LIGHTNOVELWORLD Chapter 38
『 Ooooooooooooom(ॐ)—————– 』
The sound coming from the headphones was elongated to the point where it hardly felt like a voice at all, yet it resonated with a distinct tone and vibration all the same. The voice spread out in a way that seemed unbelievable for a single breath, continuously vibrating the headphones and causing the delicate ears of Rise to flutter with its cheap buzz.
The vibrations originating from her ears plunged directly into her brain, stimulating her mind and unveiling a mysterious landscape through the essence of the incense.
* * *
『 ॐ————- 』
Rise felt as though she were floating in a state of weightlessness. The sensation in her body was akin to being completely naked in the depths of space, drifting freely and feeling wrapped in amniotic fluid just before birth. It was also reminiscent of her spirit soaring high above, as if it had detached from her flesh.
Her body felt endlessly light.
Like feathers slowly descending, she was lifted far beyond the pull of gravity and freed from the constraints of air, gliding through the ether. Just moving one finger felt like stirring through a pool of insensitivity, neither cold nor hot, while moving her back made it feel as though invisible wings were holding her up, allowing her to soar through the sky with an overwhelming sensation of freedom and liberation.
The vibrations she could hear only amplified her feeling of floating.
The long, drawn-out sound of vibration.
Is this what it feels like to listen to sweet music while submerged deep in the ocean?
Is this what it’s like to hear sounds played as lullabies while immersed in the womb?
She felt infinitely at ease, along with a hint of longing for something beyond reach.
Finally, when the long vibration came to an end, a brief pause hit just before a new round of vibrations began and she slowly opened her eyes.
“Eeek!”
She opened her eyes and saw something.
Eyes.
A colossal eye that seemed ludicrously huge by any human standard was spinning and traversing across a spherical body. The massive stripes engraved on this sphere shifted as if they were alive, turning curves into lines and lines into curves continuously.
An endlessly enormous thing.
Simultaneously harboring the same feeling of weightlessness, it felt even lighter than her own body.
This being, standing in an ink-black space, floated in that state without air and gazed down at the world with its gigantic eye, expressing its existence only through vibrations, which made its appearance truly mysterious.
It seemed to want to speak something to Rise in a voice so ethereal it resembled clouds dissipating, approaching her through the vibrations of the invisible, stemming from the depths of that dark space.
『 ॐ————- 』
It was a vibration.
A gigantic vibration.
A vibration that resonated in Rise’s brain and stimulated her soul.
Confronted with the eye of Jupiter, she felt her body and spirit tremble endlessly with the vibrations. And when her consciousness seemed to be pulled into that eye and concentrated into a single point that pierced its essence—
『 ————-! 』
Rise understood the meaning behind the vibrations.
Not with flesh, but with spirit; not with the soul, but with the heart.
Yes.
She embraced and understood it solely with her heart.
And the instant she grasped that meaning, her vision exploded like fireworks before her eyes.
“Ah….”
It was an explosion of colors.
More exquisite and beautiful than anything she had seen in a kimono exhibition when she was little, the vibrant, sparkling colors burst forth in every direction. They spread out orderly, transforming the previously monochrome universe into a beautiful tapestry, and as the colors pulsed and swirled, they became art in and of themselves.
What should this be called?
Should it be referred to as the colors of the universe?
The stripes on Jupiter unraveled like threads, melding into those colors, while the smoke wafted like a sigh, scattering and beginning to seep into the world.
Only the eye remained until the very end.
The swirling, flowing eye continued to gaze upon Rise, revealing its magnificence, then began to absorb the colors of the universe spreading everywhere around it, contracting endlessly.
It shrank.
The colossal eye of the star became a storm.
The storm shone brightly in the darkness, swirling around, radiating spiral lights created by the colors it was consuming. The twinkling lights, even with the final cries, couldn’t escape the future of compression into a single point.
It shrunk.
Smaller and smaller.
The storm became a vortex.
The vortex turned into a sphere.
The sphere became a pearl.
Eventually, it became a dot, and nothing remained in the world.
Only a blank canvas remained in its place.
『 ——————-! 』
But a canvas exists to be filled.
That dot seemed to have absorbed everything for the sake of the now, filling the world with bright light that even stained the spirit. The bursting light flooded the world, beginning to sketch a form.
“Snake?”
It was a snake.
The rainbow-made snake spiraled around her, gradually increasing its speed until it left nothing but a rainbow afterimage in its wake. That afterimage, like a rainbow woven of light, could not be grasped by the hand; no matter how hard one waved at it, its essence remained untouchable.
It resembled a mirage indeed.
The rainbow began to color the world, causing flowers to bloom everywhere.
As if paint spilled onto white paper and spread out forming representations of flowers, the vibrant colors emerging from the rainbow began to dye her sight, repeating and repeating themselves like a beautiful work crafted from smeared colors on folded paper, enveloping the entire world beyond her immediate view.
And the blooming flowers whispered to her ears through vibrations.
『 What is God? 』
『 What is faith? 』
『 What is the correct belief? 』
『 Is blind faith always right? 』
『 What if what you worship is a lie? 』
『 Is doubt the opposite of faith? 』
『 What is the value of truth found through doubt? 』
The vibrations erupted with questions.
Deep within her heart, they inquired of her arising unconscious.
The unconscious being, existing in the vibrancy of the universe, could only answer through vibrations, and it could respond only with what she had learned and acquired.
That it could answer only with what was learned and acquired stemmed from the natural limitations of one who had not transcended to the spiritual level; a painful barrier of learning.
She shouted the incoherent thoughts swirling in her mind with no sequence or coherence.
It was too raw to transform into language, couldn’t form sentences, only floating words striving to color their meaning. Yet the colorful echoes merely continued to penetrate her awareness, whispering their essences into the world.
As the fragrance wafted towards her nose, though she may not have wished for it, like the stimulating colors that seeped into her eyes without desire, only naturally, the flowers whispered in her ears.
The colors flowed freely, forming shapes like the eye of Jupiter.
However, the blossomed flowers did not fade, nor did the rainbow’s brilliance dissipate from the world; the flowing flowers, each time they brushed past Rise, posed different questions.
For a practitioner, these questions could be a sorely desired dialogue, vital sustenance in nurturing the heart, but for the young shamaness Rise, they were certainly unbearable.
Amidst the relentless barrage of inquiries, she answered them as best she could.
Disjointed, fragmented phrases, seemingly unrelated words.
These words floated along with her being, their meanings blending into light, and the miracles of connection materialized into coherent sentences from time to time, even as the continuous whispering persisted.
And at the moment a light reached the flower,
The flower became a mandala.
The mandala blossomed with colors, affirming her answers with repeated hues, planting seeds through the massive vibrations that connected her spirit, soul, and flesh as she began to bloom. During this blooming, a white thread approached her like lightning, weaving and weaving as it tore through the colors before her, forming something.
That form had a truly rare, distinctly large shape that radiated presence akin to a star.
『 Awaken. 』
And so, she was embraced by the colors and closed her eyelids, plunging into the darkness.
* * *
“Ugh, uugh!”
Rise awoke.
And the first thing she did upon waking was not to scream or admire the lingering echoes, but rather to vomit everything inside her.
She knelt down, practically squeezing her stomach to hurl, retching continuously for what felt like an age.
When she finally finished, Jinseong approached her slowly and asked.
“What did you see?”
Still dazed, Rise looked up at Jinseong and replied.
“I saw… a star…”
At her answer, Jinseong smiled faintly.
He looked into her eyes and said, “That is the deity you shall serve.”
Upon hearing that, Rise’s eyes trembled violently. As if she was deep in thought, they swayed back and forth, filled with confusion on her face. Yet even amidst that confusion, the grand landscape she had seen just before awakening kept replaying in her mind, occasionally causing her to wear an expression that seemed to drift away from reality. Her gaze filled with a weightlessness increasingly bolstered amidst the turmoil.
Before long, she lowered her head from Jinseong’s gaze, slowly rising to her feet.
She walked over to a peculiar stone shaped like a dog and stared at it for a long, long time.
As she gazed, the divine stone became peculiar, and then the peculiar stone turned into a mere rock, until the rock itself turned into something worthless, she continued to gaze vacantly at it.
Eventually, reaching that end, she looked at Jinseong and knelt down.
Then, bowing respectfully, she said, “Please grant me a new deity for the shrine.”
That pose was reminiscent of one truly possessing genuine faith.
“I will devote everything.”
That vision was truly beautiful.
“I shall do so.”