Mutsukabezaka

Classed as a yokai, Mutsukabezaka is a malevolent spirit reckoned to have lived for more than a thousand years. It carries no permanent body of its own, hiding within whatever human it currently controls and revealing its actual form only for the fleeting moment when it springs to seize a new victim.

This creature's highest pleasure is to die before a bystander while inhabiting a host, so that the watcher is left tormented by the mistaken conviction that they somehow caused the death. Seizing that instant of guilt, the spirit passes into the onlooker while condemning its former shell to bleed on forever. It thrives on human love and the frailty of the heart, letting its victims perform every part of the labor while it shoulders no toil or blame of its own.

Its lone aim is to propagate and pass on its line, and the few that remain scattered across the world could be lurking anywhere, biding their time to expire before an unwitting passerby. One of them claimed Gunpei Kamafusa, drove him to die before the woman he loved, and left her pregnant with its brood.

Digging into Gunpei's tale, Rohan Kishibe surveys the ground near Naoko Osato's home and encounters a little girl who insists she cannot talk to strangers. She bolts, stumbles, and strikes her head against a rock, bleeding heavily the way Gunpei once did. Grasping that she is the daughter of Naoko and Gunpei, and that a spirit rides inside her, Rohan turns to Heaven's Door to write one last memory into her: that she neither knows him nor is able to lay eyes on him. The entity flashes its genuine form to leap into Rohan, but, abruptly blind to him, aborts the attack and slips back into the girl, who survives. Rohan then dubs the being Mutsukabezaka and calls his study finished.