The fifth novel, "S", revealed that Masako was sexually impregnated by Ryuji and gave birth to a girl named Akane Maruyama. Akane, unlike the Sadako clones, did not inherit the defective genes that imperiled the clones, including Masako, who died a few years after she was born. Meanwhile, Ryuji had worked hard to stop the ring virus from propagating through Kazuyuki's journal. He relented to allow four Sadako clones to exist, thinking that they had a short life and therefore merited no caution. However, the clones were killed off one by one by Ryuji's student Hiroyuki Niimura, who felt that he had the duty to rid the world of Sadako for good.