Hibachi Mana Exposes a Village’s Ritual in Honogurashi no Niwa, Then Helps Undo the Fallout

NIJISANJI — Hibachi Mana followed a village chief’s secret ritual to its source in the farming-and-mystery game Honogurashi no Niwa on Friday, helped set off a curse that put every villager to sleep, and then helped undo it, all within the first two and a half hours of a five-hour stream.

Mana opened by coaxing his capture board to cooperate, then caught up on the farm. It was winter day 18 in the game, he had 49,000 yen, and he said he had earned about 70,000 yen more off-stream running the mines and had spent it on gear upgrades. The story called for Mana to lift the key to an outbuilding from the home of a villager named Konno at the request of Tobari, a girl who wanted to slip out at night. Konno, absorbed in a newly arrived tin of Darjeeling tea, never noticed the key go.

“It’s not my fault, is it? That was self-defense.” — Hibachi Mana, after beating the boss

That night Mana and Tobari trailed the village chief, Rin, through a hidden passage behind a pot in her manor and down into an underground passage, where she chanted to summon a boss Mana said he had never beaten. His first attempt failed. He won on the second, saying he did not want to use healing items, and when Rin demanded to know what he had done, he answered: “It’s not my fault, is it? That was self-defense.”

The ritual then went wrong. Tobari, apparently under another’s control, stabbed Rin, giant trees sprouted across the village, and the story jumped to the next morning, when Mana woke to find nearly everyone asleep. The one person up was Kisuke, a villager who had carried everyone to safety. He told Mana the village was under the curse of its earth god. Rin, back on her feet, said she had meant the ritual to ask that god to spare the village. Mana, reflecting on how it had begun, put it at “about 75 percent” his own fault.

Rin later admitted that her real secret was that she meant to offer herself to the earth god. Around the 2:37 mark, Tobari and Kisuke gave their blood to the boss and asked it to seal the god away, and the village was restored and its people woke. Kisuke reminded Mana that the village’s rule against exposing other people’s secrets exists to head off disasters like this one.

The rest of the night returned to farm routine: a year-end festival where Mana made rice cakes, a strawberry planting he split in half to ease the workload, and, near the five-hour mark, a paddy of rice across 500 squares. Komako asked him to help look for three items said to be able to kill the earth god, and Mana said the next stream would begin with questioning villagers about them. He said his throat was hoarse after a recording session earlier in the day, that he would likely stream again the next day, and that he might rest if it got worse. Chat’s busiest minutes came as the ritual turned and the villagers collapsed, and the stream drew 41 paid messages.