"So, this archway――"

"Oh crimson darkness reigning over chaos! I summon thee, orb which toys with the flow of time! Cycle the ever revolving flame of the end again and again, and fill the sky with over-discharging thunder! Beings who trail in darkness, beings who swim in ashes! By thou sinful and taboo name, willfully become carriers!"

"She started chanting an incantation!?"

That honestly surprised me!

And how nostalgic!

You don't see that kind of stuff these days!

That style of acting is like from 20 years ago, right!?

Afterwards, Shinobu continued chanting (in Japanese for some reason) a damn long incantation ―― and without knowing where, how or what activated.

When I looked around ―― I was inside.

Inside the archway.

That simple four sided polygon that looked like it would crumble any moment ―― was transforming into a smooth black wall obstructing vision of the other side.

I took a step back from the nauseating feeling.

My heart took a hit too.

Enough to make me lose sight of myself.

I hurriedly tried to go to the other side as if circumventing the archway, but from the other side, I could normally, quite normally see the grounds of the shrine ―― the road to the shrine, and the main shrine at the end of that road were peeping through.
Completing the circle around the archway and going back to the shrine grounds ―― as expected, I couldn't see the stairs on the other side of the archway, there was only pure darkness――

[...]

Although the world we were about to leap into was actually already known rather than unknown, in other words it was the past, but I was just as excited, and took a step into the archway, towards that black wall.

(Kabukimonogatari, ch. 5)