Chapter 1024: The World Is a Kaleidoscope (6)

Qing stood alone in a daze within a landscape that was unfamiliar, yet known.

All she could see was the vast sky.

The sky was such a dazzling blue that the pure-white clouds hanging across it stood out all the more, grand and majestic like gigantic snowcapped mountain ranges.

It was as if the world had been folded sideways and pasted onto itself.

This place was atop a gigantic mirror. A reflected image that mirrored the sky exactly. Above and below, both spread endlessly into the far-off sky. Was this what it felt like to stand in an infinite heaven?

Clouds drifted.

A river of clouds flowed above her head and beneath her feet.

And in the west, two suns, one sinking and one rising, drew vertically closer toward the boundary between the upper and lower worlds.

And at last, when the two suns touched, the whole world became nothing but radiant gold.

A sunset so brilliant it passed into rapture, and the world gradually darkened. Since it was the last burst of light before the sun went down, it was the kind of breathtaking sight one ought to witness even at the cost of going blind.

The two suns, above and below, became a single shape, then flattened, and finally vanished without a trace.

Now the whole world was a sea of stars.

The starlight of millions upon tens of millions of stars shimmered with a precarious glow, forming a magnificent celestial sphere, and the mirror-like earth reflected that sphere exactly, so that it felt as though she were standing in outer space beyond the world itself.

Then suddenly, together with the feeling of someone’s presence, she heard a low whistle right beside her, full of pure amazement.

Soon after, a familiar voice called out to Qing.

“Wow, what a magnificent view. Enough to make dying right here feel worth it. Honey, where is this?”

“Uyuni. The salt flats.”

“The desert? Here? Not some kind of lake?”

“They say when it rains and fills with water, it turns into the biggest mirror in the world. It normally doesn’t look like this, and if there’s even a little wind, ripples form, so the sky doesn’t reflect properly. I heard a perfect view like this is rare.”

“What, this is a real place?”

“In South America. In a country called Bolivia.”

“South America? Where’s South America?”

“South of the United States, obviously.”

“The United States? And what country is that now?”

“You don’t know the United States? How does that even make sense? The boss of Earth, the strongest country in the world, and you don’t know it?”

“The strongest country in the world? That’s... no, whatever. The East is huge, so how would I know what you mean. So? Is this the scenery you wanted?”

“Yeah. I really wanted to go there at least once. I never made it all the way in the end, but I still ended up coming here like this.”

“Really? Is that so?”

The voice burst into peals of laughter.

When Qing turned to look at the owner of the voice, she saw a woman crouching down and burying something.

Parting the pooled water, parting the salt, the woman was burying something that looked like a large seed.

But only for a moment.

The ground spat it back out as if going ptui, and the seed popped right back out and floated there on the saltwater.

“Hm, stronger-minded than I thought? Still just the surface layer?”

“Surface layer?”

“No, it’s nothing. Honey, is this really the place you wanted to come to? Isn’t there somewhere else? A place you wanted to go but couldn’t?”

“What would be the point? I can’t even take one step outside the hospital anyway—”

The hospital? What hospital?

In that instant, Qing’s face twisted violently.

At the same time, a splitting headache—

In response, the voice hurriedly whispered to Qing.

“There, there, don’t do that. Since we’re at it, why don’t we go somewhere else too?”

At the same time, a sharp snap of fingers.

Before she knew it, the surroundings had changed into another landscape, unfamiliar yet familiar.

Frozen glaciers and half-exposed gray earth.

Low plants spread close to the ground like moss, clustering together in dark, gloomy greens of low saturation, while a stream fed by glacial melt filled the surroundings with a faint sound that nevertheless carried a deep presence.

And in the sky, swaying curtains of blue, green, shimmering light billowed and danced, beautiful enough to leave her spellbound without thinking.

“My god, where is this now? Ahh, it’s gorgeous.”

“Iceland.”

“Iceland? You mean that Iceland in the North Sea? Danish Iceland.”

“Iceland belonged to Denmark? I didn’t know that. I thought that was just the country’s name.”

“It was, until two hundred years ago. If I’d known Iceland was this beautiful, maybe I would’ve gone at least once. It wasn’t even that far.”

“Then why didn’t you go earlier?”

“Well, because I didn’t know. And even if I had, I probably couldn’t have gone anyway. Those Barbary bastards sink every ship except Danish merchant vessels.”

“Sea... pirates? This isn’t Somalia. Were there pirates there?”

“Enough. Now then, let’s see.”

The woman planted the seed again.

Since the ground was frozen solid, the woman had to struggle quite a bit to crack it open, but all that effort was rendered pointless by the pitiless earth going ptui and spitting it right back out again.

“Not here either? Next, next.”

The scenery changed one after another.

At one point they stood looking at a gigantic waterfall so vast it would not fit in her field of vision even if she turned from side to side, and next they gazed at a towering waterfall descending from so high above it pierced the clouds.

A vast desert, a majestic rock mountain beyond the grasslands, gigantic triangular structures from thousands of years ago, then snowfields, a sweeping land of ice.

And all kinds of seas—a blue sea, a sea black and yawning wide open, a jade-green sea, a sea so clear you could look down at all kinds of coral reefs...

Each time, the ground kept going ptui, ptui, rejecting the seed, and the woman’s expression turned sullen.

“No, did you really go your whole life unable to travel and end up carrying a grudge about it or something? Are these really the only views you want to see? They’re all breathtaking, sure, but is that it? Just standing there blankly and staring at scenery?”

“Then what?”

“Instead of that, how about showing me the view you truly want? The real feelings buried deep inside you? Hm?”

“The view I truly want...”

“Yeah. The view you really want, the true feelings you can’t tell anyone else, just let me in on them a little. Hm? I even gave you a gift. Are we really going to be like this with each other?”

“Gift...”

Qing’s expression went hazy.

And then, the instant an endlessly ominous starlight flickered in the sky, the world changed.

*****

The woman in the dream stood in a world she had never seen before. No—could this even be called a world?

The woman’s face twisted with bewilderment.

THUMP, THUMP, THUMP—if the sound of a beating heart were magnified tens of thousands of times, it would become this kind of roar, and the earth pulsed in time with it: the sound of the land itself beating.

A vast space made entirely of flesh.

Some parts were fresh crimson meat, while others had turned black with discoloration, and others still had rotted into gray.

Thick blood seeped through split-open cracks.

In the distance lay a corrupted lake where bubbles endlessly swelled and burst, spraying yellow pus in all directions, while beneath them more bubbles rose and boiled like lava.

Every time a bubble of pus burst, countless worms tangled together like threads came swarming out, and the earth opened its mouth, baring human teeth, greedily chewing and swallowing.

It was such an unspeakably ominous landscape that even the woman, who had lived seeing uglier things than anyone else in a brutal world, had never imagined anything like it.

“What the hell is this, you, you, what in the world are you carrying inside—”

At that moment, the [N O V E L I G H T] woman’s voice cut off abruptly.

Because only now did she finally notice the sky.

An impossibly gigantic celestial body hanging on the horizon.

A black sun taking up half her field of vision, and because something was covering the face of that sun, its center was pitch-black while its edge blazed all the more brilliantly, that ring rippling with an ominous color that existed nowhere else.

The black sun swept across the earth.

There were no eyes anywhere on the sun, and yet it was the kind of instinctive realization the living drew from witnessing a phenomenon.

At the same time, under that gaze, the earth began to awaken.

“My lord! Lord of my soul! Commander who leads the mightiest legion in hell! By the contract beneath the ash tree, protect me, and you must carry out the contract, the contract must be fulfilled—”

[####]

Suddenly, the woman ‘heard.’

CLACKCLACKCLACKCLACKCLACKCLACK!

The violent din that abruptly filled the whole world was the sound of the woman herself chattering her teeth.

Thunk. Unable to control her trembling hand, the woman dropped the seed she had been holding.

Startled out of her mind, the woman immediately threw herself down and reached for it, but then countless cracks split across the seed’s surface, and eyes—eyes, hundreds and thousands of eyes—opened and darted busily in every direction.

And then, every one of those eyes met hers.

“Ah.”

The moment she let out that one short gasp, the world spun with a dull impact.

Not the world. The woman spun. The world spun because the woman’s head was rolling across the ground.

In that tilted world, she saw her own body standing there blankly, neck severed. She saw that headless body holding a crooked dagger, clutching a filthy, heavily rusted dagger in a reverse grip. She saw that headless body with its hand raised high, ready to bring it down.

Don’t do it, don’t do it, the woman screamed with all her strength, but the head torn from its lungs could only gape soundlessly in desperate, voiceless shrieks, and soon the body slowly lowered its arm.

Slowly, very slowly. As the arm turned, the pointed blade gradually angled toward the body, toward below the navel, slowly, slowly.

Don’t do it, I said don’t, but the gaping scream never became sound.

At last the tip of the blade sank into the woman’s belly. A horrifying pain sank into her mind as well. An endlessly irrational pain. Why should a severed head feel the agony of the body left behind? But the woman had no room in her mind to protest such irrationality. The sickening sensation of metal slowly boring into her lower abdomen, that endlessly cold blade somehow also searing hot like boiling lava, fire that froze cold, ice scorched by flame.

The body’s movement looked as if it had stopped, but in truth it had not. Incomparably slowly, yet without pause, it kept pushing the blade into its own abdomen. The movement was infinitely slow, but the pain was swifter than anything, and on the woman’s head—on that face—there was only a scream, warped by endless agony.

Time passed. Or did time pass? One year, ten years, a hundred years, a thousand years, time stretched out without limit, the time it took for the blade that had reached the hilt to slowly come back out, the time the coldest and hottest pain of all churned through her insides.

Now, only now, it was over. Finally.

But then—

Thunk, thud-thud-thud.

As if mocking the woman, things began pouring down from the sky without end.

Large blades and small blades, long spears and short spears, braziers scattering ash and sparks as they landed upright without toppling, and into them fell branding irons of every kind, settling into place inside the fire. And the things that fell only grew larger. Gallows with nooses hanging from them, guillotines with blue-steel blades hanging down. There were even enormous devices the woman had never seen before; though she had never seen them, she felt she knew their purpose. The machine with two massive iron plates facing each other would surely be a press meant to flatten a person into pulp, and the machine with countless gears meshing with exquisite precision would be a giant grinder capable of chewing anything apart. And all of them, every last one of them, were tools for killing people.

But more horrible than all of this, more terrible than all those slaughtering instruments, those instruments of murder she would have to endure one by one, there was something else.

That face. That smiling face. That face smiling as if happier than anything in the world, eyes glittering with expectation, looking at the woman with a joy beyond compare—that pure, transparent malice.

The woman screamed. At the same time, she begged.

But there was no sound, so there was no way of knowing what she was saying.

And then the headless body moved and picked up a spear. Then it raised it high, and aimed the spearhead at the severed surface of its own neck—

*****

There are mornings like that.

Mornings when consciousness returns naturally and you wake in a good mood. A morning when brisk vitality fills your whole body, when your mind is clean and clear as though not a single stray thread remained, and everything is simply fresh and invigorating.

Of course, it was a little disappointing that she could not fully enjoy rubbing her skin against the smooth texture of fine silk bedding while still drowsy.

Still, when you greet the morning feeling this good, that freshness lasts the entire day.

A truly miraculous morning!

A strong and powerful morning!

At that, Qing shot upright.

And then tilted her head.

“Hm. But I feel like I had a really good dream or something. What was it?”

She was sure she had dreamed something incredibly exciting and fun, and although she was aware she had had such a dream, not even the tiniest fragment of what it had actually been about came back to her.

“Well, that’s dreams for you.”

Wasn’t that just how dreams were?

Of course, some dreams did linger in memory, but even those got forgotten in no time at all. That was what dreams were like.

Qing brushed it off without a care.

Why would something like a dream matter?

Food was what mattered. It was breakfast time.