Discerning the Truth (5)
The white beach, battered by waves — same as before.
Each step I took sank into the sand; each time I stopped, the tide rushed in to claim the hollows.
This tiny space, steeped in mystery and contradiction, was far too vivid to be called a dream.
I walked forward as if cutting a path across the sand, and before long I came face to face with a familiar black mass.
"……."
The boundary of a world severed with impossible precision. Just short of that edge, a vast darkness waited to receive me.
This was the second time it remained in my memory — but the third time I had actually stood before it.
Like a great hole punched into empty air, the darkness hung suspended, and beneath it the beach sand was endlessly scoured away.
"You pulled a cheap little trick," the darkness said, its voice rolling out and gouging hollows in the surrounding sand.
It had realized I'd escaped this place with my memories intact. Not that it mattered if the Agent of Mystery noticed. Among the things Spinel had whispered to me was this: even if I was found out, there would be no punishment.
"So? Planning to hand out a penalty?"
In a sense, it was a form of cheating. And yet, every time I asked the figure before me about penalties, the answer never came back affirmative.
"It doesn't matter. Even that is being judged as part of the trial."
"Lucky me."
"And you are already suffering a disadvantage for this trial."
At the Agent's next words, I couldn't help but flinch. I was already carrying a penalty. That was what it was telling me. My face hardened as I stared into the abyss before me.
"I'm under a disadvantage?"
"Of course. A more difficult trial has already been set before you than before the others."
"Why?"
"What do you believe defines a human being as human?"
"Don't tell me……."
There was only one thing that came to mind.
"Body. Mind. Memory. We take all of these together and define a single human."
"So the problem is that the contents are different."
"You differ in both memory and temperament from the one who previously passed this trial. And yet your magic still recognizes you as the same individual."
I was Percival Smith — and I was not Percival Smith. The very fact of my existence was an unforeseen variable to them. You might deceive people, but it seemed even the oldest of magics could not be fooled.
The one mercy was that magic itself was bound to the body, not the soul.
The Agent did not stop there. It continued explaining the trial.
"And so Truth demanded that the difficulty of your trial be raised."
"Raised by how much?"
"Every trial you face has been elevated by one rank."
"So this one is roughly on par with a 5th Circle trial?"
"You may think of it that way."
Come to think of it, even Sinel had passed the 4th Circle trial without much trouble. The fact that I couldn't even find a foothold on a solution had never made sense — until now. Of course I was stuck. Of course I was tearing my hair out. A first-timer at a mage's trial, and I'd been sitting for the 5th Circle exam.
"……No wonder it felt so hard. I've been getting scammed."
"Will you give up, then?"
"No. I don't care. It's a wall I have to climb either way."
There was no risk in this challenge. Fail, and all you had to do was wait out the interval until you could return. There was no reason not to take a trial that offered only returns and no downside.
The endless dark within the Agent stirred, and from its depths a vast eye turned upon me and asked:
"False mage. Will you challenge the trial?"
"I will."
I nodded, and the darkness before me began to move. That bottomless abyss spread in every direction, and before long every scrap of light around us scattered and fled.
A private universe of spreading, glittering light. An incomprehensible world that pulsed with a force that, merely by looking at it, made you understand your own place in the order of things.
And with it, a voice came flooding in — as if to announce the start of the trial.
I hate the world that abandoned me.
What the hell is money, that it would do this to me.
I want to kill every last one of them.
Why not me? Why only you…….
The first thing that reached me was malice. People hate. They resent. They envy. They covet. Raw, unfiltered malice poured straight into me without a single screen between us.
……I failed again.
Nothing — none of it — goes the way I want.
I want to die.
Next came despair. Somewhere in the world, someone was regretting. Someone was cursing their own lot. Melancholy voices brushed past me again and again.
"……Ah."
Then the torrent of thoughts crashed over me in full. Voices of unknown origin filled my ears and scrambled everything inside my head. Someone screamed. Someone else wailed and let themselves go. Dizzy. Chaotic. Everything that passed through me left its mark behind.
There are things that cannot be undone.
The sky is clear.
Today's weather is a red mirror.
Ahh……. The long line of wire snaps, and then—
The more I touched what was alien, the more I was stained by its color. My stream of thought, muddied by sympathy with strangers, had long since lost its original direction. Things that were not me crawled around inside me. Formless things tangled with one another and transformed into something else entirely — something I could no longer understand.
The blue sky is covered in insects.
When it rains, are you well today as well?
Black and blue and red and black.
Without remainder. Falling wind.
This was no longer my will. What sustains the self — memory, or thought? Can something that flowed in from another person still be called your own thinking?
I was thrashing, lost in the storm of thoughts, when a voice reached me faintly through the noise.
I miss Blackie.
A familiar voice. And one I must never forget.
I focused on that faint sound, and as if answering, the voice rang out once more.
The cripple walks the sea again today.
What should I eat tomorrow?
The hard problems are inside the mirror.
God is always, for your sake…….
Sinel Cloverbloom. The first companion I had met in this world. Pure and yet cunning; rough-edged and yet sharp. In this city of blood and conspiracy, she was also the first person I had chosen to trust.
Like a lighthouse alone on a dark sea, I searched for Sinel's voice among the flood of others pouring in.
Why won't you look at me?
The light won't turn on.
All of it — every last thing — just does whatever it wants.
I wish the boss would buy me something tasty.
There was something I wanted to achieve. That was why I had met Sinel. Why I had made her my ally. Extras who hadn't even been left with names had come to know each other.
How many days until payday?
War City is not a story full of happiness. Someone dies. Someone is robbed. Someone chases revenge. Each person's purpose calls blood, and the blood thus made goes looking for its next sacrifice. In a world of the strong devouring the weak, few are permitted to smile. The ending of a story like that is a bitter, mouth-coating tragedy.
I hope I get a big paycheck.
In a story that ends in tragedy, we had met to complete each other's tales. And so I still did not want to disappoint her. Keep losing to a simple trial like this, and all I'd do is parade my own powerlessness in front of everyone.
I lifted my head and looked up at the sky. The black world, stretching without end, asked me in its own voice:
The Agent's voice, demanding the trial's answer. Hearing it, I began to consider what I ought to say.
Originally, I was not Percival Smith. I had been nothing more than a reader of a novel. And the Agent standing before me knew that — and asked me anyway. This was not a request for some formal, empty exchange.
"I am……."
A simple question, and yet a difficult one for someone who had been a stranger here. I had been running from acknowledging it all this time, but the moment of choice that could no longer be postponed had arrived.
Who am I? Is the self of the past the real one, or the self of the present? I had to answer that now.
Dark Merchant… You must have suffered plenty to earn that name, right?
The name I had been looking away from was the same. What proves a great person is not great deeds alone. No matter where you stand. No matter what form you take. What proves the self is the resolve you carry. Only unshakable belief forges the self you aspire to be.
So this was a kind of declaration — aimed at myself.
"I am—"
I am Sinel Cloverbloom's employer. A great information broker praised as the Dark Merchant. The only one who knows how this world ends. And the one who will bring this world its proper ending.
And the name of the one walking that great path is—
From here on, too — I would keep being Percival Smith.