Book 1 (2): Summer Darkness — Chapter 4: |
Chapter 4
“Let’s run away,” Satoru said.
“To where?”
“Anywhere, as long as we get away from this nest,” Satoru stood up and made to look outside the sleeping area. “Saki, do you remember? The path we took here was pretty complicated.”
“Yeah, maybe. My memory is a little hazy, so I’m not too sure…”
I tried to recall the sequence of turns from the queen’s hall to where we were now.
“I can’t. I know we went left in the very beginning, but after that the directions are all mixed up.”
My sense of direction wasn’t the best to begin with. It’s not so bad when I can repeat the same route multiple times, but even then if I have to reverse the directions in my head, I still get confused.
Satoru crossed his arms, trying his hardest to dig out the memory of the way we took.
“There’s one thing I remember. The path sloped a little downward the entire way here. ”
I remember because it felt like we were being led to the underworld.
“Oh really? I see…we didn’t go uphill even once?” Satoru grabbed my hand. “Then let’s just keep going up. If the path starts slanting down, we’ll just go back to the previous intersection and choose the other path.”
“But not all paths that slope up are the right ones, right?” I brought up the obvious flaw in the plan.
“That’s true, but even if it’s not the path we originally took, if it goes up, it’ll eventually reach the surface, right?”
Is it okay to be that careless? I was starting to have some doubts about Satoru’s judgment. Would it even be possible to retrace our path in the dark? Maybe if we had a rope or something. Even Theseus had Ariadne’s thread to guide him through the Minotaur’s labyrinth
“Hey, can’t we call the queerats and tell them we want to go outside? Because, if we get lost…”
Satoru leaned in close to me. “We can’t explain to them why we want to leave, right? And we can’t predict how they’ll react if they find out we don’t have cantus.”
Listening carefully, I didn’t sense any queerats nearby. It seemed like dawn was the period when their activity was lowest. But the tunnels outside were even darker than the room we were in, like they were submerged in ink. I couldn’t find the courage to step out of the room.
“Hey, isn’t this kind of weird?” I said.
Satoru made an impatient noise. “Nothing’s strange. What’s strange?”
“Why is it brighter inside the room than outside?”
He stopped suddenly, looking surprised. That’s right. It was barely perceptible, but inside the room, I could see movement. But the tunnel leading from the room was pitch black.
“You’re right. …I see. There must be a source of light somewhere!”
We looked around, but didn’t find anything.
Satoru was still holding on to the spear he had taken from the Ground Spiders like it was the most important thing in the world. After ascertaining my position, he started poking around the room with the spear. As he did so, a little pinprick of light glimmered on the spearhead.
“What was that?”
I walked slowly toward the depths of the room. There seemed to be weak light coming from above. I looked up and gasped.
There was a huge notch cut out of the ceiling, through which I could see the stars shining high in the sky.
“Outside? Does this lead aboveground?”
“No, it doesn’t. …those aren’t stars,” Satoru whispered disbelievingly. “They look like stars, but they’re not twinkling at all. What the hell is it?”
Satoru thrust his spear at the emerald green flecks of light. I thought he couldn’t possibly reach them, but surprisingly, the spear easily touched the ceiling, and the lights quivered.
He drew back the spear slowly. I thought some of the spot of light would come with it, but instead strings of thick liquid dripped from the tip.
Satoru touched it with his finger. “It’s all sticky. Wanna feel it?”
I shook my head.
What was glowing on the ceiling were glowworms that had been domesticated by the queerats.
Evidence of glowworms dating back to ancient times have been found in caves in Australia and New Zealand. Although they’re called worms, they’re more closely related to flies and mosquitoes. The larvae nest on the ceiling, using sticky balls of mucus to trap other insects for food. The light they produce is used to attract prey, but also creates the impression of a galaxy of green stars as it bounces off the balls of mucus.
Glowworms originally did not exist in the Japanese archipelago, but were imported as fishing bait shortly before the collapse of the ancient civilization. A number of them survived and were modified by the queerats to be used as chandeliers in their reception halls.
Satoru stuck the spear in the ceiling again to collect more of the mucus and figure out which part were the insects. Then after a short discussion, I climbed onto his shoulders to collect more. Since I was lighter, I had no choice but to be on top, touching the nasty green glowing bugs.
He took the bugs and stuck them onto the spear (using their own sticky excretions). Maybe it was thanks to the queerats selectively breeding the bugs that they never stopped glowing even when they were handled so roughly.
“Alright, let’s go,” Satoru said decisively, starting toward the exit.
We shouldered our backpacks, grasped each other’s hands, and guided only by the light of the glowing bugs, stepped out into the darkness.
Thinking back on it even now, it was such a strange journey.
The only light came from the faint ghostly glow on the tip of the spear. Beyond that little circle of light, we couldn’t even see our own hands. I tried looking off to the side and waving my hand in front of my face, but all I could make out was a dark shadow. In order to see where we were going, we had to walk side by side. The tunnel was just wide enough for that, and I was even thankful that it was so narrow because now part of us would be constantly touching the walls.
“Are we ascending now?” Satoru said every now and then.
Whenever he asked, I answered with “yeah,” or “I don’t know,” or “who knows?”. No matter how I responded, it’s not like the situation was going to change.
The light sometimes revealed a two or three-way fork in the road. These splits were always easily visible thanks to the luminous moss growing near them.
Although luminous moss glows, it’s not through the same mechanism as the glowworms. In order to achieve photosynthesis in the dark tunnels, they use lens-like cells to store and give off light.
Queerats should be able to run around these tunnels relying only on their sense of touch and smell. But as they became more civilized, they needed a more efficient way to move around, so they started using the natural properties of things around them.
We continued walking silently. Since we didn’t meet a single queerat, I assumed that this was probably their resting period. At first I thought this was fortunate for us, but as time went on, things started looking a little foreboding.
“Hey, haven’t we been walking for a while now?” I asked Satoru.
“Yeah.”
“Maybe this really is the wrong way?”
We stopped. If we were wrong, then where were we? I thought back over the path we took.
“This doesn’t make sense. I’ve been remembering as we walked, how many, and which turns we took. So I don’t think this is the wrong path…”
“But I still think we went wrong somewhere. It shouldn’t be taking this long.”
“I guess so. Let’s go back and try again.”
We turned around and headed back the way we came. It was depressing to be heading down deeper into the tunnels again, but we didn’t have a choice. However, within a few moments, a surprising scene appeared.
“A fork in the road!” I breathed.
“I don’t believe it. That wasn’t there earlier, was it?”
Since I had been memorizing the path as we walked, I was completely sure of my answer.
“…it wasn’t.”
Satoru started examining the dirt around the path
“Hm…I get it! Damn it,” he growled suddenly, making me jump.
“What’s wrong?”
“I see. That’s possible too. But in such a short amount of time…” he sighed deeply.
“What are you talking about? Hey, what’s going on?”
“The dirt around here is fresh…”
I felt the blood drain from my face as I understood.
Queerats are always building new tunnels and changing the shape of their nests. In other words, there’s no guarantee that the path we took hadn’t changed from the time we arrived in our room until now.
“We thought we were fine since there was no activity going on. But it seems like the tunnel digging goes on despite that. They’re probably preparing the nest for war right now. I’m guessing that right after we had gone through the tunnel, they dug through from somewhere else, creating this split.”
Satoru threw the clod of dirt angrily against the wall.
“So we’re…”
“Yeah, we’re lost.”
If I could see Satoru’s face right now, I’m sure it would be full of misery and unspilled tears.
We wandered aimlessly through the dark tunnels. Although in reality we were probably only there for about half an hour, the stress of walking through near-absolute darkness in addition to being in an extremely cramped space made it seem like an eternity. Although we were lightly dressed and the air was cold enough to raise goosebumps, I was drenched in sweat.
With vulgar words that we rarely used, we cursed our bad luck, complained to the gods, and cried uncontrollably, but we never let go of each other, and continued to walk.
Then gradually, our minds fell into disarray.
For me, the first sign was auditory hallucinations.
I heard a disembodied voice call “Saki, Saki.”
“Did you say something?” I would ask Satoru, and sometimes an annoying voice would answer from above my head, “No.”
“Saki. Saki.”
I heard it clearly this time.
“Saki. Where are you? Hurry and come back.”
My father’s voice.
“Dad. Dad!” I shouted. “Help. I’m lost.”
“Saki. Listen. Never go outside the Holy Barrier. There’s a strong force inside the barrier so it’s safe, but the moment you take a step outside, there’s no cantus to protect you.”
“I know. But I can’t go back. I can’t find the way back.”
“Saki. Saki. Be careful of the queerats. They worship people with cantus as gods and will obey them unfailingly. But we don’t know how they’ll behave toward children without cantus. That’s why we have to keep them away from children as much as possible.”
“…Dad.”
“Hey, what are you saying? Get a hold of yourself.”
Compared to my hallucination, Satoru’s voice sounded far away and unreal.
“It is said that when the fifth emperor, the Emperor of Delight, came into power, the public’s cheers went on for three hundred years. The first to stop applauding were burned as sacrifices and their charred corpses were used to decorate the palace. Because of this, the citizens nicknamed him the Emperor of Eternal Screams.”
“Dad. Help.”
“The thirteenth empress, Airin, was called the Queen of Sorrow…every morning, the people who had displeased her…took great joy in the most brutal…fasting in order not to throw up…thirty-third, Emperor of Magnanimity, called Wolf King…devoured corpses…his son, the thirty-fourth, Emperor of Pure Virtue, Heretic King…strangled his father to death when he was twelve…feared assassination, killed his younger brother and cousins, all children…their bodies fed to worms and roaches…sixty-fourth, Empress of Holy Beneficence was called Owl Queen…kidnapped a pregnant woman every full moon, swallowed the fetus whole, pellets of human bones as far as the eye can see…”
My father’s distorted voice suddenly became strangely monotonous.
“Listen. An ethologist from the ancient civilization, Konrad Lorenz discovered that animals with strong killing instincts like wolves and ravens have an innate mechanism that causes them to avoid conflict with their own species. Physically weak species like rats and humans don’t have as strong of a mechanism, so they fight to the point of massacre.”
“Dad. Stop.”
“Ioki realized that by sacrificing one of his bases, his troops would be able to sever the enemy’s lines. But there was one problem. The base that had to be sacrificed was his own. As he predicted, his group was surrounded by the enemy. Ioki and six of his comrades fought bravely until the end, but they were all slaughtered, the bodies mutilated to the point that they were indistinguishable from ground hamburger meat.
“You idiot. Snap out of it!” Satoru hit my shoulder.
“I’m okay,” I said, but the voice persisted.
On top of that, I started seeing things.
“Did you obtain permission from your school to come this far?” the monk said mockingly. “You have violated the very foundations of the Code of Ethics, the last of the Ten Precepts, ‘Do not desecrate the Three Jewels’. You have fallen for the words of a demon and questioned the teachings of Buddha. So I will seal you in these human shapes for all of eternity. You will spend the rest of your lives trapped in them…”
“Saki! Saki!”
I was being shaken so hard that I thought I might have whiplash. Slowly, I returned to reality.
“Satoru…”
“What have you been muttering to yourself? I thought you’d gone nuts.”
“I think I have,” I whispered.
That was probably the real danger. If we didn’t have each other, we might really go crazy.
We wandered the tunnels for a long time. In that time, we didn’t meet a single queerat, but now that I think about it, they might have detected our presence long before we arrived and left to let us pass.
I was the first to become aware of something unusual.
“Did you hear that just now?”
There was no response. I squeezed Satoru’s hand hard. Still no response.
“Satoru?”
I smacked him lightly on the cheek twice, thrice. Finally, he let out a low moan.
“Wake up! I heard something weird.”
“There’s been a sound this whole time,” Satoru said faintly. “Calling us from below. The voices of the dead.”
I shuddered. Instead of me, Satoru was the one acting insane now. But more importantly, that sound was worrying. After walking through the pitch black tunnel, I felt that I had heightened intuition. My sixth sense was warning me that danger was approaching. This wasn’t the time to be worrying about Satoru’s condition.
Listening carefully, I heard it again. Because of the reverberation in the tunnels, I couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from. But it was gradually getting louder. I could hear it clearly. The shrill screams and battle cries of the queerats. The sound of something metallic, like a gong. And something indiscernible, like applause or the roar of the ocean.
All these sounds clashed cacophonously; it was the sound of war. My premonition was right.
“Hurry, run! The Ground Spiders are attacking.” I pulled on Satoru’s hand, but he didn’t respond.
Another fork in the path appeared. Which way should I go? Left, right, or back the way we came?
I reached for Satoru’s right hand and pointed the spear forward, but couldn’t see the faint green light at the tip. After checking the spear, I discovered that all the glowworms were dead.
Then I realized that we weren’t in total darkness. The moss around the path glowed dimly. There must be light coming from somewhere. We had been in the tunnel for so long that I wouldn’t be surprised if it was already light outside. If I was right, then the exit should be ahead.
Peering through the darkness, I saw a faint glimmer of light. I grasped Satoru’s hand tightly and approached carefully. As we walked, the tunnel gradually brightened. But as it did, the sounds of fighting grew louder as well.
If we went out right into the midst of the fight, we’d have no way to protect ourselves.
It was soon as bright as a moonlight night in the tunnel. Light was coming from an uphill path that curved to the right.
I hesitated for a moment then took a step forward. We couldn’t stay here forever. At any rate I wanted to go check that it really was an exit.
In the end, that small hesitation probably saved our lives.
Suddenly, there was a scream, and a queerat came tumbling down the curve.
It shuddered and twitched sporadically. As it tried to come this way, I saw that it was fatally wounded.
At the same time, I smelled something strange. Like rotten eggs. As I looked past the dying queerat, there was a flash of light, and smoke started drifting into the tunnel.
Don’t breathe in the smoke. That was my first instinct.
“This way!”
I wheeled around and dragged Satoru back the way we came as fast as I could.
But as we ran down the path, the smell didn’t abate. On the other hand, it became stronger.
As I started to panic, Satoru finally came around.
“It’s no use trying to run. We’re like mice in a maze,” he laughed.
“We’re not mice,” I snapped.
“Yeah we are,” he muttered completely nonchalantly. “When they’re smoked, mice run to the end of their holes.”
“Smoke?”
I finally realized the reason for that strange feeling I was having.
“That’s weird. Normal smoke goes up toward the sky, not downward.”
“Isn’t that obvious?”
Seeing that I didn’t understand, Satoru said, with the attitude of an intolerable know-it-all, “They’re attacking the enemies inside the tunnels with poisonous gas that’s heavier than air.”
I gasped. “If you knew, then why didn’t you…!”
Suppressing my irritation, I continued down the tunnel, thinking over the paths we had taken so far. There was one long uphill segment that I had hoped would lead aboveground. But when we were close to the surface, it dipped downward again, as if purposefully trying to disappoint us. If we could make it there, then maybe we could avoid the poisonous gas.
Without light from the glowworms, we ran around the labyrinthine tunnels in a state of near-panic. It would be a miracle if we managed to find the right path.
“This one goes uphill!”
I felt a long incline. Although our legs burned as we ran upward, we gritted our teeth and kept going. The pain was proof that we were still alive.
Eventually, the ground flattened and started sloping gently downward.
“Let’s wait here for a bit.”
Once the nest filled with gas, all we could do was hope that it wouldn’t reach us. If the paths had been straight, it would have been a better idea to keep running, but the tunnels stretched out all around us like a web. The gas could travel around and come back to us, so in this case the best bet was to find higher ground.
We sat down in the darkness.
“Are you okay?”
A quiet “yeah,” was all I got from Satoru.
“I wonder how much the gas has dispersed.”
Even though I still couldn’t see him, I felt Satoru shake his head.
“It won’t.”
“But that’s impossible. It can’t stay in the tunnels forever, right?”
“That’s true, but it probably won’t disappear for a few days,” Satoru sighed heavily. “Before that, we’ll either run out of air, or the gas will make it up here.”
Bile rose in my mouth. Were we going to die where we stood?
“…then, what should we do?”
“No idea,” Satoru answered shortly.
“If the Robber Fly colony manages to win, they might dig us out. Even in that case, we still have to wait until the poison gas disperses.”
Despair drained us of all energy. We had been so desperate to find a safe place that it wasn’t until now that we noticed we had walked into our own graves.
Waiting helplessly for the end was tantamount to psychological torture. Compared to this, running from the poisonous gas could probably be considered fun.
“Hey. Even though we’re stuck in this situation…” the words came out naturally.
“Hm?”
“I’m glad I’m not alone.”
“Are you happy you can drag me down too?”
I smiled slightly.
“If I were alone, I wouldn’t be able to stand it. And I definitely wouldn’t have made it this far.”
We had tried our best, even if the final result was to be stuck at a dead end with no escape.
“Same here.”
I was relieved that Satoru seemed to have returned to his normal self. {Maybe those who were mentally disturbed were incapable of suffering.}
“I wonder if Maria and them got away okay.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“That’s good.”
That was the end of our conversation.
In the darkness, the only thing that moved was time.
Has it been a minute, five minutes, or half an hour? I jerked awake from a half-sleep.
“Satoru! Satoru!”
“…what?” he answered uneasily.
“It smells. Don’t you understand? The gas has reached us!”
The smell of rotten eggs, same as the one that had been at the exit.
“We can’t stay here anymore. Should we try going ahead?”
“No, this is the highest point we know of. If we go down, it’ll be suicide.” Satoru thought hard. “You have a better sense of smell than I do, which way is the gas coming from? The exit, or both sides?”
“I can’t figure out something like that.”
I could sometimes tell where sounds were coming from, but I didn’t think I could do the same for smells.
“No, wait.”
I walked a little toward the exit and sniffed the air, then did the same in the other direction. I was glad that Satoru couldn’t see me. I was sure I looked like a queerat twitching its nose.
“…I think it’s only coming from one direction. The place where the exit was.”
“Then we might be able to make it. Let’s try to block up the tunnel.”
“How?”
“By burying it.”
Satoru stuck the spear into the ceiling and started pulling it down. I couldn’t see him, but from the movement in the air and the chucks of dirt that hit me on the face, I could imagine the effort he was putting into it.
“Saki! Watch out!”
Satoru suddenly crashed into me. I flew backward into the tunnel with him on top of me.
I was just wondering what had happened when tons of soil started falling from the ceiling. Covering my face with my hands, I waited for the cave-in to stop. I couldn’t even open my mouth to scream. When it was finally over, I was covered with dirt, and my legs from the knee down were completely buried.
“Are you okay?” Satoru asked worriedly.
“Yeah.”
“That was dangerous. We were almost buried alive.”
Thinking logically, trying to bring down the ceiling of the room you were in was stupid, but our instinctive drive to survive caused us to act without thinking of the consequences. And in the end, it proved to be fortunate.
We extricated ourselves from the dirt and confirmed that the path was completely blocked. And just to make sure, we patted the mountain of dirt to make sure that it was solid enough that gas couldn’t pass through.
“Hey, look up. If you brought more dirt down, wouldn’t it go through to the outside?” I asked looking up at the gouged out ceiling (of course, I couldn’t actually see anything).
“You can’t hear anything coming from the outside though. There’s probably still more than three meters to go. It would be impossible to dig out from here. We’d be buried alive for real.”
In the end, we sat down on the dirt again.
In the commotion of blocking the path, I mistakenly believed that we were making progress. But now that I thought about it, our situation hadn’t changed a bit. Compared to earlier, we were in an even narrower space, and if the gas suddenly came from the open side of the path, it would be all over for us. If we collapsed the other side of the tunnel too, we’d soon run out of air and suffocate.
This time, we were doomed.
I didn’t want to die here. But there was nothing more we could do. As I waited for my life to end, I was surprised at how unemotional I was. But I was too tired to muster up the energy to feel anything.
I edged away from Satoru and sat hugging my knees. Hallucinations started appearing once again. The outside world was so infinite that most things pass unnoticed. This fact came easily as if a switch had been flipped. After wandering through the darkness for so long, our mental defenses were weakened, and the demons in the hidden corners of our mind were free to run rampant.
The first thing I saw was a minoshiro. Its semitransparent body ambled slowly in before me, right to left. It was incredibly realistic. The ends of the Y-shaped feelers on its head and the quills running down its back glowed white, red, orange, blue, and other bright colors.
Then, shining green threads of sticky mucus started dripping from the ceiling. In the blink of an eye, a glowworm galaxy appeared.
The minoshiro appeared to be stuck in the dripping mucus. It twisted itself free and continued walking, but in the end was still trapped. The threads swayed like a chandelier, gradually binding the minoshiro tighter and tighter.
Then, the minoshiro started autotomizing his trapped feelers and quills one by one.
The now bald minoshiro’s back started glowing vibrantly with all the colors of the rainbow. The colors mixed and overlapped, creating stripes and spirals in the air. The beauty of it made my mind go blank.
At some point it transformed into the false minoshiro, its colorful afterimage still lingering above its back, and started disappearing from my field of vision.
The residual light slowly faded away into darkness.
Was everything going to fade away as well? Just as I thought that, the scenery changed completely.
Suddenly, an orange light erupted right in front of me. A flame burning above an altar.
From underground comes the sound of chanting, interrupted by orange sparks.
It’s the scene from that day.
A praying monk threw some pills and poured fragrant oil into the fire, making it flare up dramatically.
The chanting sounded like a chorus of crickets reverberating in my ears.
That was the day of my initiation to receive my cantus.
Why is it that as my life neared its end, I don’t think about my family, or the happy times in my childhood, but of that scene.
Suddenly, a completely different memory surfaced.
“That’s against the rules. We can’t tell anyone what our mantra is,” Satoru said pertly.
Although he was usually up to no good, Satoru suddenly decided to put on the act of a model student.
“It’s fine. We’re friends, right? I won’t tell anyone,” I wheedled.
“Why do you want to know anyway?”
“I want to see what it’s like. Like how it’s different from mine, and such.”
“…then tell me yours,” Satoru said slyly.
He was provoking me. Fine. Two can play at that game.
“Okay. How about this? We’ll write it down, and show each other on the count of three.”
“…um. Actually, no. If we show it to someone else, it’ll lose its power.”
That’s not how it works, I wanted to say.
“So? It’s not like I’ll be looking at it long enough to remember it. Just flash it for a second.”
“Then what’s the point?” Satoru asked suspiciously.
“It shows that we’re friends. Also, we can get a general feel for how long it is and such.”
I managed to convince him, so we wrote out our mantras on sheets of straw paper.
“Ready? One, two, three,” we flipped our papers around and looked at each other’s mantra for a tenth of a second.
“Did you see it?” Satoru asked worriedly.
“Not at all. But I could tell how long it was. It’s not that long.”
“Yeah, yours too Saki. It’s about the same,” Satoru said looking relieved.
He crumpled up the paper and set it on fire. It was reduced to ashes in a matter of seconds.
“…but did you see even one word?” he seemed unusually anxious.
“Not a letter. Your writing is so awful I couldn’t read it at all.”
He was finally convinced and left the room. I went over and looked at the stack of papers he had written on. Satoru pressed down hard when he wrote, so it left a distinct impression. I shaded the paper lightly and the words appeared.
I looked it up in the library and found that it was the mantra of Akasagarbha.
It would probably go smoothly. I held my breath and focused on Satoru.
He was breathing quietly as if asleep, but once in a while murmured something unintelligible.
Right now, Satoru’s consciousness was at its lowest, almost like the state you’re in when you’re hypnotized. If you could bring out all the thoughts that are usually suppressed, like what happened to me earlier, then it wouldn’t be surprising if you could control someone through their hallucinations.
The hardest part about hypnosis was bringing down the subject’s level of consciousness. If you could do that, then the rest is easy. After all, I already knew the mantra buried deep inside Satoru’s mind.
Nonetheless, failure would be unforgivable. If I fail, we would both die here. I rehearsed my lines mentally over and over. I took deep breath and spoke in my strictest voice.
“Satoru Asahina.”
Since I couldn’t see him, I couldn’t tell if there was any response.
“Satoru Asahina. You have broken the rules and gone where you were not supposed to. Furthermore, you have allowed your mind to be poisoned by a demon. The real problem, however, lies much deeper.”
I felt him stir.
“You have violated the very foundations of the Code of Ethics, the last of the Ten Precepts, ‘Do not desecrate the Three Jewels’. You have fallen for the words of a demon and questioned the teachings of Buddha. Therefore I must seal your cantus immediately.”
Satoru gasped and started crying.
I felt terrible for him, but steeled myself and continued.
“Look at the flames.”
I didn’t hear a response.
“Look at the flames.”
Still nothing.
“Your cantus is sealed inside this emblem. Do you see it?”
A deep sigh, then, “Yes.”
“The emblem is cast into the fire. Everything has been burned away. All your worldly desires have been burned away. The ashes return to the vast, wild earth.”
I raised my voice, “Look. The emblem has been eradicated. Your cantus is now sealed!”
Satoru let out a painful wail.
“Cast aside your worldly desires. To reach nirvana, cast everything into the cleansing flame.”
I was getting closer and closer to the critical moment. I approached Satoru.
“Satoru Asahina. In your devotion to Buddha, you have abandoned your cantus,” I said as gently as I could, trying to penetrate deep into his consciousness, winding around his mind, binding him with my suggestion.
I wholeheartedly want to save Satoru. Although this is the fastest way, I apologize for making him suffer. I’m also thankful for his efforts to help me. All of my feelings swelled and threatened to drown me. My voice shook.
“Now, by the compassion of Buddha, you will receive a pure mantra, a new spirit, and your cantus will be returned to you.”
I hit him on the shoulders, bent down, and whispered in his ear, “Namo âkâúagarbhaya oṃ ârya kamari mauli svâhâ.”
For a moment, nothing happened.
But, slowly, light started spreading slowly around us.
“Satoru!” I shouted, crying.
The spear was glowing. The obsidian tip gave off a burning red light.
“Satoru, you’re doing this, right? You see? Your cantus is back!”
“Yeah…looks like it,” Satoru said, as if waking from a long dream.
“Hurry! Blow a hole in the ceiling! Get rid of all of this!”
“Okay.”
“Oh, wait. There might be poison gas outside too…”
“Don’t worry. I’ll blow it all away,” Satoru grinned reassuringly. “There might be a vacuum for a second. Cover your nose and ears.”
I managed to plug my nose and ears with my thumb and middle finger. Above me, the dirt started shaking and rumbling as if there were an earthquake.
The next second, there was a roar like a hurricane and the ceiling vanished.