"Phew…"
Kaguya could feel how heavy her breathing had become.
In that instant, when she ran past the cardboard box, for a brief moment, she felt two gazes converging upon her—two incomparably cold gazes, not directly meeting hers, yet so intense that she could instantly sense them and understand their consequence.
[If you're seen, you die.]
A powerful instinct nearly made Kaguya's body freeze up.
But at that moment, a burst of music suddenly sounded on the other side of the living room, near the mouse hole from which the two had first emerged.
The man and woman's gazes slowly shifted away, turning toward the source of the music.
Taking advantage of the opportunity, Kaguya hurried her pace to leave, while Maki, holding a phone, followed closely behind her. The two of them slipped into the bedroom one after the other.
A foul stench.
That was their first, most direct impression upon entering.
Piles of dirty clothes were thrown into the corner of the room.
On one side of the room, the bedsheet tossed onto the floor bore clear yellow-orange stains.
A snot-nosed little boy, about two years old, lay on the only large bed in the room, snoring loudly. One of his feet dangled off the bed, exuding the same unbearable stench—it was impossible to tell how many days it had been since they were last washed.
Kaguya frowned deeply, and the expression on Maki's face was not much better.
In any case, the first thing to do now was to investigate this place.
With that thought, Kaguya took a step forward—then stopped.
No, that wasn't the smell caused by poor hygiene.
It was the stench of a dead, rotting person—that was why it was so unbearable, to the point that one almost couldn't help but vomit.
Only then did Kaguya notice that the massive boy wasn't sleeping at all—he had long been dead.
His body was covered with purplish blotches, and from those blotches crawled clusters of white maggots. Then he opened—
[Smack.]
Maki lightly patted Kaguya's shoulder, snapping her out of her daze.
The boy, who had almost sat up from the bed, lay back down again and resumed his loud snoring.
Was it because they had heard the snoring that a weak interaction had formed, triggering hallucinations?
Realizing this, Kaguya quickly took out her earplugs, while behind her, Maki had already plugged her own ears.
They turned off the communication on their phones.
The phone Maki had left in the living room by the mouse hole stopped ringing.
Although it was impossible to call outside from this cursed place, for some unknown reason, phones could still connect with other devices within the apartment. Thus, when they came in, Maki had left her phone by the hole so it could serve as a decoy in an emergency.
Maki didn't understand why such an abnormal place could maintain this strange semblance of "normality," but that didn't stop her from taking advantage of it.
It was just a little unfortunate that it happened to be her newly bought phone—she wondered if she would have a chance to retrieve it.
That fleeting thought passed through her mind.
The two girls' steps had already carried them deep into the darkness under the bed.
It was covered in dust.
With every step they took, clouds of dust erupted—so much that it almost obscured their vision.
Meanwhile, in the living room, Takumi had already closed his eyes, sitting silently on the sofa with a furrowed brow.
Those voices were growing stronger and stronger.
The voices that still lingered in that room, still echoing on.
[Get out of the way, stop blocking my sight.]
[What use are you, just bringing me trouble.]
The faces of the man and woman he had seen when he was very, very young—filled with disgust.
[Finally a son, haha, that's more like it.]
[Finally got one, but this useless money-draining brat is even more of an eyesore.]
The joyful expressions of those two after the birth of the second child—and the look of even greater disgust toward him.
[This candy is for your little brother, not for you.]
[If you dare eat it, I'll beat you to death!]
And even more of those hideous faces.
It just never ends.
Takumi opened his eyes, refusing to look at the blurry figure standing above his head.
He no longer wanted to see any more of those things, yet the sensations from the doll's side kept continuously transmitting those images and sounds to him.
At first, he had been able to cut off the connection with the doll and ignore the images and sounds from that side, but after spending some time in Room 304, the doll seemed to have formed a much closer link with him. Not only could he no longer block it, the signal had instead grown stronger and stronger.
He had come to know the child's age—5 years old. That was the age at which her life had stopped moving forward.
Before the age of 3, what she suffered were only beatings and insults. In those blurred memories, the treatment she received wasn't particularly vicious—at least it merely reached the level of "suffering." But when she was about to turn 4, after her younger brother was born, she became the hated burden, and the torment she endured grew increasingly cruel.
From being beaten and kicked for saying something displeasing, to stricter and stricter curfews imposed purely for the parents' amusement. Her father would strike her a few times whenever he saw her; otherwise, he felt uneasy. Her mother, meanwhile, would point at the wall clock while scolding and beating her, even stabbing her arm with a needle just to watch her cry in pain.
She didn't know how to resist—or rather, the very concept of resistance was unrealistic for a child her age.
Of course, she wasn't entirely dull-witted. She had once secretly adjusted the clock so that her mother, who wanted to punish her, couldn't find an excuse—and in the end only kicked her once before letting her go.
It was just that, on that day—
The day when the debt collectors once again broke into the house, carried away the old television, smashed the table, bed, stove, and everything else, terrifying her younger brother who had been at home—
On that day, when her father, enraged, beat her mother yet again, leaving her seething with fury all day—
On that day, what happened was something she could never have predicted, something she could never have imagined.
After all, who could have imagined that such a thing would happen?
"Tch…"
Takumi covered his forehead, taking a deep breath to steady his emotions.
He must not fall into it.
He must not let his consciousness sink into these things.
Those fragments permeated with strong pollution and curses, remnants of the past that existed in that room, would not help him solve the problem before him—only make his condition worse and worse. He could not allow himself to sink too deeply, whether out of sympathy or anger; he must not harbor any thoughts of concern toward them.
What existed here were, in the end, eerie things devoid of all human feeling. These miserable memories would only contaminate anyone who learned their content and drag them together into the abyss; beyond that, they held no meaning whatsoever.
Takumi could feel his clothes faintly heating up, as if about to be soaked through with boiling water.
Please, he prayed silently in his heart, I must find some useful clue.
Meanwhile, Kaguya and Maki had already stopped moving forward.
They had found a corpse.
Unlike that excessively enormous family of three, this body, like Kaguya and Maki themselves, possessed the proportions of a normal human being.
The person had already been dead for a long time—what remained was basically only a skeleton, with a few traces of human tissue still clinging to the bones, and there was no longer any foul smell.
Judging from the skeleton, it should have been a tall, adult male, dressed in expedition gear suitable for movement. Beside him lay a backpack.
Kaguya cautiously kept her guard up, holding the Blood Puppet, ready to throw it out the moment this thing got up. Maki, meanwhile, carefully stepped forward, took the backpack from beside the corpse, and opened it to inspect its contents.
The first thing she pulled out was a sheet of paper with writing on it.
[To Those Who Come After]
[I am a fool buried here, a sinner—Sanchez.]
At the top of the paper, the trembling handwriting wrote those words.
Sanchez?
Was this his body?
The discovery left both Kaguya and Maki a little surprised, and even Takumi, who was watching this scene through the doll whose connection could not be severed, was momentarily dazed.
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