:re Chapter 78

Mutsuki dreams of an investigator pressing him about what became of his family, a question he cannot answer because he does not recall it, and the man accuses him of lying. He wakes limbless under Saeki's watch. Told he had been crying in his sleep, Mutsuki says he is hungry, then coaxes his captor into talking about his own life, hoping the distraction will keep Saeki from striking him.

Saeki describes growing up in a tent on a mountain, raised only by his father, who called him a fool and warned that capture by the CCG would doom them both. His father once confessed to eating his own wife, Saeki's mother, when his hunger grew unbearable. Left alone for stretches, the boy passed time staring at the pictures in books. During one month-long absence, starvation drove him into a nearby village, where he met a human girl named Minomi. Her company transformed his world; she taught him to read and write, and their games briefly quieted his hunger. He hid his ghoul nature by claiming strict parents kept him from school.

Minomi confided that she wanted to escape somewhere far away, and Saeki noticed bruises she attributed to family circumstances, finding her determination to live beautiful. After her family relocated abroad, his father learned of the village visits and abandoned him for the risk he posed. Searching for his father, Saeki instead reencountered Minomi and sheltered her in the tent, promising to drive her to the ocean someday. They fell asleep, but strange noises drew him outside, where he found his father dismembering her body and inviting him to feast. Enraged, Saeki killed his father, then became fixated on Minomi's clean, intact torso, and from that day he began collecting torsos. He tells Mutsuki that forgetting the past might be a mercy, and just as Mutsuki feels he finally understands the man, Saeki rises and lifts him up.

Saeki, the killer called Torso, recounts his origin: a starving, abused upbringing, his father's cannibalism of his mother, and the murder of the human girl Minomi. The discovery of her preserved torso and his rage at his father birthed both the killing and his obsession that gives Torso his name. The chapter ends with Saeki hoisting the captive Mutsuki off the ground.

The installment functions as a full backstory chapter for Karao Saeki, delivered as a confession meant to buy Mutsuki's understanding. Mutsuki's own suppressed memory of his family surfaces only as a fragment in the opening dream.