Chapter 96 - The Trailblazer X

19

Cheon Yohwa’s Ghostmon collection progressed rapidly. By the end of summer break, her completion rate for the encyclopedia was already approaching 80%.

Victory was assured.

The only problem, if you could call it that, was that the world went a little screwy every time another ghost was imprisoned in an hourglass—her substitute for a Poké Ball.

“Huh? The world’s shrinking?”

“Yes. It’ll be quicker to show you.”

I took Cheon Yohwa aboard my flying boat and lifted off.

A Savoia S-21, modified with a rear seat. This fine aircraft was a modified version of the seaplane flown by Porco Rosso. It was originally an anomaly roaming Japan, but I brought it over whenever I got bored.

“Wow, two sets of wings! So cool!”

“You have good taste.”

“Hehe. Yep! Mom taught me that when someone introduces something really lame and looks super proud of it, I should always shower them with compliments!”

“...?”

The flying boat climbed, passed Jeju Island, and reached the East China Sea. Cheon Yohwa, who had been squealing excitedly, suddenly went, “Huh?” and pointed at the horizon.

“Mister! What’s that?”

A massive wall of fog stood where she was pointing.

It was so dense it belonged in the movie The Mist. Stretching along the horizon, it covered everything beyond it, sea and sky alike.

“The boundary of the world.”

“B-boundary?”

“I only realized it recently myself. My guess is that every time you steal control of a ghost from Gapless, the world itself gets a little smaller.”

“Eeeek...”

“I’ll take us closer.”

BRRRR!

The engine hiccupped. My flying boat approached the ‘fog wall.’

“Wow. I really can’t see anything...”

“I’ve already tested it, and we can’t enter that fog. It feels like an invisible wall is blocking us. A few days ago, I could go farther, but after you sealed one more ghost, the boundary shrank to here.”

“Whoa. But how does trade work, then? You order stuff from overseas all the time, Mister, and the news hasn’t said anything.”

“That’s the interesting part. Watch.”

An enormous bow emerged smoothly from beyond the fog. A container ship. It glided out of the shipping lane beyond the fog wall as though nothing were out of the ordinary.

“Whaaaat?”

“See? Every other object and living thing in this world, apart from the two of us, is functioning without any problems. They simply take form only in the world inside the fog wall.”

“Uh, that’s a liiittle confusing... So only the world inside the fog wall actually exists, but it’s set up as though everything outside the wall is working perfectly fine... Is that it?”

“Probably.”

The flying boat skimmed along the fog wall.

“After all, this world is something like an illusion woven by Gapless.”

The ghosts of Hundred Tales that Cheon Yohwa was sealing were not simply separate, independently existing anomalies. Every one was a fragment of Gapless.

Plundering them from Gapless meant taking away ‘part of its existence.’

“In human terms, it’s like stealing memories. In computer terms, stealing data. My interpretation is that Gapless is running out of the resources it needs to create this world, this illusion. Now there’s nothing left of the world except the area around the Korean Peninsula.”

“Ohhh...”

“It also proves that everything in this world is nothing but a shadow imitating and mimicking existence.”

“...”

Cheon Yohwa suddenly became much less talkative. Well, people were bound to feel overwhelmed when confronted with an anomalous phenomenon on this scale.

“... Let’s head back, Mister. I’m cold.”

“Wait a moment. There’s still one more thing I want to show you. You’ll regret missing it.”

“...?”

“Now.”

I pointed at the sky.

The sun was sinking. The sun slipping westward was probably not truly there in space at all, merely an illusory sphere visible within this narrow world. The instant that false sun began to pass beyond the fog wall, the clouds of fog dividing sea and sky were dyed red with the sunset.

A brief gasp came from the rear seat.

“... Beautiful.”

Rather than a few drifting clouds in the sky, the sunset had claimed the entire boundary of the world as its mirror. It was magnificent. The fog wall greedily drank every drop of blood shed by the dying sun.

The entire west of the world was sunset.

Then, in less than five minutes, the sun sank completely beyond the fog wall. The sunset vanished with it.

The lingering emotions of those who had witnessed the sun’s quiet suicidal plunge stretched out like a contrail.

“... Why did that sunset happen? The fog wall isn’t real fog. It should just be an object.”

“Well, I don’t know either. Even in this world, where everything is an illusion, the sunset on that fog wall is especially illusory. But it’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“... Yes. Very.”

“One illusion is merely a deluded dream. Yet for some reason, we humans find it beautiful to dream an illusion within an illusion.”

“...”

The engine cried. All the way back to Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School, Cheon Yohwa was quiet, as though lingering over my words.

She said only one thing as she headed back to the dormitory.

“... Thank you, Mister. I think I know which ghost I need to catch last.”

It was summer.

Cicadas fell from every tree and died. Nameless birds and insects picked at the corpses scattered over the ground. In the season when late summer slowly recited death, the whole world was the scene of a locked-room murder.

It was autumn.

Over the corpses that had died in summer, the maples cut off their reddened palms and laid them down as covers. Everywhere in the world was a solemn burial of sacrificial companions. We had agreed to call that red communal graveyard autumn.

And then.

“Delivery!”

I went out to the gate of Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School and took the plastic bag of delivered food.

The delivery rider, who must have set his own daily wage—the price of this day of his life—adjusted his sky-blue helmet and climbed onto his motorcycle.

BRRRR...

With its engine crying, the motorcycle slid onto the road outside the gate. And disappeared.

Beyond the fog wall.

“...”

Now the world was no larger than the school’s perimeter walls.

Whichever way I looked, the sky was wrapped in white clouds of fog. In the morning, cars driven by teachers slipped out of the fog wall, and in the evening, those same cars vanished beyond it.

One more day passed, and the distance from this side to that side, from this shore to the other shore, was only the width of the school grounds.

The end of space. Time holding its breath. That thing over there—there ought to be nothing there. On the surface where all things silently emerged and sank, beings were splashing in the water.

For a moment, the droplets thrown up by a child’s playful hands were the very weight of existence. In every splash dwelled the world’s sunset.

For a while, I stood motionless outside the student council room’s window, staring at the white film of glass that separated me from the other shore.

“How many are left now?”

“Two.”

It was winter.

Snow fell for the first time. Because this world had been built in summer, it was the first snow.

A snowflake tapped the windowpane. The quietest of knocks. Looking outside, I found everything immediately before me had become white, snowy fog.

The world had the floor area of a studio apartment, a little over thirty-three square meters.

The universe had shrunk to a student council room where two people could barely breathe.

—...

—GOOONG... GOOONG... GOOONG...

—“Ooh, oh, oh, oh, oh.”

RATTLE. RATTLE.

From time to time, the small sounds of struggling ghosts came from the shelves. The rest of the world’s area, swallowed by fog and vanished, was confined within the glass walls of ninety-eight hourglasses.

The final remaining ghost.

Cheon Yohwa stared steadily at it.

“You must obey me.”

—“Sorry, but that kind of brainwashing doesn’t work on me.”

A voice identical to Cheon Yohwa’s.

It came from the full-length mirror across from her. Inside the mirror, a being with the same hairstyle and school uniform as Cheon Yohwa sat upright in a chair.

—“You know that. No matter how hard you try to brainwash me, you’re only telling yourself to obey yourself, aren’t you?”

A doppelganger.

An anomaly that could live only as someone’s shadow. That was the fragment of Gapless Cheon Yohwa had saved for last.

“Why would I be you? You’re a ghost trapped in a mirror. I’m outside. You can’t move around, but I’m free.”

—“Aha. People these days call shuffling around in a thirty-three-square-meter world freedom? Sorry. I’m stupid. I didn’t realize prisons were the freest places on Earth.”

“Are you an idiot? A prison with rooms that big would be a luxury hotel.”

—“Oh, sure. Must be nice staying in a five-star hotel. I’m sooo jealous.”

“I hate you.”

—“I hate you too. We really are identical.”

Cheon Yohwa sighed. Was this my cue to step in?

“Take it easy. Have some coffee.”

“Oh! Yes, Mister... Wait, you made this yourself instead of ordering delivery? Wow. Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it. It’s a little hobby of mine.”

I had many, many hobbies, but being a barista was foremost among them.

Surely nothing was more rewarding than pinpointing another person’s tastes and bombarding them with caffeine.

After several rounds of trial and error, I discovered that Cheon Yohwa’s tongue pursued a policy of reconciliation between the ‘coffee should be bitter’ faction and the ‘coffee should be sweet’ faction.

Espresso? You call this coffee? It’s herbal medicine. Macchiato? That’s sugar water.

Cheon Yohwa founded a new party, calling for a grand unification of left and right.

Naturally, she was destined to face criticism from both sides, but like everyone who insisted on a third party, she brimmed with baseless confidence. The party’s name was ‘Double Espresso Cream Latte.’

Leave the cream unmixed, like ice cream. Shave some thin slices of chocolate and lightly scatter them on top. The chocolate should contain at least 70% cocoa but less than 90%. Include a straw or spoon so she can gradually mix in the cream as she drinks. There, finished.

“Sooo delicious...”

Cheon Yohwa looked like the happiest person in the world.

“Well-made coffee can feel this fulfilling... Mister, could you make this for me every morning? These days, without your coffee, my head starts getting all foggy around lunchtime.”

“Thank you for the glowing praise. But much as I’d love to, it won’t be easy.”

“Why?”

“Civilization’s intact here, so beans, cream, and chocolate have been very easy to get. Once we return to reality, I’ll only be able to make it occasionally.”

“Aww. Now I have one more reason not to want to go back to reality...”

—“Oh? How good can it be? Could I have a cup too, Mister?”

“Shut up,” Cheon Yohwa muttered.

The temperature in the room dropped a notch.

“Before I really kill you.”

—“...”

RATTLE, RATTLE, RATTLE.

The ninety-eight hourglasses on the shelves trembled slightly. In the center of the table, a stainless-steel electric kettle shuddered as it boiled water.

Cheon Yohwa breathed out a long breath, warmed by coffee, quietly restoring the room’s temperature.

“Thank you, Mister.”

“Hmm? Coffee’s my hobby, so...”

“Not just the coffee. Just... everything.”

“...”

“I know you have a lot of secrets. But one thing is certain. Whatever happened to our school, you could have ignored it and left us alone.”

A blizzard blew.

“Sometimes I imagine what would have happened if you hadn’t been here. Time is the one thing I have to spare, after all. I daydream about all sorts of things.”

“I see.”

“I’ve been afraid of ghosts since I was little.”

White snow emerged from white fog and struck the white window. After striking it, the snowflakes were swept away by the wind and vanished beyond the fog again. White brought them into being; white erased them.

The whitening of existence.

“My father is sort of the leader of a cult. Mmm, no, he’s just plain a cult leader.”

“...”

“You know what? Our house is really big. There’s even something like a church built in the basement. Hundreds of people gather there every month, chanting these weird incantations... Um. Our family is the Yeongyang Cheon clan, with Cheon written as ‘thousand.’ But Father told me I absolutely had to write my surname with the character for ‘heaven.’ At home or at school, always. Ahaha. Weird, right?”

“...”

“Mister. You saw those strange talismans stuck up around our school, didn’t you?”

“Yes. I saw them.”

“Our family runs this school too. They brought in a relative to sit as chairman, but it practically belongs to Father. Most of the kids here are from families in the cult.”

“...”

“So when the sky suddenly turned bright red one day, and the ghosts appeared... somehow, I just accepted it. Ah. Of course. Divine punishment.”

Snowflakes clung to the window. Snow flowers endlessly bloomed and faded.

Existence was a white flower.

“But I couldn’t just let the kids die.”

“...”

“It was probably our family’s fault. I’d practically run away from home, so I had no idea how things had ended up like this... But still, I was the Student Council President. Everyone in the cult always called me ‘young lady.’ I had to take responsibility.”

In a room of thirty-three square meters, wrapped in the scent of white flowers, Cheon Yohwa’s story flowed.