Chapter 23: The Wish

Four o’clock. The dead heart of the morning.

Outside, the heavens had torn open. Rain lashed against the windows in furious sheets, driven by a howling wind that seemed to shake the very foundations of the villa. Thunder cracked, a series of violent, deafening explosions.

Yomikawa Tsuko was ripped from sleep, her own heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. The room was a suffocating pit of darkness, relieved only by the anemic, faint glow of her phone on the nightstand. The usual low hum of the computer’s cooling fan was absent. She turned her head, a cold dread coiling in her stomach. The computer, which she had meticulously configured to record the night’s events was a blank, dead screen.

The power was out. Utterly and completely.

She sat bolt upright in bed, pressing a hand to her throbbing temple. In the concealing blackness, her eyes, usually so cold, so dispassionate, now reflected a profound, alien disquiet.

The nebulous, unsettling images from her dream were already dissolving, like phantoms at sunrise. But the emotional detritus, the psychic residue of the nightmare, still clung to her, a heavy, suffocating weight in her chest. It was a raw, jagged sensation, like a shard of ice pressed against her heart, making her feel intensely uncomfortable, deeply… unmoored.

“This… aberration… within my chest. What is it?”

Yomikawa Tsuko clutched at herself, a strange tightness constricting her lungs. She forced herself to take several deep, shuddering breaths, but the bizarre, suffocating sensation refused to yield.

“What the hell is happening to me?”

With a grunt of effort, she swung her legs out of bed, her bare feet fumbling for the familiar comfort of her slippers. A reflexive flick of the light switch yielded nothing but an empty click. The darkness remained absolute. With a frustrated sigh, she felt her way to the bedroom door, her hand tracing the cool wood and pulled it open, stepping out into the even deeper blackness of the hallway.

A few hesitant steps brought her to the precipice of the main staircase. Her gaze plunged downwards, into the inky, cavernous void of the living room below. And in that instant, a chilling, visceral wave of déja vu washed over her, so potent it almost buckled her knees. The night she had exchanged hair with Senpai. The circumstances had been eerily, terrifyingly, identical.

The same jarring awakening in the suffocating blackness of the night.

The same violent, elemental fury of the storm, the same sudden, disorienting plunge into powerless darkness.

As she lifted her foot, poised to take the first tentative step down into that abyss, a sensation utterly unknown to her, a feeling completely alien to her core being, surged through her body, spreading like a paralyzing, icy current.

Her hands and feet began to tingle, a strange, unnerving weakness seeping into her limbs, making them feel distant, disconnected. A creeping, inexplicable chill, cold as the grave, snaked its way up her spine, coiling at the base of her skull. Her heart began to pound, a wild, frantic tattoo against her ribs. Her foot, suspended in mid-air, froze. And then, with a small, involuntary gasp, she stumbled backward, away from the beckoning darkness of the stairs.

Thump.

The sound of her slipper slapping against the wooden floor was shockingly, deafeningly loud in the oppressive silence of the house, a stark, brutal reminder that in this vast, echoing villa, she was utterly, terrifyingly alone.

Below, the familiar, benign shapes of the living room furniture, now swathed in impenetrable shadow, seemed to twist and writhe, taking on grotesque, menacing forms in her fear-widened eyes.

“The living room…” The thought, cold and sharp, pierced through her daze. “There might be something… something else… lurking down there, in the dark!”

A sudden, almost feral urge, raw and primal, seized Yomikawa Tsuko. She wanted to run, to scramble back to the illusory safety of her bedroom, to dive beneath the covers and pull them over her head, to hide, to cower, until the blessed, rational light of dawn.

“I…” Her breath hitched.

And then, with a clarity that was both shocking and horrifying, she understood. She recognized this new, terrifying invader, this alien sensation that was currently holding her hostage. Her eyes, wide with a dawning, incredulous horror, stared down at her own trembling hands.

This… this was fear.

A cascade of disconnected images flooded her mind: the contorted, terrified faces of characters in cheap horror films, the dry, clinical definitions of the word in dusty psychology textbooks. All of it coalescing now into a single, undeniable, deeply personal, and utterly unwelcome, experience.

She was afraid.

She, who had never known the debilitating touch of such a useless, irrational emotion.

Which could only mean one thing. Last night… during the storm, during the power outage… something profound, something fundamental, had indeed been exchanged between her and Senpai.

Hanako’s sixth wish, from the tattered legend, blazed in her mind with the sudden, searing clarity of a lightning strike.

“To be able to bear an outstanding child possessing Natsuhime’s bloodline.”

That wish, in its chilling simplicity, implied a complete and utter transference of Hanako’s “unseen inner essence” with that of Natsuhime. DNA. Blood type. Fingerprints. Even, horrifyingly, the very neural pathways, the intricate architecture of the brain itself.

The only component that would have, logically, remained untouched by such a profound exchange was memory. The raw data of a life lived.

And now, Hanako’s sixth wish… it had come to pass. Not on the twenty-first day, as the legend dictated, but here. Now. On the fourteenth day after the face-swap.

“What… what the hell is going on here?” The question was a ragged whisper in the suffocating darkness.

Yomikawa Tsuko was shaken to her very core. A torrent of frantic thoughts, conflicting theories, and chilling deductions crashed through her mind.

“Has the timeline of the wishes been… altered? Accelerated? Because this body, Senpai’s body, was already a virgin?”

“Then what of Hanako’s supposed fifth wish? Was it simply… bypassed? Deemed unnecessary?”

“No. That doesn’t feel right. It’s too neat, too… convenient.”

“The fifth wish, as it’s told in the story… it was a lie. A carefully constructed fabrication.”

“The first scenario I considered, just before I succumbed to sleep… that must be the truth.”

“The legend of Lord Mask-Taker… even in its earliest, most primitive iterations, it must have contained elements that were deliberately skewed, that didn’t align with the actual reality. And that discrepancy, that careful manipulation of the narrative… it had to be the work of a human hand, a calculating mind.”

“Reconstructing the sequence, then, based on what has just occurred… Hanako’s wishes must have unfolded thus: first, the exchange of voice. Then, hair. Then, skin. Then, the entire physical body. And now, tonight… the exchange of DNA. The very essence of being.”

“Which means… the so-called wish to become a pure virgin… it never existed. It was a phantom, a clever piece of misdirection.”

“But… who? Who would have the motive, the means, the sheer audacity, to alter the fifth wish so fundamentally, and then to allow that corrupted version of the story to propagate, to become the accepted truth?”

“Either Hanako herself lied, during her final interrogation by the Chief Priest… but the likelihood of that, given her circumstances, seems infinitesimally small.”

“Or… the Chief Priest. When he publicly proclaimed Hanako’s plot, her monstrous transgressions… he was the one who deliberately, and with cold calculation, modified the wish.”

“And if it was the Chief Priest… then what was his true motive?”

“Concealing the nature of the seventh wish, for reasons of his own – perhaps to protect some dark secret, some unspeakable truth – that, in itself, is a relatively straightforward act of omission. Understandable, even, in a twisted sort of way.”

“But to actively displace the original fifth wish, shunting it to the sixth position in the sequence, and then to meticulously invent a completely new, entirely false wish to insert in its place… Why? What possible, desperate reason could there be for such an elaborate, almost baroque, deception?”

“The true fifth wish, the one that involved the exchange of DNA, and the fabricated sixth wish, the one involving childbirth… what crucial difference did they represent to the architect of this manipulation? What was so dangerous about the DNA exchange happening on day fourteen, that it had to be disguised, or appear to be delayed until day twenty-one?”

Yomikawa Tsuko’s brow furrowed, her mind a whirlwind of chilling speculation.

“The only significant variable… is time itself.”

“The fifth wish, as per the corrupted legend, was enacted on the fourteenth day.”

“The sixth wish, on the twenty-first day.”

“A precise gap of one week. Was there some external event, some critical, time-sensitive circumstance, that necessitated either postponing the true transformation, or, conversely accelerating some other unknown part of the plan by that exact seven-day period?”

“And furthermore, if this reconstruction is indeed accurate… then there are not one, but two wishes whose true natures have been deliberately concealed from history. The true fifth wish, the one that just occurred, which was disguised as the sixth. And the original, still unknown, seventh wish.”

A maelstrom of unanswerable questions, terrifying possibilities, and grotesque implications swirled in the darkness of Yomikawa Tsuko’s mind. She stood frozen at the head of the stairs for what felt like an eternity, until another deafening, window-rattling clap of thunder outside finally shattered her intense cogitation.

For a single, blinding instant, a jagged fork of lightning seared the sky, illuminating the villa’s grand interior. And in that stark, unforgiving flash, Yomikawa Tsuko’s slender figure, alone in the vast darkness, seemed almost ethereal, unnaturally pale, her borrowed beauty rendered fragile, almost translucent. Her shadow, stretched long and grotesquely distorted by the momentary, brilliant light, writhed on the wall behind her like a gaping, black abyss, a hungry void threatening to swallow her whole.

Her hand, slick with a cold sweat she had never before experienced, instinctively tightened its grip on the smooth wood of the banister. And then, as the darkness crashed back in, even more oppressive than before, another, even more unsettling, possibility slithered into her mind.

“There is… yet another alternative explanation.”

“Perhaps… it wasn’t a matter of fabricating an entirely new fifth wish and inserting it into the established narrative.”

“Perhaps… it was a far simpler, yet equally deceptive, manipulation. A mere… reordering. The original fifth and sixth wishes were… swapped in the telling.”

“And if that is the true nature of the deception… then there might indeed be a way for me to verify it. A direct, empirical test.”

“Whether a male body is virginal or not… that is a matter of some ambiguity, difficult to ascertain with absolute certainty. But a female form… a female body possesses clear, unambiguous, physical markers.”

At this thought, a deep, troubled frown creased Yomikawa Tsuko’s brow. Then, slowly, with a visible effort of will, the tension in her face seemed to ease, replaced by a chilling, almost predatory calmness.

“But then again,” she mused, her voice a silent whisper in the echoing darkness of her own mind, a new, colder, more pragmatic thought taking root, “what truly compelling reason do I possess to unearth the intricacies of this ancient, sordid affair? Why must I be the one to know these forgotten truths?”

“Idle curiosity? I hardly possess Ōgami Yōsuke’s insatiable, almost… childlike… thirst for irrelevant answers.”

“Whatever horrors transpired in that distant, dusty past… what conceivable impact could they have on me, now? Existing, as I do, in this entirely different time, this entirely different, borrowed, reality? Even if I never fully unravel the ultimate truth behind this cursed legend… does it genuinely, fundamentally, matter to my own objectives?”

“Lord Mask-Taker and Senpai… their grotesque, desperate quest for immortality, for some twisted form of godhood… it does not, at present, directly conflict with my own carefully laid plans. Delving into their secrets, their hidden histories, their ancient shames… it offers me no discernible, tangible benefit. And it might, in fact, invite… unnecessary complications. Unwelcome, and potentially dangerous, attention.”

As this cold, clear line of reasoning solidified, a wave of something akin to… unexpected relief… washed over Yomikawa Tsuko. With a conscious, deliberate act of will, she began to disentangle her thoughts from the treacherous, labyrinthine pathways of the ancient, cursed legend. She looked down again, towards the Stygian blackness of the living room below.

The vertiginous height of the staircase, the oppressive, all-consuming darkness, the damp, cloying chill that permeated the very air of the villa… it all combined to reignite that same, unsettling feeling of vulnerability, that strange, unfamiliar weakness that had, against all logic, against all prior experience, inexplicably taken root in the core of her being.

“Am I… am I now afraid of the dark?” The thought was a ludicrous, insulting absurdity.

“Am I… a coward? A weakling, trembling at shadows?”

“No.” The denial was fierce, visceral. “That is impossible. Utterly impossible.”

“I am strong. I am a survivor. And the strong… the strong are never afraid.”