The Traveling Swamp is the fifth episode of the anime series.
Synopsis[]
Ginko is traveling through the mountains to see his friend, Adashino. Along the way, he meets a girl named Io, who lives inside a swamp that is capable of moving by itself.
Plot[]
Ginko visits a friend, Adashino and shows him mushi related items like the horns from Un and green cup that was drawn by Shinra Ioroi. Adashino gets interested in them, but Ginko explains he is willing to sell them if the helps him out. He starts telling him about how he traveled through the mountain and met a liquid mushi and a girl. As he saw the swamp and the same girl again on different place, Ginko realizes the swamp isn't ordinary. She tells him its "living swamp" and is seemingly moving to a direction that Ginko says its the sea. He tells her a story of Suiko, a colorless liquid mushi that stays in still water. If you accidentally drink it, you are unable to breath without constant contact with water and your body turns transparent, without the water, you turn into liquid and flow away. The girl, Io, then explains how she met the swamp. As she was drowning, a green water approached her and she later woke up in the swamp, believing the swamp saved her and gave her a second chance.
At night, Io recalls how she was sacrificed as wife to the water god, to calm a flood. She takes her kimono and when the swamp is about to move, she tells Ginko that she will become one with the swamp and dives in the water. Ginko then realizes the swamp indeed is Suiko.
Adashino tells Ginko a story told by fishermen, about a something green like a whale that comes from the river and reaching the sea it disintegrates into the water, making them realize that Suiko is looking for a place to die. They go check old maps of underground river tunnels and old rivers and figure that the Suiko is following an old river path and realize where it will merge into the sea. Calling the fishermen, they set up a net in hopes when Suiko passes, they will catch Io. During the nice, Suiko comes but manages to pass the next along with Io, leaving only her kimono in the net.
On the next day, the fish had returned to sea, feeding on the carcass of Suiko. The fisherman are catching more fish than ever and in one of their nets they catch a transparent girl. Adashino and Ginko manage to turn Io back to normal, who stays to live in the fisherman village, close to Suiko's carcass. Back in the mountains, Ginko sees multiple new swamps and realizes that Suiko had been surfacing as it traveled to leave offspring.