49
The sticky, parched heat of the summer night finally dissipated as night fell. Ieiri Naoko leaned against the windowsill, the sleeves of her white work clothes rolled up to her elbows, half her arms dangling into the night. A night breeze swept in from the depths of the sky, carrying the cooling air of the day-baked concrete floor. As it brushed against the back of her sweat-soaked neck, it felt a tingling, refreshing sensation.
The cigarette was held between her fingers, the dark red sparks brightening with each inhale, then slowly dimming with each breath. Grayish-white smoke escaped from her lips, first a wisp of condensed mist, then shattered by the night wind, dissipating into the starlight. The window sill scraped against her bones, the slight pain mingling with the nicotine dizziness, reminding her of the midnight after she finished reading that book a few days ago...
Even the most exhausting human imagination couldn't describe the subtlety of the summary. Some unknown, unobserved, higher-dimensional being descended upon her cramped, crowded room. It enveloped her like water, drowning her. She could no longer tell whether it was a form of protection or an invasion.
"What a mess..."
Whether it was himself or those two guys.
She tried hard to restrain her memories, trying to control them from appearing on their own, but she was powerless, just like the memories that day that were out of control and were randomly flipped through.
*
From the moment she uttered that name, the world seemed to be frozen.
The sound disappeared, the wind stagnated, and even her breath condensed on her lips, turning into a pale mist. She stood in absolute silence, as if the entire universe had been drained of air, leaving only her and the door.
Yes, a door.
The door was black, but not pure black—more like a shadow left after all colors had been devoured. Fine, vein-like lines floated on its surface, like a living thing slowly breathing. An eerie glimmer seeped from the edge of the doorframe, like moonlight soaked in rancid grease, sticky and murky.
It was dark, as if layer upon layer of filth had splashed in front of the door and polluted it.
It had no handle, no keyhole, not even an obvious gap, but she could feel it - it was **inviting** her.
An irresistible temptation seeped out from behind the door, like sweet honey mixed with the smell of rust, entwining her thoughts. Her fingertips stretched forward uncontrollably, and just as they were about to touch the door, she suddenly heard -
Dong.
A dull sound, like a heartbeat, came from behind the door.
She had already arrived at the door, her palm pressed against the cold door panel, and she felt a certain rhythm.
That door...was waiting for her.
She stood in front of the door, her fingertips trembling slightly as they hovered over it. It wasn't completely closed, and the wind seeping through the crack carried a fishy-sweet scent, like the scent of old rust mixed with rotting flowers.
The darkness behind the door called to her.
She took a deep breath and pushed the door open.
At first, she thought it was just another world—a more mysterious, more magnificent one. Starlight shimmered like broken diamonds across the deep purple sky, strange creations glowed faintly in the darkness, and tiny golden dust floated in the air like shattered sunlight. But she felt an inexplicable dread. She ran forward, her footsteps echoing in the empty, alien world.
She didn't notice that the "starlight" was moving slowly with her footsteps.
She didn't notice that the "creatures" were silently shrinking as she passed by.
She didn't even know that the "ground" she stepped on was oozing out a sticky liquid, like a slowly healing wound of some creature.
It was not until she was tired from running, squatted down, hugged herself, and looked at the fake starry sky to catch her breath, that she discovered that the stars were "blinking" one after another.
That's not a star.
Those are eyes.
At first, it was just a faint chill on the back of her neck, like a spider's silk brushing gently. But when she turned her stiff neck, trying to find the source of the gaze, she found herself immersed in a sticky, viscous gaze from all directions. The air grew thick, and every breath felt like swallowing cold mercury, her lungs slowly compressed by an invisible pressure.
Her retinas began to sting. Within the shadows that should have been pitch black, countless tiny, wriggling points of light gradually emerged—not light, but pupils. Thousands of lines of sight split from the void, like the seeds of a peeled pomegranate, or like a pile of slimy fish eggs, each reflecting her contorted, pained face.
“Ah—a…”
Her throat uttered incomprehensible words.
She wanted to scream, but her voice was strangled in her throat the moment her vocal cords vibrated. Those gazes penetrated her pores, wormed their way through her veins, like countless icy centipedes crawling through her bones. Her knees buckled uncontrollably, but even falling was a luxury—space itself had frozen, freezing her in a crumbling position.
To her horror, she suddenly understood these gazes.
They didn't come from the outside world—they hatched from every deep sleep, every moment of discouragement, every suppressed evil thought. The abyss had never been elsewhere; it had been lured here by herself, hiding inside her skull. Now, it finally tore through the top of her head and gazed at this poor creature who had finally discovered the truth with a motherly, gentle gaze.
"You have an opportunity to ask me a question. Do you want to use it now?"
Use it up...
Naoko Ieiri began to regret her reckless impulsiveness in summoning this... monster.
Her lips began to tremble, like two dead leaves about to fall in the wind. The air forced from her throat collapsed between her teeth, leaving only hoarse, unpitched gasps. The tip of her tongue touched the roof of her mouth and then slipped off, like the trembling limbs of a newborn animal trying to stand for the first time.
“a…”
A single syllable exploded, piercing the dead silence. Her saliva suddenly became thick as glue, adhering her vocal cords to the walls of her throat. Like a baby cleaning milk stains, she had to slowly grind the word with her gums until it became soft and malleable.
Each syllable clashed like rusty gears, jarring her chest. She heard her own voice, horribly unfamiliar—dry, bloodshot, as if polished by sandpaper. The smell of rust filled her nostrils, as if tiny capillaries were bursting.
“■■■■■■■■■■?”
The last word finally fell to the ground, shattering. She suddenly coughed violently, her spine cracking as she bent. The broken syllables shimmered in the darkness, like torn medical records scattered on the morgue floor. Only then did she realize, with a start, that learning to speak again was even more painful than the first time—after all, babies don't need to salvage dissolved language from the void.
〖Won't〗
This is the agreement
A sharp burning sensation suddenly emanated from the palm of her left hand, as if someone were pressing a scalding iron into her flesh. She clenched her fist, her nails digging deep into the lines of her palm, but she couldn't suppress the fire dancing beneath her skin.
As she trembled and opened her palm, a scarlet crack snaked out from the end of her lifeline. The flesh cracked like a ripe pomegranate, revealing the pulsating red beneath. It was not a wound, but an eye slowly opening.
The wet ciliary blood vessels trembled at the edges, and the black abyss at the center of the pupil shrank to the size of a needle tip. She saw the eyeball rolling, the blood sticking out into thin silver threads. The palm lines became curse lines wrapped around the eyeball, and the love line happened to run through the pupil, like a scar that would never heal.
While her scream was still stuck in her throat—
The eye winked at her.
A warm liquid suddenly oozed from between her fingers. It wasn't blood, but some kind of transparent mucus with a rusty smell. She frantically wiped it on her clothes, but a sharp stinging pain spread through her palms, as if countless tiny teeth were gnawing at her flesh. The eyes were smiling, and she could clearly see her own distorted reflection emerging on the scarlet cornea.
A melting self with compound eyes.
“…”
He clenched his palms, and the reversal technique spontaneously healed the wound. His fingertips still felt cold—as if he had truly penetrated some invisible barrier. The night wind carried a familiar scent, and the faint light in the distance cast a dark afterimage on his retina.
The air conditioner outdoor unit was buzzing and vibrating in the corner of the wall. She looked down and saw that she was standing barefoot on the tiles. Her right hand was still stretched forward, with her five fingers spread out towards the night sky, as if she wanted to catch a shooting star that just happened to streak across the sky.
Nothing had changed, as if the boundless and quiet starry sky and the door were all her hallucinations, but every detail in her memory was breathtakingly accurate - the pressure of the stars, the dense sight, and some unknown egg breaking out of the cocoon from within her body.
Everything is so real.
She slowly curled her fingers. The skin on her palm was intact, having been healed by the reversal technique without leaving any marks. But when she turned her hand over, a drop of warm liquid suddenly fell on her palm.
Not sweat.
I don't know when a tear started flowing, and it was seeping into the old scar along the lines of my palm.
It turned out that she had already been in tears - when she met that existence.
*
The memory is returned and locked again.
The Milky Way stretched across the sky like a streak of spilled milk. She counted the stars mindlessly, her cigarette ash piled up like a long trail. A moth had landed on the back of her hand, its wings fluttering softly with its breath. From behind her came Geto Suguru's cryptic mutterings, startling the moth into flight, disappearing in the humming, vibrating air conditioner.
She suddenly felt that the smoke rings she exhaled shared the same shape with the nebulae billions of light years away.
She took a deep drag on the cigarette, letting the scorching smoke roll in her lungs, then slowly exhaled. The gray smoke ring twisted and deformed in the night, like some kind of dissipating spell. The cigarette butt still flickered with a dark red spark, but she didn't care. She simply pinched the hot spot with her thumb and index finger -
"laugh."
The subtle sound of burning flesh was particularly clear in the silence, and a wisp of burnt white smoke rose from between her fingers. The pain pierced her nerves, but she didn't even frown, simply staring at the crushed cigarette butt curled into a gray-black residue in her palm.
Her skin began to crawl.
Beneath the scorch marks, flesh reassembled itself, as if alive. A faint blue glow shone beneath the pale texture—the trace of the technique coursing through the veins. The eschar peeled away, and new skin covered the wound at a visible speed. In an instant, the wound was restored to its original state, leaving not even a trace of red.
She let go of her hand and the ashes flew away in the wind.
The warmth of phantom pain still lingered on his fingertips, but there was no longer any evidence of his recent self-destruction. This was the price, and also the curse—this body had long been imprinted with a permanent repair technique, making even self-punishment a fleeting and futile endeavor.
She looked at her empty palms and suddenly smiled. When a wound heals too quickly, it can sometimes be more despairing than if it never heals.
"Primordial Celestia..."
The whisper was like an icy centipede, suddenly burrowing into her ear canal and crawling along the inside of her skull. She shuddered, the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end, as if countless tiny ice needles were creeping down her spine.
"No……"
A breath escaped her throat, but her legs had already moved before her conscious awareness. Her slippers slipped on the tile, and her left foot tripped over her right, nearly causing her to fall. Her right hand gripped the doorframe tightly, her nails scratching five pale marks on the glass door.
In the room, the halo of light from the ceiling suddenly began to flicker.
The shadow of the glass cabinet door twisted and expanded in the corner of the wall, and the papers on the desk moved without wind. She stumbled to the bed, and the overturned cup rolled wetly on the tile floor. As her fingers trembled and touched the lying Xia Yujie, she suddenly heard—
**Oh**
The voice came from Geto Suguru's mouth, but it was not his voice.
His breath stagnated in his chest, his fingertips dug into his palms, but he felt no pain. Moonlight leaked in through the gap in the curtains, just across that familiar face. Jay's eyelashes trembled, but under his eyelids turned out -
There were two scarlet full moons.
The color of the eyes that opened was no longer Jay's.
His pupils resembled the aperture of a broken camera, sometimes expanding into pools of blood that devoured the entire white of his eye, sometimes shrinking to pinpoint-sized red dots. Each expansion and contraction was accompanied by a sticky, watery sound, as if some viscous liquid were stirring behind his eyeball. His irises were melting, and black blood threads crawled across his sclera like living creatures, gradually forming strange runes.
The corners of his mouth rose at a perfectly symmetrical angle, smiling at Ieiri Naoko.
〖See you again〗
〖Glass〗
Jay's vocal cords vibrated, but what came out was layers of reverberation, as if ten people were speaking at the same time deep in his throat.
She fell back under the gaze, and in the flickering light she saw something wriggling beneath Jay's skin, stretching the pale surface section by section.
His gaze was fixed on the wriggling scarlet—the lines seemed alive, snaking out from beneath the collar, like countless tiny blood snakes slithering beneath the skin. Every vein glowed with a sickly sheen, as if molten sulfur wasn't flowing beneath the skin, but blood.
When the lines climbed up his neck, his Adam's apple suddenly rolled like a spasm.
"Puff."
A vertical crack opened across the pale skin, a sticky red fluid seeping from the gap. A bloodshot eyeball suddenly popped out, its wet eyelids blinking frantically, lashes dangling from thin strands of mucus. The pupil, like muddied ink, shifted shape constantly—sometimes shrinking to a pinpoint, sometimes expanding into an irregular, jagged shape.
The eyeball suddenly turned to himself.
Dense black dots appeared on the iris, and those black dots began to rotate, like stars in the night sky. When the eyeball curved into a crescent shape -
It's laughing.
The sound of fabric tearing suddenly rang out. More scarlet lines emerged from Geto's sleeves and collar, and those lines began to ooze out tiny drops of blood, condensing into floating spells in the air. And that eyeball still stared at her, her distorted reflection gradually emerging in the pupil.
A reflection that is developing the same lines.
"Uh... glass?"
Xia Yujie's fingertips hovered in mid-air, about to touch his forehead. His voice was low and cautious, the tail end almost shattering in the air.
She swung her hand violently, and with a crisp "snap" sound, her wrist was deflected.
Her breathing was so hard that it seemed as if it was forced out from a broken throat.
Xia Yujie's arms remained frozen in place, his fingers slightly curled, his brows furrowed, the corners of his mouth twitching as if he were about to say something, but in the end, he simply pursed his lips. His eyelashes drooped, casting a trembling shadow under his eyes.
Tears rolled down her cheeks and dripped onto the floor.
One drop.
Two drops.
Ieiri Naoko cried silently, like some kind of silent accusation.
His Adam's apple rolled, as if swallowing back countless unspoken words. In the end, he only managed to squeeze out one sentence:
"I'm sorry for making you worry."
His fingertips unconsciously curled up, then slowly clenched into fists. He lowered his head, a forced curve at the corner of his mouth, as if trying to force a soothing smile, but it only made his expression look more broken.
The apology fell lightly to the ground, like a ball of ash wet by rain, without even retaining any warmth.
"Put your clothes on, pervert."
In the end, she just spoke in a hoarse voice, wiped her tears, stood up from the ground, threw a white coat to him, turned her back and didn't want to look at his current appearance.
Scarlet, eerie lines crisscrossed its naked upper body, making it seem alive. The eye that had emerged from its cocoon on its Adam's apple had shrunk back into its flesh, leaving only the scarlet mark of a closed eye.
As Geto tried to get dressed, the lines on his skin began to twist wildly. He felt something grip his heart. Every beat squeezed out a sticky pain. The lines twisted on his body, and his skin bulged like melted wax, revealing dense—
Eyelids.
The eyelids opened one after another, revealing the red eyeballs underneath. Each eye rolled around, the pupils shrank to the size of a needle tip, and they all stared at the clothes that were about to cover them.
They are against having their vision obstructed, they don't want him to wear clothes.
"Glass, I might have to be a pervert for a while."
They are alive.
He could vaguely sense the consciousness of these eyes, which kept conveying a message to him: I want to see, I want to see, I want to see, I want to see, I want to see, I want to see...
He tried to talk to them, tried to calm their restlessness, and thought there would be communication barriers, but it went surprisingly smoothly.
The lines gradually retracted into his heart under his comfort. Two open eyes appeared on the backs of his hands. There was a faint burning pain on the tip of his tongue, and an eye was rooted in his tongue.
The eyes rolling up and down along the Adam's apple seem to be very satisfied with the current state. They quietly disguise themselves as tattoos and occasionally blink.
"Is Satoru still awake?"
Geto Xia Yu looked back at the person who was unconscious in the bed next to him, feeling a little worried.
He was favored and protected by the primordial celestial body, and was given these eyes to protect him, so he was never contaminated by anything. Glass had a reversal technique to protect his brain, but only Wu faced the contamination from it directly.
He was worried that Wu would undergo an irreversible change.
"Jay, did you get a tattoo? It's so ugly."
“…”
Geto Suguru grabbed the pillow and threw it over.
Worrying about this idiot for nothing.
"I'm glad you're okay." Glass lit another cigarette. "I just don't know if everyone who has read this book has called out this name."
If that's really the case, what's the difference between this and it coming to this world in person?
"No." Geto lowered his head to button his shirt, slowly raising his eyelids, a misty calmness floating in his pupils. "It's just the three of us."
“We are its anchor.”
A smile appeared on the corner of his mouth, and he was secretly expecting something - the three of them would serve as the vessels for its arrival, waiting for it to come to the new world.
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