Psyren ending explained: the anime just began, but the manga already answered who sends the cards
Psyren's calling cards come with a ¥500 million reward and one rule, and the manga waited until its 10th volume to show who wrote it.
The Psyren anime premiered on October 5 on Tokyo MX and BS11, streaming on Crunchyroll outside Japan. Satelight produced it, Katsumi Ono directed, and Shin Yoshida writes the scripts. Rikuya Yasuda voices Ageha Yoshina, a high school student who picks up a phone card printed with the word "Psyren" after his childhood friend Sakurako Amamiya, voiced by Mayuko Kazama, disappears. It's adapted from Toshiaki Iwashiro's manga, which ran in Weekly Shōnen Jump from December 2007 to November 2010, 161 chapters across 16 volumes.
What the card does
Psyren is an urban legend in Ageha's Japan: anyone who uncovers its truth gets ¥500 million. The card is the way in. Use it in a payphone and you are pulled into the game, a devastated future overrun by monsters called Taboo, where you either complete the mission or never come back. The polluted air there unlocks psychic powers called PSI.
The game is run by Nemesis Q, a voice and a figure in a cloak that hands out the cards and sets the missions. It has one rule it enforces without exception: anyone who tells an outsider about Psyren is eliminated.
Who sends the cards
Nemesis Q isn't a person. It's an intelligent PSI program, sent back from the future, and its job is to find people who could stop that future from happening and train them inside it.
Its creator is a psychic known only by her experimental number: Grigori #07. Grigori was the government research program that took her from an orphanage as a child, at six, and ran tests on her abilities. Her body couldn't survive traveling through time, so she built Nemesis Q to go in her place.
The game's master never sets foot in Psyren. She built something that could.
The reveal comes in volume 10, when Ageha's group finally meets "Nemesis Q's master." She also tells them what she built it to find out about: one person.
Don't miss: Is Cyberpunk: Edgerunners becoming an anthology? Season 2 fans hope Netflix keeps going
Why it's personal
That person is her younger twin brother, Miroku Amagi. He went through the same Grigori program, and in the future Ageha keeps being sent to, he leads W.I.S.E, the psychic organization the heroes spend most of the series fighting.
How the manga ends
Ageha's side stops W.I.S.E from getting hold of the Promised Tear, a meteorite it has been chasing, and defeats Mithra. The fight leaves Ageha in a coma.
While he's under, Grigori #07 tells him what happened. In the Psyren timeline, Miroku and his ally Grana sacrificed themselves to destroy Ouroboros and Mithra. Ageha wakes up, finds Sakurako again, and frees Grigori #07.
Previously we wrote: The Avatar: Seven Havens timeline has a 225-year hole