Chapter 181
Faces.
Faces.
Faces!
There were faces.
Everywhere, on every tree, on all the trees surrounding the training ground, faces were abundant.
"And they said it would be effective...!"
The benevolent faces were all at the same height.
Short trees.
Tall trees.
Trees twisted this way and that.
Trees that had died and become old stumps.
Trees that had become square timber.
Trees with ropes wrapped around them for training purposes.
On all those trees, Ksitigarbha faces were engraved, showing benevolent smiles. The Ksitigarbha faces drawn using mold as paint on trees as canvas, with closed eyes and faint benevolent smiles, were exquisite, but to the instructor, those smiles looked like nothing but mockery.
Mockery full of provocation, as if saying, "Even like this, you can't catch me."
"Instructor, what's going on... Gasp!"
"Eek!"
"Ugh!"
But others couldn't share the same thoughts as the instructor.
Those who came out of curiosity after hearing the instructor's angry shout immediately screamed in fear upon seeing the numerous faces surrounding the training ground.
Many martial artists clung to the instructor's side in terror.
"Instructor! Wh-what on earth is that?"
"What is that?!"
The instructor looked at the martial artists clinging to him, perhaps due to fear.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say he glared at them with killing intent.
"You... bastards..."
"Eek!"
Eyes filled with killing intent.
And noise flowing out like a growl.
The instructor's terrible anger and the sound of grinding teeth felt in between.
The trainees who had been scared by the incomprehensible bizarre situation realized the more frightening reality of an 'angry instructor with a bad temper who doesn't hesitate to use violence'. The martial artists moved away from the instructor's side as if they had planned it, and while consciously trying not to look outside the training ground, they all hurried back to their quarters.
Squealing in fear like girls over nothing. These damn bastards, their minds aren't properly set. Their minds! In my day, the sky-high instructor was much more frightening than such things. How dare they cling to their master out of fear of ghosts and even touch his body?
The instructor narrowed his eyes and quietly muttered:
"It's hell training for a while."
Creak.
The instructor gritted his teeth and glared at the quarters.
Then he turned his body again and looked outside the training ground.
Faces.
The benevolent faces of Ksitigarbha were mocking the instructor.
Moreover, the faces embedded in places where darkness hadn't fully dissipated looked even more bizarre, as if only heads were floating in the darkness.
The instructor stared at the faces for a long time and then sighed softly.
"Those guys from yesterday, seems their skills didn't match their names..."
He sighed heavily and returned to his room.
Then he rummaged through booklets to find business cards, and contacted people who seemed reasonably skilled to ask them to investigate the forest.
"Hmm. There's nothing particularly wrong, but..."
"What's the problem that made you call us?"
"The feng shui is stable, and there's nothing particularly cursed..."
"Sometimes natural formations can cause problems, but... this place is far from that. Didn't you just see things?"
But the experts he called all said there was no problem.
"I used detectors, but I couldn't find any gas or hallucinogenic substances."
"I even measured carbon monoxide just in case, but it's below the standard level."
"Mushrooms? Hahaha. There are no mushrooms that cause hallucinations in this mountain. There are some poisonous mushrooms, but... most of them just cause diarrhea, or problems with the nervous system or stomach... That's about it."
"Mold? Ah, of course, there are molds that cause hallucinations. But this isn't that, it's just mold commonly found in mountains. It doesn't particularly cause diseases, and it doesn't have any effect on people. Moreover, it doesn't even harm plants much. It's a type of mold that lives in symbiosis with plants, symbiotic fungi."
Terrain.
Statues.
Air.
Mushrooms.
Mold.
They all said nothing was problematic.
"How can you say there's no problem? Isn't there a problem right there!"
The instructor, seemingly frustrated by the experts treating him as strange, pounded his chest and pointed at the Ksitigarbha faces stamped on the trees. But the experts only made puzzled expressions even after seeing that.
"Well... There is a problem."
"But the problem is that we can't find any problems within our expertise."
"There's no formation, no scientific problem, no hallucinogenic effect, no human traces, no traces of magic."
"No matter how I look at it, that's not artificial. It's naturally occurring, I'm telling you."
The experts kept talking to the instructor as if they were embarrassed.
They did their best.
But it was beyond their power.
They kept repeating only those two meanings like a broken record.
"Sigh. I understand. So it doesn't seem to be human-made?"
"We can't say for certain, but that possibility is the highest."
"We can say that the possibility of it not being human is significantly higher. However, since there are no absolutes in probability, we shouldn't exclude the possibility of it being human either."
"No. So are you saying it's human-made or not?"
"For now, our opinion leans more towards it not being human... You can understand it like that."
"Then you're saying it's the work of ghosts?"
"But as we mentioned earlier, please keep in mind that we can't exclude the possibility of it being someone using some outlandish method beyond our knowledge. As with thieves and police, the techniques of the intruding side are often more developed than those of the defending side. This situation might be like that too, so..."
The instructor was disgusted by the experts' behavior of beating around the bush.
"...I understand. Thank you for coming such a long way."
As far as we can tell, there's no particular problem.
But there might be problems we couldn't identify.
It doesn't seem to be human-made.
But it might have been done by humans.
What kind of dog-shit conclusion is this?
It's not like it's an all-purpose composite sketch.
There was a joke that went like this:
When making a composite sketch to catch a criminal, if you say 'Gender is male or female. Age is 10s to 60s and could be older. Height is 100cm to 210cm, and caution is needed as they might have disguised their height,' most would match.
The behavior of these experts right now resembled exactly that.
It could be human, or it could be a ghost.
There might be a problem, or there might not be.
It wasn’t like betting on the life of a cat in a box, how could completely opposite things coexist in one sentence!
"They're all frauds, frauds. Incompetent bastards."
The instructor covered his face with his hands and frowned deeply as if his head was hurting.
"I'm going to get scolded at this rate..."
He imagined what would happen when this matter reached the ears of the head or the elders.
『 You rice-worm----!!! I sent you to teach and protect the kids well, and you cause this mess because you can't handle one little thing---?! I don't know how an incompetent rice-wasting worm like you rose to the position of instructor! 』
『 L-l-look at him! Boldly asking for help because he couldn't handle anything on his own! I can't tell if he's from the same school or a spy planted from another school! They say FBI or CIA plants incompetent and overzealous spies to ruin things, and isn't he exactly like that! 』
『 Head, I can't say my eye for people is that excellent, but I know one thing. When someone like that rises to a high position, the subordinates suffer, and like stagnant water, proper vitality doesn't circulate and the organization itself rots. Head. You must dismiss that fellow. If you're going to give him one more chance, you need to re-educate him from scratch with mental training that would make hell seem lukewarm. 』
『 Hey, you! I'll give you a chance. Either commit seppuku, or clean up this mess with the resolve to commit seppuku! 』
Shudder.
The instructor trembled as if the mere imagination was terrifying.
He even felt auditory hallucinations as if he could hear the abusive language of the head and elders whispering in his ears, and could vividly imagine the head throwing a seppuku knife in front of him with fiercely glinting eyes.
"No, I have to solve this somehow..."
* * *
While the instructor was searching for experts who could solve this problem, he also put all his effort into managing the martial artists who were being shaken by the bizarre incident.
He opened up the food storage to feed the martial artists special meals, simplified the training that had to be done across the entire mountain to indoor training only, and harshly drove them to collapse at night out of fear that they might spread false rumors while talking to each other.
On top of that, he even changed the patrol that he used to have trainees do to doing it himself.
It was a desperate struggle to avoid a situation of internal and external troubles.
Even if the external trouble came unavoidably, if the morale of the martial artists dropped here and false rumors started to spread, things would grow to an unmanageable scale.
And perhaps these efforts bore fruit?
That night, nothing happened.
Nothing strange was seen while the instructor patrolled, and the martial artists who had been a worry were just sleeping deeply due to exhaustion. Moreover, even though he spread his qi sense to the maximum, he couldn't feel any human presence, and nothing was caught by the security devices he had changed just in case.
Thus, the instructor spent the night feeling relieved, and as soon as morning came, he waited anxiously for the experts to arrive.
And in the early morning when the sun hadn't risen high and it was still dim, two people came.
"Hello. We've come from the shrine."
A young man who looked like a chief priest.
A young woman who looked like a miko.
"You said there was a problem?"
It was a pair of man and woman reminiscent of a rabbit and a fox.