At 6:01 AM, as the sun bled orange over Tokyo, his left foot cracked . Not a sprain—a clean, surgical snap of every metatarsal. He collapsed in his apartment, screaming. The doctors were baffled. "Spontaneous fractures," they called it.
Terrified, he tried to cheat. He found the page where he had stolen the wedding ring. Stealing a vow of love. Effect: Your own love will turn to ash. Goro had a wife, Mika. He ignored her, spent her inheritance, and treated her like furniture. But he thought, I don't love her. So no loss.
Goro was alone. But the ledger wasn't finished. He flipped to the final page, the one with his name at the top. Under Effect , it didn't list a broken bone or a lost possession. It simply said: A lifetime of choosing cruelty. Effect: You will become the victim of every man you ruined. He laughed—a broken, thumbless, lonely sound. "And who will punish me? Ghosts?"
The last thing Goro saw was his own name written in the Cause column—and underneath, a single word in the Effect column that stretched into infinity: Oblivion . Goro sowed wind; he reaped the whirlwind. Inga is not a punishment—it is a mirror.
Goro, now limping, grew paranoid. He returned to the shrine. The ledger was dry, waiting for him. New entries had appeared, chronicling his past sins: Breaking Nakamura's thumbs. Effect: Your own thumbs will wither by week's end. Three days later, his thumbs turned black and fell off like rotten figs. He couldn't hold chopsticks. He couldn't count money. He couldn't sign a single contract.