I see you have read this far.
I’m so sorry.
I’ve been seeing them since my online meeting with Ozawa.
They whisper in my ear, saying, “Write everything. Spread it everywhere.”
The whispers come to me in my dreams.
It seems I went too far.
Desperate, I made talismans in hope of finding salvation, but the whispers continued.
They only stopped while I was writing this.
Writing became my one way to survive.
I had to dive deeper into the curse, and I continued writing in order to escape it.
I know why it wants to grow, to spread.
Yet I continued writing, helping it spread to others.
I wanted to be saved. I wanted to live.
Even though it would make all of you sacrifices.
I knew Ozawa was dead, but I lied about looking for him so I could spread this curse.
Reading that my friend was missing piqued your curiosity and lured you in, kind reader. Even without that trap, masking the place’s name behind spurred you to continue reading in the hopes of figuring out the real location. Perhaps you even wanted to talk about it online.
Unfortunately, I knew all this. As a writer, I know how to manipulate readers into spreading information.
At the beginning when I asked for your cooperation, I meant I wanted you to read this book.
But I kept some things from you.
That was the last piece of my conscience. My way to resist.
The stronger your connection to a horror story, the more its curse affects you.
So I ended the story several times.
Then you, reader, wouldn’t have to touch upon the curse anymore.
But it didn’t allow me.
No matter how many times I ended the story, the whispering did not stop.
Not until I wrote everything, spread everything to others.
She chose me because I was the same.
Giving the work to someone in a similar situation let her spread the curse more effectively than any talisman.
By “the same,” I mean someone who is also a mother.
She went house by house, not in search of children but in search of mothers.
She wanted a woman who would sympathize with her. A woman fit to raise a child with her.
I had lost the child I gave birth to. I had sympathized with others at the facility. I must have been the woman whose experiences most closely resembled her own.
Foolishly, I pulled at that once-severed connection and got involved with her again.
She despised the media. At the same time, she knew firsthand the influence it wields.
She knew a freelance writer like me was the best choice to spread and grow her child.
That woman, the red woman, wanted to resurrect her son.
She clung to the fake god who spurned her, even though she believed in it. What’s more, that god took her child’s life. She didn’t even understand the implications of what she was doing.
She is a helpless fool who kept praying, even when she could see her dead son hanging in front of her.
She is beyond pitiful.
Stealing the stone and changing the talisman’s characters to her child’s name let her revive something, but that something only resembled her child.
Still, she believed it truly was her son.
So she co-opted the curse and used the talismans to infect innocent people, all in order to raise something that only consumes other people’s life force.
She morphed into a horror herself, repeating the same actions even after losing her soul.
But that still wasn’t enough.
So she used me.
Beings like her have no soul. They merely hunt their prey on instinct.
Even as she wrote that the god she’d worshipped was false, she never shed a tear.
That is just how such beings are. Human reason doesn’t apply to them.
But that woman is not the only pitiful one.
If we trace these events back in time, that man—even the child—were simply sacrifices.
Sacrifices demanding more sacrifices. How ironic.
The demon is still out there, sucking the blood of humanity and birthing more false gods.
But knowing that makes no difference now.
This is truly where About a Place in the Kinki Region ends.
There is nothing more to write. I have written everything.
Knowing ’s precise location is pointless.
Reader, you are already intricately linked to it.
It is too late.
I no longer hear her whispers.
Maybe she has forgiven me.
But I see a boy, standing there in the corner of the room, watching me.
Make of that what you will.
Dear readers, I’m truly very sorry.
And thank you for finding me.