Ono Renji is a biology major with an academic death wish.
While his peers chase grants and publish safe papers, Renji studies cryptids. The creatures dismissed as folklore, pseudoscience, or outright jokes. He doesn’t claim they exist. He studies the patterns people refuse to ask about.
That curiosity earns him ridicule, isolation… and a final-year research assignment in the jungles of Sumatra.
There, alongside a professor who openly mocks cryptozoology, Renji encounters something no paper can explain, an incident quietly erased as an industrial accident. Whatever happened in that forest follows him back to Japan, changing the way he senses the world, the land, and the stories people tell to ignore inconvenient truths.
As strange disturbances begin to surface closer to home, Renji is forced to confront an unsettling possibility:
Maybe cryptids aren’t myths because they’re fake.
Maybe they exist to deal with things humans aren’t ready to face.