He had a presence similar to the abnormal Kamikakushi recorded in the archives—believed to be the leader, the main body of the ancient god Kamikakushi.
As the moon shifted in the sky, its light quickly illuminated the entire room. I crawled toward the table in the center of the room and used it to support myself since I couldn't stand due to the thigh injury I had sustained a moment ago. I raised my head and looked at the mysterious man who had suddenly fallen from the sky. The moment I looked at him, he immediately fixed his gaze on me and said, "So you're the one."
I wanted to ask him what he meant and what he came here to do, but before I could say a word, it was like he had completely disappeared—taking my oni with him. At that exact moment, I heard a screech coming from the far end of the room, where my mom's oni and my supposed ally were fighting. The loud scream went on for a certain amount of time—what I believe to be a minute—and then it stopped. The entire place fell into dead silence.
Suddenly, the mysterious man appeared behind me and picked me up. The moment I felt his presence behind me, I turned around and saw that in his right hand, he was holding the records—the book titled Kamikakushi—and in his left hand, he was holding the oni that my ally had been fighting, the one that was supposed to target my mother. He looked at me with a blank expression on his face and said, "It's time to go."
I responded by asking him, "Who are you?" He didn't answer.
I asked another question, "Where are we going?"
He replied, "Somewhere safe."
He told me to stand and follow him. I looked him in the eye and said, "Can't you see that my leg is injured? And why would I follow someone who just fell from the sky and broke all the way through the ceiling of my home down to the basement?"
Again, he looked at me with a blank expression, as if his mind wasn't present—like he wasn't immersed in the current moment. At that point, I noticed something strange: the moonlight that had been coming from the hole in the ceiling was no longer entering the room, and the pain in my leg—the wound from a few minutes ago—was also gone. I looked at my thigh, and to my surprise, both the wound and the object that had pierced me were completely gone.
The mysterious man then said to me, "You may not know who I am, but you should know by now that you can't survive on your own."
Right after he spoke, the oni he had crashed onto when he first arrived stood up and rushed toward me in an attempt to fulfill its duty, which was to "erase" me. But the man grabbed it by the neck and turned to me, saying, "Do you finally understand?"
Overcome with fear, I followed him. As we were going up the stairs, I saw a female figure coming down—it was my mother. The sound of the man breaking through the ceiling must have woken her up. She looked only at me, as if she was unable to see the man or the oni that were clearly in front of me.
She asked, "Ezra, what is this place? What was that sound?"
This confused me. According to what I had read in the records during the previous "round," people who were being targeted by oni should be able to see their own oni as well as the ones targeting others.
I stood there in front of my mother, confused. Suddenly, the man said to me as he raised the book in his hand, "What you read in this book wasn't true—at least, not anymore."
He walked toward my mother. I didn't know what he intended to do, so I tried to stop him. But to my surprise, he just walked through her as if he were some kind of ghost. The moment he passed through her, my mother lost consciousness and fell. I rushed forward and caught her before she could fall down the stairs.
The moment I touched her, we were no longer on the staircase—we were in my mother's room, and the bookshelf was closed, as if we had never gone inside.
The mysterious man with white hair went to the bookshelf and picked one of the books—specifically, one without a number. The other books were numbered from 1 to 20. When he touched the book, it immediately became numbered '21'.
I placed my mother gently on the bed. He threw the book numbered '21' to me and said, "Write your name and an account of when you first saw your oni in that book."
I stood there silently for a while. Then I asked him, as he was walking out of the room, "What did you do to my mother?"
He stopped walking, turned toward me, opened his mouth, and said something—but for some reason, I couldn't understand what he said. At that very moment, we were no longer in my mother's room.
I carefully looked around. It seemed like a warehouse of some sort. Then, the oni that had been helping me for a while stepped forward and shouted, "He is here!"
The moment he said that, I felt the presence of multiple oni coming from the inner section of the warehouse. The mysterious man then touched my shoulder and asked me,
"Do you fear death? "