Originally, from what I can remember, I came here, no one noticed me—as usual—and then I left. But this time, in this class, I'm holding an empty book with the number 21 written on the front and back. There were five people sitting at the desks in front of me, as well as two beings I wouldn't describe as human.
If I remember correctly, one of those black figures—one of the oni—had helped me sometime before in a previous "round," and the white-haired man, his name was Shiro. He and the other three people had just helped me escape Kamikakushi, an ancient Japanese god whose goal is to remove humans from this world. They helped me escape by… killing me.
"How were you able to make me go to the past? I thought only the oni are capable of doing that," I said after the small moment of silence I used to collect my thoughts. As usual, after I asked a question, they took a moment before answering. After what felt like a minute of complete silence, Shiro said to me,
"Do you still think of yourself as human? Do you see us as human?"
"Well, from your appearance, it'd be normal for me to consider you lot humans…" I replied.
"Let me ask you another question. The woman who barged into the building before you died—the one I had a conversation with—do you consider her to be human?" he asked. Before I could answer, he spoke again,
"Let's leave all that for now. That book in your hand—from now on, that'll be the only truth in your life," he said.
"And why do you say that?" I asked him.
He replied, "You've read what we call the Records, right?"
"Yes, I have, but I didn't go quite far in the book," I replied.
"Then you must know how the oni work, and that each time the present is removed—or more accurately, hidden—you lose a certain part of your existence, since you're the one who caused the world to go back to the past due to your death," he said.
"Yes, I also know that if I die to anything else other than an oni, the present won't be erased and the world won't go back to the past. And this fact is why I asked you that question immediately after I noticed that we had come back to the past," I replied.
"So, with all this information, you must know what that book is for. For everything you do involving the Kamikakushi and its oni, you must write it down in that book. Eventually, the book will start writing it for you, and the contents of your book will later be transferred to the Main Records—which is the book you found under your house, behind the bookshelf. And on that shelf, you must have seen similar books in your mother's room. Yes, those are the records of the lives of people who are no longer with us—people who succumbed to the Kamikakushi and were removed from this world," he said to me.
"So you're telling me to write in this book because there's a chance I'm not going to survive this ordeal, and I'll need to leave information for the next person that happens to be cursed by Kamikakushi and decides to fight for their life?" I asked him.
"Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Although we'll try our best so you don't die, it's always good to have insurance," he replied.
"Then let me ask another question. Why am I the only one writing in an unusual book? What about you guys? Why don't you leave a little insurance for the next people?" I said to him.
"Well, it's simple. It's because only those who still bear the curse of the Kamikakushi can write in that book. Although we can read what's inside it, if we try to write anything inside, it'll just fade away—as if we had never tried to write anything. Well, with me as a sole exception," he replied.
When he said this, the first thing that came to my mind was Why are you an exception? I wanted to ask him this question, but with how our conversation had been going, he was most likely not going to answer me. So I decided to ask a different question—one that might help me understand why he had asked me a certain question at the beginning of this round: Do you still think of yourself as human? Do you see us as human?
"What are you?" I asked him, with a serious look on my face.
Rose, the woman with the red hair, stood up and stepped out of the classroom. The man with the tattoos and Shiro just stared at me. After a small moment of silence, Shiro—the man who killed me and brought me to the past, the man who seemed to have a connection to the Kamikakushi—said to me,
"Are you familiar with the term Ashura (阿修羅)?"