I, Hiroshi Nohara, the star of Japanese cinema!

This extreme contrast, this genius that straddles light and darkness, brings an incomparable charm that is almost divine.

"Hey! Tonight, the final episode of 'Anzhiju' is on! Shall we watch it together in our dorm?!"

"Count me in!"

"necessary!"

A promise was quietly made between countless young souls.

Little did they know that what they were about to witness was not just the ending of an animation.

It is also the most thorough and loudest counterattack launched by the people's reputation and love against the arrogance and manipulation of capital.

Chapter 42 Beginning

In the early hours of Thursday morning, the night was as dark as ink, blurred by countless tiny lights, like an ink painting that had not yet dried.

In countless corners of Tokyo, the aftermath of last night's office ghost story "Anzhiju Paper" has not yet faded, and a new ritual of fear has quietly begun.

In the late-night cafeteria, Shui Shangxiang didn't watch TV. He simply lowered his head to polish a willow-bladed knife. The blade reflected the light, as cold as the moon's cold light. But this couldn't hide the ripples in Shui Shangxiang's heart.

Or perhaps, it was precisely because he was in a state of confusion that he used the excuse of wiping the willow-blade kitchen knife to hide his panic.

Just outside the bar, the guests seemed to be under a spell, their eyes fixed on the old TV in the corner.

【Anzhiju·Videotape】is now on air.

The story takes place in a typical Japanese-style room. On the last day of summer vacation, three middle school students in school uniforms are gathered around an old-fashioned video recorder, with expressions unique to adolescence, a mixture of boredom and excitement.

"...It is said that this videotape can show ghosts." One of the boys said mysteriously and stuffed a black videotape without any label into the machine.

On the TV screen, there was a noisy burst of snow, and then the picture stabilized. It was a cemetery, and the camera was shaking, like the grainy texture of a home video.

Nothing at all.

"Tsk, that's boring." A boy yawned.

But at this moment, the boy who took out the videotape suddenly narrowed his eyes. He pointed at the screen, his voice trembling with a barely perceptible tremor: "Hey... look, is there a figure over there?"

In the picture, a blurry white figure flashed by behind a tombstone.

"How could that be?" The other two didn't care.

"It's true! It...it's getting closer! Getting closer!" The boy's voice began to sound terrified.

The white figure in the picture, like an out-of-focus ghost, quickly approaches the camera in an irrational, jumping posture.

Then, just as it was about to take over the entire screen, it suddenly disappeared.

"Look! Did you see it?! It's gone!" The boy turned his head suddenly, trying to seek confirmation from his companions.

But behind him, two cold, overlapping voices came faintly.

"What do you see?"

The boy turned stiffly.

The person curled up in the corner was no longer his classmate.

They were two ghosts with pale bodies and black liquid flowing from their eyes. They were grinning and smiling silently at him.

End of the play.

……

In the early hours of Friday morning, the large room at Shinagawa's taxi dispatch center was filled with smoke.

The drivers no longer played cards, nor did they complain about drunk and loud-mouthed customers as they used to.

They just gathered around the TV, as if waiting for some kind of fateful judgment.

【Anshiju·Tomoya-kun】played.

On the street after school, a high school girl in a sailor uniform saw several children sitting together, pointing at the ground.

"What are you playing?" she asked curiously.

"We're playing with Tomoya-kun." The children looked up, their innocent faces tinged with a strange excitement. They pointed at a human-shaped shadow on the ground, as if stained with thick ink. "Sister, do you want to play with us?"

The girl smiled and refused.

The next day, she met the group of children again at her doorstep.

"Sister, Tomoya-kun said he wants to come play with you."

The girl refused again because she had to work.

At dusk, when she dragged her tired body back home, the doorbell rang.

It's those kids again.

The excitement of the day was no longer on their faces, only a dead calmness remained.

"Sister, we brought Tomoya-kun... here."

The girl impatiently drove them away and locked the door. But when she walked into the living room and looked up, the blood in her body froze instantly.

On the white ceiling, there was a huge human-shaped shadow, slowly wriggling like a living creature.

Tomoya-kun... is here.

……

Saturday night is the last calm before the storm.

Countless families in Tokyo, countless university dormitories, and countless sleepless souls at night all focus their eyes on that small screen.

What they were waiting for was the final chapter of this two-week feast of horror.

【Anzhiju·Pain in the Body】

In the summer in the countryside, cicadas are chirping noisily.

Three elementary school students in shorts were huddled together, using an old telescope to peer into another haunted house in the distance that was said to be haunted by a ghost.

A timid child left first.

The remaining two are still there.

"Look! There's movement!" A child holding up a telescope exclaimed in a low voice.

From a distant house, several blindfolded people emerged, walking slowly in a line, as if sleepwalking. Behind them, an indistinct tumor-like object trembled constantly.

"Let me see it quickly!" Another child couldn't wait to grab the telescope.

He pointed the camera at the haunted house, only to find that the blindfolded people had disappeared.

"Huh? Where are the people?" He turned the telescope in confusion and searched around.

The camera panned across the fields, through the woods, and down the path leading to the house where they were.

Then, his movements suddenly froze.

He saw it.

Through the lens that magnified dozens of times, he saw that those blindfolded, distorted figures had appeared in front of them at some point.

Distortion began in his telephoto lens!

End of the play.

……

So what happened was what happened in Suzuki's classroom in the Tokyo TV production headquarters building early Saturday morning.

"The late-night animation "Anzhiju" has a final episode viewership rating of 6.01%!"

"Late-night animation "Kibo Samurai", sixth episode rating: 5.87%."

The dust has settled.

The magnificent castle built with capital and resources was completely crushed at the last moment by the seemingly insignificant "slide" in a devastating and almost humiliating way.

There was deathly silence in Iwata's classroom.

In Suzuki's classroom, the volcanic emotions that had been suppressed for a whole week finally erupted at this moment.

"We won! We won! We are No. 1! The real No. 1!"

Nancun Xing and Chang Gu Luzou threw the documents on the table high up like two crazy people. The sheets of paper flew in the air like ribbons at a celebration.

Suzuki Seito looked at the carnival in front of him, tears streaming down his old face.

He walked to the corner, stood before the young man who had been watching all this quietly from beginning to end, and patted him on the shoulder. A thousand words came to him, but in the end, they only turned into a sigh filled with endless emotion:

"Nohara-kun, this era... perhaps, really belongs to you young people."

"You're too kind, Suzuki is humble." Nohara Hiroshi just smiled, his eyes calm and deep.

He knew that all this was just the beginning.

Chapter 43 Anger

The door of Iwata's classroom, which was usually always tightly closed, now seemed to be strangled by an invisible hand, not allowing any light to penetrate and no sound to escape.

The air was as thick as solidified asphalt, and it seemed to be dragging everyone inside into a bottomless abyss.

Finally, the dead silence was broken by a violent loud noise.

"boom--!"

The solid wood desk was overturned by a huge force, and the documents, coffee cups, and crystal ashtrays on the desk were scattered everywhere without dignity like fallen leaves swept up in a sudden storm.

The coffee stain spread across the carpet like a pool of dried brown blood.

Masao Iwata stood in the center of the mess, his chest heaving violently.

The face that always showed shrewdness and calculation was now distorted by extreme anger and humiliation, like a piece of waste paper that was crumpled and then tried to be straightened.

His triangular eyes, which always flashed with calculation, now only contained beast-like madness.

Lost.

In a way that he could least understand and least accept.