Tomie walked to the decorative mirror on the wall. Its surface threw back the image of her face smeared with blood, hair plastered in dark, wet strands against her cheeks and neck — no fangs, pupils unchanged, skin no paler than before.
「Are you mocking me?」
Tomie furrowed her brow and bared her teeth at her own reflection.
Frustration and irritation surged up inside her.
She had put genuine effort into completing that ritual. And this was all she had to show for it?
She folded her arms across her chest. Her expression was sour, but her mind was already turning quickly.
Had the transformation failed? Probably not. That strangely dressed Elizabeth had left with perfect composure — nothing about her manner suggested a failed ritual.
Was it the physical body that was meant to transform? Could the power simply not manifest inside the Dream World? That didn't seem right either. The transformation itself had taken place within the Dream World, and the vampiric power Elizabeth had bestowed seemed to operate on more than just the body.
Tomie paced back and forth in front of the mirror, increasingly certain that something was off — she just couldn't pin down what.
It wasn't external. It was internal.
An extraordinarily subtle wrongness — like a piece of furniture in a room that had been shifted a few centimeters. You'd never notice unless you looked deliberately, yet somehow you knew, beyond any doubt, that it wasn't where it used to be.
She closed her eyes and stood still, attempting to quiet her mind and capture that elusive, drifting sensation.
Her thoughts were clear.
Memory ran in an unbroken thread: her decision to hold the ritual, the preparation of the scene, seizing the sacrifice, working the Iron Maiden, reciting the incantation, Elizabeth's appearance, the touch on her face, the disappearance — every detail vivid and sharp, the logic coherent throughout.
Nothing had been tampered with. No strange fragments had been inserted. She was still herself — Kawakami Tomie, with her characteristic patterns of thought and her characteristic emotional reactions.
And yet there remained an alien quality to it all. Like a needle of ice so fine it was nearly invisible, lodged in some soft corner of her consciousness.
No pain. No itch. Not even an inconvenience, strictly speaking — but its mere presence was a continuous, persistent interference, something that made it impossible to fully relax, impossible to take for granted, as she once had, that everything was exactly as it should be.
「Tsk.」
Tomie opened her eyes in irritation and abandoned the futile attempt at introspection.
She hated problems like this — vague, intangible, impossible to grab hold of directly.
If she couldn't think her way through it, she'd stop thinking about it.
Tomie dropped the matter instantly and decided to find Amamiya Rin for answers.
She had no idea where he was — but desire strong enough, intention focused enough, would guide her to him.
It was the witching hour at dusk. The sun had already sunk behind the western mountains, leaving only a bruised smear of dark orange along the horizon, gilding the city in the tired remnants of its light. The heat in the air was bleeding away fast, and the evening wind had begun to carry a real chill.
「Coach Takamura, I'm heading out — see you tomorrow.」
Amamiya Rin toweled at his sweat-damp hair and called out to the vaguely familiar-looking coach inside the boxing gym.
He pushed through the glass door and stepped outside. The evening air hit his still-warm skin immediately, raising a ripple of cool sensation.
The sweat had plastered black strands of hair against his brow and temples. His grey training vest was soaked through across most of the back, clinging close to his frame, tracing the lean, hardened lines built up through long months of conditioning.
He glanced up at the clouds catching the last of the sunset, drew a long, cool breath, and felt the tension coiled through his body and nerves begin to slowly unwind. The set, focused look faded from his face, replaced by a quiet, unhurried kind of exhaustion in the set of his eyes.
「Haaah——!」
A long, slow exhale, as though breathing out everything that had accumulated through the day. Amamiya Rin descended the front steps and set his sights on a nearby all-you-can-eat barbecue restaurant — a well-deserved, serious meal.
He turned — and walked straight into a face he knew extremely well.
「Oh! Tomie, long time no see. Want to come eat all-you-can-eat barbecue?」
Amamiya Rin stopped mid-step, lifting a lazy hand in greeting.
「The smoke and grease are disgusting. Absolutely not.」
Tomie refused without hesitation. In her estimation, a place like a barbecue restaurant — especially an all-you-can-eat one — was beneath her standards entirely.
Amamiya Rin shrugged. He hadn't expected her to agree.
He moved to step past her. He was tired and hungry and in no particular mood to deal with this temperamental young lady right now.
「Don't walk away!」
He had barely taken half a step before a hand seized his shoulder — firmly, with undisguised irritation behind the grip.
Amamiya Rin stopped and turned his head to look at the hand on his shoulder, then at Tomie, his expression plainly puzzled.
Tomie released him at once, as if she had touched something unclean. Her left hand immediately produced a tissue from her pocket, and she wiped her palm with an expression of fastidious distaste.
Amamiya Rin pressed his mouth into a thin line but said nothing.
「I need you to look at something first,」 Tomie said, her tone sharp and barely concealing her impatience.
「Something's wrong with that ritual.」
「Ritual?」
Amamiya Rin tilted his head, looking at her with genuine confusion.
「The black magic ritual that came with Elizabeth Báthory's portrait. I performed it a few days ago.」
「Did it succeed?」
Amamiya Rin's gaze sharpened immediately.
A long time ago, he'd had a passing idea: what if a black magic ritual could be performed inside the Dream World? The one involving the Apology Demon, specifically. If it could be done, and if the collective willpower of everyone involved grew strong enough — more Tomies composing the Dream World — there might eventually be a chance to trap the Apology Demon inside it.
But he had never acted on the idea. The reason was simple: he couldn't win. That thing was a world-ending class demon. If the summoning succeeded and he couldn't defeat it, the secret of the Long Dream would be exposed.
And yet here was Tomie — reckless as ever, without a word of warning to him — who had gone ahead and performed a black magic ritual inside the Dream World on her own.
Still, blaming her now would accomplish nothing.
He had long since taken the measure of Tomie's capacity for shamelessness and sheer stubbornness. No amount of reproach would register — she'd let it roll off her, or worse, turn it around and mock him for being timid.
The immediate priority was to understand what had happened and assess the risk.
「Succeeded… or failed? Honestly, I don't know. I followed every step in that ridiculous book — the blood was drawn, the incantation was recited, Elizabeth actually appeared — but then she just… appeared?」
Tomie's voice carried open frustration. She kicked a pebble off the curb.
「Just appeared?」
Amamiya Rin wasn't sure what to make of that. So was it a success or not?
「The summoning worked, anyway. She wasn't exactly the woman from the portrait though — white hair, dressed in something theatrical and elaborate like a stage costume, carrying a scepter — oh, and actually, she looked a bit like that big dragon lady from your memories.」
Tomie pressed her lips together.
Amamiya Rin blinked, then it clicked — and the look on his face went slightly complicated.
Camilla? Of all things — could his own memories have distorted Elizabeth's appearance?
「Then she touched my face, said a few theatrical lines, and vanished. And I haven't changed at all!」
Tomie folded her arms tightly, her tone impatient.
「No fangs. Nails haven't grown. No sense that my strength or speed has increased. I haven't turned into anything bat-faced. So did the ritual work or didn't it?」
Amamiya Rin leaned against the brick wall outside the gym and thought for a few seconds.
「Tell me the whole process — every detail, start to finish. Leave nothing out.」
Tomie clicked her tongue, but she began from the beginning anyway.
She described the layout of the castle hall, the use of the Iron Maiden, the collection of blood, smearing it across her body, reciting the incantation — then Elizabeth stepping out of the portrait, her strange armored appearance. She included the fragments of unfamiliar imagery that had flashed through her mind, and the sluggish, resistant feeling, like something foreign had forced its way into her head.
「Oh — and she said something about this. A sub-space formed from human longing? A dream? She seemed to recognize that this place was the Dream World.」
Amamiya Rin listened without interrupting, one finger unconsciously tapping against his knee.
「Barring any surprises, that Elizabeth was the real thing.」
When Tomie finished, he was silent for a moment before speaking.
「And your issue probably isn't physical. Based on what you've described, Elizabeth's first embrace — the transformation — most likely operated on an entirely different level.」
「A different level?」
Tomie raised an eyebrow.
「What other level could there be? The soul? Memory?」
「Soul, yes — and memory, too — but more than that: consciousness, spirit, belief. Trace it to the root, and it comes down to the mind.」
Amamiya Rin met her gaze, his voice measured, each word deliberate.
「The mind?」
Tomie's brow creased slowly. She had a deep and particular loathing for this sort of vague, intangible nonsense.
Her body was immortal — the one thing that could be affected was the mind.
Not that just any form of mental interference could reach her. Even existences who had lived through countless ages, capable of swapping souls with anyone, would find that once they entered her body, they gradually became another version of her.
The only exception so far was Amamiya Rin — and only because of a particular combination of circumstances that had brought them to an enduring stalemate on the level of the psyche.
「You said that when she touched your face, you felt something alien seep into your mind — interference, noise, fragments of unfamiliar memory. Is that right?」
Amamiya Rin asked.
「It felt like some kind of memory transmission, but I can't recall it clearly now. And whatever it was, it was so ordinary — nothing worth knowing. Just the sort of knowledge any average person would have about vampires. Even if she hadn't transmitted those memories, I could have imagined those images myself.」
Tomie gave a small nod, then added with a note of contempt.
「That is… recognition. How do I put this?」
Amamiya Rin rested his chin in one hand, sorting through his thoughts, unhurried.
「Mind, consciousness, psychic contamination, brainwaves — based on everything I've come to understand about this world so far, entities like demons or malevolent spirits — the non-physical kind — their interactions with humans almost always work through these channels.
「Take the Apology Demon's dissolution, for instance — that operated through Evil Electromagnetic Waves. Your own charm is a form of psychic contamination. The power of human belief and will can create urban legends like the Slit-Mouthed Woman. It's possible that demons like the Apology Demon and Elizabeth are themselves formed from humanity's collective unconscious — from recognition — combined with some unknown element we don't yet have the framework to understand.」
The idea had taken shape in Amamiya Rin's mind after he learned the true origin of the Slit-Mouthed Woman.
In a horror-tale worldview without a formal system of supernatural power, if you set aside the genuinely unknown monsters that exist in reality, entities like urban legends — the kind intimately entangled with human beings — may well owe their birth to humanity itself.
Junji Ito's creative inspiration, after all, came from social phenomena. The Apology Demon, for example, was inspired by the meaningless public apologies of politicians. The Hanging Balloons were reportedly drawn from a real event — the mass suicide of fans following a celebrity's death.
「Hey, hey — you're going off on a tangent.」
Tomie cut him off with open impatience. She had zero interest in listening to Amamiya Rin's unconfirmed speculation.
「Ah — right, I did drift a bit. Though it's not entirely off-topic, actually. Mind, brainwaves, recognition — barring surprises, those are precisely the channels through which Elizabeth changed you.」
Amamiya Rin nodded, then shook his head.
「Do you remember Kawahara Miyuki? After she performed her black magic ritual, she had no awareness of the change in herself either — not until the day she witnessed another version of herself committing a murder, and only then did a vague suspicion begin to form. But it wasn't really seeing another self commit a murder. It was her experiencing what an alternate personality — which had taken over while her primary self slept — had done.」
「You're saying… Elizabeth created a secondary personality inside my mind?」
Tomie grasped it immediately, and the expression on her face went dark.
「Exactly. A cognitive implant — or more precisely, a grafting of identity. That is Elizabeth's true method of first embrace. She requires no physical body from you. She requires only that your consciousness persists. And it isn't a simple transfer of memories — it's the insertion of an entire mode of being into your cognitive structure, complete with its own internal logic and behavioral framework.」
As Amamiya Rin spoke, a kind of wondering reflection came over him.
A cognitive implant. A grafting of identity. When it came down to it, all Elizabeth had done was give Tomie the recognition — the belief — that she was a vampire.
Which meant, in Elizabeth's view, the moment Tomie genuinely held that belief, Tomie would naturally become a vampire.
It sounded absurd — and yet, in a world where the strength of belief could reshape reality, it was not remotely impossible. Extreme emotions of all kinds gave birth to different urban legends.
The Slit-Mouthed Woman. The Weeping Woman. The Ikiryo. Believe hard enough that you can do something, and you will do it. A terrifying principle.
The most terrifying part was that the beliefs most capable of bending reality — mind over matter — were almost invariably the negative, extreme ones.
Positive emotions couldn't reach that same extremity. Even Indou Ranko had to use pain to push herself into the kind of suffering that unlocked her full spiritual power.
Right — and Higa Kinako had worked the same way. It was mentioned in It Comes: Higa Makoto had witnessed Higa Kinako covered in wounds, and had started hurting herself as well in order to draw out power through the same means.
Of course, there were likely factors Amamiya Rin still didn't fully understand — shifts in physical structure, for instance. It was also possible that Tomie's brainwaves had already been recalibrated by Elizabeth's evil electromagnetic influence.
Tomie listened to the analysis in silence. Several seconds passed. The expression on her face shifted through a range of things it couldn't seem to settle on.
She despised any form of being changed. Especially this kind — internal, creeping, soundless.
「Of course, all of this is still conjecture on my part — but verifying it is actually quite simple. Hypnosis. One deep hypnotic session, guiding you into the depths of your own memory and cognition, and we can determine whether this vampiric secondary personality I'm describing actually exists.」
Amamiya Rin offered a method of verification. Tomie, naturally, would not refuse — and she agreed on the spot.
The two of them immediately moved somewhere more suitable, and the verification began.
____
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