This is a Japanese internet horror story that has circulated quietly for years.
What you are about to read is a first-person account originally posted online, describing an encounter with something known as Kankandara (姦姦蛇螺).
The story is presented here with minimal changes for clarity, but the events, tone, and perspective remain faithful to the original account.
I recommend reading it slowly, without skipping ahead.
When I was in middle school, I was a clueless country kid.
Every day, I messed around with my friends and lived a rough, reckless life.
The two I was especially close to were A and B.
A and I had essentially been abandoned by our families, but B was different.
He was doted on by his mother.
One day, during our third year of middle school, B got into an especially vicious fight with her.
He never told us the details, but it sounded like he had hurt her deeply—emotionally.
His father took in the situation at a glance.
Ignoring B completely, he walked straight over to his wife.
Her clothes and hair were disheveled, and she stared down at the floor with dead, lifeless eyes, like a fish that had already died.
Seeing her like that, his father finally spoke.
“So you’ve become the kind of person who can trample someone this badly,” he said.
“Don’t you understand how much your mother cares about you?”
Without looking at B even once, he pulled his wife into an embrace.
B reacted with open defiance.
“Shut up. Want me to beat the hell out of you?”
Like I said, all of us were pretty messed up back then.
But B’s father showed no reaction at all.
He continued speaking calmly.
“Do you really believe there’s nothing in this world that frightens you?”
“Nope. If there is, I’d love to see it.”
After a brief silence, B’s father spoke again.
“You’re my son. I know exactly how much your mother worries about you.
But if this is all you’re capable of doing to her, then I have my own way of dealing with it.
I’m not speaking as your father now. I’m speaking as one human being to another.
Let me be clear—
the reason I’m telling you this is because I’ve already accepted that you might die.”
If you’re fine with that, then listen—
and with that, he finally looked B straight in the eyes.
Something about his demeanor made B feel an overwhelming pressure, or so he later told us.
Even so, B had gone too far to back down.
“Fine. Say it.”
“There’s a restricted area inside the forest nearby. You know the one.
Go there. Get inside. Walk deeper.
You’ll understand why once you do.
And when you get there, try acting the way you are now—if you think you can.”
The forest he was talking about lay at the base of the mountain near where we lived.
The mountain itself was open to the public, and at first glance the forest looked normal too.
But if you went deeper inside, you would eventually reach an off-limits area.
That restricted zone was surrounded by a fence nearly two meters tall.
Barbed wire and white paper streamers were tangled around it, and countless bells—large and small—hung from every part of the fence.
It gave off an intensely unwelcoming impression.
Everything about it felt wrong. Completely unnatural.
I had once seen shrine maidens gathered at the forest entrance on a certain day.
The area had been sealed off at the time, so I never learned what they were doing.
There were plenty of rumors in town.
The most common one was that some kind of religious facility was involved.
But honestly, just getting anywhere near that place was a hassle—and creepy as hell.
I’d never heard of anyone going all the way inside.
Without waiting for B’s response, his father took his wife upstairs.
B left the house immediately and met up with A and me, just as planned.
That’s when he told us everything.
“For your old man to say that much, it must be serious,” A said.
“I heard rumors it’s a cult hideout,” he added.
“If you get caught, they might brainwash you or something.
I’m not scared or anything, but… are you really going?”
I looked at B to see what he thought.
The answer was obvious from his expression.
“Of course I’m going. It’s just my dad bluffing.”
Out of pure curiosity, A and I decided to go with him.
That same night, the three of us headed out.
By the time we finished gathering supplies, it was already past 1 a.m.
Full of confidence, we arrived at the site, took out our flashlights, and stepped into the forest.
The path was easy enough to walk, even lightly equipped,
but it would take nearly forty minutes to reach the restricted area.
Less than five minutes after entering the forest, something strange happened.
Almost the moment we started walking, we heard a sound coming from somewhere far away.
In the quiet of the night, B was the first to notice.
“Hey… don’t you hear something?”
He stopped and slowly turned his head from side to side.
A lifted his face and listened carefully.
I heard it too.
Something dragging across fallen leaves.
And the sharp crack—crack—of branches snapping underfoot.
The sound was distant, faint.
Because of that, I didn’t feel scared.
It’s a forest—animals live there, right?
That’s what we told each other as we kept moving.
After walking for a while, we finally realized something.
The sound was moving in sync with us.
When we walked, it moved.
When we stopped, it stopped.
It felt like something was watching us.
A chill ran down my spine.
“This is bullshit,” B muttered, lowering his voice.
“Someone might be tailing us.”
“They’re not getting closer, though,” A said.
“The distance hasn’t changed.”
He was right.
From the moment we entered the forest, the distance stayed constant.
It never came closer, and it never fell back.
The sound followed us the whole way.
When the fence finally came into view, the sound slipped from my mind.
The fence itself was far more disturbing.
None of us had ever seen that fence before.
It was far beyond anything we had imagined.
At the same time, a thought crossed my mind—one I had never seriously considered before.
Normally, I mocked anything related to ghosts or the supernatural and never believed in it.
But even to us, standing there, the reality in front of our eyes could only suggest that kind of thing.
The atmosphere was dangerously wrong.
Was this place… cursed, in a spiritual sense?
For the first time since entering the forest, I began to think we might have come somewhere truly dangerous.
“You’re telling me we’re supposed to break through that and go inside?”
A said, staring up at the fence that towered over him.
“No matter how you look at it, this isn’t normal.”
“Shut up. Don’t chicken out over something like this,”
B snapped back, jeering at A and me as he started attacking the fence with the tools we’d brought.
The fence shook violently.
Barbed wire and white paper strips rattled, and countless bells tied to it rang out in unison.
But the fence was far sturdier than B had expected.
The kind of tools an ordinary person would carry barely made a dent.
The two of us tried helping, but it didn’t budge at all—
it felt as if some kind of special material had been used.
In the end, the only option left was to climb over it.
Fortunately, wire mesh covered the surface of the fence, giving us enough grip to make the climb.
The moment we crossed over, a strange sensation washed over us.
It felt suffocating—
like being a prisoner locked inside a cage.
A and B felt it too. Both of them hesitated, unable to take another step.
Keeping low, the three of us exchanged looks.
We had already crossed the fence. There was no turning back now.
After walking for another twenty or thirty minutes, we began to faintly see the fence on the opposite side.
That was when we found something unusual.
Six specific trees were wrapped with sacred ropes.
Those trees were connected by rope, forming a hexagonal boundary.
Formal paper streamers—far more official than the ones hanging on the fence—were attached to it.
At the center of the hexagon, a single box sat alone, like an offering box.
The moment we saw it, all three of us fell silent.
Especially A and me.
We shuddered, realizing we had stepped into a place we truly should not have entered.
No matter how stupid we were, we still had a basic idea of what sacred ropes were used for.
That alone made it clear that fencing off this area and marking it as restricted carried serious meaning.
The scene in front of us said everything.
We had finally gone too far.
“This has to be what your dad was talking about,”
I said to B.
“There’s no way we can ‘go wild’ here,”
A muttered.
“This is obviously bad.”
But B refused to back down.
“It doesn’t have to be something evil,” he said.
“Let’s at least check out that box. Might be treasure inside.”
B ducked under the rope stretched between the trees and stepped into the hexagonal space.
He walked straight toward the box.
I was less worried about the box itself than about what B might do.
Still, I followed him inside the boundary.
The box had been left exposed to the elements, covered in dirt and rust.
A mesh was stretched over the lid, and beneath it, a board blocked any view of the inside.
The outside of the box was covered with symbols drawn in what looked like chalk.
They resembled family crests.
Every side—front, back, left, right—was covered in different emblem-like designs.
Not a single one matched another.
I tried not to touch anything unnecessarily.
While warning B to be careful, the three of us examined the box.
It seemed to be fixed directly to the ground.
It wasn’t particularly heavy, but it wouldn’t lift at all.
We checked every angle, trying to figure out how to see inside,
and eventually discovered that only the back panel could be removed.
“Hey, this side comes off. Let’s take a look,”
B said.
He removed the panel and peered into the box from the back.
A and I leaned in over his shoulder.
Inside the box, jar-like containers shaped almost like plastic bottles were placed at each corner.
And in the center lay several wooden fragments, about five centimeters long, arranged in a strange shape—
their tips painted red.
／＼／＼＞
Six small wooden sticks were arranged in this shape, with only four adjacent points painted red.
“What is this, toothpicks?” I said out loud, voicing what I was thinking.
“Hey, there’s something inside these PET-bottle-looking things. This is gross,”
A said, turning his face away from the box.
“So we came all this way for plastic bottles and toothpicks? This makes no sense,”
B muttered in frustration.
A and I limited ourselves to lightly touching the bottle-shaped jars, but B picked one up, sniffed it, tilted it around, and examined it closely.
After putting the jar back in its original place, B reached for the toothpick-like sticks.
That was when it happened.
His fingers were sweaty, and for just a moment, one of the sticks stuck to his skin. When he pulled his hand away, the arrangement collapsed.
At that instant—
Chirin, chirin! Chirin, chirin!
From the opposite direction of where we had come—near the fence faintly visible beyond the hexagonal boundary—an explosive clamor of bells rang out.
I froze in shock, my whole body stiffening.
The other two shouted at the same time, startled, shifting their stances instinctively.
“Damn it! Who’s there!? Don’t mess with us!”
B screamed and ran toward the sound.
“Hey, idiot! Don’t go that way!”
I reached out, trying to grab him.
A shouted in a panicked voice, “This is bad! This is really bad!”
I chased after B and grabbed his shoulder—when he suddenly stopped dead in his tracks, holding his flashlight pointed straight ahead.
“What, is this some kind of joke?”
A said, forcing a joking tone as he followed us, trying to calm himself.
But B’s body was trembling in short, violent spasms.
“Hey… what’s wrong—”
As I spoke, my eyes were drawn, without thinking, to the illuminated area ahead.
B’s flashlight was shining on the base of one of the trees standing among the others.
From the shadows at its roots—
A woman’s face was peering at us.
She showed only half her face, staring directly at us without squinting despite the backlight.
Her mouth was open wide, exposing both rows of teeth, making a sound like “iiiii—,”
and her eyes were completely unfocused.
“AAAAAAAH!”
I couldn’t tell whose scream it was—it all blended together.
We all turned on our heels and ran.
My mind went blank. My body moved on its own.
It wasn’t a conscious decision—it was pure survival instinct.
We didn’t have time to check on each other. Each of us independently chose the same destination: the fence.
We clung to the fence we had climbed over earlier and scrambled up it in a blind frenzy.
At the top, we didn’t hesitate—we threw ourselves over and dropped down the other side.
I immediately started running toward the forest entrance.
But A was struggling, unable to climb over the fence.
“A! Hurry up!” I screamed.
A was completely disoriented, his face deathly pale.
“Hey! Hurry!” B shouted.
While waiting for A, I kept my eyes on the other side of the fence.
“What the hell was that… what was that thing?”
“I don’t know! Shut up!”
B snapped, unable to hide his panic.
We were completely losing it.
That was when—
Chirin, chirin! Chirin, chirin!
The bells rang out again, louder than before, and the fence began to shake.
“What!? Where’s that coming from!?”
I shouted, fear like nothing I’d ever felt before flooding my body as I looked around wildly.
The sound was coming from the direction of the mountain—away from the forest entrance.
It was getting closer, shaking the fence as it moved toward us.
“This is bad! This is really bad!”
I yelled, without thinking.
B shouted at A, who was still struggling with the fence.
“Hurry up already! Come on!”
I knew yelling would only make things worse for him, but in that moment, rational thought was impossible.
A climbed desperately, slipping several times, clenching his teeth, letting go of the wire mesh, then grabbing again, finally hooking his hands over the top.
Just as A was about to pull himself up—
B and I both turned our heads in the same direction.
My entire body broke out in sweat. I couldn’t make a sound.
Noticing our reaction, A froze on top of the fence.
At the far end of the fence line, stretching all the way toward the mountain—
It was clinging there.
On the outside.
On our side.
At first, I thought it was just a face.
But it was naked—only an upper body—with three arms extending from each side.
Using those arms, it skillfully gripped the ropes and barbed wire, mouth still open in that same “iiiii—” shape, crawling toward us like a spider moving across its web.
The terror was overwhelming.
It was a grotesque, unknowable abomination.
“AAAAAAAH!”
A leapt from the top of the fence in sheer panic, crashing down beside B and me.
The impact snapped us back to our senses.
We hauled A to his feet and ran toward the forest entrance.
We didn’t look back.
We stared straight ahead and ran with everything we had.
A path that should have taken less than thirty minutes felt like it took hours.
As the forest began to thin, we saw something that looked like human figures.
For a split second, we thought, No way…
We stopped dead, held our breath, and hid in the shadows.
There were several silhouettes—people.
Confirming that they weren’t that thing, we ran again, straight into them.
“Hey! They’re here!”
“Did they really go past the fence!?”
“Hey! Hurry and tell his wife!”
The adults gathered around us, shouting over one another.
My head was completely blank. I couldn’t even process what they were saying.
We were put into a car and taken—despite it being past 3 a.m.—to a community hall normally used for local events.
Inside, my mother and my older sister were there.
A’s father was there.
B’s mother was there.
Seeing B’s mother was one thing—but even my own mother, whom I hadn’t really spoken to lately, was crying.
A looked uncomfortable when he saw his father.
“Everyone’s safe… thank God,”
I heard B’s mother say.
I got slapped by my mother.
A got punched by his father.
But afterward, they said things to us—warm words I had never heard before.
After a while, B’s mother bowed deeply in front of everyone.
“I’m so sorry. This was my husband’s responsibility—and ultimately mine. I truly apologize. I’m so sorry.”
She bowed again and again.
Even though it wasn’t my family, watching a parent humiliate themselves like that in front of children felt awful.
“That’s enough, ma’am,” A’s father said.
“Everyone’s safe. That’s what matters.”
“That’s right. This isn’t your fault,” my mother added.
After that, the adults handled everything.
We were completely left out.
Given the time, they wrapped things up quickly and sent us home without any explanation.
The next day, around noon, my sister shook me awake.
Still half-asleep, I looked at her face—and it was tense, as if the night before hadn’t ended.
“What is it?” I asked irritably.
In a low voice, she said:
“B’s mom called. Something’s really wrong.”
I took the phone.
The moment I answered, I heard screaming on the other end.
“B—! B is not right! What did you do last night!? You didn’t just go inside the fence, did you!?”
There was no way I could interrupt her.
I told her I’d come over and hung up.
A had gotten a similar call and was already at B’s house.
The two of us listened as B’s mother explained what had happened.
After coming home that night, B suddenly started complaining that his arms and legs hurt.
He screamed in pain, collapsed with his arms and legs stretched straight out, and thrashed around on the floor.
His mother tried to help, but she couldn’t understand what was happening.
She managed to get him into his room, but he never stopped acting strange.
That’s why she wanted to check on us.
We went straight to B’s room.
Even on the stairs, we could hear his screams.
“It hurts! It hurts so bad!”
Over and over, from behind the wall.
When we opened the door, B was there—arms and legs rigid, screaming in agony.
“Hey! What’s wrong!?” I shouted.
A knelt beside me.
“Get a grip! What’s happening!?”
B didn’t respond. His eyes drifted aimlessly as he kept screaming.
We had no idea what was going on.
Without a word, A and I looked at each other and went back downstairs.
“Tell me what you did there,” B’s mother said calmly.
“That will explain everything. What did you do yesterday?”
I knew exactly what she wanted to hear.
But the thought of remembering that again made me sick.
So I stayed vague, carefully avoiding the details of what we actually did.
“What you saw isn’t important,” she said.
“Tell me what you did.”
I forced myself to remember.
A was doing the same.
We all saw the same thing.
We all touched the jars.
So what was different?
The only thing left was—
…the toothpicks.
A and I raised our heads at the same time.
It was those wooden sticks.
Only B had touched them, and he had disrupted their shape.
And he had not put them back.
We told B’s mother about that.
Then the calm expression on her face visibly changed, and she began trembling violently.
She immediately took out some kind of paper from a drawer in a shelf, looked at it, and made a phone call to somewhere.
A and I had no choice but to watch what she was doing.
After the call continued for a while and she hung up, B’s mother returned to us and said in a trembling voice,
“If we go to visit them, they said they can meet us right away, so go home now and get ready. I’ll speak to your parents myself, so you don’t need to say anything. I think they’ll prepare without being told. Then, come back here the day after tomorrow.”
I had no idea what any of it meant.
Who were we going to meet?
Where were we going?
Even when we asked where we were going, she avoided explaining.
Since we were urged to go home immediately, we both went straight home for the time being.
As soon as I arrived, my mother said, without any preface, “You must go,” and nothing more.
Before I knew it, the day itself arrived two days later.
A and I were taken by B’s mother to a certain place.
It seemed B had already been taken there ahead of us.
I thought it might just be a little far away, but it was not just outside the town—it was not even in the same prefecture.
We boarded the Shinkansen and traveled for several hours.
After getting off at the station, we drove along mountain roads and were taken to a village deep in the mountains, like something out of a picture.
In an unpopulated area on the outskirts of the village, there stood a mansion.
We were guided there.
It was a large, old mansion with detached buildings and storehouses, and it was very impressive.
When B’s mother rang the doorbell, a rough-looking man and a woman came out to greet us.
The man’s appearance gave the impression that he was “from that side,” and despite being in a mountain village, he was wearing a suit, which made him suspicious.
The woman looked slightly older than me and was dressed in a white robe and red hakama, the outfit of what you would call a shrine maiden.
The man appeared to be the shrine maiden’s uncle, and he gave an ordinary surname, but the shrine maiden introduced herself as “Aoikanjo” (that’s how it sounded to me; I’ll call her Aoi from here on).
Even though she said she was giving her name, it seemed completely different from the usual understanding, and I didn’t really get it, but basically, it meant that we could not know anything about her family background at all.
Without being told anything, we were guided into a vast tatami room.
There, without knowing right from left, we were made to listen to what was said.
“Your son is being kept at rest right now. Are these the ones who were with him?”
the suspicious uncle said.
Even someone as cocky as us shrank back at his appearance.
“Yes. It seems the three of them went to that place together,” B’s mother replied.
“I see. Then you two will tell us. Where you went, what you did, and what you saw. As detailed as possible.”
A and I told them about what happened that night in as much detail as possible.
Since several days had passed, we filled in the details together.
However, when we reached the part about the toothpicks, the uncle suddenly shouted.
“Hey, what did you just say?”
His gravelly voice suddenly echoed through the room, and we shrank our shoulders even more.
“H-huh?”
A asked back, acting nervously.
“You didn’t move that thing, did you!? Don’t tell me you messed with it!”
He leaned forward with such force that it looked like he might grab us at any moment.
At that point, Aoi, dressed as a shrine maiden, stopped him and began to speak in a thin, barely audible voice.
“In the center of the box, there should have been small stick-like objects placed in a way that represented a certain shape. Did you touch them? By touching them, did you change the shape, even slightly?”
I turned toward Aoi to avoid the gravelly voice.
“Yes, um, we moved them. I think the shape was disturbed.”
“Do you remember who changed the shape? Not whether they touched them—whether they changed the shape.”
I looked at A, then told her it was B.
Then the uncle leaned back, let out a breath, and looked at B’s mother.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry, but your son is probably beyond help. I hadn’t heard the details, but with those symptoms, other causes could have been considered. I never thought they would have moved that.”
“That can’t be…”
B’s mother tried to continue speaking, then swallowed her words and lowered her head.
I felt the same way, even though I didn’t say it out loud.
The words “beyond help” stuck in my ears.
What were they talking about?
I wanted to ask that, but I couldn’t say it out loud.
Seeing our state, the uncle began speaking again with a sigh mixed in.
This was when the story of what we had seen was finally explained.
In ancient times, it was known as Kankandara, written as 姦姦蛇螺.
Its common names were “Naridara” or “Narijara.”
Names like “kankandara,” “kankanjara,” “naridara,” and “narijara” seem to vary depending on the age and lineage of the people who know about it.
The most common name today is simply “Dara,” but among special families like the uncle’s, the name “Kankandara” is used.
It was already closer to myth or legend.
There was once a village whose people were troubled by a giant serpent that devoured humans, and they asked a shrine maiden lineage, said to inherit various powers as children of the gods, to defeat it.
That family accepted the request and sent one particularly powerful shrine maiden to subdue the giant serpent.
While the villagers watched from the shadows, the shrine maiden fought desperately to defeat it.
However, when her guard dropped for a moment, the giant serpent devoured her lower body.
Even so, the shrine maiden used various techniques to protect the villagers and fought desperately.
But the villagers, deciding that there was no chance of victory once she had lost her lower body, did something unthinkable: they offered the shrine maiden as a sacrifice to the serpent in exchange for the safety of the village.
The giant serpent, which resented the powerful shrine maiden, accepted this and had the villagers cut off her arms so she would be easier to eat, then devoured the shrine maiden reduced to a daruma-like state.
The villagers obtained temporary peace.
Later, it was revealed that this itself had been a scheme by some members of the shrine maiden’s lineage.
At that time, the shrine maiden’s family consisted of six people.
The abnormalities began immediately.
From one day on, the giant serpent stopped appearing, and in the village that should have been safe with no more attacks, people began dying one after another.
In the village, in the mountains, in the forest.
All of the dead were missing either their right arm or their left arm.
In total, eighteen people died, including all six members of the shrine maiden’s family.
Four villagers survived.
“There are no records of when or where this was passed down from, but that box has been moved and enshrined at fixed intervals. The caretaker differs each time. You saw the family crests on the box, didn’t you? Those are the marks of the families that have provided places of enshrinement. There’s a gathering of families like ours that examines and decides this. Sometimes fools even volunteer on their own.”
The uncle continued.
“No one other than the caretakers is told anything about Kankandara. Nearby residents are only told that it’s a place with a dangerous background and who to contact in case of emergency. When this is explained, advisors—families like ours—are present, and that alone makes them understand what ‘dangerous’ means. The current advisor isn’t us, but since this was an emergency case, word reached us yesterday.”
I see.
The person B’s mother had called two days ago must have been someone else.
The person who received the consultation probably first brought B to this house, and after discussion, decided to entrust the matter to these people.
It seemed that, without us knowing, B’s mother had contacted them and been told a certain amount of detail.
Next, Aoi spoke.
“Basically, the box is moved to a mountain or a forest. As you may have seen, the six trees and six ropes represent the villagers, the six sticks represent the shrine maiden’s family, and the jars placed at the four corners represent the four survivors. And the shape formed by the six sticks is what represents the shrine maiden herself.”
It was a quiet, unbroken explanation.
“As for why this format came to be used, and when the box itself became what it is, no one in the present generation, including my own family, knows anything beyond what has been passed down.”
Among the theories, the most convincing one is that the four survivors researched everything they could in order to pacify the shrine maiden’s grudge, and that this unique format was the result.
As for the fence, only the bells followed the traditional form, while the wire mesh and such were added by later caretakers.
“It seems some members of our family have exorcised Kankandara in the past, but all of them died within two or three years. And suddenly, one day. Almost none of the people directly involved survive. That’s how difficult it is.”
Even after hearing all this, I didn’t understand even half of it.
Here, the situation suddenly changed.
“Ma’am, do you have a rough understanding now of just how powerful this thing is? As I said earlier, if the sticks hadn’t been moved, something could have been done. But this time, it’s probably no good.”
The uncle stated this bluntly.
“Please. Isn’t there anything you can do? This is my responsibility. Please, I’m begging you.”
B’s mother bowed her head again and again.
Even though there wasn’t even the slightest reason to blame her, she kept lowering her head, taking all the responsibility upon herself and desperately pleading.
However, she wasn’t crying.
Her expression looked as if she had resolved herself to something.
“We want to help just as much. But I’ll say it again—if the sticks were moved and you saw that, then it’s over. You saw it too, didn’t you? What you saw was the shrine maiden who was eaten by the giant serpent. You must have seen the lower body as well. That’s why you should have understood the meaning of that shape.”
“Huh?”
I recalled the unpleasant memory and examined the grotesque figure writhing in the darkness.
What I saw should have been only the upper body.
“Um… when you say the lower body? I saw the upper body, but…”
When A said this hesitantly, the uncle reacted with exaggerated surprise, and Aoi also widened her eyes.
“Hey, hey, hey, what are you talking about? You guys moved those sticks, didn’t you? Then you should have seen the lower body too.”
“What kind of appearance did she show herself in front of you? The lower body? The arms? How many were there?”
I described the features exactly as I remembered them.
“She had six arms. Three on the left and three on the right. But there was no lower body.”
I checked with A midway and emphasized that we had only seen the upper body.
Then the uncle leaned forward again and glared at us as if interrogating us.
“Hey, are you sure? You’re really saying you didn’t see the lower body?”
“Y-yes.”
I nodded repeatedly, making small vertical motions.
The uncle turned to B’s mother and broke into a broad smile.
“Ma’am, there might be a way.”
B’s mother looked unsure whether she should feel relieved or not, and simply held her breath and pulled her chin in.
I stayed silent, wanting to know where this conversation was heading.
“There are two actions that cause you to be exposed to the shrine maiden’s resentment. One is changing the shape that represents the shrine maiden—that must never be done. The other is seeing the shrine maiden’s form that the shape represents.”
Aoi said this in a calm, flat tone.
“In reality, once you move the sticks, it’s usually over. You’ll inevitably see the shrine maiden’s form. But for some reason, you didn’t see it. Anyone else present would see the same thing, so if you didn’t see it, then that child didn’t see it either.”
“What does it mean that we didn’t see it?”
I asked, and Aoi nodded slightly.
“She was still the shrine maiden herself. But she was not Kankandara. She likely had no intention of taking your lives. She appeared not as Kankandara, but as a shrine maiden. What happened that night was, to her, a kind of play.”
Aoi said that the shrine maiden and Kankandara are the same existence, and at the same time, separate existences.
“If Kankandara hasn’t appeared, then what’s attacking that child right now is probably just something at the level of play, like Aoi said. If you leave it to us, it’ll take a long time, but we should be able to do something about it.”
For the first time, the tense atmosphere eased.
Just knowing that there was a chance B could be saved made it feel like a weight had been lifted.
The change in B’s mother’s expression at that moment was impossible to put into words.
It was clear how much she had worried about her son over those past few days.
Seeing her reaction, both the uncle and Aoi softened their expressions as well.
Suddenly, they looked like ordinary people.
“We will officially take the child into our care. I’ll explain everything to you later, ma’am. You two should have Aoi purify you just in case before you go home. And from now on, don’t go acting fearless so carelessly.”
After exchanging a little more conversation about B, we were taken to another room and given a purification ritual.
Due to the rules of this family, we were not allowed to see B, nor were we told what kind of measures would be taken.
Without meeting B’s mother again, we were put straight into the car for transport and returned to our hometown, just the two of us.
Even after returning to school life, we never saw B again.
We graduated without ever knowing whether he had transferred schools or was still officially enrolled.
All we heard through others was that he had completely reformed and was now living properly somewhere.
In the end, B’s father never once showed his face throughout the entire incident.
A and I were also able to settle down not long after.
There were many reasons for that, but the biggest one was B’s mother.
It made us think about what kind of feelings a parent has when looking at their child.
Since that incident, both A and I changed the way we interacted with our parents.
There were other things we learned as well.
The shrine maidens who gathered on specific days were members of families that served as advisors.
Although Kankandara was recognized as a dangerous existence, it was also treated in a way similar to a god.
That was because the giant serpent had originally been a god of the mountains and forests.
Because of that, once a year, they would perform kagura dances and recite norito prayers at that place to offer memorial rites.
By the way, the reason we heard sounds after entering the forest was because Kankandara was in a state like being kept loose inside the enclosure.
The hexagonal barrier and the toothpicks inside the box served as seals, and as long as the shape of the sticks or the barrier was not broken, it would not show itself.
The place of enshrinement is designated according to certain rules, limited to specific parts of mountains or forests, and they carefully determine the range down to precise numerical values.
Basically, Kankandara cannot leave that area, but if it is surrounded by fences, it may cling to the outside and approach, like what we saw.
It seems that the location near my hometown has already been relocated.
It’s probably somewhere else now.
