The original Ma En — more precisely, the self that had first arrived in Japan, before any nightmare had struck — possessed a fatal weakness.

The warning on the slip of paper confirmed what he'd suspected. Without that confirmation, Ma En thought he probably would have hesitated — but still, under sufficient pressure, would likely have chosen to reconstruct his psychological and mental state toward what it had once been. He had the data for it. Each time his past self had conducted mental and psychological assessments, the results had been preserved. He could have reconstructed the model entirely from accumulated records.

One month ago's self. One year ago. Two years ago. Further back, across more than a decade of data, each entry a precise record of what "past-self" had looked like.

The tension inside him eased slightly: he could do it. But he no longer needed to.

Being "verified" by his past self — what a peculiar experience.

But there was more on this slip of paper, and he cared about it deeply. The self that had left this warning should have had sharper insight into "Ma En's weakness" than he currently did — and he hoped what followed would confirm what he was already thinking.

He breathed in, and read the rest:

—An intense obsession with the bizarre — he cannot abandon any bizarre thing he has already come to possess. But what he already possesses may be the only weapon against the enemy. Do you know what it is? If you don't remember, you must find it yourself. If you still remember, then what I've written here confirms my view: it is our only weapon against the Matchmaking God.

—When existing knowledge cannot contend with the unknown, the answer is not to seek more knowledge. The answer is to find a new unknown — and let unknown balance unknown.

—It may be possible to expect that different unknowns have their own balance mechanisms, keeping each other latent within our known world. And you must guard against this: when that balance is broken, even temporarily, things that have been latent all along will turn manifest — and when they do, they will bring terrible disaster to our world. Imagine the world as a body. Imagine our known things as dominant genes, and our unknown things as recessive genes. When a recessive gene turns dominant, it necessarily brings deep change to the body — potentially causing the body's internal systems to collapse. Is that not right?

—Future-me: be careful. Re-examine the significance of the Matchmaking God. It may have no will of its own — but its influence on the enemy runs so deep, and through the enemy its indirect influence on us must also be powerful. I give this warning again: confirm three times where the key to defeating the enemy lies.

Much of what the note contained aligned, unprompted, with what Ma En had already concluded. The paper was small — far too small to hold this much content — and the writing was correspondingly minuscule, compressed into a private shorthand cipher he alone knew. From the variations in that handwriting, he could reconstruct the emotional state of the self who'd written it: the urgency of someone who sensed danger closing in, every word chosen to pack maximum meaning into minimum space.

When he reached the back of the slip, he had to search the room for a magnifying glass — presumably left for elderly guests — to confirm what was written there. At the very end, he found the mark he recognized: one of several specialized notation systems he'd designed during his student years, each carrying different meanings and different information. This particular mark meant the paper itself had to be developed again — a second reveal, different from the first, to surface the most important content.

He didn't think his past self had been paranoid. Against enemies this strange, no degree of vigilance was excessive.

He followed the mark's instructions. This development required dissolving the paper entirely — and the slip itself was a special material. He found a clean basin and brought his mind to stillness, preparing a precise chemical solution with the steadiness of a surgeon performing a delicate procedure: no instruments, no measuring aids. Under normal conditions, his success rate for this was about fifty percent.

But right now, he was more certain than he'd been at any point in this past month.

Since seeing Asuka, something had come alive inside him. Even in a foreign country, so far from home, she had given him a feeling very close to being back there — the same atmosphere, a spontaneous sense of responsibility, something that wanted to protect. His mind felt clearer than it had been in a month. He knew the enemy was formidable. But he wasn't afraid.

At this moment, he felt unmistakably that his life had value.

The stronger the enemy, the more it illuminated the worth of everything he'd invested in himself over the years.

He even felt that the pain he'd endured — the pain of forcing himself to grow through study and thought, to reshape himself — had been preparation for exactly this kind of enemy.

So: no tension. No pain. No excitement. Only a quality of calm clarity about his own existence.

Everyone died. But some people got to choose what they died for.

He submerged the paper in the solution. After one minute, the dissolved remnants floated to the surface. Ma En held the basin under the light, lying close to the edge, the magnifying glass raised, working to read the marks in the residue. As he'd anticipated, they read: The Seven Transmutations of the Profound Mystery Records.

So. That was the final weapon. The original Ma En could never have abandoned that object — not something so bizarre, so central to why he'd come here in the first place. The importance of that book to him had been too great.

The self who'd left this note had also foreseen that the book might have to be used as a one-time weapon — and, at the time of writing, could conceive of the possibility but not quite commit to it.

Present-self could commit to it entirely.

For Ma En, this was his greatest gain. He could now see himself clearly. He could regard the deaths of his past selves as the good fortune of his present self.

Sai Weng lost his horse — who could say whether it was fortune or disaster?

He gripped his fist for a moment, examined the remnants once more until they had dissolved completely, then stood, picked up the basin, and poured the solution into the toilet.

Having read the note's contents, he now had more to add to his thinking about the relationship between the Matchmaking God, Matsuzaemon, and the other monsters. He took out his analysis materials, circled the names of the Room 3 neighbor, Miyano Akemi, and Hirota Masami, and set them aside as a separate category, then revisited what remained. He redrew and revised the relationship diagram, focusing now on the Matchmaking God, Matsuzaemon, and the ordinary monsters.

Throughout his earlier analysis, he'd been able to sense some kind of underlying tension between the three. Re-examining their relationships, he became increasingly certain they were not entirely harmonious — they existed in a contradictory unity. He thought: perhaps he should assume that the contradictions in their positions outweighed the closeness of their connection.

Contradictory unity. Dialectical analysis. That had always been his sharpest mental instrument.

If the Matchmaking God, Matsuzaemon, and the monsters held positions that were mutually contradictory, then contradictory positions would produce contradictory behavior. From what he knew, the monsters likely had an extremely strong dependence on the Matchmaking God — a dependence that might run deeper than spiritual sustenance, reaching into the continuation and development of the species itself. In general, this kind of deep reciprocal relationship should be bidirectional. But Ma En's sense was that the Matchmaking God did not depend on the monster species to an equivalent degree.

—The monsters and the Matchmaking God were unequal. This inequality resembled the inequality between humanity and nature.

—Matsuzaemon held very high standing within the monster group. But he and the monster group were also unequal. This inequality resembled the inequality between an individual person and the human collective.

—The monster species' survival did not conflict with the Matchmaking God. But the monster species' survival did conflict with Matsuzaemon's survival.

—Matsuzaemon could not directly eliminate his conflict with the monster species. He could only manage and postpone it. But while managing it, he was certainly trying to find some method to resolve it permanently. What he was doing now would cause the monster species' internal mechanism to act against him. That meant he believed he had found a method — one that could resolve everything at once, permanently — and that this method was available to him, perhaps only to him.

Ma En crossed out the words "monster group," then drew several circles around "Matchmaking God" and connected it by a line to "Matsuzaemon." He felt he'd reached the critical point: whatever grand move Matsuzaemon was willing to make at the risk of being punished by the monsters' internal mechanism — just as he'd thought earlier — it was absolutely not for political ambitions.

—He wanted to use the inequality between the Matchmaking God and the monster species to escape the monster species' internal mechanism permanently. To step outside it entirely. Just as a person might try to rise above the law, above others...

—Did Matsuzaemon want to become the monsters' god? Or to become the single entity beneath the god that was untouchable by the monster species' mechanisms?

Ma En's gaze sharpened. He circled the words "earthquake," "the cracks across the disaster zones," "Matchmaking God," "monster group," "human group," and "Matsuzaemon" together, then drew another circle around "human group" and "monster group" combined, annotating it: exceeds one hundred thousand.

"Yes — he's expanding. Matsuzaemon is expanding the number of victims, expanding the number of monsters, expanding the unknown locations..." He murmured to himself. His expression darkened somewhat; there'd been a moment of shock, but as he confirmed his reasoning again and again, he grew calm.

He knew now what Matsuzaemon intended to do.

—The inequality between the Matchmaking God and the monster group expressed itself in "ritual sacrifice" as well.

—Matsuzaemon was attempting to use a special, enormous ritual sacrifice — using vast numbers of humans and monsters as offerings — to make the Matchmaking God shift from latent to manifest. He had to do this to access its power more directly.

—Setting aside whether Matsuzaemon could actually succeed: even if the Matchmaking God did nothing, the act of making it manifest would bring enormous catastrophe to humanity. Just as the note had said: a qualitative transformation absolutely could not leave an existing system stable.

"He wants to summon the Matchmaking God?" Ma En said to himself.

Now he had it — Matsuzaemon's weak point. His obsession with and dependence on the Matchmaking God were so total that this was where he was vulnerable. That was his weak point.

Whether past-self or present-self, both had reached the same conclusion: re-examining the relationship between the Matchmaking God, the monsters, and Matsuzaemon would yield something. The difference was: past-self had verified that present-self was necessary. Some things could only be done by present-self.

Matsuzaemon closely resembled the original Ma En. His weakness was identical to the original Ma En's weakness. But Matsuzaemon couldn't change. Ma En already had.

And now Ma En understood something more — the layered meaning in what the Room 3 neighbor had cryptically called "the similarity between past and present." The monster species' mechanism for selecting its leaders was perhaps expressed in precisely these correspondences between the figures involved.

A hypothesis: Ma En corresponded to Matsuzaemon; Miyano Akemi corresponded to Hirota Masami. Then who did the Room 3 neighbor correspond to?

Ma En thought of the mysterious person he'd eavesdropped on — the one who might be Kamishima Kousuke. Perhaps that person was the counterpart to the neighbor.

Whatever the case, Ma En knew he had to be more careful when facing Matsuzaemon — specifically guarding against the mysterious person. Based on the neighbor's experience, the neighbor's relationship with Matsuzaemon had gone very badly.

Something else was interesting: Miyano Akemi and Hirota-san had already become the generation that had replaced the previous one. But Matsuzaemon and the Room 3 neighbor had never achieved a decisive outcome between them — they'd been locked in opposition for years, right up until the mysterious person and Ma En arrived.

This might mean: Miyano's death was actually the trigger for the monster species' internal renewal mechanism — the moment it first opened. And at that original moment, not only had the Room 3 neighbor made an error; Matsuzaemon had also made one. Matsuzaemon had believed he was right, and found out he was wrong.

The monster species' internal renewal mechanism had been triggered then, but hadn't completed. It had been delayed, all the way to now.

Now, Ma En and the neighbor stood on the same side. Matsuzaemon and the mysterious person stood on the other. After years of accumulated tension between old and new, individual and collective — everything had built to a limit point.

Ma En smiled — the tight emotion he'd been carrying finally had somewhere to go.

Another story of contradictory unity.

Matsuzaemon had seen the contradictory unity between the Matchmaking God and the monster species — and so he was trying to use the Matchmaking God to resolve the monster species' internal mechanism, to win himself a longer existence and greater power.

The monster species was using the contradictory unity within its own internal mechanism to force Matsuzaemon into becoming the part that was metabolized out, ensuring the species' stronger survival.

The Room 3 neighbor and Matsuzaemon's contradictory unity was itself part of the monster species' internal mechanism.

And within all of this, Hirota-san had already become her own calling — connected, yes, but genuinely outside the central framework.

"But how could I possibly let you succeed?" Ma En picked up The Seven Transmutations of the Profound Mystery Records without thinking and held it without opening it, running his fingers quietly across the cover.

To contend with the bizarre and uncanny Matchmaking God — perhaps only something equally bizarre and uncanny, the Seven Transmutations, would do.

He had the weapon. But how should it be used? When was the right moment? And at whom should it be aimed?

Three choices: the Matchmaking God itself. Matsuzaemon. Or — the connection between the Matchmaking God and Matsuzaemon.

He chose the third.

Because he couldn't be certain the Seven Transmutations was powerful enough to resolve the Matchmaking God directly. But if he severed Matsuzaemon's connection to the God — even without killing Matsuzaemon himself — Matsuzaemon would be eliminated by the monster species' internal mechanism. He had gone too far. That mechanism would handle the rest.

Ma En had no retreat. The Room 3 neighbor had no retreat. For Matsuzaemon, his planned sacrifice equally left no retreat.

For now, set Matsuzaemon to one side. Think more about the Matchmaking God.

He set the Seven Transmutations aside and organized his notes.

Even if his target wasn't the Matchmaking God itself but rather the connection between Matsuzaemon and the God — the precise preparation for that planned sacrifice — he would still need to understand the Matchmaking God far more deeply than he currently did. But the God was so opaque, and its information was guarded by some mechanism, as the Room 3 neighbor had said, dispersed across different places.

He was wrestling with this when the VHS tape Asuka had given him entered his line of sight. He paused, set down the materials in his hands, and picked up the tape. The recording from the paranormal TV show — filmed at the haunted spot in Sanchoumoku Park, in the cemetery.

I think today is a lucky day.