Chapter 9

Touka takes a call from Renji Yomo, telling him she has a matter to attend to and will join him soon, a hint that she means to look in on Kaneki. At the same moment, Kaneki and Nishiki Nishio come to blows. Pushed to his limit, Kaneki unleashes his kagune and drives it clean through Nishio's midsection. Stunned, Nishiki concedes that repeated strikes like that would finish him, and from the shape of the claw he recognizes the power as Rize's, scarcely believing that someone like Kaneki could command it.

The smell of human flesh reaches Kaneki, and he turns toward the crumpled body of Hideyoshi Nagachika. Hunger swallows his reason until his instincts run the show, and he grins as the scent sharpens his appetite past resisting. He throws himself toward Hide to feed, only for Touka's sudden arrival to stop him cold. When he snaps at her to get out of the way, she instead shames him, warning that he will turn into something loathsome once a ghoul's hunger drowns out every other thought and leaves him willing to spend his friend's life. She reminds him how bitterly he would regret consuming his only friend, calls hunger the root of a ghoul's fate, and admits she despises it before promising to help him through this one time.

Kaneki comes to back at Anteiku, where Yoshimura explains that Touka and the others carried him up to the second floor. His first anxious question is whether Hide is all right, and he is relieved to find his friend alive and mending. He tells Yoshimura the hunger had stretched on so long it felt like starving to death, that Hide seemed the only option, and that he cannot understand why. He also asks about the blood in his mouth and what he did while unconscious.

Yoshimura reveals that he was fed human meat in his sleep, since otherwise he would have torn Hide apart with his bare hands. Kaneki insists he never wished to harm his friend, and Yoshimura urges him to accept the person he has become, having believed himself neither human nor ghoul and feeling lost between Hide's world and the ghouls'. Kaneki breaks down weeping, terrified of being alone. Yoshimura comforts him, saying he is human and ghoul at once, free to move between both worlds because he belongs to each. He offers Kaneki work at Anteiku and pledges to teach him how to live as a ghoul while staying human, so that in time he can judge for himself whether ghouls are merely beasts ruled by appetite.

Kaneki impales Nishiki with his kagune, whose form betrays it as Rize's power. Overtaken by hunger, he nearly devours Hide until Touka intervenes and shames him into stopping. Waking at Anteiku, he learns he was fed by others to spare his friend. Yoshimura reframes his dual nature and offers him a place at the cafe.

Opening the first volume's later stretch, the chapter carries the Japanese title 孵化 (Fuka), meaning Hatch. It is a turning point in Kaneki's acceptance of his half-ghoul identity and the beginning of his life at Anteiku.