He was careful not to rush to conclusions. Among all the possibilities he could account for, the likelihood that the mysterious person was Kamishima Kousuke was highest — and that led easily to more questions in sequence.

Red Party International was a vast international organization, but each country's Red Party remained relatively independent. Different national chapters connected through Red Party International to conduct broader international affairs and exchange — but one country's Red Party couldn't casually intervene in another's domestic political activities. International matters were for the international; domestic matters were for the domestic. This was consensus.

One might ask how to distinguish an international matter from a country's internal matter — a genuine ambiguity zone existed, and in that zone the designation fell either way depending on circumstances. Resolution was the result of negotiation. The more powerful the country, the more of its positions were fixed by consensus; equally, the ambiguous areas tended to skew toward the less powerful country.

His homeland was, unquestionably, more powerful than Japan. In both Red Party International and the International Assembly representing nations globally, his homeland held no less than two-fifths of the effective voice.

The material the mysterious person possessed was classified postal service intelligence. The postal service, as a critical component of national macroeconomic coordination, governed one-third of civilian distribution channels and all non-civilian ones. Every person working in the non-civilian distribution channels had classified identity — the classification level might be low, but it did not fall in the ambiguous zone between "international" and "domestic."

Even if Japan's Red Party were operating through international channels, obtaining access to this category of material required filing a formal request through legitimate procedures.

Kamishima Kousuke was the handler Ma En's postal service colleagues had introduced when he first came to Japan. When Ma En arrived, Kamishima had recited a portion of Ma En's background. But the level of disclosure then hadn't alarmed Ma En — what was shared had been limited to resume details, nothing that crossed into classified territory.

What the mysterious person had recited earlier had brushed up against that edge, however. Even at the edge, it was enough to make Ma En believe the mysterious person had pried open some channel within the postal service — though he didn't know whether this was a deliberate intelligence leak from the non-civilian department, or whether there was a mole inside the postal service itself.

Postal service members were bound by strict protocols. Even low-classification material remained classified — and in the right context, it could be sold for considerable value, or used as an instrument in intelligence contests. Ma En had resigned and could no longer know what the postal service had done internally since his departure.

From the mysterious person's tone, he was clearly positioned on the enemy's side. He invoked a deity, his voice low and obscured, yet Ma En could hear clearly the fervent quality underneath it. Ma En believed: this person's attitude toward what he called his god was genuine. And that fanatical faith marked him as a fanatical person.

From only the eavesdropped voice and content, Ma En couldn't establish a specific link between the mysterious person and Kamishima Kousuke. He couldn't make the wild, fervent image align with the cool, crisp impression Kamishima had left.

He was well aware: the name that had surfaced in that instant was almost certainly his internal wariness speaking. People might find it absurd — both of them were Party members, both part of the organization; how could one not fully trust another Party member? But for someone who'd spent years in the postal service's non-civilian operations, this kind of wariness was simply natural. In that work, suspecting what should be suspected — even when it was emotionally difficult — was not a choice but a baseline. Functioning on pure reason or pure feeling equally couldn't sustain you there. The key was balance — a subtle, constantly-adjusted equilibrium between rational and emotional response.

He wouldn't treat his split-second thought as established fact. But if Kamishima Kousuke were the mysterious person, and had accessed these low-classification materials through unofficial channels, it would mean that both the postal service and possibly internal organizations in his homeland had already been infiltrated by "monsters" or by people connected to the cult.

Whether you called them moles, operatives, traitors, or spies — the damage they caused was the same. Anyone willing to sell low-level secrets would sell high-level ones too. This was not a small matter. He hoped the postal service had already detected something and moved.

More than that — he hoped the situation was not this bad, and he was only catastrophizing.

For now, all he could manage was his own side. He was somewhat relieved that his gamble had actually paid off. There had been a high chance the eavesdropping would fail: if the mysterious person had not been nearby, if he truly had no intention of contacting the five again, if he had not come immediately, or if he had handled the five separately, Ma En's little move could easily have come to nothing. Once the five scattered, he would only have been able to track one of them.

Knowing that there was a mysterious person who had investigated him in depth, who was at least somewhat interested in him, and knowing how that person had evaluated him after this test — none of that was bad. The intelligence was worth the cost of those five micro-bugs.

The mysterious person's attitude had been arrogant, but Ma En felt no anger at all. Being called a "monster" by a monster was a peculiar experience.

He didn't think the mysterious person had been belittling him. Several encounters with the bizarre and uncanny had done nothing but prove his smallness. He admitted that he was small; there was nothing shameful in that. The worst thing was to mistake oneself for powerful.

He knew that any workable plan required identifying the relatively stronger parts of his weak self and the relatively weaker parts of a strong enemy. Only then could he create an opening. His weak self might still have areas where he was relatively strong; a powerful enemy might still have relatively fragile points. Only where the enemy was weak and he was strong could there be an effective fight.

If the enemy were strong in every respect and he were weak in every respect, then all he could do was pray for a miracle. He had imagined that extreme possibility before, but from the Room 3 neighbor's attitude, reality probably was not that extreme.

Those five thugs had clearly already been dealt with by the mysterious person. From the final sounds, the method had involved something monster-like. Ma En wondered whether that person might be similar to the Room 3 neighbor.

No matter how he looked at it, the mysterious person's emotions and rationality both seemed off. Ma En increasingly felt that the man had already been interfered with by his own emotions, and that was why he'd made the unwise move of killing while talking so much. Were those muttered explanations really necessary? What had he wanted to prove? What had he been trying to strike at? Ma En didn't believe the man had been kind enough to leak information to him in that way.

Was it Matsuzaemon's recent move that had stirred some emotional reaction in all the monsters? Did the reaction resemble human emotion because they had coexisted with humans for too long? Or did Matsuzaemon's influence over them reach only the surface layer of "human emotion," without touching their deeper, qualitative survival mechanism?

The latter seemed more likely to Ma En. And from that angle, Matsuzaemon's position within the monster group looked important, but not all-important. He was still a replaceable false core.

He could now confirm that the Room 3 neighbor, the mysterious person, and Matsuzaemon all possessed special, monster-like power, which made them seem extremely formidable. But if they could still display signs of being disturbed by something like "human emotion," then was it possible that the real power did not reside in them, but in the Matchmaking God? In ordinary times, the monsters hid among humans and displayed almost no difference. From a commonsense perspective, such a subtle and restrained mode of survival often signaled relative weakness. Perhaps those three were not qualitatively different from the monster group at all — perhaps they were only exceptional because the degree of power they possessed from the Matchmaking God was different. Did the Matchmaking God actively assign different degrees of power to each individual monster, thereby dividing them into ranks? Or did the monsters themselves differ in status and ability, and on that basis draw different degrees of power from the Matchmaking God?

As he pocketed the earpiece and set off again toward the most expensive hotel in the district, Ma En felt he had vaguely found a key to breaking the enemy. The mysterious person's performance had reminded him that the enemy could make mistakes too, and perhaps did not yet realize what mistake had been made.

In the postal service, a mistake like that nearly meant instant elimination. But the enemy were monsters, so Ma En remained cautious.

Half an hour later, Ma En walked through the entrance of the most expensive international hotel in the district.

He'd temporarily set aside the monster questions during the walk. He scanned the lobby layout: no empty seats anywhere, filled with people of various appearances, each of them dressed formally and impeccably — by comparison, his own casual clothes stood out. Nobody paid him any particular attention. Every person there was either in conversation or in a state of private, relaxed self-sufficiency.

He walked to the front desk. He caught the brief flicker of surprise in the female concierge's eyes — and just as quickly, she recovered, greeting him with the standard professional warmth, not a trace of diminished service. He inquired about the rooms. The good news: he'd arrived early enough that the highest suite still had one vacancy. No bad news beyond that.

Hearing that Ma En wanted the highest suite, the concierge's expression showed a new flicker of genuine surprise. He suspected it was his appearance — he didn't look like someone with that kind of money. True enough, he wasn't wealthy; but he had some savings, and Katsura's salary was decent. The occasional night or two in the best room was within reach.

He signed the registration form. An attendant was already waiting by his side.

The attendant was a man — composure and bearing said everything, as did the hotel's overall standard. Someone checking in for the first time might have felt slightly nervous or out of place. But a guest would never need to say this — the attendant would use sustained, calibrated courtesy, professional reassurance, and tactfully-timed guidance to dissolve any awkwardness. That was the intention: leave wanting to return. That was victory.

Sorting guests by apparent status was of course a real practice — but the thing was, guests without "sufficient status" would never know it. The real gap between premium service and top service was invisible. Ma En was getting the "best available suite," not what the hotel would consider its true VIP room — that he knew existed somewhere, though not where.

In his homeland, he knew precisely what those hidden VIP rooms and hidden menus looked like. After all, wherever there was distribution flow, there was the postal service. The postal service existed where people could see it — serving everyone, without distinction — and simultaneously in places people couldn't see, "serving" those who considered themselves above ordinary people. The scope of national macroeconomic coordination ran deeper and more total than most citizens imagined. In a certain sense, the postal service especially enjoyed dealing with those who believed they had real power, and committed entirely to the engagement.

He had experience. On Red Party territory, the postal service had hundreds of methods for making a person's position untenable — and typically used only the most efficient one. Though he felt something like apology toward the civilian side, on the non-civilian side the postal service had standards, and its operatives carried themselves accordingly.

"Thank you." He gave the attendant a polite nod as he accepted the key, saw him out, and locked the door behind him.

He moved through the room in habitual sequence — checking every corner and concealed position for surveillance equipment. Unfortunately, even this suite had several, well-hidden. He located them all without any frustration or sense of intrusion. He understood perfectly why a hotel would do this; he didn't feel his privacy was being violated.

Being monitored was simply a fact. In the postal service office, he'd watched himself on security feeds daily to check whether his clothes were tidy.

But at this particular moment, the timing was inconvenient. So he set down the briefcase and umbrella, took a few branded chocolates from the dish on the coffee table, unwrapped them and ate them quickly, and used the foil wrappers to cover the exposed terminals of each surveillance device. He didn't care what the hotel security room made of this — they would never appear in his room over something this minor, or the hidden monitoring would have no point.

He turned on the television and cycled through the channels. Two-thirds of them were still running earthquake-related content. Some had brought in prominent seismologists to discuss the quake's impact on daily life and its probable causes — he paid little attention. A few hours since the event, and these commentators were already drawing conclusions? The detailed measurement data had probably only just reached their laboratories.

Real conclusions about something like this typically needed months of analysis.

All speculation, he thought, and kept cycling channels.

He still remembered what Katsura had described earlier — Matsuzaemon forcing his way into the morning assembly session and speaking. Wasn't that news? Or had it been suppressed?

About five minutes later, one station cut to a brief news insert. The timing and duration of the insert were strange — not obviously important, not obviously minor. But Ma En caught it, and his expression became slightly more attentive.

This was what he'd been waiting for. The insert concerned the assembly incident — and in it, for the first time, he saw Matsuzaemon.

How to describe him? Matsuzaemon was somewhat different from what he'd imagined. A tall and thin person, very alert-looking — yet with a complexion that was clearly unhealthy. Less like a leader, more like a patient freshly discharged from a rehabilitation center who'd cleaned himself up and dressed for the cameras. On screen, Matsuzaemon appeared to be in his mid-forties, slightly balding, wearing gold-framed glasses, his dress and overall presentation thoroughly refined, scholar-elite.

Anyone who saw him would register: this man was haggard.

Sunken eye sockets — yet the eyes themselves held an alarming energy and a morbid vitality. He stood surrounded by an array of microphones, speaking with force, his voice loud, projecting something that was, somehow, strangely infectious.

Ma En's instinct: the media personnel covering him almost certainly included his own people. This man was articulating political grievances — but political grievances were not what he actually wanted.