Please, Find Yourself Again
"Whew. Is that the end of it?"
I dropped onto the grass and looked over the work I had just finished.
Up in the empty air, a host of common senses had billowed into being, soft as speech bubbles.
The bare essentials, if a person meant to melt into the society humans had built. A few of them were abstract and fragmentary, with no room in them for variety, but life would be a misery without them. Even now they were fading, thinning away into the distance.
"Nothing left to cough up?"
"Kiek. Kieeeeeek……"
I shook the limp sprout until it rattled. Wrung out like a rag, dry to the last drop, it gave a sick little moan.
"Hah. Shame. So this really is all of it."
I looked around. A spotless sky without a single cloud, young grass, flowers just poking their heads up. The plain ran wide and unbroken all the way to the horizon, and there wasn't a building or a tree anywhere in sight. An endless green plain, in the most literal sense of the words. I couldn't tell where I was standing, or even whether I was facing north or south.
It was simply clean. Clean past all reason. An hour or two in a space that wide might have lifted a person's mood, but the moment I thought of it lasting forever, a chill walked up my spine.
The owner of this plain was a girl. It was her mindscape, restored by Amaterasu and the Oni King, and I had been doing important work in it.
The Demon Tree had swallowed the girl's original mindscape. I was making it vomit back the memories, the common sense, the heart, the wounds, the recollections, the very existence lodged inside, and returning all of it to her.
The mindscape itself had been restored perfectly. Hundreds of millions of shattered, vanished puzzle pieces had been remade one by one, fitted together without a seam, and locked so tightly they would never break again. But there was something we had overlooked. There was only the vessel. The contents were worse than missing. They were empty.
The girl's mindscape was a blank page and nothing else. Amaterasu had tried to fill it with divine power, but even she could not create something out of nothing. Spilled water cannot be poured back into the cup, and the girl was no longer the girl she had been. Soul and body were the same, so it was hard to say she was entirely someone else—and yet calling her the same person was a stretch.
Even a god could do nothing about that part. If the Five Great Substances had been here—Resurrection, Death, Space, Mind, and Record—it would have been a different story. But what can you do? They weren't.
So I did what I could with the absence. I worked this sprout half to death and forced everything it had gulped down back to its rightful owner. Not all of it, unfortunately. The little wretch was a living thing, after a fashion, and it knew how to digest its food.
What I managed to give back was the girl's Common Sense and her Nature, and Emotion she could no longer remember. Even that much was why the mindscape had taken the shape of a field. Without it, she would have been a human beast with nothing but a clever head.
"I couldn't get the most important thing out."
The core of what let the girl be the girl.
If only the Heart had been there, none of this misery would have been necessary.
"I could have gone straight back to the real world, had sake and sushi, and stretched both legs out."
I would have enjoyed the trip through Japan properly. Seen Hong Yumin and Pele in kimono, too.
"Handed the important information over to the Shrine. Looked after Ookami and his family."
Met Setsuna, and tried my hand at waking Japan's heroes up.
Setsuna the White. A power who ranked even among the best in the hero business. Running into him and Ookami the moment we arrived in Japan had been pure luck.
"Strange, though. How did we meet them the instant we got here?"
In the limousine bound for the Shrine, Ookami's attack had broken out at exactly the right moment. That same Ookami had happened to come flying across our path and brought a building down. Now solve for the probability that Setsuna would be among the heroes chasing the fallen Ookami.
"Zero. Luck can only stack so many times before it stops being luck."
It really could have been coincidence. The future is worse than complicated—it does as it pleases—and since I simply go where the current takes me, I can end up inside it.
"I was going to meet both of them while I was in Japan anyway, so the time saved was nice. But strange is still strange."
Maybe I ought to ask Hong Yumin, or Pele. Amaterasu would do just as well. I'm a phantom thief, not a fortune-teller.
"……And where do you think you're going?"
"Kieeeeeek……"
The sprout that had been creeping out of my hand froze stiff. Crawling along on two roots and two leaves, it broke into a pouring cold sweat.
"Come here."
"Kieeeee……"
Tears scattered from its leaf-veins as it turned its backside around and crawled back to me. It drooped its stem so miserably, so plainly unwilling to come, that pity rose in me until I thought my chest would tear.
It wasn't a metaphor. It actually tore.
Roots and stems that had grown out of my lungs punched through my chest and bristled like thorns. A branch speared my heart and hoisted it above my head the way a criminal's head is hung for the crowd, and my ribs sank into bark and ground themselves to powder. Roots drove down through my small intestine and the rest of my guts, drinking the nutrients with an ugly hunger, and root hairs occupied my blood vessels. Ten seconds hadn't even passed. In a blink, far more of me was tree than had ever been human.
"Krrk! Krrk!"
The sprout spun its leaves in wild circles. It rejoiced the way Goujian must have, after all those years of sleeping on brushwood and tasting gall, when vengeance finally came due—with a joy fierce enough to punch a hole through the cosmos. It poured every feeling it had, and several it didn't, into mocking me. The grudge ran so deep that halfway through it collapsed and wailed, keening.
A full banquet of every emotion a plant can express. It had no face, not the way a human does, and yet its body alone made every thought perfectly clear. Remarkable.
"The world really is full of wonders."
"Krrrk?!"
Perhaps because I said it so calmly, with my neck snapped and my vocal cords gone. The sprout jumped and tore at its own stem. A mask caught on the tip of a twig looked down at it.
"So. Did that feel good?"
Me, dying?
"Sorry. Something like this won't kill me."
This was a mindscape to begin with. So long as I kept my wits about me, dying was difficult.
"Kieh! Kieh!"
The sprout backed away in little stutters, stamping its feet. Roughly translated, it seemed to be demanding why I wouldn't just wither up and become one with it.
"How should I know? You're the one who would."
"Kyaaaaaaaak!!!"
The sprout flew into a rage. It flung itself down and slammed the leaf that passed for its head into the ground, bang, bang—and when slamming wasn't enough, it dug. A small hole opened.
"And there it goes."
The acting was impressive. It had thrashed as if it had lost its mind, but the truth was that the moment its revenge failed, it had already been looking for the angle to run. The way that head worked was anything but ordinary. For a watered-down scrap of blood that wasn't even the real thing, its intelligence was a match for most people. Surely a mind it had stolen from the girl.
"Running is perfectly acceptable. Weighing your odds and then running means you understand your place."
The rough street-thug speech flipped, without warning, into polite formality. The mask clattered free of the branch. It dropped like a ripened fruit, rolled across the ground a few times, and settled neatly over the hole. Its eyes looked straight down into the dark.
"But, O sprout of the Demon Tree—if you meant to use that judgment of yours, you would have done better to beg."
"Plead to be spared. Place your mercy in my hands. Who knows? I might have thought of some other use for you."
"You are far too different from your true body. That one is quite careful around me, you see……"
"It grieves me. I had meant to lay out a magnificent feast the next time we met. It refuses to see me, so I have no way to put the plan to use."
"I shall have to soothe this disappointed heart."
"Do not refuse. You have no say in the matter."
"You came all the way into the depths of my heart, and now you mean to leave empty-handed. As master of the house, I cannot allow it."
"So please. Just this once. Indulge my stubbornness."
"You will be very. Very satisfied."
"Allow me to introduce you."
"This is my heart."
The plain was wiped away. The sky went dark. A moon rose, turning as the earth turns in its orbit, and countless stars drew the Milky Way across the black.
Beautiful. Beautiful past bearing. A rain of stars no modern sky could offer. A sea of stars. I wanted to fall into it.
Sunk in that longing for the stars, I put my body back in order. I cut away the roots and branches, gathered the organs that had spilled, and buttoned myself closed over every soiled place. I brushed off the dust, tapped my shoes clean, and walked across ground that held water instead of soil. I walked up onto a white table.
The sprout lay there with a napkin tucked at its neck, resting in perfect decorum.
"……Ki……kik, kik! Ki……"
Its leaves shivered and shivered. Pitiful. The poor thing had seized up.
A long, splintering creak. A black spot appeared on the white surface and stretched, up and down. Then, smoothly, the table tilted, and the sprout slid away down the slope.
"Kiii! Kiii!!!"
Save me! Save me! Pleeeeease!!!
"My apologies. I'm hearing things."
Save me, was it? Hardly the line for the occasion.
"That is not what you are supposed to say."
"Repeat after me."
I. WILL. EAT. WELL.
PLEASE. ENJOY. YOUR. MEAL.
Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. A wet, satisfied smack of the lips.
"Gulp."
The mask that had played the part of the white table smiled, just like the one on my face.
"Oh, for—"
Thwack.
"Get back in there. Who told you to wedge yourself in and sit down?"
Shouldn't have taken it out. Honestly. The mask put on a gloomy face and sank into the water.
My vision flipped, and I was back in the girl's mindscape.
"……There's a sun now?"
Had something shifted in her heart, out there, in the short time I was gone? A sun that had not been in the girl's mindscape had risen, and Amaterasu's scent drifted from it.
"She's doing her part. Admirable."
I chewed, and spat. The mask coughed up something like a small bead. Soft and yielding, it was the last piece of the girl that the sprout had hidden so carefully.
"Only a fragment…… but I'll take what I can get."
I covered it with soil and buried it well. Even I didn't know what role the fragment would play. One thing was certain. The girl of the past was not yet dead.
I left the girl's mindscape.
The girl had taken back what was hers, entire. She would probably never lose it again.