He whispered, “I remember the day you fell into the river. You were seven. You laughed before you even started to drown. That’s not a memory, Mei. That’s who you are.”

But Mei held out her bowl. Inside was a single, perfect strawberry—the fruit they had shared as children on the last summer before she disappeared.

Kaito, freed from the vines, crept toward the sound. The village was half-swallowed by mangrove roots. Lanterns flickered in windows, though no one lived there. Through the fog, he saw them: the Hollows —former humans who had lost all memories, their mouths stitched shut with red thread, their bellies translucent. Inside each stomach, a single object glowed: a pocket watch, a lock of hair, a child’s drawing. These were their last remembered things. Without them, they would unravel into salt.

Kaito’s goal was simple: find his missing sister, Mei, who had come to the island three weeks earlier as a paranormal blogger. But Granny Umi warned him: “She will not know you. The feast takes the sweetness first—love, fear, grief. Then the face. Then the name.” That evening, the bell in the drowned village tolled.