Tsurenai Hodo Aokute Azatoi Kurai ni Akai - Vol. 6 Ch. 48 - Why did you pray?

[MangaDex]

 

[BongoKatze]

Hayami looks more masculine in the altar photo

 

[BongoKatze]

The mayor's lore dump wont fully make sense until a later volume

I've caught up to the latest chapter, and there’s still more to that story to be revealed

 

[misopogon]

This is probably the most exposition we've gotten in this manga

 

[UnvalidUserName]

Cool! I guess??

 

[YAMEROOO3]

I will remember none of this

 

[BongoKatze]

I will remember none of this

In short

• Ancestors were exiled due to a hallucinatory illness.
• Resettled in these mountains two generations ago.
• The illness persisted and the village declined severely that it lost the ability to maintain records.
• On the last day, the dead returned as a god.
• The god beauty freed them from their torment.

And now with the illness returning they think Hayami is the god that will save them

 

[feignedremoteness]

there’s a running theme of curiosity - looking at things - turning away from things - gouging out your eyes - only looking at the superficial layer - being satisfied with not knowing - projecting an idea onto something and looking only at that instead of the real thing - the violence of looking and the violence of truth

Hayami might actually be acting as a stabilizing force for the town, if you think about how active/real the haunting around the school are, it’s surprising that more students don’t go missing or end up dead. The only ones we’ve heard about are the ones connected with Hayami, such as the older brother. There might be a level of coverup at play, but maybe Hayami acts as a benevolently dangerous focal point so that other spirits can’t draw in victims?
“Something” in the past saved people from having to look at and acknowledge their harsh reality and the “things that shouldn’t be there.”
We see a lot of forgotten graves and burial sites, places that would probably have wanted to curse the village years ago and things the villagers would have wanted to forget.
Hayami came to them and said “look at me” and the villagers were able to forget their guilt?
Hayami seems to pity the graves and burial site ghosts and show more sad emotions toward them than other things. (They have NO pity for the missing older brother, nor do they seem to feel bad about it.) Perhaps they feel bad because THEY’RE the reason that relatives stopped visiting the graves (because they took away the guilt and sadness).

If you think about it, if you say “nothing bad ever happened in this town” it’s not very believable, but if you say “the weird thing about this town is a beautiful person that no one knows anything about,” then people will get distracted by that mystery and forget to ask “surely something else happened in this town at some point?”
Hayami might want the town’s past to come to light, even it destroys the reason for their existence.

 

[BongoKatze]

I’d say your second paragraph is kind of a gray area, so don’t hold onto it too tightly

Hayami might want the town’s past to come to light, even it destroys the reason for their existence.

Consider this, Hayami and the other supernatural beings probably came from the same era as the land’s ancestors, and the reason they’re still around now is to bring the town’s hidden past into light, something the hardline believers have been trying to cover up