Masamichi swam through deep, dark water, aiming for a shimmering light far above.
The cold water wrapped around Masamichi’s body, unwilling to let him go, but he shook it off with his legs and pushed back against the onslaught of water pressure.
Ah, it’s wonderful to be able to move…!
He was happy that he could control his arms and legs well enough to swim vigorously, which far outweighed the feeling of suffocation he experienced.
I’m alive. I’m alive!
Filled with joy, Masamichi swam toward the surface.
Splash!
When his face finally poked out of the still water, Masamichi’s eyes snapped open.
“Huh?”
The cold water that he had felt a moment ago had disappeared completely.
Covering his body in its place was a heavy cotton blanket.
“What the…?”
Unable to understand what was happening, Masamichi blinked and turned to look around.
“Where am I?”
He was lying on a bed against a wall in a small, strange room.
It wasn’t the hard bed in his apartment. It seemed like a high-quality mattress. His whole body felt firmly yet gently supported.
This bed must have caused the heavy, water pressure–like sensation.
As comfortable as it was, the classic buckwheat-hull pillow—which he wasn’t used to sleeping on—was very hard and caused a dull ache in the back of his head.
When he took a breath, Masamichi coughed loudly, brought on by the smell of dust and mold.
The blanket didn’t seem to have been cared for in a long time. Its weight was probably from absorbing plenty of moisture.
With one hand, Masamichi began pushing the blanket down toward his stomach and tried to sit up on the bed.
He immediately felt a sharp pain throughout his body and fell back with a groan.
“Ow… What the hell is going on…?”
The pain seemed to have cleared the haze in his mind. The events that had transpired before he lost consciousness sped through his memory like a fast-forwarded video through a kaleidoscope.
Oh, I was hit by a car, my body was a wreck, and I almost died…then I met an incredibly beautiful man who was also incredibly strange.
Struggling with a cough that wouldn’t stop and pain that wouldn’t subside, Masamichi desperately tried to recall what had happened.
Didn’t he tell me to be his servant if I wanted to live…? And that he’d get my messed-up body back to normal?
Masamichi thought about how his arm had been twisted at a strange angle, and shuddered.
But the hit-and-run, the near-death experience, and his interaction with the mysterious man all seemed unreal. It all seemed like a terrible nightmare.
“A nightmare… A dream. Hey, maybe it was a dream,” Masamichi whispered.
Then he lay down and gently lifted his hands to his face.
He could bend his arms at the elbow joints in the right direction. He could open and close his hands.
He slowly lifted one leg at a time. There was some pain, but he could move them however he wanted.
But all the muscles and bones throughout his body screamed like he’d had a strenuous workout the day before.
“For some reason, it hurts all over, but nothing seems broken or torn.”
As soon as he said “torn,” he had a terrifying vision.
It was hard to believe that the man he had seen existed. Heck, he had been eating Masamichi’s torn leg.
Masamichi’s entire body shivered as he recalled the man’s pale face.
Something like that couldn’t possibly…
“It couldn’t happen in real life,” he muttered aloud. “Stuff like that only happens in zombie movies.”
Precisely. So okay, he was hit by a car. That much must have actually happened. But from that point onward, it was all a bunch of nonsense—in which case, it had to have been a delusion from the shock of the hit-and-run.
Of course he would be in pain if he’d been in a car accident. It was miraculous that this was the extent of his injuries.
What was odd was that he was now in a strange room. Perhaps some kind soul had found him lying on the ground after the hit-and-run and taken him home with them.
But who would do something like that instead of calling an ambulance? I’m a total stranger to them… Would that happen?
Suddenly feeling uneasy, Masamichi carefully sat back up.
As expected, his whole body tensed, and the slightest movement caused pain. But it wasn’t so bad that he couldn’t move, as long as he got used to it.
Masamichi looked around again and saw that the room had a vintage style and felt very lived-in.
The twin-size bed had a plain wooden headboard.
The walls were painted a greenish-brown color with a rough texture, and the floor was a low-pile carpet, but there might have been tatami mats underneath.
Only the aluminum blinds on the windows, perhaps remodeled, were modern, and just one side let in enough sunlight to brighten the room.
Everything else in the room—the cedar planks on the ceiling with a few stains that looked like rain leaks, the square pendant-type light, the heavy chest of drawers, and the beautifully carved wooden mirror stand—were like a time capsule from the past Showa era.
Of course, Masamichi did not exist during the Showa era, but his grandparents, especially his late grandmother, had had a room like this.
In that sense, the unfamiliar room seemed nostalgic.
However, there was a lot of dust on the bedding, headboard, light fixture, and other furniture. The carpets’ original color had probably been more vibrant than what he saw.
“I wonder if no one has used this room for a long time. Maybe it was unoccupied, so they brought me here.”
Masamichi was very grateful, but that aside, everything was so dusty. His allergies weren’t as bad as when he was a child, but he was still allergic to house dust, so the room was not an ideal environment.
He continued to cough intermittently, and his ribs ached every time he did, so he decided to cover his nose and mouth with the sleeves of his shirt as a makeshift mask, when he realized something horrifying.
He had no sleeves—because he wasn’t wearing anything.
He was buck naked. He carefully pulled off the blanket so the dust wouldn’t fly all over and found that he wasn’t even wearing his underwear.
“Why?!”
Masamichi screamed this time and began searching, but his clothes were nowhere in sight.
Fortunately, no one else was in the room, so it wasn’t an issue of being seen. Still, he was uncomfortable in his present state.
And wrapping the blanket around his body would only worsen his coughing fits.
“Oh, geez…why am I naked…? Huh?!”
Unable to find anything to hide himself with, Masamichi glanced at his body, realized something, and cocked his head.
Faint, wispy, pale-red lines ran all over his body. They looked like the red pen marks he had scribbled on his arm when he was a child and had had trouble washing off.
“What is this? Oh!”
The clearest line was low on his right leg. As Masamichi gazed at the undulating line with wonder, he recalled the mysterious man again.
“Oh yeah, that guy was chewing on my right leg. He looked like he enjoyed it and commented on how it tasted. I dreamed my leg was torn off my body, and the wound was jagged—just like this line.”
Masamichi’s naked body trembled.
“Wasn’t that…a dream…? It had to be. But…”
But his leg was fine, he told himself. He was still anxious, though, and drew his right knee to his chest and tried to check that everything else, mysterious line aside, was okay with his right leg.
However, his vision was pretty good despite his days of studying, so he noticed a crucial fact that he wished he hadn’t.
“My birthmark! It isn’t there!”
A cry of despair rose from Masamichi’s throat as he finally stopped coughing.
He had been born with an oval brown birthmark on the inside of his right calf that looked like a cluster of small moles. His mother had affectionately called the two-centimeter-long birthmark “the pork cutlet on your leg.”
Dad used to make a terrible joke, saying he’d recognize me anywhere if something ever happened to me, but now that something’s happened to me, the mark has disappeared!
He reminisced about that bittersweet memory for a moment before remembering something even more unpleasant.
The mystery man had grinned, with Masamichi’s blood trailing down his lips, when he’d said he would restore his body “mostly to its former state.”
Mostly…to its former state.
Masamichi was about to mutter that the weirdness didn’t mean those things had truly occurred, when the pieces started coming together.
His right leg must have been torn off in the hit-and-run at the spot where the pork cutlet had been.
And because that man had eaten the skin without noticing the birthmark, he hadn’t thought to put it back where it had been.
Masamichi didn’t want to believe it, but everything made sense when he thought about it like that.
“It was a nightmare, but it wasn’t a dream. It really happened.”
If that were the case, the light red lines running all over his body were the remnants of the wounds he had suffered in the accident, which the man had repaired. That also made sense.
“I mean, I’m not convinced, but it does make sense. But wait, how can logic like that exist? I was definitely dying. No way could a human being fix it like this, leaving only thin lines on my body and terrible muscle pain!”
Greatly disoriented and in a mild panic, Masamichi struck the soft mattress and shouted.
Then an unexpected response came from outside the closed door.
“Of course they couldn’t. How could a mere human do something like that?”
“Eep!”
It was a familiar male voice.
Wait a sec. Don’t tell me that’s… It couldn’t be.
The next moment, Masamichi’s doubts turned to certainty.
The man opened the heavy wooden sliding door without knocking and entered the room, looking as beautiful as a marble statue or a figure in a painting.
“Oh no, oh no, oh no…I knew I wasn’t dreaming. He was real! Oh my god!”
The horror movie–like events that followed the hit-and-run had happened after all.
Shocked by the reminder and, at the same time, panicked by the fact that he was completely naked, Masamichi still did not pull the blanket over himself. Instead, he hugged his knees to his chest and tried to make his body as small as possible and reduce the exposed areas.
Paying no attention to Masamichi’s efforts, the man stomped into the room and placed a paper bag on the bed.
“You’re finally awake. All right, perfect. Put that on.”
Not “hello” or “are you okay?”
“U-um…”
Masamichi continued to clutch his knees, so the man’s expression became annoyed, and he clicked his tongue.