Chapter 84 - Episode 12. Path of the Abyss (5)
Chapter 84: Episode 12. Path of the Abyss (5)
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Sirwen quickly went after the police officers.
Before long, she saw a child cornered in an alley, surrounded by officers.
“Give it up, kid.”
The child was backing away one step at a time with a steel pipe in hand, while the officers closed in on him. Sirwen felt an uneasy sense of dissonance. What in the world was she looking at?
The officer guarding the mouth of the alley spotted her, grew wary, and pulled out a baton.
“You there, miss. It’s dangerous here, so step back.”
“What did that child do?”
“Hm? Ah, he’s refusing to become an adult.”
The officer kept talking with a grin, as if she had asked something obvious.
“That’s the sort of crime that carries the death penalty.”
At those words, Sirwen’s mind fell into confusion.
Being a child was a grave crime.
Did Earth really have laws like that?
Dream Demons established, from childhood onward, the values they would follow for the rest of their lives. Usually, when creating towers, they built those values around the principle of survival of the fittest so they would not feel guilt, choosing whatever ideas suited their tastes.
Sirwen’s own values had been shaped heavily by her godfather, Mulack, and the clearest expression of the ideological legacy he left behind was Soul-Centrism.
Survival of the fittest and Soul-Centrism.
They were values that could never truly fit together, so every time Sirwen created a tower, she was forced into deep anguish. How was she supposed to respect every soul while still following the principle of survival of the fittest? More fundamentally, was it even possible to respect souls within a worldview built on survival of the fittest?
Whenever Sirwen created a tower, she always ended up betraying her own ethics, and the results were never good. Even so, there was one principle she alone had always upheld: no child was ever invited into a tower she created.
“Stop right now. He’s a child.”
That was why, even knowing she should not act like this, she could not restrain herself.
“Hey, come over here!”
“What is with this lady...?”
The officer muttered awkwardly.
Just then, another officer standing nearby examined Sirwen closely before speaking.
“Wait. Doesn’t this lady look kind of strange?”
“Hm? Is she cosplaying?”
The officers were staring hard at her temples. Sirwen realized too late.
...Damn it, I should have hidden my horns.
“Miss, let’s see your ID.”
This was bad. Over the officers’ shoulders, she could see the child still trapped in the encirclement.
If you fall into the Uncanny, never do anything that draws attention.
Her godfather’s advice finally rose in her mind, but it was already far too late to put it into practice. Sirwen decided to resolve the situation without mercy by using magic. Saving the Guide came first.
But then.
Fwoosh, hiss.
“...Huh?”
The flame that had started to rise from her fingertips died out on the spot.
Magic was not working.
And that was her mistake.
The officer who saw fire appear in midair stared wide-eyed. Then the officer’s body began changing into something monstrous. Black spread over the whites of their eyes, and their muscles swelled viciously.
Something was going wrong.
[CAUTION! CAUTION!]
[Foreign substance detected within the world. Implement immediate expulsion measures.]
The officers rushed her like beasts, and Sirwen was caught before she could do anything. Their eyes were filled with a mechanical desire, a primal unconscious urge to eliminate the other standing before them.
“Help...”
With her mouth clamped shut, Sirwen hurriedly looked around, but there was no one to help her. The people passing by merely watched her indifferently. Under those unconcerned stares, Sirwen felt a terrible fear.
This was a world ruled by the unconscious. Everything here had already been agreed upon, and no one could go against it.
No one except one person.
“Move!”
A child’s voice rang out from somewhere.
Whoosh, crack!
The instant Sirwen squeezed her eyes shut, one of the officers collapsed limply.
“You little brat!”
She heard a stainless-steel pipe cut through the air, followed by the repeated sound of skulls being crushed. Blood sprayed from the back of someone’s head and splattered onto Sirwen’s cheek. Before her trembling eyes, the last officer crumpled, revealing the child standing there, soaked all over in blood.
He looked like a little fiend.
Did some beings grow in exactly the same way no matter what sort of environment they were thrown into?
Sirwen muttered without meaning to.
“Even as a child, this man hasn’t changed at all.”
The child wiped the blood off the pipe with a few quick strokes, then glared at Sirwen with sharp eyes.
“Who are you?”
It was an absurdly reassuring voice.
Especially for a child.
* * *
A Guide in the Uncanny reflected the mind’s mental age.
A self with the mind of a boy appeared as a boy, and a self with the mind of an old person appeared as an old person.
Which meant...
So this child was that human’s first form.
For some reason, Sirwen found it funny. That arrogant human really had the mind of a child like this.
Then again, maybe that was only natural.
While Sirwen was turning such thoughts over in her head, little Jaehwan, who had been listening to her story and sorting out what he had heard, finally spoke.
“I see. Looks like you drifted here from the Memory Canal?”
“The Memory Canal?”
“Sometimes Memory Fragments get swept into this place by meteor-shower storms. You’re the first living being to visit, though.”
Little Jaehwan seemed strangely moved by that.
Sirwen asked in a quietly sympathetic voice.
“So you’ve lived here this whole time?”
“Yeah.”
“While being chased by officers like those?”
“Yeah.”
His voice was far too calm, far too composed. This child had probably lived for a long time in a world where such things were simply normal.
“...Why is this world trying to kill children who refuse to become adults?”
The question seemed to catch him off guard, and little Jaehwan looked thoughtful for a moment. In truth, there should have been no answer. This was a world of the unconscious, a world forcibly built against reality. There was no reason for such a world’s laws to exist in the first place...
“Because everyone is an adult.”
Sirwen’s lips parted slightly.
Perhaps only a child could have given an answer like that.
A world where everyone wore the same face, and so tried to exclude every other difference.
The shock of that answer was so great that Sirwen only realized a moment later that little Jaehwan had asked her something in return.
“There’s something I want to ask.”
“Uh, yeah? What is it?”
“What kind of person is the ‘me’ outside?”
I see. This child is curious about the self outside.
Sirwen smiled faintly.
What kind of person should she say he was? How was she supposed to phrase it so this child would be happy? No suitable words came to mind. When she thought about it, she barely knew anything about Jaehwan at all.
“He’s like you.”
“Is he an adult?”
Sirwen hesitated for a moment, then answered.
“No, he’s a child.”
At that, little Jaehwan’s lips twitched. Looking closely, he seemed pleased.
He looked so adorable that Sirwen wanted to hug him.
Of course, that small desire faded the moment little Jaehwan spoke again.
“First, I need to send you back outside.”
“You know how?”
“I do. That’s what I do.”
“What do you do?”
“I send lost memories back to where they belong.”
Sirwen understood. That was why they were called Guides.
Little Jaehwan raised a small finger and pointed at her.
“It looks like memories other than you got dragged in too.”
“Hm?”
“That piece stuck to your clothes. It’s a Memory Fragment.”
Now that he mentioned it, a glowing stone-like shard had indeed been clinging to her body for some time. It seemed to be one of the meteor-shower fragments that had entered with her.
Sirwen carefully peeled the shard away.
“Judging by the red color, it looks like a very important and urgent memory.”
“Memories have levels of importance too?”
“The stronger the red light, the more urgent the memory. If it isn’t returned to the Memory Canal quickly, something could happen outside.”
Sirwen suddenly thought about the situation outside.
The Lords of the twelve zones were threatening them.
If there really were an important and urgent memory right now, what could it be?
...Could it be?
Sirwen’s expression grew complicated.
* * *
Before she knew it, a week had passed since Sirwen started traveling with little Jaehwan. In that time, she had been able to observe every detail of his daily life.
Every night, little Jaehwan slept in a sewer beneath an underpass. At dawn, he got up early and headed to a convenience store.
To steal food.
He waited until the convenience store clerk nodded off, then got himself a day’s worth of food. Usually that meant triangle kimbap and refrigerated hamburgers.
Once daytime came, little Jaehwan, as always, climbed up above the underpass carrying an illegally modified communications device.
To receive public Wi-Fi.
“When a Memory Passage opens, the Wi-Fi signal suddenly gets unstable.”
From above the underpass came the light, tapping sound of shoes.
For some reason, Sirwen found that sound unbearably sad.
An endless wait, with no chance of a turnaround and no salvation.
That was all a child who looked barely ten years old did from morning to night. Then, if a “passage” happened to be discovered, he moved in person to retrieve the Memory Fragments.
“When I’m unlucky, I run into officers like last time. It’s not that common, though.”
Little Jaehwan muttered in his usual detached voice as he fiddled with the Wi-Fi receiver. Sirwen quietly watched him.
She knew well enough that this was a world of the unconscious.
This world was not real. It was only a world that existed inside Jaehwan’s imagination.
And yet...
“...Are you okay?”
She could not bring herself to finish the sentence.
Even to a child, there were things too rude to say. No one had the right to speak of someone else’s life that way.
The child asked back.
“What do you mean?”
His tone suggested he did not even know what the problem was.
The question mark that rose at the far edge of that innocence left Sirwen at a loss.
This child had been born here and raised here. For a child who had lived in hell his whole life, hell itself was simply the natural state of things.
Sirwen bit her lip.
It might be because of the Dream Demons that this child had been trapped in this world.
If a world of the unconscious was something formed on the basis of reality, then there was a strong chance that this child’s world had been shaped by the Tower of Nightmares.
The horrific experiences Jaehwan had endured, and the wounds he carried.
Jaehwan’s nature, which had never once knelt despite that desperate journey, was what had formed this world.
With a miserable heart, Sirwen looked at little Jaehwan. She felt she ought to say something, but she had no confidence she could say the right words.
“Other than sending memories back, don’t you do anything else?”
After agonizing over it for a long while, the words Sirwen finally managed to bring out turned into a question entirely different from what she had meant to ask.
“Anything else?”
“Yeah. Anything else.”
“Hmm.”
Little Jaehwan looked like someone who had never once been asked such a difficult question.
Sirwen thought she had brought up the subject for no reason. There was nothing crueler than teaching hope to someone who had never known it.
Just then, little Jaehwan spoke with a dazed look in his eyes.
“I look at memories.”
“Memories?”
“Yeah.”
Little Jaehwan rummaged through his pocket and took something out. It was a white stone shard.
“I don’t send every memory back.”
Sirwen immediately recognized it as a Memory Fragment. Like the red shard that had stuck to her own body, it was a meteor-shower fragment containing a memory. Sirwen flinched and asked in surprise.
“Is it okay for you to keep something like that? Won’t that cause trouble?”
Jaehwan shook his head with a slightly sheepish look.
“It’ll probably be fine. This one isn’t a very important memory.”
“It isn’t? How do you know?”
“By the color.”
According to little Jaehwan, Memory Fragments were ranked in importance in the order of white, green, blue, and red. And the fragment he was holding right now was white.
An unimportant memory.
As if to show her, little Jaehwan gently stroked the surface of the white stone shard. At once, the air warped and the stored memory began to replay.
Whirr, whirr.
The scene rolled like a film projector.
What appeared in the image was Jaehwan as a child, living on Earth before the tower appeared. Young Jaehwan was nestled in his mother’s arms. Then Jaehwan’s mother spoke.
[Today, I’ll read you this book.]
On Earth, it was a book everyone read at least once. It was not an easy book to understand, but it was so famous that everyone knew it. Even Sirwen knew the title. It was required reading, always counted among 『100 Masterpieces You Must Read to Make a Good Tower』.
Sirwen squeezed two thousand years of memories for an answer.
It was... some story with a prince in it, wasn’t it?
Rather than abuse her memory any further, she decided to focus on the story Jaehwan’s mother was telling.
[So, so the Little Prince came to Earth?]
[Yes, he came to Earth.]
It was a story about a prince.
A little prince who lived on asteroid B612, then one day arrived on Earth and traveled across it.
[...The Little Prince said, “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”...]
That book was the story of a little prince who saw the “world” with his own eyes. To adults who spent all day counting numbers and claiming they were doing “important things,” the little prince said that what was truly important could never be seen with the eyes. A prince who could imagine a sheep inside a box, and an elephant inside a boa constrictor.
A prince who believed in the power of imagination.
Sirwen knew how the story ended.
In a world where everything was quantified, a child who refused to read numbers could not survive. A sheep inside a box or an elephant inside a boa constrictor was of no use at all in living through the world.
That was only natural.
So if this story was to remain beautiful, the Little Prince had to die. Only the dead could preserve their innocence. At last, as the story neared its ending, young Jaehwan asked:
[Then what happens to the world after the Little Prince leaves?]
[Hm?]
Jaehwan’s mother sounded flustered.
It was a question no one had ever considered.
A world no one had looked back on, intoxicated by the beauty of the story.
There was a boy, the first to look back at that world.
[The world the Little Prince left behind.]
[That’s...]
[What remains in that world?]
Footnotes:
Chapter discussion