[Time remaining until your boyfriend, Kaoru Hoshitani, is taken: forty-nine days]
The bedroom was shrouded in darkness.
Only the faint moonlight filtering through the window cast hazy, silver-gray shadows across the floor.
Everything was so quiet — so quiet that she could hear her own heartbeat: thump, thump, thump — like some kind of ominous premonition.
Aina Saiten stared fixedly at the screen of the old mobile phone. The blood-red countdown seemed to possess a bizarre vitality as it pulsed before her eyes.
The red was so piercing, so searing, as if it represented her own heart, which felt as though it were about to bleed.
‘This countdown… it really moves…’
Fifty days.
Forty-nine days.
Day by day, it was decreasing.
If it had been fifty days ago, Aina Saiten never would have believed anyone who warned her that this countdown was real. She would have dismissed it as nonsense, a prank, or a lie made up by someone with too much time on their hands.
But now?
Now she had seen it change with her own eyes.
From 100 days, to fifty days, to forty-nine days.
Day after day, accurate and cold-blooded.
She truly felt that, in fifty days, Akane might be stolen away by another woman…
What did that feel like?
Aina thought it was probably like going to the hospital for a check-up and being told by a doctor that you have a terminal illness and only fifty days left to live.
Shock, resentment, and disbelief.
And… despair.
That despair rose like a cold tide from the soles of her feet, surging past her knees, her chest, and her throat, nearly drowning her. She felt like she was suffocating, about to drown in this boundless darkness.
Her hand gripping the phone trembled incessantly. The tremors spread from her fingertips to her wrist, from her wrist to her arm, and finally to her entire body.
She slowly turned her head to look at her boyfriend lying on the bed.
The moonlight peeking through the gaps in the curtains cast mottled shadows across Kaoru Hoshitani’s face.
His sleeping face was still exquisite — those refined features, the fair skin, and the long eyelashes — everything was just as it had been the first time she saw him, making it impossible to look away.
However, his brow was slightly furrowed.
It was knitted so tightly, as if he were having a nightmare, as if even in sleep he could not escape the shadows entangling him.
Looking at that face, an unspeakable sorrow welled up in Aina Saiten’s heart.
Perhaps in fifty days, this face would be cupped by another woman, kissed by another woman, and claimed by another woman as her own.
Those closed eyes would open under someone else’s gaze, and that curled body would stretch out in someone else’s embrace.
And she would only be able to stand aside, watching it all happen.
One of the key factors that allowed humans to stand out from other animals was imagination.
Yet it was precisely because of that damned imagination that images began to uncontrollably flood Aina Saiten’s mind —
Akane embracing another woman, Akane kissing another woman, Akane and another woman… doing those things that should only belong to the two of them.
Every image was so clear and so real, as if they were playing out right before her eyes.
Aina Saiten felt her heart being seized by an invisible hand, tightening more and more, until she could hardly breathe.
She opened her mouth, trying to inhale, but it felt as if something were blocking her throat. She could only let out tiny, drowning gasps for air.
Right then —
The phone screen in her hand suddenly went black.
The device, which originally couldn’t be turned on because it had no power, seemed to have forced itself on just to display that eerie countdown. Now, having finally exhausted its last bit of energy, it shut down again.
The bedroom fell back into total darkness.
There was only the weak moonlight from the window and Aina Saiten’s hurried, erratic breathing.
The sound of her breathing was exceptionally clear in the silent room, like the final struggle of a drowning person.
An unknown amount of time passed.
Aina Saiten slowly stood up, her movements stiff like a rusted machine.
She walked to the bedside table, picked up the charger, and plugged it into the old mobile phone.
Then she just sat there on the edge of the bed in silence, like a statue.
Behind her was Akane’s steady and even breathing.
The sound was so peaceful and calm, as if nothing had happened, as if the world were still as beautiful as it was yesterday.
But Aina Saiten knew it wasn’t.
The surface appearance of “quiet years” could no longer hide the deep fractures beneath.
She sat there, motionless.
Her gaze fell on a point in the void, without focus or light.
Her mind was a blank, yet it also seemed to be churning with countless thoughts.
Time ticked away, minute by minute.
Twenty minutes later, she finally moved.
Her stiff arm, which had remained in the same position for so long, slowly lifted.
Her joints emitted a faint “click” from the prolonged stillness, sounding exceptionally sharp in the quiet room.
She picked up the old mobile phone, which had regained a bit of charge, and pressed the power button.
The screen lit up.
The light was somewhat piercing, hitting Aina Saiten’s pale face and illuminating her bloodshot eyes. It was as if she hadn’t blinked once during those past twenty minutes.
In those eyes, there was fatigue, pain, struggle, and a hint of… nearly frantic determination.
She unlocked the phone and swiped across the screen.
The app with a yellow background and a white alarm clock in the middle was still sitting there quietly, like a silent sentence.
It reminded Aina Saiten that none of this was an illusion. The countdown was real.
The threat was real, and the approaching “that day” was also real.
Aina Saiten stared at the icon for a long, long time.
Then, she tapped it.
The striking, blood-red countdown met her eyes once more.
Forty-nine days.
The four and the nine.
Her gaze lingered on the numbers for a few seconds before slowly moving down.
The countdown wasn’t the only function in this app.
Below and to the side of the countdown, there was another button.
A play button.
Aina Saiten remembered it vividly.
When she was on the train and first discovered this app, it was because she had clicked this button out of curiosity that she saw the video — Akane and that yellow-haired woman named Rika Kawasaki, in the footage…
She took a deep breath, so deep that it felt as if she were sucking all the air in the room into her lungs.
Then she stood up and walked toward the restroom. After entering, she softly closed the door, leaving the sleeping Kazune alone on the bed.
Inside the restroom, Aina Saiten leaned against the door and slowly exhaled, desperately trying to build up her psychological defenses.
After all, any normal woman wouldn’t want to see a video of the man she loved being intimate with another woman. Just imagining such scenes was enough to drive someone mad.
Aina Saiten, of course, didn’t have that kind of fetish either. She didn’t want to see those images, didn’t want them branded into her mind, and didn’t want them to become nightmares that would torture her in the future.
But she needed to watch.
She needed to find clues within these videos. She had to find any trace of the black hand behind the scenes, find the truth behind the countdown, and find a way to stop it all from happening.
If she did nothing and just watched as the countdown decreased day by day, then she really would have no choice but to wait for “that day” to arrive and watch as Akane was taken from her.
She didn’t want that, and she would never allow it.
Aina Saiten’s finger hovered over the play button, trembling slightly.
Her breathing grew rapid, and her heart rate accelerated. She could feel her palms sweating, her back turning cold, and all the muscles in her body tensing up.
But her bloodshot eyes grew increasingly focused.
‘I definitely won’t let another woman take Akane away!’
She spoke to herself in her mind, her voice resolute and firm, like an oath.
Then, she pressed the play button.
The images on the screen began to jump.
Aina Saiten stared deathly at the small screen, at the images about to appear, and at every frame that might reveal the truth.
The restroom was quiet, filled only with the faint sounds from the phone and her hurried breathing.
Outside the door, in the bedroom, Kazune was still fast asleep.
His brow was still furrowed, as if he were enduring something even in his dreams.
He had no idea that the thing he feared most was drawing closer, step by step.
The night was deep, and the moonlight was like water.
Everything was about to surface…