scans_daily

Read from right to left. This is 1/3 of a full-length story.

The story opens with Dr. Furuhata travelling to the White Sands Village. He meets the village chief in the mountains, who leads him to the village. There are no paved pathways and Furuhata asks why; the chief responds that the village is not interested in being developed.

The doctor feels a strange tremor in the air but the chief claims not to. In the village clinic, he is told that there has been no doctor for the last ten years. He is introduced to Kigami Shizu, the only nurse at the village.

The doctor later goes through the town medical records and discovers that many villagers suffer from anemia. He asks why and the nurse explains that the village seldom comes into contact with others and often has intermarriages; thus, many of them have inherited their ancestor's genes.

The next day, he is seeing a patient.

The doctor later comes upon a tree that was knocked over in a storm.

The doctor later has an appointment with Sunagami Riyo, the bleeding girl's older sister. She visits the clinic daily and two weeks later...

The doctor goes outside that night for some water and hears the strange tremor again. He sees Sunagami, who tells him that she is visiting the town's shrine.

He figures that there must be something under the shrine and goes to dig.

\

He tells the village chief about it, who says it's nonsense. The doctor later discovers an area on the ground similar to the shrine and begins to dig it up.

The village chief tells him not to do anything rash with the vein, but the doctor instead stabs it.

The doctor realizes that the vein must be absorbing even more blood from the villagers to replenish itself.

A few days later, the village has a new visitor:

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silverhammerman

And then Dr. Furuhata explained the whole thing to the new guy, who proceeded to alert the proper authorities, who then had a team of trained professionals handle the situation in a professional and scientific way.
What? This is like, the one Junji Ito story I've seen that doesn't have a completely closed and soul-crushing ending, so I'm not going to miss this opportunity to head canon up a happy ending.

zabilac

Your headcanon is now my headcanon.

crinos

Yeah, you think everyone would just move away from this terrible terrible place after the first time it drained all the blood from your body.

espanolbot

Yeah, well. Horror story, they're powered by stupid for the large part.

Like the Paranormal Activity movies.

cyberghostface

I think the impression is they've more or less accepted it; I.E. the girl preferring the way she looks when she's pale.

donnblake

There's also the possibility that they have a better idea of what's going on then they let on- after all, the girl who sacrifices her blood to it does apparently get what she wants. It's possible that the arteries belong to some sort of entity with psychic abilities.

icon_uk

Given their apparent dependence on the.. thing, I don't think you can presume that anything they do is through choice or acceptance. They are part of "it" now and such everything they do is supect.

Bomb the place from orbit... it's the only way to be sure.

nezchan

Actually, the one with the monster next-door-neighbour where the house deformed at the end had a decently open ending, there the intended victim gets away and the house is revealed as abnormal for all to see (and presumably investigate/destroy). So that one wasn't too bad.

Although yeah, usually it's DRRRRRR DRRRRRR DRRRRRRR.