LIGHTNOVELWORLD Chapter 39
Kenji didn’t wake up until Rise completed her bow and adjusted her posture.
The incessant beeping from the headphones pressed against his ears danced rhythmically, only allowing him to open his eyes when it seemed the sound would finally cease.
“Ugh!”
As soon as he awoke, Kenji began to retch violently. Having kept his eyes closed for so long, his nausea was even more intense than Rise’s, and the way he heaved felt almost as if his stomach contents—including his very insides—might just burst forth.
After a while of this anguished gagging, Kenji rolled back over, eyes spinning, and put his headphones back on, lying down as if he could recapture that sensation from before. Eyes closed again, he struggled to experience that beeping sound once more, but alas, his efforts were in vain.
“Why, why can’t I hear it?!”
The beeping was still playing through the headphones.
It was loud enough that even Rise, who was pulling herself together from afar, could hear it, but Kenji, the one wearing the headphones, could not.
It was a strange occurrence.
Foaming at the mouth, Kenji went into a frenzy, needing the sound, attempting to imitate the beeping with his own voice. But—
“Why! Why! Just this! Only this!”
Kenji clawed at his hair in desperation, screaming in agony.
With such intensity that he pulled out tufts of it, blood began to bead and flow down onto his forehead. Yet, completely oblivious to the warm, tickling sensation of blood running down his face, Kenji simply screamed, only screamed.
“I need it back! I need the sound again!”
He howled, his voice tearing through the air.
His tongue felt parched and dry, foam gathering in his mouth as he screamed madly, rolling on the floor in desperation.
After a while, he crawled over on all fours and clutched Jinseong’s pant leg, shouting.
“I want to experience that ecstasy again!”
But Jinseong only smiled calmly and did not grant Kenji’s request.
Kenji clung to Jinseong, pleading and begging, attempting to get the headphones back to listen for the sound, and eventually he latched onto Rise, saying,
“Rise! Please, ask that spirit—no, that noble being! Request to hear the sound, make them let me listen!”
“…Please?”
“Yes! Aren’t you a beauty? If a beauty like you asks, they might at least pretend to listen!”
Did he even know what he was saying?
Rise stared at Kenji with a pitying gaze, which gradually turned icy.
The warmth of compassion and empathy in her eyes hardened and chilled, resembling an iceberg in the Arctic.
“…Is that what a father should say to his daughter right now?”
Just because she’s beautiful, he thinks asking will sway them?
That statement felt like…
Like…
Rise couldn’t bear to think further.
With a cold gaze and an utterly sorrowful expression, she looked solely at her father.
Witnessing this, Jinseong spoke up.
“Didn’t I say I came to grant you blessings? This is how your father will certainly look in the future.”
Rise shot her head up at Jinseong’s words, perhaps feeling resentment, but soon found herself lowering her head again, reminded of the vow she had just made.
Yet, Jinseong approached her, placing a comforting hand on her shoulder as he whispered,
“Do you know what I discovered in your father’s room?”
“…I don’t know.”
“LSD, methamphetamine, and even ayahuasca.”
“Methamphetamine… That’s crystal meth, right?”
“Indeed.”
“I don’t know what the others are…”
Each one was appallingly dreadful.
The common thread among them was that they were all hallucinogens.
“Of all these, methamphetamine was the most frequently used, so disaster must have struck.”
Jinseong looked at Kenji, in a dogeza pose, begging for sound, examining the scratches hidden beneath his disheveled clothing. They looked like wounds from scratching at insect bites.
“That’s what we call the Meth Bug.”
Meth Bug.
A hallmark symptom of methamphetamine use, and a sign visible in those who have fully succumbed to the drug. Methamphetamine is said to create a sensation of insects crawling beneath the skin, and in trying to alleviate that torment, users scratch until wounds like those appear.
If one goes further, they become emaciated, irritable, and their teeth degrade into a mess. They turn into lunatics willing to do anything for drugs, their minds completely shattered, never to return to their former selves.
“Even junkies avoid methamphetamine. What in the world made him want to ingest that? Did he want to drink hallucinogens to dream his ideal dream or something?”
“An ideal dream…”
Rise looked at Kenji, as if comprehending something.
But her momentary pity swiftly evaporated, replaced by the sight of Kenji, who was now grotesquely thrashing about in madness.
“Can my father ever return to who he was?”
She asked earnestly, her expression filled with hope.
The terror she had experienced just before falling into a dream, the awe and submission she felt toward Jinseong, and the shameful sight of her father all mingled within her.
Rise’s mental state was approaching its limit.
Yet Jinseong did not turn away from Rise’s crumbling psyche.
“It is possible.”
With a rabbit-like smile, he pointed at Kenji.
“What do you think he saw with his eyes shut?”
In the depths of her unconsciousness, Rise grasped a state of meditation.
There, she saw a vast universe, stars, engaged in dialogue, and tasted the fragments of enlightenment.
It was a clear enhancement of her spirit.
Although it was an experience too overwhelming for young, untrained Rise to bear, it was undoubtedly a fateful opportunity.
So what did Kenji see?
What had Kenji, who listened to a cyber drug rather than a direct recording from Jinseong, gazed upon and experienced?
She didn’t know.
Exploring one’s own unconsciousness is an unknown domain; peeking into someone else’s is even less likely.
But perhaps within the endless euphoric embrace of dimethyltryptamine and the cocktail of endorphins released by the cyber drug, Kenji had felt unbridled happiness.
Maybe he had glimpsed something he desperately wanted to see, so much that he reached for hallucinogens.
But that fleeting happiness was now gone.
It had become the foundation for treatment and a collar held in Jinseong’s hands.
“I don’t know what he saw. But without my permission, he will never be able to recreate it.”
Jinseong smiled, recalling the Sparganum embedded in Kenji’s body.
Rise stared at Jinseong’s confidently smiling face for a while before lowering her head deeply.
It was a different kind of submission than the one Kenji displayed on the ground.
* *
Day of Nightmares.
From that day onward, the shrine began to change.
First, the shrine’s door became locked.
The Torii, which used to greet worshippers warmly, was now sporting a ‘no entry’ sign, preventing anyone from entering. The once bright red of the Torii had turned darker, now a grim crimson. Instead, large candles flanked either side, glowing brightly as if to illuminate the entrance.
Upon entering, there wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere on the shrine’s grounds.
It was as if the place had erased dust itself instead of sweeping it away with brooms, and there were no fallen leaves or trash to be found at all.
Stepping into the main hall, the sacred body once cherished now floated in a pool of blood, bubbling ominously, and where that body should rest was a luminous sphere of white light.
The sphere shone primarily white, yet if one stared too long, it would seem to darken into black, drawing one’s mind into a void. Focusing more intently revealed dots contracting and expanding, oscillating between being a dot and a sphere, continuously morphing, crafting forms that resembled lines and shapes, ever-changing in appearance.
But ultimately, its shape resembled a star, precisely the form Rise had seen just before.
Beneath the sphere of light was a meticulously polished bronze mirror, which reflected not the light, but instead, projected Rise’s spirit onto the outside world.
In simpler terms, the image was a reality cast from Rise’s own memory.
And hovering around the sphere of light were two eerie figures, as if standing guard.
A deformed, vacant-looking child ghost flitted about within a certain radius, as if to protect the glowing sphere, constantly watching to ensure nobody approached. Its movements brought to mind a child playing pretend, lending it an oddly cute appearance.
In contrast, a Slime-like entity loitered around the sacred body, ceaselessly altering its form to guard the strands of Gold Thread. It created walls like a waterfall, enveloped in a dome shape, and extended thorns like bars, all the while shifting softly to protect the luminous sphere.
Jinseong, watching the spectacle silently, turned to Kenji and asked.
“Are you ready?”
Under Kenji’s eyes lay dark rings, as if he had endured countless years of mental anguish. These dark circles were pronounced, and the vacant gaze in his eyes revealed no hint of vitality.
He looked akin to a zombie created by a Voodoo Practitioner.
“Of course!”
The moment a glimmer of resolution returned to Kenji’s sunken eyes was only when he thought of the cyber drug. Yet Jinseong had no intention of granting Kenji pleasure, despite having provided it to him many times before.
Naturally, Kenji went on a rampage.
To show him a taste of heaven only to snatch it away?
That was nothing short of destruction in Kenji’s eyes.
He begged.
Bowed his head until his forehead nearly cracked against the ground.
Begged until the skin of his palms peeled back.
Kneeled until he could no longer straighten up, shouting and screaming until he coughed up blood.
But even begging was futile; reality refused to change, and Jinseong had no desire to bend to Kenji’s will.
If anything, he could have resisted or perhaps threatened, but that too was beyond Kenji’s capability.
The horrors he had previously faced and the Sparganum lodged in his brain tightly shackled both his body and mind, leaving him no choice but to beg humbly, like a dog with its tail tucked.
Time and again, he repeated his pleas until finally, he chose to transmute his yearning into resentment.
That resentment turned towards those around him, who were on the same level as him.
“Those bastards! They should all end up just like me!”
People who were indulging in pleasures he could no longer partake in.
His former companions in drug use.
Kenji wished them to be in the same dire straits he found himself in—their fates mirroring his own; he wanted others to share his fate, to experience the hell of losing a taste of paradise.
Though filled with an amalgam of emotions, jealousy ranked foremost among them.
Jealousy.
That lowly emotion dominated him utterly.
“I’m the only one like this….”
In a way, Kenji might well be a truly exceptional drug addiction therapist.
He was so passionately dedicated to liberating others from the grip of drugs; if that doesn’t qualify him as a therapist, then what would?
“Everyone else should be just like me! Just like me!”
Kenji shouted, his eyes glistening with madness.
His craving for pleasures forever out of reach and the insanity clawing at his mind swirled together, forming a tempest within him.