Which original yokai would you pick?

Pick which one of these you'd least want to run into.

1. The Flayed-Skin King - An unknown something stitched together from tiger skins, worn inside-out. - A hive-mind creature—not human, not beast—kills a tiger, eats everything inside it down to the bone, then puppets the skeleton around. Its true nature is unknowable. - It latches onto a human or animal, hollows them out, uses their body to provoke a tiger, and then deliberately gets itself eaten by that tiger. - After that, it gnaws out all the tiger's organs and wears its skin, acting like a tiger. - It looks like skin stretched over bone, and makes a sound like two or three small animals badly mimicking a tiger's roar. - Witnesses describe it as rat-sized, with smooth wormlike bodies, creepy smiles, and black-and-orange coloration. - In modern times, it's said to wear human skin instead.

2. The Dull Raven - A jet-black crow, but unlike normal crows with glossy wings, this one's just a deep, murky black. A bird that never cries out. - Normal crows guide tigers toward food, but the Dull Raven guides tigers toward cliffs and other deadly spots. - When the tiger falls to its death, the raven tips off a human, and once the human takes the carcass, it follows that human back to their home—then leads tigers there. - Its goal is to gouge out the eyes of children too slow to escape. - According to legend, it was once a crow favored by a king, but its heart was so rotten it showed on the outside. After death, only its shadow remained. It doesn't even need to eat anymore, but it still rips out kids' eyes for the pleasure of hearing them scream.

3. The Mock-Jangseung - A wooden effigy made solely for curses, resembling a jangseung (traditional village guardian totem). - It looks similar to a jangseung, but its mouth is closed, and it wears a faintly mocking expression. - This yokai started out looking like a four-legged raccoon dog, but it always resented the real jangseung for protecting humans. - So it tempts humans into destroying the real jangseung, then takes its place. - If the people are too dumb to notice something's off, it takes its time—summoning other yokai, showing the humans hallucinations so they can never leave the village.

4. The Whispering Bedbug - A yokai that looks like a tiny insect. - Black all over with orange spots, its markings forming a faint, blurry pattern like a screaming face. - It crawls into a person's pillow or blanket and whispers malicious rumors into the sleeper's ear. - The victim gets an all-over crawling itch and becomes hypersensitive to what others say. - Eventually, they isolate themselves—and once they're alone, thousands of these bugs crawl over their body, lay eggs inside, and eat them from the inside out, leaving nothing but a black stain.

5. Kekekeke - A yokai that appeared in the late Joseon period. - No records survive to say who or what it was. - It just runs at people and bites them. - If you try to kill it or fight back, it vanishes. - It's definitely physical—you could throw it off, maybe even a kid could overpower it—but the problem is it keeps reappearing and charging at you over and over. It hounds its chosen target until that person stops fighting back. - You can't get any sleep. - You can't hold a funeral for it; you can't exorcise it. It's already gone before you try. - No one's ever clearly seen its form—just a mass of caked blood. The only details are a grotesque mouth and black gums, and that it seems to be a woman. - Some say she wore clothing similar to what comfort women were forced to wear, but that claim was dismissed as a rumor. - What's certain is that it manifests in a single person like a mental illness. Most records end with the victim either falling to their death while fleeing, or being mauled to death by an animal (probably). - And it reappears near where its last victim died. Not right on the spot, but anyone who's ever seen it, even once, can become its next target. - From a distance, it looks like a white thread zipping past. The targeted person won't even realize that thread was a ghost until it's too late—they're already marked, and they'll be hounded until they die.

6. The Fish-Skin Face-Mash - A bipedal humanoid whose face is completely crushed into a lump of meat, with skin like a fish. - Unlike a mermaid, it has no fins or fish tail—just fish-like skin. And its face is a pulped, bloody red mess. - It always stands on a rock jutting out of the sea. From a distance, it just looks like a bloody red speck. - Once spotted, it vanishes without a trace. But if you stay near that rock too long, it'll punch a hole in your boat and flee. - And just before someone drowns, its crushed face unfurls underwater into a horribly contorted visage, the yokai grabs them, and it tears their head off to eat. - Autopsies show the victims' heads look like they were smashed against a rock. - Holes in boats or inexplicable mechanical failures in propellers always turn up around its sightings. - It still appears in modern times—and seems knowledgeable about boat machinery.

7. The Black Parasite - You know that feeling when you're on a dark road, your skin crawls, and it's not just your imagination—you feel like someone's breathing right next to you, clinging close? That's this yokai. - Its original name was lost, so I'm calling it the Black Parasite. - It used to be a changgui—a parasitic yokai that clings to tigers. But after all the tigers died out, it detached and started looking for humans to attach to instead. - Someone who gets this thing stuck to them doesn't notice at first. But gradually, cuts stop bleeding, and injuries stop hurting when they should. - And it starts whispering malicious things, justifying betrayal toward someone, making it feel like the host's own thoughts. - Its only goal is to socially isolate the host. - Since people can't eat people, complete isolation is the next best thing. - It lives inside the body. If you cut out the infected flesh, instead of red muscle you find black, second skin. That skin is the yokai. You have to gouge it out completely with a knife, but you never know where or what shape it's in—in bad cases, it's wrapped around the heart. - If it's on the heart, the host might become a total psycho, incapable of empathy.

8. The Memory-Eating Cat - This yokai looks exactly like a cat, but it is not a cat. - It doesn't mix with other cats and they don't accept it. This cat is a wicked yokai that eats memories. - Usually, it just acts like a normal cat, but it hangs around people and steals their memories. - The more memories it eats, the more it thinks like a human. Eventually, it even steals the person's appearance and replaces them entirely. - There's no way to drive it off. You have to kill it. Even if you try to chase it away, once it's started feeding on a host, it won't let go. You just have to kill it.

9. The Iron Bear - A colossal bear yokai from ancient times. - It lived in some mountain, grew enormous by eating tigers, and bears the pattern of a tiger on its fur. - Swords and arrows can't pierce it. - In the mountains, an entire mountain is this bear. It lies draped over a smaller hill, and over time, dirt piled up and trees grew on it, so it just looks like a mountain. - Our ancestors once put it to sleep and recorded how to do it, but those records are lost now. If this bear wakes up, there's no way to stop it. - Of course, modern weapons can punch through 30 layers of iron, so probably nothing to worry about.

10. Hide-and-Seek - A yokai that haunts a school. - It's attached to the school and only appears after 1 AM. - It tells the first student who spots it, "You're It now," then hides and vanishes. - In this game of hide-and-seek, the roles of It and the hider are reversed. - After it vanishes, the player who is It must not touch anything. If they lay a hand on the closet or object where the ghost is hiding, the ghost leaps out, says "Good job," and forces that object onto the player. - For example, if it's a glass window, shards embed all over their body and kill them; if it's an iron bar, it wraps around their neck and strangles them. - By morning, the object that was stuck to or bound around the body disappears, leaving only the dead kid with nothing but the fact that they died.