Going through a recording Ushio left behind, and viewing Ushioh’s (shadow replacement) memories like a video, Shinpei and Sou see how far the current tragedy on Hitogashima has already progressed and are determined to stop it before things go even farther. On this “run through,” the three of them investigate the old clinic Sou’s family once ran, an abandoned building in the mountains with plenty of places for mysteries to hide. But they don’t expect to uncover the shadows’ base of operations, or just the magnitude of what they’re dealing with. Other people on the island have started wondering about recent events as well but no one is safe now, not from each other or from their shadow-selves.
By this point, Shinpei seems to have accepted Ushioh as a replacement for Ushio, although it helps that the two of them really do act like the same person, unlike all the other shadows so far. Other shadows may take on the appearance of a real person but it seems as if they come with their own personality, like they’re only using this shape as a tool. But Ushioh seems to have copied not only Ushio’s looks but also her feelings and personality — at one point in her flashback she genuinely believes herself to be the original. I’m unsure if Ushioh not being like the others will turn out to be important later on (another shadow says she’s a “defective stray” but surely that can’t be the end of it) or if it’s just a device to make Shinpei and the readers empathize with her more but it will almost certainly make for a messy ending (since, even if the story ends without killing all the shadows, there’s no way Ushioh can remain where anyone from Hitogashima would recognize her). She also has a few other abilities revealed in this volume that other shadows don’t have, though frankly at this point with so many oddities to her I wouldn’t be shocked if Summertime Rendering pulled off an insane twist like “Ushioh was actually Ushio all along but from the future, somehow!”
I definitely don’t see this series ending without bloodshed however, the forces behind the scenes are too old and too powerful to go down without a fight. Linked to the legend of Hiruko, the first child of the gods Izanagi and Izanami who was born “unfit” (the potential depiction we see of them here is pretty unsettling), the shadows’ overall goal is to commit the massacre at the festival that Shinpei has already seen once and they have no qualms about deceiving the humans who were previously their accomplices in the plan. There is certainly an air of “everyone here has already gone this far, so we’re not willing to stop or compromise” and with how some of the shadows are turning out to be even more unkillable, again the series seems to be setting itself for another bloodbath, one way or another.
It’s definitely a shame that no English release date for the anime has been announced, this would have made for an atmospheric summer anime for fans to speculate over week to week. If you let the story sit in your mind too long it’s hard not to think of oddities in the story, like why are so many humans willing to go along with a plan which involves so much killing and disrespect to the dead to start with, but that is a commonality in horror. This is a series meant to be read until you can’t read anymore and yet come back the next day just to keep reading more.