed to be a continuation of Miyano Akemi — and he himself, who had a special relationship with Hirota-san, might be the next iteration of the same position-determined ritual.

No. Thinking further: perhaps the ritual's inherited quality was expressing itself through the very act of drawing him into the neighbor-Matsuzaemon conflict.

Am I and Hirota-san part of some larger ceremonial chain as well?

He felt his mind turning at extraordinary speed — but these thoughts weren't arriving because he was seeking them. They were simply emerging on their own, bubbling up from somewhere without invitation. He grabbed his broken finger and wrenched. The sudden violence of the pain drove the thoughts back out of his head by sheer force.

When he snapped back to himself, he immediately pressed both hands over his ears and stopped looking at the neighbor's strange ritual. The "farce" quality had vanished without a trace. But even with eyes shut and ears covered, the neighbor's shape and sound had already imprinted themselves in his mind — continuing there on the strength of his own uncontrolled imagination. This was no longer a matter of how firm his will was. The images wouldn't stop even without his attention on them. They wouldn't dissolve.

Ma En worked his broken finger.

Pain. Right now, only pain could serve as the weapon of self-preservation.

While enduring the uninterrupted agony, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the paper ball that had once saved his life inside the nightmare. With trembling hands he unfolded it, and stared at the twenty-four strange symbols on the surface. The neighbor's alien murmuring continued in his ears, resonating in his mind, amplifying into something that no longer sounded like a human voice — a vibrating, fractured tone — and at that moment, something in Ma En's mind seemed to be plucked by it, like a string that had been waiting.

The Twenty-Four Solar Terms.

He remembered suddenly, with absolute clarity: he had been researching these twenty-four strange symbols. The research materials were in Room 4. A large collection of them.

He'd been unable to connect what he'd been studying — the Twenty-Four Solar Terms — to this paper ball. But in this strange and dangerous moment, the connection came from nowhere, complete and immediate. It felt like cresting a hill to find a road on the other side.

When the memory surfaced, a voice — his own voice — immediately rose up in his mind, replacing the neighbor's ceremony with something else:

"On the fourth month's opening, Summer marks the festival — the great passage. By this time, all things have grown, complete; this completion becomes the aim. Grain Full is the intermediate term; life, the small things begin to fill toward fullness — hence the name: Small Fullness."

No. Something was off. Ma En recognized, even as the text arose, that this was an explanation of the solar terms Beginning of Summer and Grain Full — but the explanation had something wrong in it. He couldn't stop to identify it; he had no room. The explanation had already begun repeating in his mind, again and again, faster with each pass, blurring with speed, the whole thing compressing into a single mass of sound. Like a great whirlpool had been set going in his head, and something immense was rising from beneath it — trying to force its way through the fabric of his thoughts, through the physical matter of brain and skull and forehead, trying to break free—

Ma En shut his eyes in pain. He felt the world rotating, his legs going soft beneath him. Yet although his eyes were closed, he could still see the cemetery — from above, from outside himself, a sweeping overhead angle looking down at the whole scene:

The rotting gray-black shrine.

The neighbor kneeling before it, screaming, vines lashing in alien rhythms.

The scattered mounds and tombstones.

And the rock wrapped in the sacred rope — which the neighbor had said was the boundary between the god's domain and the human world, and which, in the folklore of this island, a rope of that type did indeed mark as something similar.

And in that moment, Ma En truly saw: filament-like things emerging from behind the rock. No color he could name. No texture he could describe. Only their shape: long, slender, impossibly thin. They'd already been emerging for some time, drifting in response to the strange rhythm building in the cemetery, rising and falling as if breathing.

Then — soundlessly, with only a sudden sharp piercing sensation — one filament drove itself into the body that had been laid off to one side.

The next moment, Ma En saw nothing. His mind seemed to explode from the inside, leaving no room for thought. A violent, restless, blood-hungry impulse began pressing him toward some action — toward harm, toward some kind of ritual — as if doing it would grant him power beyond ordinary human reach—

"No — no — no!" Ma En slammed his forehead against the ground. His fists followed. The impact brought a measure of clarity. He immediately attacked his broken finger, using the concentrated agony to drag himself out of that negative craving. Only then did he realize: at some point without knowing when, he had collapsed to his knees, just like the neighbor in front of him.

Ma En breathed in violent, ragged gasps. Instinctively he touched his forehead. The skin had split — a vertical crack. He didn't know when it had happened. Perhaps when he'd hit the ground. Perhaps during that strange and malevolent experience.

He only knew that the craving that had surfaced at the end — the dark, blood-hungry desire — had been wrong. Some would say it was still a part of him, that there was no clear right and wrong. But for Ma En, he had no use for what he himself judged to be incorrect, whether or not it truly was part of him, whether or not right and wrong was a concept that applied. He only wanted to become the person he chose to become — not the person he was supposed to become.

For most of his life, he had been in a struggle with one aspect of himself. It was that struggle that had made him what he was now. This was the path he had chosen.

"Ah, I remember now..." He murmured to himself. "That's where that criminal got caught... What a terrifying book."

In that moment, Ma En finally remembered: the strange symbols on this paper ball, and the Seven Transmutations of the Profound Mystery Records whose correct meaning he had yet to fully work out.