The Average Life Continues

Renji returned to routine the way a bruise faded. Slowly, unevenly, and never completely.

Morning alarms resumed their familiar insistence. He showered, dressed, and ate convenience store bread while standing in his small apartment kitchen. Outside, the city behaved exactly as it always had. Trains arrived on time. Construction continued where it had paused. People argued about trivial things and worried about manageable ones.

Nothing acknowledged that the world had almost torn.

At the university, no one mentioned Sumatra. The official report circulated briefly before vanishing into an archive few ever accessed. An industrial accident. Environmental damage. Unlicensed operations. Tragic but resolved.

Renji did his part to keep it resolved.

His thesis draft was careful to the point of frustration. He cut paragraphs that once excited him. He softened language that had felt precise. Where he had written about recurring spatial anomalies, he replaced them with phrases like irregular environmental perception. Where he had connected distant case studies, he framed them as coincidental cultural convergence.

It felt like lying with footnotes.

Professor Kawashima read the draft in silence, turning pages slowly. Renji waited, hands folded, the familiar tension creeping into his shoulders.

“You have reduced this to something acceptable,” Kawashima said at last.

Renji nodded. “That was the intent.”

“You could have argued more,” Kawashima continued. “Your data supports it.”

“And then it would be rejected,” Renji said. “Or worse, taken seriously.”

Kawashima closed the folder. “Yes.”

The word carried weight. Approval, and something close to regret.

“This will pass committee,” Kawashima said. “Barely. You will graduate.”

“And after that,” Renji asked.

Kawashima leaned back in his chair. Sunlight filtered through the blinds, catching on the rim of a glass of water on his desk. The surface trembled faintly before settling.

“After that,” Kawashima said, “you will decide whether you want to keep seeing what others ignore.”

Renji understood the warning. He did not answer.

Life narrowed.

Renji learned to navigate the city by feel rather than map. Certain routes felt heavier than others. Some construction sites made his skin itch, his chest tighten. He learned to detour without conscious thought, to arrive late rather than push through spaces that resisted him.

Most days, nothing happened.

When something did, it was small. A flicker of pressure near an abandoned building. A moment of dizziness beside a drained canal. Sensations that passed if he slowed his breathing and waited.

He did not transform again.

Kawashima warned him that partial inheritance resisted repetition. Without a complete succession, each use increased instability. Loss of identity. Berserk response. The same fate as the creatures that forced their way through the veil.

Renji listened.

He adjusted his life instead.

News cycles continued their endless churn. Equipment malfunctions. Unexplained blackouts. Minor incidents framed as human error. Once, late at night, Renji saw a shaky video circulating online. A blurred figure moving too low and too fast along a dimly lit street. Someone had circled it in red and added a caption.

Orangman spotted again.

The comments were jokes. Arguments. A few frightened responses buried beneath layers of mockery.

By morning, the video was gone.

Renji did not save it.

Ethan Cole left Japan quietly.

Renji learned this from Kawashima, who mentioned it during a routine meeting, his tone deliberately casual.

“He has reassigned himself,” Kawashima said. “Another region. Another site.”

“Did he say anything,” Renji asked.

Kawashima hesitated, just long enough to matter. “He said you were not suited for prolonged containment.”

Renji smiled faintly. “That sounds like him.”

“He also said,” Kawashima added, “that you were correct about one thing.”

Renji looked up.

“That excessive force leaves deeper scars than the intrusion itself,” Kawashima said. “He disagrees with your method. Not your intent.”

Renji absorbed that in silence.

They did not speak of Ethan again.

The research sites shut down gradually. No announcements. No explanations. Contractors moved on. Equipment vanished overnight. New proposals appeared elsewhere under different names and different budgets.

The machine was never acknowledged for what it was.

Renji sometimes wondered how many people had stood at the edge of something wrong and felt only confusion. How many had sensed pressure and dismissed it as stress, fatigue, imagination.

He understood now why cryptids remained myths. Not because they were unbelievable, but because belief invited attention. Attention invited exploitation.

Secrecy was not protection. It was triage.

The cryptid-shifters did not contact him.

Once, walking along a river at dusk, Renji thought he saw a crouched figure near the water. Its outline was wrong in subtle ways. Too still. Too deliberate. Flat eyes reflected the last light of day.

Renji stopped.

The figure did not move.

After a moment, Renji turned away and continued walking. When he glanced back, the riverbank was empty.

His body remained altered in quiet, persistent ways. Crowded spaces exhausted him more quickly than before. Forested areas calmed him, even artificial ones. When it rained, he felt grounded, as if the water pressed him gently back into himself.

He did not consider this a gift.

Graduation arrived without drama. Renji wore the gown, accepted the diploma, bowed where expected. His parents took photos, proud in the general way people were proud of achievements they did not fully understand.

“What will you do now,” his mother asked over dinner.

“I am not sure yet,” Renji said.

She smiled, satisfied by the honesty.

On his final visit to campus, Renji stopped by the library. The anthropology shelves remained dusty and underused. The cryptozoology section was unchanged. Thin volumes. Sensational covers. Outdated theories.

He did not add to them.

Instead, he left a copy of his thesis on the return cart. The title was deliberately dull. No mention of anomalies. No implication of inheritance. It would not be cited. It would not be mocked.

Outside, the city continued its ordinary rhythm.

Renji paused at the edge of campus and pressed his palm briefly against the ground. He felt no urgent pressure. No tearing. Only the constant, low strain of a world stretched thin and holding anyway.

Cryptids were not myths because they were fake.

They were myths because they were doing work no one wanted to acknowledge.

Damage control did not change history. It did not earn recognition. It simply prevented things from becoming worse long enough for people to forget how close they had come.

Renji adjusted his bag and stepped into the crowd.

Tomorrow, he would wake up, eat breakfast, and go to work somewhere unremarkable. He would listen more than he spoke. He would avoid places that felt wrong.

And when the world strained again, as it inevitably would, he would do what he could.

Quietly.

Carefully.

Like everyone else who had ever carried a myth and learned to live with it.