The news insert had run for under thirty seconds. In that brief window, Matsuzaemon demonstrated an unusual intensity — but to Ma En's ear, what he said was, exactly as Katsura had described, thoroughly conventional. The content amounted to positioning his own ideology at a particular altitude and emphasizing that altitude, then looking down from it at every other ideology and finding them "worthless." Ma En didn't care what specific political positions he was expressing or what political demands he was claiming to make. He was watching the expression. Listening to the voice. Reading the coordination between the rhythm of his speech and the rhythm of his gestures.

He was memorizing every word.

The content itself was nutritionally empty — but something might be extracted from the speech itself. Whether these words were Matsuzaemon's own or prepared for him by someone else, the moment he spoke them, they naturally bore his signature: certain tendencies in his subconscious that he himself might not have noticed.

Matsuzaemon's television time was brief. The program quickly returned to its regular content. Ma En noticed: the anchor seemed slightly flustered. His read: either this station never had inserts, or this particular insert was genuinely sudden. In the more likely scenario — both within the news team and inside the television station there were Matsuzaemon's people, and these people held positions significant enough to force an impromptu broadcast. Obviously this was a further inference: those people had risked losing their own jobs and stable income by doing so. Ordinarily, few people readily abandon stable employment and good salaries. There were exceptions, but Ma En decided to evaluate this according to the usual human logic.

He studied what the program was doing, trying to find small details that might let him read what was happening in the studio, and get more clues from it. He concluded he was probably overthinking this — the program showed only a small stumble when returning to its normal content, then quickly settled back into its rhythm.

He found a notepad and pencil in the room and, using sketches and written dialogue, reconstructed what Matsuzaemon had looked like while being interviewed. He spent thirty minutes on revisions, adding observations from his own sense of things — the non-standard profiling technique. Then he set the notepad aside and let himself settle.

When he came back to the notes with a cooler head, he looked at each sketch again, at each dialogue fragment. Some of the accent-heavy words he'd noted shifted slightly in the second reading — memory degrading, or emotional interference from the first pass. He acknowledged this. But when he stripped away all meaning from the words and focused purely on sound and rhythm, the core pattern's consistency remained high.

He followed his own line of reasoning and mimicked Matsuzaemon several more times, reproducing the expressions and gestures with which he pronounced those words. Afterward, he became even more certain:

Yes. He was pressing switches.

The key wasn't the meaning of the words, but their sounds, and the pattern with which those sounds were inserted into the syntax. Those particular sounds carried a peculiar rhythm.

Strange.

He stopped deliberately saying the words themselves and voiced only the sounds, stripping away the surplus words and fixing the intervals between them. They resembled the whistles used to trigger the conditioned reflexes of trained animals, the signals used to drill them.

Could it be that Matsuzaemon couldn't control those monsters through thought alone? Or that the number of monsters had already exceeded the limit he could directly control? Or was it that only now, at this moment, he was truly flipping the switches of latent monsters, turning them from humans into monsters and then issuing orders to them?

But then how could he ensure that the monsters would all be watching this news insert at this exact time?

Or did he only need to affect a portion of the monsters who saw the clip, letting that influence spread to more of them? No. If that were the case, he would only need to give orders to the monsters around him.

Ma En felt that Matsuzaemon had deliberately arranged the interview and forced it to air, and that the emphasis of his speech lay not in its content but in a form of command. Even so, the exact content of that command, and the pattern behind it, still remained beyond his grasp.

Only one point was certain. Katsura and the Room 3 neighbor had both been right: Matsuzaemon had begun to move. Before this he had hidden behind the incidents, making no major move. From here on, his actions would likely become larger and larger, and it was only a matter of time before all of Bunkyo District descended into chaos.

If Matsuzaemon's actions were like deploying troops, needing to accumulate piece by piece until August before they became an unstoppable tide, then his plan was certainly terrifying. If it required two months to launch, then time and scale were almost certainly proportional.

Conversely, if he needed to sustain things until August before gaining an irreversible advantage, then his side still had a chance before August. There was a window.

But if Matsuzaemon didn't need to wait until August to complete all his preparations, if he was willing to throw everything forward early, then Ma En's side would not hold the advantage either, because none of them were ready yet. Even the Room 3 neighbor, who was eager to kill him, needed enough time to prepare — Ma En could see that the man only wanted to get one step ahead of "August."

Matsuzaemon moving too fast or too slow was equally bad for their side.

Ma En rubbed the bridge of his nose and set down the notepad. As of now, the initiative still sat entirely in Matsuzaemon's hands. Was there anything that could establish the pace of his moves?

Katsura was already working toward arranging the face-to-face meeting. Maybe only when that happened would any deeper assessment become possible.

Ma En turned his attention back to the television, dropping a sweet chocolate into his mouth. He still wanted to see if anything else might surface. The earthquake. The mysterious person. Matsuzaemon. This morning had produced enough shocks, but he felt there might be more. There was still much to do — the materials in the briefcase needed to go through properly; almost certainly there were clues hiding in plain sight that his ordinary-day self had overlooked. But he waited patiently, watching the screen. Looking for anything that seemed to carry hidden information.

It was like pulling a big fish out of muddy water and immediately hoping for another — Ma En didn't actually mind whether another one came. Even spending the whole morning watching television was fine. He felt his nerves and his mind both needed to cool down, and television was the right instrument for that.

Even if nothing new surfaced, he could rest. Matsuzaemon was obviously not going to appear at the hotel door. Being excessively tense served no purpose.

The ordinary and the interesting content both passed across the screen, gradually steadying his thoughts. He picked the notepad up again and read through it — checking whether anything in his original impressions and judgments had gaps or errors.

What came from impulse, reviewed later from a calm place, always felt different. Comparing the sense of change between the two states — finding what remained consistent — was how Ma En verified that his non-standard technique was actually producing reliable results.

With all of his first-pass excitement stripped away, he went calmly through each sketch and each dialogue fragment. Some of the accent-heavy words had shifted slightly — certain ones now seemed possibly extraneous; certain ones seemed to have been overlooked. Memory and emotion both at play.

He re-annotated, then re-checked against the original pattern structure. This time, the hypothesis held again: the feeling hadn't changed; when he stripped out word meanings and focused only on sound and rhythm, the consistency across both passes was high.

That heavily-accented voice with its peculiar rhythm gave him a vague but distinct feeling of familiarity. He found the source quickly: the partial phoneme clusters shared something with the sounds the Room 3 neighbor produced when disorder took him over, and with what the nightmare procession creatures had sounded. The specific content might have been different — but there was a possible shared language underneath.

From the beginning, he'd had no way to prove Matsuzaemon was one of the monsters. He'd had no way to prove Matsuzaemon's special position among them. Most of his intelligence had been secondhand — difficult to verify, and even the neighbor's own accounts had given him reason for partial skepticism.

Now, he felt he'd found evidence.

In the sketch's margin, below Matsuzaemon's name, he drew several circles and filled them in. He added his suspicions and his working conclusions.

Then the earthquake coverage on one of the channels produced something that caught him.

This was a live broadcast segment — the location was not Bunkyo District but the adjacent Chiyoda District. Setting aside the anchor's slightly exaggerated delivery, the scene was clearly a public park, and in that park there was an enormous crack in the ground. According to the report, the crack had been produced by the earthquake; what made it newsworthy was that the crack appeared to lead into a separate, self-contained underground cave space. The anchor claimed the cave might contain some kind of remains or ruins. On screen, a handful of curious people had already descended through the crack, while a larger crowd watched from the edge.

By this point, investigators had already gathered at the crack's edge, preparing to descend — but the interior of the cave would not be broadcast live. Ma En thought: the people who'd gone in earlier would be more than happy to share what they'd seen.

While investigators in protective gear with rope lines were entering, the anchor moved to a summary. It was then that Ma En learned: this wasn't only Chiyoda District. Across the entire Tokyo Metropolitan Area — wherever the earthquake had struck with greatest force — cracks had appeared. In hills, on flat ground, in busy public parks, in remote locations, and directly in the middle of city streets. And every one of these openings led into what appeared to be underground cave systems of the kind that might contain ruins.

The anchor went on: "These cave systems may be interconnected — they could form a vast underground ruin complex spanning the entire Tokyo Metropolitan Area." A speculation, offered as the most probable possibility.

Ma En found the speculation almost certainly correct. And precisely because it was correct, it was troubling — because it connected immediately in his mind to Matsuzaemon and the monsters.

This just got considerably more complicated.

He knew: even a government order couldn't prevent curious people from entering these places. If there was something inside, it would spread by word of mouth, drawing more people in — or those people would bring something unpleasant back out with them.

Perhaps it was simply the frame he'd been living in — but no matter how he looked at it, he felt the Room 4 Ghost Story's whirlpool had expanded again.

This was no longer a Bunkyo District matter.