More and more situations were converging in one place. Viewed individually, none of them was particularly strange — they were the kind of ordinary occurrences that happen every moment in the world, natural phenomena, social behaviors; even the parts that surprised him were simply things he hadn't anticipated, things that, once they happened, he could accept. But when they were strung together by a certain quality of imagination, they sent a chill through him. Especially for someone who had already lived through bizarre and uncanny events and couldn't escape the thinking patterns they produced — situations like these became a whirlpool, generating a powerful, dynamic sense of connection that he couldn't pull himself free from. It seemed possible to foresee larger catastrophes unfolding in a chain reaction.

Ma En felt this acutely. And yet, until he could identify the secret at the center of that whirlpool — or at the very least understand the nature of this chain of events — he had to exercise greater patience, because he had no concrete, effective solution at hand.

Most of what the Room 3 neighbor had told him had since been confirmed — but one doubt remained: could killing Matsuzaemon truly end this series of enormous and bizarre calamities? Could it truly forestall dangers that hadn't yet erupted? And, more urgently, the question underneath that one: how did one kill Matsuzaemon?

The neighbor hadn't revealed his plan or his trump card. Ma En couldn't be sure the neighbor had a trump card at all. How had he calculated his odds of winning? Was it merely a form of psychological reinforcement — bolstering his own resolve? And if, in the worst case, the neighbor couldn't kill Matsuzaemon — would that make things worse? If Ma En were left on his own, how would he deal with an even more deteriorated situation?

Too many uncertainties. He used his imagination and his sharp awareness to sense extraordinary secrets hidden within these seemingly ordinary events — but the question was how to solve them. Instinctively, he believed he could. But was that instinctive confidence rooted in trust in his own abilities? In trust in the neighbor? Or was it simply baseless faith?

He felt he was missing something crucial. He knew where the enemy was, but he couldn't point to any proven, definitive vulnerability. Killing ordinary people was easy — they had many vital points. But where was a monster's vital point? Was it hidden in their mode of existence? In their means of communication?

As he turned this over, a sensation struck him — powerful, but difficult to pin down: he possessed an extremely threatening weapon.

He identified it quickly: the strange perspective he'd experienced in the Sanchoumoku Park cemetery, and the paper ball apparently connected to it, and behind the paper ball, another bizarre and uncanny object — the nameless book he'd provisionally named The Seven Transmutations of the Profound Mystery Records.

Ma En didn't consider himself especially different from ordinary people. But if differences existed that ordinary people would find incomprehensible, they most likely stemmed from that book's influence. And further: his particular position within the Room 4 Ghost Story — the quality the neighbor had found genuinely moving — was perhaps something the book had conferred on him as well.

Even after losing his former way of thinking, even after losing part of his memory, the moment Ma En laid hands on that physically real, nameless book, he could confirm: this book was the most central reason he'd come to Japan, and it was extremely dangerous.

What remained of his memory, combined with what he'd experienced at Sanchoumoku Park, confirmed the danger. It was interfering with the holder's spirit and mind in mysterious ways — pressing a dangerous and malevolent method onto the holder's thinking.

Blood sacrifice.

If drawing out the strange power in this book, to contend with whatever horror lay behind the Room 4 Ghost Story, required performing blood sacrifice — then Ma En refused.

He imagined himself performing blood sacrifice, and found no difference between that version of himself and the cult members he most abhorred. He couldn't accept their brutal ritual emotionally, regardless of its effectiveness. From a purely rational standpoint, the possibility of accepting blood sacrifice sat below one percent. Which meant: unless his own odds fell below one percent, he was certain he would never perform it.

Even this current accumulation of events hadn't reached the point where Ma En would violate his own principles for a blood ritual.

There's still a chance. There must be another way.

He pressed this conviction inward, struggling with it, and believed it was not unfounded. Because everything in the world — whether matter or spirit, imagination or some seemingly causeless feeling — was not independent. Everything was interconnected, even multiple facets of a single essence.

People habitually isolated their thoughts, their thinking, their imagination, elevating them to a high place and setting everything else beneath them, because they depended on thinking to interpret everything else. But Ma En had never had that habit. In his solid, cold worldview, feelings, thinking, and imagination were never lofty or elevated things. They were always influenced — results of the interaction between his own actual existence and other visible and invisible actual existences, phenomena built on the mutual action of known and unknown matter.

Yes. Feelings, imagination, and thought were all expressions of complex and universal objective movement. When he had a sensation, when he produced a thought, it meant a genuinely existing possibility was warning him — and he should follow that possibility until it was thoroughly proven wrong.

He had to escape his current thinking, break free from the temptation of blood sacrifice, and see the Seven Transmutations and the secret of the Room 4 Ghost Story from another angle. One he simply hadn't perceived yet.

Don't be anxious. Don't rush to conclusions. Think more carefully. Again and again.

While he interrogated himself and turned his thoughts over, he kept cycling through television channels, hoping some new piece of information might spark something and help him grasp that vague, not-yet-perceived possibility. The programs on multiple stations had shifted in unison into news broadcast mode:

"Soviet Foreign Minister Gogov again demands: the Union cannot be divided."

"The American labor movement resurges; American President Klin accuses the Canadian Red Party of attempted interference in domestic politics."

"Mexico's presidential election concludes; the Mexican Red Party becomes the ruling party for the first time."

"Britain's former Prime Minister speaks: the people need their Queen."

"Micro Software Company preparing to release the Window 3.0 system; the Flat-Fruit Company accuses Window 3.0 of infringing on their icon patents, case expected to be submitted for trial next month."

"The eagerly anticipated new generation mobile phone has been successfully developed — equipped with a 2.5-inch black-and-white display, a form factor no larger than the palm of a hand."

"Japan's western Westni Corporation seeks to establish new audio standards, encountering significant difficulties."

"A Black male claims he can confirm the existence of Higgs particles, requesting the scientific community provide manpower and enormous funding to construct a massive new particle collider. According to reliable sources, this individual is a street vagrant."

"Massachusetts coast struck by tsunami; a village has confirmed over one hundred casualties and missing persons; a nearby seismic event triggered clouds of toxic dust, causing collective hallucinations among residents of an adjacent settlement."

...Large quantities of intelligence about livelihoods and economic conditions entered Ma En's ears, but he couldn't find their connection to current events. These items weren't worthless — but they weren't what he needed. For some time afterward, he found no additional clues in any of the programs.

Ma En stopped thinking, checked the time — already past noon. He called the front desk and asked for lunch to be sent to his room, then picked up his briefcase and went to the large desk, shaking out all its contents. He smoothed the paper ball flat and pressed it to one side, then set the bag containing the vomit on the other. When he picked up The Seven Transmutations of the Profound Mystery Records, he was suddenly seized with dizziness, grabbing the table edge before he fell.

He was no longer surprised by these sudden strange occurrences. The book was simply like this. Even the paper ball — which he himself had transcribed and annotated, which had no physical connection to the book, whose contents were a kind of conjecture built on conjecture, with scant direct evidence — had been enough to let him escape the Matchmaking God's nightmare, enough to send him into that bizarre perspective.

The book had malevolent power. The dizziness was perhaps a warning.

He rested, then grasped the book again, quickly flipped through its pages, confirming once more that it contained nothing — a blank book, truly. But he remembered: it hadn't always been like this. And even its texture was not what it had once been.

He also remembered that his past self had planned to research the book's material using more scientific equipment, but had prioritized the Room 4 Ghost Story and never gotten around to it. Both the book and that bag of vomit could be analyzed at the Academy of Peaceful Learning, where he currently worked — they had the necessary instruments. He intended to do that soon.

The door was knocked. Ma En pressed the book under the other materials, took the black umbrella to the door, confirmed the visitor through the peephole before opening it. The service worker pushed a cart in, arranged the lunch items methodically at the table without once glancing sideways under Ma En's watch, then excused himself promptly. Ma En tipped him naturally, watched him enter the service elevator before relocking the door.

He inspected the food carefully, checking for drugs by simple means — not foolproof, but he was genuinely hungry. He'd worked through the previous night, too many draining events had followed, he'd eaten only a light breakfast, then ran into a chain of accidents. Mental exertion had been extreme; his energy had been running at a deficit for hours.

Ma En brought three or four documents to the dining table and read them while he ate. Most of the materials he'd taken out during the earthquake related to the Room 4 Ghost Story; a portion concerned seasonal terms, clearly connected to the paper ball's contents, which meant they were connected to the Seven Transmutations as well. Reading through them again now, he couldn't help noticing how meticulous his past self had been — annotations in many places. But this batch of materials didn't produce any new thinking; it only confirmed what he already believed.

He worked through two sets of materials before finishing his meal. He didn't immediately call for the service worker to clear the table, continuing instead to study the documents and write his own hypotheses and speculations into their margins. His past self had held some incorrect ideas, which he corrected; there was much past-self hadn't addressed, which he now elaborated in detail. Clearly, his past self had studied seriously — but without sufficient experience, hadn't been able to reach many conclusions.

While reading and adding to the documents, he noticed something. It came in the handling of pages — a subtle tactile sensation passing through his fingertips on occasion. The sensation was familiar, but too slight to have registered initially. It was scattered across different documents, different pages; only after handling all of them could he confirm that the sensation was real.

The sensation of a secret message.

Ancient techniques were still frequently used in the modern era; new methods allowed hidden content to remain more thoroughly hidden. Anyone with a need to write secret messages tended to settle on a formula that suited their particular inclinations — using specific methods and encodings to conceal the content. It was both a practical need and, in its way, a pleasure.

Ma En had such a need. He had his own formula, and he could identify the specific sensation it produced. It was highly personal — developed for himself, not for postal service work.

Past-self has hidden something.

The thought moved through him. He was grateful to have recovered the black umbrella. Without its supplies, even knowing these documents contained hidden content, he couldn't have made it appear. His formula was highly specialized — created specifically for him.

He went for a basin, filled it with water, extracted powdered granules from the black umbrella, and dissolved them in the water. He soaked all pages whose texture had felt unusual. The process wasn't complete yet — he needed to evaporate the excess moisture at a specific controlled temperature. Complete drying or too-rapid evaporation would prevent the hidden content from appearing. Fortunately, there were candles in the room; these were the ideal companions for this particular formula. A small irony: Room 4 had not been stocked with candles.

By the time Ma En had completed all the steps, an hour had passed. He processed all pages with hidden content, decoded the encoding — which required solving a set of complex mathematical calculations — and spent another fifteen minutes on that. Then, following the proper sequence, he extracted specific words from the pages and combined them correctly.

The message read:

"Retrieve the red hat from Asuka. Password: I am the rabbit that jumped from the magic hat."

Ma En laughed, involuntarily.

You're something, past-me.