Knowing Solitude
The sage was arrogant.
It was not as though he had never known hardship or adversity — yet with his exceptional talent he had risen higher than anyone else, and never once had he tasted failure or defeat.
That arrogance only grew stronger after he became a god.
The pride of having risen from a mere mortal to an immortal. The gulf he felt between himself and others, widening with every step. The unshakable certainty in his own power…
In circumstances like these, humility would have been the harder path.
Even so, his nature was not wholly cruel, and that left him with a certain half-measure of mercy. He would throw his own life away without hesitation, yet he was compassionate toward the weak, and he hesitated when it came to taking many lives at once.
In a way, the tragedy that was about to unfold had already been written.
"He's appeared, Your Majesty! That man again!!"
Jayana, whose eyesight was keen, saw the sage flying toward them from afar and went pale with terror.
A general of the Kosala Kingdom, he had taken part in all three of the previous expeditions, and so he had felt the sage's overwhelming power firsthand. To his eyes, the sage was no longer human. What human being could soar through the sky and single-handedly scatter an army of a hundred thousand? Even the demigods of legend could not have stood beside him.
To the Kosala army, the sage was already a god.
And now that he truly was a god, the assessment was no longer wrong.
"…I have eyes of my own. Stop making a fuss."
Even as he rebuked Jayana, Virudhaka could not hide the tension on his face.
Kuuung—
The sage deliberately landed hard before the Kosala host. The earth shuddered with the impact. The soldiers of Kosala could not tell whether their legs were trembling from the vibration or from sheer fear.
"You never tire of coming back, do you."
The sage walked among the soldiers at a pace neither hurried nor slow. The men who should have stopped him stood frozen, unable to move. Without a single clash, the sage arrived before Virudhaka, who sat upon his war chariot.
"Isn't it about time you gave up?"
Before Virudhaka, the sage let out a sigh heavy with genuine weariness. The king's face burned with humiliation at that dismissive air.
"What?"
"You already know it won't work. I don't know why you keep doing something so pointless, but stop starting needless wars and getting people hurt."
"…"
"I have already shown you mercy three times. There will not be a fourth. Turn your army around, even now. And from this day forward, do not covet the Shakya Kingdom."
"…Is that a threat?"
"It is a warning, not a threat. Do you truly believe yourself worthy of being threatened? Your arrogance runs deep."
"…"
The sage's voice was utterly calm. There was not the slightest intent to provoke. That very fact only stoked Virudhaka's rage further.
In truth, Virudhaka's obsession with the sage's kingdom existed because of the sage himself — more precisely, because of the inferiority complex the sage inspired in him.
Through atavism, Virudhaka had inherited the power of an ancestor who had been an avatar of Vishnu. Born with formidable strength, he had grown into a man no one around him could match. He had never seen them himself, but he believed even those mighty Shramanas could not have stood against him.
Power. Birth. Rank. Authority.
The only thing he lacked, he thought, was honor. And so he had sought some modest achievement to claim it. He had chosen the sage's kingdom as a target of invasion simply because it was near — nothing more.
It had been a delusion.
Meeting the sage had driven that truth into his bones. Everything he had believed unbreakable — the power of his bloodline, his status as a Kshatriya, the authority of a king, his mighty armies — meant nothing before the strength the sage had built with his own hands.
Does this make any sense?
I am the chosen one. Why must I abandon my will because of a single man standing in my way?
Virudhaka could not accept it. He could not tolerate the existence of anyone who stood above him.
"…If only you were gone."
Virudhaka clenched the necklace hanging at his throat.
"If only you were gone…"
The sage sensed something wrong. He moved to sever Virudhaka's neck in a single stroke — but Virudhaka was a step faster.
…No. That was not it.
For a sage who had mastered the Mind's Eye to miss Virudhaka's movement defied all reason. It was impossible. And yet the sage could not stop him — because the power Virudhaka wielded was a greater principle, one that lay beyond the Mind's Eye itself.
A force unbound by physical time.
A force whose outcome was already decided.
A force that never missed.
An absolute law that formed one of the foundations of the cosmos.
An unavoidable weapon of Vishnu that guarantees the target's death or imprisonment.
Virudhaka activated the Astra sealed within the necklace. At the same instant, a vast darkness swallowed the sage whole.
When he came to himself, the sage was floating in a dense darkness where nothing could be seen.
There was no distinction between earth and sky. There was no ground to stand on, and he could not so much as twitch a finger. Even physical time did not exist here.
What is this…?
Yet mental activity alone did not cease. In that thick darkness, the sage did not panic. He calmly assessed the situation.
The last words I heard were Vaishnavastra, weren't they?
He had not known Virudhaka could use an Astra — much less the Vaishnavastra, an Astra that carried the power of Vishnu. According to the legends handed down, once it was activated, no method could block or evade it, and whoever the target might be, death was certain. A legendary magic of absolute finality.
But this felt different from other Astras.
His battle with Mara had given him some understanding of what Astras were. In that light, the Vaishnavastra operated on an entirely different track.
In the first place, I could simply have killed him before he activated it.
At the time, the sage had not yet grasped the concept of reversed causality. He had not even known such a thing existed. Had he known, he would have killed Virudhaka the moment he saw him.
But that was already past. It could not be undone.
In the darkness, even the sage's "eyes" failed to function properly. Knowing nothing, he could only pass the time within the dark.
I don't fully understand it, but I have to get out of here first.
There was no telling what might be happening to the kingdom while he remained trapped. The sage kept thinking, searching for a way to escape.
How much time has passed?
For the first time, the sage felt impatience. Anxiety and fear took root inside him.
He could not be certain, but within this darkness every activity save mental thought had come to a halt. Even that much was only possible because he was a god. Had he still been a human bound by physical limits, his brain would have simply stopped, and thought itself would have been impossible.
And yet, for the sage, that might have been preferable.
Think. You have to think. Until now there has always been a way. You can do this again. You can.
The sage had never known failure. That was why, at first, he managed to endure. He was uneasy, yes — but he could not yet imagine the worst.
For the first time, the sage knew despair.
The thought that he might never leave this place kept rising unbidden.
No. I must not give up.
If he gave up, nothing would change. So he had to keep searching for an answer. By any means. If he abandoned hope, there would be no one left to help him.
And so he thought, and thought again.
At some point, the sage lost even his sense of time.
Here, time was nothing more than an illusion that existed only inside his mind. No matter how much of it passed, he could observe no change that resulted from it. At first he had counted the years himself, but after something close to several decades, he simply stopped.
It's tedious.
In a void where nothing ever changed, the sage had to battle a boredom beyond anything he had known — and he could fight it only through the act of thinking.
I fled from boredom for so long, and yet…
The tedium stretched on until it became unbearable. So the sage built an imaginary world inside his mind and began to train. He refined his enlightenment. He taught disciples. Even that alone deepened his understanding, little by little. If he ever left this place, he would surely be far stronger than before.
If he ever escaped, that is.
He had reached his limit.
Even training that existed only in the mind had found its ceiling. Now the sage felt as though he were gradually losing his very identity — not simply emptying his heart, but no longer able to be certain of his own existence.
Do I truly exist?
What if everything he had lived through was nothing more than a false illusion?
The moment the thought took hold, the sage's body began to grow faint.
"What the hell is happening to him?!"
Inanna harangued Enki as she watched Sunya's body fade away. But no amount of railing changed a thing.
"…His mind is collapsing. Like the fallen gods."
"But that's his entire body disappearing! Even when a god falls, their form might change — they don't just vanish like this!!"