Don't Cry. Don't Cry. — 11
I reached the bottom.
By any ordinary reckoning I ought to have struck the surface of the water, but what lay before me was the shattered main sanctuary of the Heavenly Demon Cult. I lifted my head. A hole gaped in a ramshackle structure that had collapsed and then frozen halfway down. I lowered my gaze and looked around.
Cold air, and the faint acrid reek of burning. This was the place where the Heavenly Demon had died. Perhaps I might see him. I would know that spot the moment I saw it, so I walked toward it.
But the Heavenly Demon was not there. Beyond the place where the corpse had lain, in the ruins, there was only a single black line drawn across the ground. I looked around, and nothing else seemed worth the name of a clue. Far off a castle showed white, and in the opposite direction there were houses.
Having come to a place this strange, I started that way to see it for myself, but the wreckage blocked the path as if I were not meant to pass. I reached out to climb, and I could not take hold of the debris. My hand met only a wall. Which meant I could not go.
Then it would have to be the tower. I set off again. If I kept walking, the house from the second world might appear at least once. I followed a stretch that had been cleared, oddly, into something like a road.
Tap, tap.
Comparing my stride here, in a place I actually remembered, the difference was stark. At this size it would take an absurdly long time. Feeling all over again the distance between this body and the days when I had been Choseol, I walked on.
And once more, a door standing all by itself. Beyond it there was plainly a cliff. Open it, though, and inside lay a cylindrical space with a faint yellow light drifting through it. The entrance to Kunlun.
A narrow passage floated at the center. I started in along it, then stopped and looked back. Far away I could see a door joined to some other place, and everything to either side of it was sealed shut. It came to me all at once that I would not be seeing Soo here.
Of course. So that was how it was.
I walked on. Pass through a door like this and Kunlun ought to be waiting on the other side, if anything here were normal. This space had never once been normal. And at the end of the passage, where Kunlun's interior should have been, there was a small door instead.
I opened it and stepped through, and a truly strange sight unfolded before me. Something like a badly warped sphere hung in the empty air, and the sky was crowded with objects that had been sucked toward it and then stopped. The whole of it was frozen, as if someone had cut out a single instant from the last moment I had shared with Yuanshi Tianzun.
Wondering whether anyone would appear here as well, I looked around. Hyungkesuni had shown herself twice already. Yuanshi Tianzun might come again. He did not. What I found instead was a girl seated in a pavilion a little way off from the sphere, a pavilion that had halted midway through its collapse.
A tall woman with purple hair, easily twice my present height. Someone I had never actually seen, because I had been the one using that body until the very last moment. None other than Choseol. I went toward her.
"Hello."
"Yes. Hello."
Her manner of speaking resembled mine in an odd way. The cadence was similar. Or was the one standing there not Choseol at all, but me? I was turning that over while I looked at her, and she was staring blankly back, so I decided that silence would get me nowhere and pointed at the castle visible far away.
"I'm trying to get over there. Do you know the way?"
At that she rose. She walked into the space where the light was twisted, seized the empty air, and lifted it. As if a cloth painted with a picture had been draped over the place and then drawn aside, a locked door appeared from within.
Choseol looked at me, slipped a hand between her breasts, and drew it out again. In the hand that emerged there was a key. She came up to me with it, reached out, took my arm and drew it in front of her, set the key upon my palm, and gently pushed my fingers closed around it. I gripped the key.
Most of the people I meet in this place are strange. They do not act like the people I know. There is no light in them, and no warmth. The odds are high that this is nothing but an illusion. Daegon and Yuanshi Tianzun still leave me a little uneasy, but they were such transcendent beings that something about them might be different. Perhaps their memories were simply too vast.
While I was thinking that, Choseol suddenly gathered me into her wide embrace. There was no warmth in it at all, only cold, but the soft give of her chest pressed against me and then fell away. After that she patted my shoulder twice, and without looking back even once she passed me by and vanished. The moment she crossed into the place walled off from me, she was gone as if she had never been there.
I looked the key over. Letters were cut into it. The word engraved there was Warmth.
Three keys now. One whose word had been scraped away. One that read Rage. And this one, Warmth.
Might as well try them in order.
The key with the erased word would not go into the hole. There was clearly a space it could have entered, and still it seemed to be telling me this was not its place. So I pushed in Rage. With a click, the lock opened at once. I could not draw the key back out. It had fused to the lock as if it had been part of it from the beginning.
Wasn't I supposed to move on using the key I had just been given? And when Tisha first handed me a key, I was fairly sure she had said it was needed to cross some wall—yet the key inscribed Despair had not opened a wall at all. It had been the key that started the train. Either an illusion has no rules, or I have gotten something wrong. I don't really know. Walk as far as I can go, and I'll find out.
I opened the door and went in. Inside was the platform where I had first arrived, only the railway ran a different way. The track I had followed out of the first world to reach this side was gone, and in its place a line had been laid that entered a tunnel in the cliff. I boarded the steam locomotive again.
No one was there to meet me this time. I would have to open the door, go to the engine room, and turn a key once more. Which reminded me of the passenger car. Earlier Eunjae had been blocking it, so the thought of going in had never occurred to me. I took hold of the door that led to the car and tried to turn it. It would not move. Wondering whether a key might make it turn, I looked, but there was no keyhole. Simply an object I could not interact with, then. With no other choice, I opened the door into the engine room.
Nothing here had changed. It was the same as before. The only difference was that the key which ought to have been seated in the lock was gone, and the lock itself was fastened again. I pushed in the nameless key. It caught and would not go. The one that slid home was the key of Warmth.
That ridiculous sound of a car engine catching, and the train set off again. I still felt no inertia whatsoever. It plunged straight into the cave, and before long there was light. The place where the locomotive stopped was the interior of a collapsed temple. The place where I had been summoned.
In a space that had originally held nothing but cylindrical walls, a platform and a steam locomotive had been set down with no regard for sense. Coal was heaped inside, so it looked like a steam locomotive. It made no sound, though, and it didn't even vent steam, so I wasn't sure it was right to call it one. Perhaps it was because, among all the memories I had gathered, there was not a single person who had ever ridden a steam locomotive. A world like a dream cannot bring forth what it does not know.
When the train came to a complete stop, I went into the passenger car, the one with a door down onto the platform. Just in case, I took hold of it and tried, and the door opened. An empty car. Nothing but seats, row after row. I looked through it in case something was there, and there was nothing. Open the door at the rear and the railway the train had come along was visible behind it. Nothing worth seeing.
I got off. Outside, sunlight fell through a round hole in the ceiling, and between the beams a huge shadow showed. A fishman some seven and a half meters tall was looking down at me. He reached out a hand and set it on the ground in front of me. By a fishman's measure, a face that was thinking of nothing at all. Even so, he seemed to mean for me to climb on. I stepped onto the palm, and he lifted me up.
Now that I thought of it, this was the place Victoria had lifted me out of. Once I climbed down from his hand, he stopped looking at me. He sat where he was, drew his knees up, and curled around them like a baby. I left him and walked on.
The first time, I had come down the hill and then walked a long way along the coast before the harbor appeared. The moment I descended the hill now, the harbor was there—and compressed to an absurd degree. Only the place for boarding a ship had been left dangling in place. I was meant to wait for a ship, then. So I stood at the harbor and waited, and a ship came toward me from straight ahead. Dead on.
Last time it had come in from the side. I was watching and thinking how strange that was when the ship, without slowing at all, ran straight for where I stood. Was it going to hit me like this? The bow slammed into the platform beneath my feet. But instead of me being struck, the ship alone crumpled and caved in on itself, and a door from inside it appeared in front of me.
And who, exactly, is directing this?
The door had warped as the hull folded, but when I pulled, it opened without trouble. I wondered whether this would take me on to Berne City. Astonishingly, what appeared was the royal palace—and specifically the room where Aurora had lain. She was lying there in truth, on the wide bed inside. Now she would sit up and say something. Thinking that, I approached her.
Aurora did not get up. I shook her just in case, and she still did not rise. She was breathing, but like everyone I had seen in here, there was no light in her and no warmth. I looked around.
Until now every door had faced the castle. If the castle could not be seen, then this was the castle. So I checked beyond the window, and through it I found the castle showing far away. And, by the only rule that had held so far, there was a door. I went to it and opened it, and it opened easily. I looked at Aurora once, and went in.
Victoria's bedroom. On the bed, Victoria was sleeping as softly as Aurora had been. The blanket had been flung far off, and the room around her was a mess. Without thinking, I tidied what I could and drew the blanket over her.
The castle I had been seeing all this time showed beyond the window. Then this was the way. I opened the window and stepped out, and what waited there was not the interior of the Royal Academy I had seen only moments before, but a high rampart. It was not this country's wall. It was black to a grotesque degree—a castle wall with no depth to it at all, as if it had been coated in the blackest pigment there is. And beyond that wall, a white castle showed.
Before the wall, a girl was standing. A long skull-staff in her hands, smiling as if she were on the verge of tears. Hyungkesuni. She stood with the wall at her back and glared at me.