A Japanese 'Killing Stone' Has Cracked Open and Released a 1,000 Year Old Demon. So Long, Everybody.

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Plague. Social unrest. Crime. Economic collapse. Free Space. Now that old standby, war. If you had "ancient Japanese rock containing an evil 1,000 year old nine-tailed fox monster" on your card, congratulations. You just won Apocalypse Bingo:

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The Sun - [P]eople are now worried that an evil demon locked in a rock for almost 1,000 years is on the loose.

The so-called ‘killing stone’ that kept the malevolent spirit imprisoned all this time has split in two, sending believers into a state of panic.

Japanese legend has it that anyone who comes into contact with the rock will die.

According to mythology, the volcanic rock – officially called Sessho-seki – is home to Tamomo-No-Mae, aka the Nine-Tailed Fox.

The demon apparently took the form of a beautiful woman, who was part of a plot to kill Emperor Toba, ruler of Japan from 1107 to 1123.

Located in the mountainous northern region of Tochigi, near Tokyo, the rock is something of a tourist hotspot - but now visitors are fearful.

Some speculate that the evil spirit may have even been resurrected to wreck havoc once more.

“I feel like I’ve seen something that shouldn’t be seen," one visitor said on Twitter. …

Officials are now mulling over what to do with the rock’s remains and could attempt to restore it.

I might be speaking only for myself, but if this is the way we're all going out, I'm cool with that. We've been hearing forever that the end is going to come from nuclear war, climate disaster, an asteroid, a virus we can't stop, an ape uprising, a Biblical rapture. But rather than ride out our fate in a bomb shelter or quarantine or frantically trying to guess which religion is going to be spared, wouldn't it be cooler to just call it an existence in style? I mean, this would be a real "Cabin in the Woods" scenario. 

Tamomo-No-Mae sounds like a combination of every cool monster of the past century or so. A little bit of Godzilla, a couple of shakes of Ghodorah, a splash of Pokemon, fold in the chick who crawls out of the TV in "The Ring," finish it off with the Mummy returning from the dead. All in the form of the creeps who go to Furry Conventions. That's the ending we deserve after all this. The Doomsday scenario we can all get behind. Getting consumed by a nine-tailed fox demon is the epitome of going out with a bang, not a whimper.

The way I look at it, humanity has had a pretty good run. A few tens of thousands of years ago, we were just another primate living in the trees to avoid being eaten by predators. In that cosmic eye blink, we've learned to fly, walked on the moon, and produced Steely Dan's "Aja." What more do we want? Those are laurels we can rest on. So rather than send all the king's horses and all the king's men to put Sessho-seki back together again, let's just embrace our fate. 

If anything, it's a wonder we held out as long as we did. I'd say it's been nice knowing you, but has it really?