The First Hurdle
The First Hurdle
While setting the constraints, I'd joked about it.
Take away sight, taste, smell, make me mute, tell me I've got a time limit—I'd probably just drop dead. No way anyone could live like that. No Mitube, no good food, no scent of flowers. Honestly, you might be happier just getting put out of your misery.
Yeah.
It was nothing more than a joke.
Nothing more than a fleeting fantasy, the kind where you go, "What if that were me instead of the game character?" I never seriously imagined it would actually happen, not for a second.
Except it did.
I'm inside the game world.
If you ask why I think that, there's only one answer.
I just knew. The instant I woke up, I had a baseless yet absolute certainty: this was the game world.
My eyes were open, but I couldn't see. A body that didn't feel like my own, with no strength in it. Something formless constantly flowing around me.
And then.
'Aaaaaagh—!!'
Agony so horrific that every headache I'd ever known seemed a joke. A searing heat blazed through my brain, like someone had cracked my skull open and poured molten iron inside.
I'd never had a perfectly healthy body, but my life had never been so miserable that people pitied me. I'd never felt pain like this before.
It was more than an ordinary person like me could endure. I thrashed as if I'd been flung off the bed, my mouth wrenched open involuntarily, and a scream tore out of me.
'Wha— hey, this is...!'
I could see myself thrashing. The bed I was lying on, the table beside it, a desk and monitor different from what I knew, the inside of a computer tower, the cement in the walls...
The steel beams and wiring inside the walls, through the wall into the next apartment.
Flickering traffic lights, sunlit windows, the fluttering leaves of a roadside tree, people walking down the street.
Inside the people—their skeletons, muscle fibers, organs, the web of blood vessels spreading—
'Aagh...!'
Information about a spherical zone centered on me was hammered straight into my brain.
I didn't know this kind of sense. All my life, I'd only taken in information through my eyes. I'd never experienced anything like it, not even once.
Every time a wave of information battered my brain, a spike drove into my skull.
'Aaaaaagh—!'
Nothing came out. My mouth opened. I definitely tried to scream. But every time, my throat locked up and the pain surged even worse.
'Why, why is this happening? Why does it hurt so much?'
Even as agony wracked me, my thoughts kept racing.
The answer arrived quickly.
That spherical something expanding from me... everything within its radius was perceived.
This is Spatial Perception. A unique ability.
It matched the in-game description I'd read: Spatial Perception grants overwhelming spatial awareness.
For ordinary humans stuck with nothing but two eyeballs, getting all that information fed straight into you from a sphere centered on yourself was an absurd advantage. Especially for frontline fighters engaged in close combat.
The problem was, my brain wasn't nearly capable of handling that much information.
Simply put: too much data was being crammed in, and my brain was screaming danger.
And on top of that, there was that faint, formless something—flowing from somewhere, streaming back from somewhere, gathering and dispersing over and over, unquestionably there but intangible.
Mana. An energy and a type of information I'd never sensed before. Now it, too, fell inside the range of my Spatial Perception, and the pain doubled.
But since my brain had never processed anything like this, it had no idea how to filter it out. The pain kept coming, an endless shitty feedback loop.
'Y-you shit...!!'
And it didn't stop there.
My brain was being clawed apart, pain I couldn't possibly endure, and any normal person would have involuntarily opened their mouth to scream—but alongside abilities like Spatial Perception and Mana Affinity, I had one other constraint.
The Curse of Silence.
A restriction that supposedly just makes speaking difficult, nothing more than some trivial interaction penalty in the description.
The scream won't come out. Because a scream is still a sound you make with your mouth.
The Curse of Silence blocks it, forcibly stopping every "word" just before it can escape.
But the words aren't stopped gently.
It halts them by force. With pain.
It feels like a knife is gouging into my throat.
Shit. It's not enough that my head's being torn apart—now my throat feels like it's being ripped open too.
In other words,
I take in information through Spatial Perception.
The overload floods my brain with pain.
But my brain, a novice to Spatial Perception, doesn't know how to filter the information, so the pain doesn't stop.
The pain forces a scream.
The Curse of Silence inflicts agony on my throat.
The cycle kept repeating: pain, followed by screams that never escaped my throat.
'I'm dying.'
At this rate, I really am going to die from shock. With this much pain, I should've passed out ages ago, yet I couldn't lose consciousness.
Before long, I was crawling across the floor, writhing like an insect.
'I'm dying.'
No voice comes out, so I can't call for help. If I could just let out a proper scream, someone might come.
My phone? I couldn't see one anywhere in the house. I couldn't even move properly anyway—all I could do was squirm on the floor.
'I'm... dying.'
There's a reason people debate assisted dying. Sometimes living itself is agony. Sometimes you might actually wish for death.
That's my situation. Barely five minutes in, and it felt like my brain was being fried dry. The agony in my throat had gotten so bad I was half-convinced the flesh up there was tattered and shredded.
Everything above my neck may as well have been ripped off and gone. Honestly, if it had been, and I'd just died right then...
If I'd simply died like that...
...
'I don't... want that.'
It hurt enough to make me want to die. But when it came down to it, I didn't want to die.
As much as I thought dying would be better than living with this pain, the moment my consciousness truly started to dim, a contradictory feeling welled up: I don't want to die.
There's still so much I want to do.
I haven't even lived a quarter-century yet.
'Think.'
Pain in my throat. Because the scream triggers the Curse of Silence.
I screamed because my brain feels like it's on fire.
My brain hurts because Spatial Perception is flooding me with too much information.
'There.'
Spatial Perception is the root cause. If I can just fix that bastard, the starting point of the chain reaction vanishes.
I have to do something about Spatial Perception. Shrink its range to nothing, or let the information flow through me instead.
I focused.
I willed Spatial Perception to shrink, to fade, to just let the information pass through.
I wished for it not to register useless things, specks of dust in a corner—and for an instant, the Spatial Perception quivered, destabilized.
Then the perfect sphere twisted, crumpling and smoothing out like a wad of paper, warping into a triangle, a square, a pentagon, shapes I couldn't put a name to, folding and unfolding again and again.
The view shifted from all-seeing, down to the cellular level, to a view looking down from the sky, to a view like looking through night-vision goggles.
'...! ...! ...!!'
The amount of information multiplied exponentially with every change—and then my consciousness snapped off.
'That was ten days ago.'
Even looking back on it now, it makes me shudder.
It's already infuriating that I got dumped into a game for no reason, but then I nearly died the instant I arrived.
If I'd died like that, there's no way I'd have passed on peacefully.
After passing out like that, I didn't wake up for three full days.
If that old alarm clock hadn't had a voice-announcement feature, I wouldn't have known how long I'd been out.
'Hoo...'
I calmed my churning insides and harmonized Spatial Perception. Just enough range to barely see the room. About five meters in diameter, give or take.
My memories are fuzzy from the haze of agony, so it's not precise, but compared to the roughly hundred-meter radius when my ability first bloomed, it's shrunk to almost a twentieth of its original size.
Probably, as my mind tried to cut down on incoming information—whether consciously or unconsciously—the first thing that got trimmed was the range. Kind of like how a struggling company slashes labor costs first.
The problem is, the cost-cutting didn't stop there.
I let out a deep inward sigh as I checked the world through Spatial Perception.
A world of pure black. Objects are rendered only by their green surfaces. Its colors and shapes resembled military radar from some movie or game. They say bats perceive the world through ultrasound—maybe this is what that feels like.
Compared to that initial Spatial Perception, which hungrily devoured every scrap of information, the current scope has shrunk to a laughable degree.
Back then, I was getting info down to muscle fiber composition and cellular data inside my own body, past even individual dust motes. Now, I can only see surfaces. And it's locked this way—I can't change it.
Range-wise, I can stretch or shrink it a bit.
But honestly, having Spatial Perception running constantly like this is going to give me a stress-related disorder.
'Shit...'
That first time—no, waking up after three days unconscious—I was so panicked.
The instant I woke, I genuinely thought my spine would snap. My stomach was plastered to my back.
I'd nearly died from a brain-melting overload, and then right after, I almost starved and dehydrated to death. Just thinking about it still gives me chills. They say you can survive about three days without water. I was dangerously close to becoming a literal mummy.
Sounds weird, right?
I didn't know where I was, sure, but there's no way a house has zero edible food in it. And even if it didn't, I could just go outside and buy something.
The problem is, shit, all I can see are outlines. I can't tell what anything is.
With my stomach clinging to my spine, I had to grope my way across the floor, crawling on all fours, while a primal fear chased me: if I didn't hurry, I could actually starve to death or die of thirst.
'Think I'm getting PTSD.'
I really feel like I'm losing my mind.
My head's still throbbing even now. Not as badly as ten days ago, but still... back in my old life, pain like this would've had me rolling around screaming that my skull was cracking open.
And now I'm building a tolerance to it. It's insane. Makes me want to jump off a cliff.
I let out a deep sigh and looked at—no, sensed—the table.
On it sat a delivery box containing a few sheets of paper and a watch-like device.
Obviously, as a blind person, I couldn't see the package. If the delivery person hadn't told me where it was from, I wouldn't have even known what it was.
〈Siyoram Special Admission Notice〉
Siyoram (始搖籃).
The main stage for Part 1 of the main story.
An island in the middle of the Pacific. The world's foremost superhuman training institution, built around the Tower of Growth at its center.
A facility that blended magic with cutting-edge technology.
High-quality lectures taught by world-class superhumans—both currently active and retired—drawn from around the globe.
I could list more reasons all day. Simply put, Siyoram is an educational institution with no equal anywhere in the world.
Average annual intake: around six hundred cadets.
Nine out of ten pass the standard examinations. The remaining ten percent gain admission through recommendations from powerful external factions or professors inside Siyoram.
And then there's a path that's neither of those: "Special Admission."
A special admission cadet doesn't need to take exams. Doesn't need a powerful sponsor. Doesn't need a professor's recommendation.
You just show up.
'Haa...'
In a game, this would just be the plot device to get the player onto the stage. But in reality... it was a little bleak.
The problem is the condition of the person who's supposed to enter through that exceptionally special admission. Me.
A mind permanently throbbing from Spatial Perception. A mute who gets punished for running his mouth. A blind man who can't properly see what's in front of him. A terminal patient who'd be lucky to live another ten years.
Sealed taste and smell are a bonus.
That's the wreck I'm in.
An institution that prides itself on being the best in the world will obviously have the most demanding curriculum in the world. Before even asking whether I can get in, the question is whether I can keep up with those lectures at all.
'......'
But the answer is already decided.
'...I have to go.'
Do I have the confidence to overcome all these awful conditions and succeed? No. I've never been that kind of confident person.
My joys in life were watching Mitube in my room, eating good food, sipping drinks, and raising plants on the balcony.
Even if I got Spatial Perception, All-Rounder, Mana Affinity, or whatever else, at my core I'm still just an introverted shut-in internet addict.
Still, I have to go.
Before I came to this world, when I was setting the character constraints, this is what I thought.
What's the point of living if you can't watch Mitube, can't taste your food, can't smell anything? A life like that isn't worth living.
I still think that. Living that way, I'd genuinely rather be dead.
But I don't want to die. Why should I have to die?
It's simple.
Living like that, I'd rather die. But I don't want to die.
So I want to live the way I used to.
Is this just some ordinary world?
It's a game world, maybe... but isn't it a world where magic-like superpowers actually exist? There has to be a way. A way to shake off these constraints.
That's how it was in the game too.
The constraint descriptions wouldn't call them "semi-permanent" for nothing. As the story progresses and the character grows, there's definitely a way to cast them off.
The perfect place to find that method, and the best place to build the strength to reach for it, is Siyoram.
I made my decision last night.
I nodded firmly to myself and opened the box.
.
.
.
'Wait, how exactly do I get there?'
Right out of the gate, I hit my first hurdle.