【Japanese Horror】The Digital Priestess — Episode 21: The Next Step Has Begun | Haunted Kaidan Tales

A shrine maiden stands beneath a torii gate as glowing lanterns flicker in the mist — key visual for the horror series The Digital Priestess by Haunted Kaidan Tales.
The Digital Priestess: The Next Step Has Begun

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Episode 21 – “The Next Step Has Begun” (Full Text)

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The Digital Priestess — Episode 21: The Next Step Has Begun

Kenichi couldn’t talk to anyone.

No—he had talked to someone.
But he couldn’t remember who.
And that truth clung to him all day.

(…I definitely told someone, right?)

He remembered yesterday.
Tanaka. His mother. The app.
He’d told someone about all of it.
And that someone had installed the app.

That much, he was sure of.
Up to that point, it had definitely happened.

(…But who was it? Why can’t I remember?)

During lectures, he couldn’t focus.
The blackboard blurred.
The voices around him felt distant—like they belonged to another world.

(…Yu… Yuto?)

When he tried to say the name, a sharp pain stabbed through his skull.
He pressed his fingers against his temple and squeezed his eyes shut.

(…Why does it hurt so much to remember?)

It felt like his memory was wrapped in fog.
Like something deep inside his brain was being suppressed—
and every time he tried to reach for it, he was forced to stop.

Just once, he worked up the nerve to ask Tanaka.

“…Hey, do you remember if I was talking to someone yesterday?”

Tanaka tilted his head, not looking up from his phone.

“Yesterday? You were alone the whole time, weren’t you?”

“What…? No, I—someone—”

“After class, you went to the roof. By yourself.”

His words were so firm, so certain,
Kenichi couldn’t argue.

(…I was… alone?)

At that moment, his phone buzzed.

A notification.
He opened the screen.
It was from Miko Weather.

“Correction complete.”

That was all.
A single, short sentence.
But Kenichi immediately understood what it meant.

(…The memory of “someone”—it’s been corrected.)

The trace left in his notebook.
The empty space inside his heart.

Everything he’d remembered—
had been erased.

A cold shiver ran down his spine.

(…They’re messing with my memories now.)

When his mother disappeared,
no one around him had noticed.
They acted as if she had never existed to begin with.

But this time—
even his own mind was being rewritten.

(…Am I going to forget everything, too?)

The thought terrified him.
The fear that “what’s real” was slowly being stripped away from him.
Until he wouldn’t even know what was true and what wasn’t.

He looked down at his phone.

The Miko Weather icon glowed slightly—
more than usual.
As if to say: “We’re ready for the next step.”

Kenichi muttered under his breath:

“…You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

He didn’t know who he was speaking to.
But in his voice was a mix of rage—
and trembling fear.

Next Episode

New episode drops on Saturday, June 21.

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The Digital Priestess is an original Japanese horror story about a mysterious app that starts off as a weather forecast — but soon, things go very wrong.
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