It's snowing, and the villagers are worried about the dead camellias. They've always known about them in the winter, but now they're afraid that they've been killed by a "sorcery" . They don't want to be separated from the rest of the village, so they'll just go back to being normal villagers. The narrator tells the villagers that the merman can't use his powers anymore because he's consumed so much life force to keep his "hallucinatory" world going. He'll die soon, and he'll have nothing left to do with the narrator. He wants to kill him, he says, but he'd rather die than live in this "hellish world." The narrator wants to eat him, but the man won't eat him. He tells the narrator to "forget about that man" and just "eat me."