I, Hiroshi Nohara, the star of Japanese cinema!

"I'm even worse off. Last night, someone actually put a talisman on the first floor of the apartment building where I live! I don't know which idiot pulled this prank, but I was so scared that I hesitated for two or three minutes before I finally walked over!"

A college student at the other end of the bar pushed up his glasses and said in a mock-sounding academic tone, "This is the memetic effect. A sufficiently impactful cultural symbol will spread and replicate among people like a virus. Last night's "Anzhiju" was a perfect source of memetic contamination."

Everyone nodded as if they understood, but the fear on their faces became even more intense.

They are like a group of children who are both expectant and afraid. They know there is a tiger in the mountain, but they still go there, just to see how scary today's new tiger is!

……

In Tokyo TV's Suzuki classroom, the atmosphere was a hundred times more solemn than that of Midnight Diner.

Everyone, including Seito Suzuki, stared at the monitor screen intently, even breathing slowly.

Yesterday's 1.75% viewership rating was like a mountain pressing down on their hearts.

Nohara Hiroshi's words gave them hope, but whether that hope could become reality depended on tonight.

"Nohara-kun, are you... really not nervous?" Kitagawa Yao asked in a low voice, looking at Nohara Hiroshi who was still as calm as water beside him.

Her own palms were already covered in cold sweat.

Nohara Hiroshi turned and gave her a bright smile, a smile that was completely out of place with the tense atmosphere of the night. "Why should we be nervous? We're the attackers now, and the pressure is on the defenders. We just need to show our weapons to the audience once again, that's all."

His calm confidence seemed to have a kind of magic that slowly calmed Beichuan Yao's pounding heart.

Everyone, including the others, calmed down at this time.

"Huh!" Seeing all this, Suzuki Seito slowly loosened his clenched fists.

Thinking about the videotape they had watched in advance, about the tragedy of the second episode, and that ingenious story combined with reality, they calmed down.

This is really a good story.

……

It's 12:20, time's up.

Familiar nursery rhymes and the "bang, bang, bang" drum beats rang out on countless lighted screens in Tokyo on time.

The man wearing the weird smiling mask appeared in the picture again, riding his old bicycle.

"Don't miss it if you pass by. The time for Anzhiju...is here again."

The late-night restaurant suddenly fell silent.

In Suzuki's classroom, you can hear a pin drop.

The masked man pulled back the curtain, revealing the story of the second episode.

【Anzhiju · Worship the Misfortune】

The picture still has the rough, yellowed texture of paper.

A young man in a suit and tie was sent by his boss to a remote mountain village to apologize because of a mistake he made at work.

The beginning of the story is unremarkable, even a little boring.

But when the young man fell on the mountain road and woke up, he found himself in an old hospital, and the atmosphere suddenly changed.

The hospital was very quiet, eerily quiet.

The other patients in the ward all had their backs to him and were discussing something in whispers. Whenever he tried to get closer to listen, the voices would stop abruptly.

He was the only "outsider" in the entire ward.

The feeling of being isolated and being spied on is accurately conveyed to every audience member through the screen.

"What...what are these people talking about..." In the late-night restaurant, Tanaka subconsciously lowered his voice, as if afraid of alarming the people in the picture.

The plot continues.

The young man was finally discharged from the hospital. When he walked out of the hospital gate, he looked back and his heart suddenly sank.

The windows on the second floor of the hospital, on the rooftop, were filled with the patients who had previously turned their backs to him. Now, they all faced him, with strange smiles on their faces, and then... in unison, they bent deeply and bowed before him.

That scene was more like a weird sacrifice than a farewell!

The young man was confused and thought that the taxi was taking him away from the hospital, so he stopped a taxi on the side of the road.

Seeing this, all the audience breathed a sigh of relief.

Finally escaped.

However, when the taxi driver looked through the rearview mirror and saw a crowd of people kneeling and bidding farewell on the upper floor of the hospital building behind the young man, his face instantly turned paler than paper!

"This is terrible... This is terrible!" The driver let out a heart-wrenching scream, slammed on the brakes, and tried to drive the young man out of the car like a madman.

"Get down! Get down right now! You won't be able to leave this village alive!!"

At the moment when the driver and the young man were struggling, the scene turned to the back of the taxi.

Against the scarlet background, the kneeling black shadows followed closely like maggots on the tarsal bones.

Immediately afterwards, a beam of dazzling light came on!

A huge truck, like an out-of-control steel beast, made a deafening roar and slammed straight into the rear of the taxi!

"what--!"

Mingmei could no longer control herself and let out a scream that pierced the night sky!

The picture suddenly retreats!

black screen.

The words "The End" appeared coldly.

……

"boom!"

In the late-night restaurant, the cup of oolong tea in Tanaka's hand slipped out of his hand and fell to the ground, shattering into pieces. But he was completely unaware of it, his mouth just opened wide, his eyes wide, pupils filled with extreme fear.

The entire cafeteria seemed to have been paused.

Dead silence! Even more dead silence than last night!

If the horror of "The Talisman Girl" is permeating, it will make you think about it carefully after you go home and feel terrified.

The horror of "The Miserable Life" is like a heavy hammer hitting you in the face! It directly pushes you to the ground and tells you what despair is!

Especially the last scene, the terrified driver, the desperate passengers, and the oncoming truck... For urbanites living in this steel forest, the devastating impact of this daily means of transportation is too immersive!

Chapter 22 Exciting!

“I… fuck…”

After an unknown amount of time, the college student, who had been acting cool the whole time, suddenly cursed. His glasses were askew, his face was pale, and he kept gasping for breath. "This... is this a story a human could come up with?!"

No one answered him.

Because everyone was so scared that they were speechless.

Worshipping misery is really a niche thing in Japanese folklore, but it is a way of transferring bad luck that everyone knows.

But no one noticed and no one cared at all.

Now it is shown nakedly in the cartoon.

Still so direct.

So simple.

Such an effective way to show it!

They thought about how they had even been abused by others in the past just for joking, and had even abused others out of jealousy and hatred!

Now, not only were their faces pale, but even their hearts were beating violently.

So scared!

……

Meanwhile, at the dispatch center of a large taxi company in Shinagawa Ward, Tokyo.

The place is brightly lit, and dozens of drivers who have just finished their shifts or are waiting for orders are gathered in groups of three or four to smoke, chat and pass the time.

There is also a TV hanging in the lobby of the dispatch center.

"Hey, Kitagishi-san, I heard that the new animation on Tokyo TV yesterday was pretty scary?" A young driver in his early twenties named Kenji said to a gray-haired old driver next to him with a cigarette in his mouth and a look of disdain on his face.

The veteran driver known as the North Shore was sipping hot tea and barely blinked at the words, "How scary can a kid's toy be? I'd better think about where my next long-distance order is going."

"Hey, I want to see how powerful it is." Kenji was fearless. He picked up the remote control and turned the channel to Tokyo TV.

Coincidentally, the story of "The Miserable Life" reaches the scene where the young man comes to the hospital.

"Tsk, this routine again." Kenji curled his lips.

Horror movies set in hospitals, this kind of horror story has been filmed to death.

But as the plot continues.

Weird things are happening.

Especially at the end, when the taxi driver let out that shrill, hysterical scream, trying to kick the protagonist out of the car, and when the big truck turned on its glaring lights and got closer and closer...

"Bang!"

The thermos cup in Yamada-senpai's hand fell to the ground, and the scalding hot tea spilled all over the floor.

In the entire dispatch center, the laughter of all the drivers suddenly stopped!

Everyone's eyes were fixed on the screen!

The crashed taxi and the desperate scene were like a steel needle, piercing the hearts of these men who regard their cars as their home!

"Shit..." Kenji's cigarette fell to the ground. He felt his calves trembling. "Is this... is this true or not..."

"You...you can't leave this village alive..." A middle-aged driver unconsciously repeated the lines from the play, his voice trembling.

Fear, like a plague, spread throughout the dispatch center in an instant.

A driver, returning from a long-distance trip in the mountains of Chiba Prefecture, suddenly paled. He recalled that he had just passed a deserted village and had seen a few strange figures on the roadside.

"No! No more running tonight! Put the car away!"