She replied, "A big storm is going to come the day after tomorrow, but I don't think my parents will allow me to come." The boy said, "It's okay. I'll finish what I started and give you your Kousaku back." She said thank you.
But he still needed to know more information about this phenomenon and whether it had happened to anyone before. So he asked her to help him gather information in the meantime. She agreed.
First, they went to the library and read old articles about the tree, but there was nothing interesting. So they went to ask the village elders, but they didn't know anything about it either. Then they came back to the tree, and the boy looked at it and asked, "What even are you?"
Suddenly, a friend of Mai from school came and told them to follow her. She took them up a hill, followed by stone steps, and on the top of the hill there was a house where Mai's friend and her grandma lived. Mai's friend's name was Sakuna. She told them, "The answers you're searching for might be here."
Then her grandma came out and asked, "Are you interested in the mythic tree?" They both nodded, and she welcomed them inside. She told them that there was an old legend tied to the tree. She said that the tree standing there was not the first mythic tree, and that this one was the third of its time. When the time of a mythic tree comes to an end, a disaster is going to fall upon the town. So, to save the town, people from different times were brought there. Some succeeded and some didn't. If they succeeded, life continued. If not, the same thing that happened to the town called Pankai would happen again.
Mai asked what happened to Pankai. The grandma said the whole town had been burned to the ground by a huge forest fire, and the people brought from different times had their souls burned with the fire, including the wishing tree.
The boy asked, "Which means I was brought here for a reason, and that's why I can't go back?"
The grandma said, "Yes, boy. You might be our only hope of saving this city."
As soon as she said that, lightning struck, and he was suddenly back in school in his own body. As soon as school was over, the boy ran to the library and gathered information about any disasters that had happened, but there weren't any. He thought the old lady might have been wrong and went back home. Everything seemed okay, and he thought he was going back to his normal life—until he reached his neighborhood.