[I tried to remember exactly what it had said.]
[[Aspirant. Welcome to the Nightmare ?????. Prepare for your First Trial...]]
Pain arrived without warning.... Actually it felt like it was always there he just discovered it now.
The body dropped to its knees so fast it looked trained, as if suffering was a command it recognized.
Dry Water didn't have time to brace or understand. He was simply inside it, forced to experience a sensation he had forgotten how to name.
He tried to locate it, to give it direction right, left, behind the eyes but it had no shape.
It wasn't in the skull or the spine. It was in the mind itself, like something had reached in and squeezed.
Dry Water realized, with a strange horror, that he didn't remember the last time he had felt anything physical.
Centuries had blurred into stillness, and his thoughts had grown used to being untouched.
Then the pain stopped.
Stopping so completely it felt like it had never been real.
For a second he stayed frozen on his knees, waiting for the aftershock that never came, his mind buzzing with the sick certainty that it could return whenever it wanted.
[I tried once more, slower this time. I wanted to understand what was happening.]
[[Aspirant. Welcome to the Nightmare ?????-]]
It came back instantly, worse than before.
Dry Water's breath caught, not because he needed air, but because the body reacted as if it did.
He felt his jaw tighten. He felt his throat lock. He felt the muscles in his back seize as if trying to protect organs that were not under attack.
He tried again to understand it. He tried to track the source.
But pain like this did not come from anywhere.
It simply happened.
He would have gone unconscious if he still had the right to. But the body didn't allow it. Even collapse was controlled, as if something had decided he was not permitted to escape through weakness.
The pain ended again, cleanly.
Dry Water remained kneeling, trembling in a way he couldn't stop, left with the humiliating knowledge that the body could be made to suffer and then reset like a toy.
***
Dry Water observed as Ayanokouji moved.
What stood out wasn't the creature, or even the rain. It was the way Ayanokouji's attention arrived.
He did not look at the vowalker with curiosity.
He looked at it the way a person looks at a lock when they already know where the keyhole is.
Dry Water had watched humans fight.
He had seen panic, anger, desperation, and pride. He had seen hesitation so thick it made the air heavy. He had seen mercy, and he had seen cruelty.
Ayanokouji didn't treat the vowalker like an enemy. He treated it like a structure that needed to be opened.
Like something that existed only to be processed.
That was what made Dry Water feel unsettled.
And the memory wasn't letting him stay at a distance from it.
***
Dry Water had become sensitive after centuries of isolation not emotionally, but physically.
He had forgotten how bodies felt, and now he was being forced into one.
Every sensation came back exaggerated, unfiltered, as if his nerves had been waiting for this moment to punish him for thinking he could live without them.
[I moved behind it and climbed its back, each motion controlled to the millimeter. There was no rush-only precision.]
[My free hand locked onto the seam pulsing down the center of its head. It felt like flesh stretched over bone, warm and trembling.]
Warm.
That single detail made Dry Water's mind recoil.
Warm meant alive. Warm meant time. Warm meant the kind of reality you only notice when you are still something that can bleed.
The shard went in.
Dry Water felt the resistance first, the dense pressure of tissue pushing back against stone, and then the sudden give that made his stomach turn.
Something hot spilled over his fingers.
It wasn't just wetit clung, thick and heavy, sliding along his skin in a way that made his hand feel claimed.
Dry Water's mind froze so hard it nearly went silent, as if refusing to process the sensation would undo it.
But the memory didn't slow down.
The hand moved anyway.
The fingers pressed deeper anyway.
The body continued its work with the same calm it used for walking.
'Uh... I just remembered flesh blood used to be warm.'
The thought was small. That was what made it unbearable.
Because it was the kind of thought only a living person would have.
The vowalker collapsed, and the body fell with it. The impact hit Dry Water's back and pain lit up immediately.
Ayanokouji's body treated pain like information.
Dry Water's mind treated it like insult.
He could feel the difference, and the difference made him sick.
***
[I began descending the hill, retracing the same path I had used to climb. My earlier footprints were still visible, pressed faintly into the brittle dirt.]
Dry Water noticed it immediately.
Not the footprints themselves.
The choice.
Ayanokouji could replay this nightmare cleanly.
Dry Water was already being forced to feel the pain n, the cold, the pressure of the ground under each step, there were no broken frames.
So why was he looking for the footprints to go back? If his memory is so good why put a fake act?
Dry Water's mind reached for explanations and rejected them one by one.
It looked like... procedure.
And that thought was what made Dry Water uneasy.
Because if Ayanokouji had known from the beginning, then this memory wasn't being remembered.
It was being executed.
'Did he know from the start?'
***
[I wasn't testing random patches. I wasn't wasting time casting water in all directions. I was advancing with surgical precision, throwing the water only forward, then walking to the furthest confirmed safe point.]
[After each step, I would double back, refill, and repeat.]
[I did it multiple times.]
Dry Water watched, and the discomfort grew in a quieter way.
There was something deeply wrong about how clean it was.
Ayanokouji didn't move like someone lost in a nightmare.
Dry Water's body kept up, but he could feel the strain building under the surface.
Not yet enough to slow him.
Just enough to remind him that the endurance belonged to Ayanokouji, not to him.
The tiredness sat somewhere behind the ribs, waiting for the moment the body would stop moving.
Waiting for rest to make it real.
***
As Dry Water ran from the vowalkers closing in behind him, The fatigue quietly followed him.
Like something patient.
He had known what Ayanokouji was doing from the start. The pattern was obvious. The water, the safe points, the controlled pace this wasn't escape. It was positioning.
But knowing the plan didn't prepare him for what the body would demand as payment.
He jumped into the well without hesitation.
The drop stole the air from his lungs.
The water swallowed him and he forced himself down, deeper and deeper, until the surface became a memory and the noise above turned distant.
He reached the bottom.
He found the end.
And he finally stopped.
He pressed himself into the dark and held his breath.
That was all it took.
The moment stillness arrived, the body remembered everything it had been postponing.
His muscles turned heavy in a single instant, His chest tightened, not from lack of air, but from the sheer effort of having been moving for so long.
Three kilometres.
Hours of walking.
Then running that felt endless.
And now, with nowhere to move and nothing to distract him, the fatigue finally claimed him.
Dry Water tried to push himself.
Just a little. Just enough to shift his shoulder, to adjust his legs, to make the pressure stop digging into him.
But to no avail, The body wasn't actually moving, It was just the memory being too perfect.
Whatever he wants doesn't matter, Memory will only move the way Ayanokouji wants.
It stayed locked in place, perfectly still at the bottom of the well, holding its breath like a machine following its last instruction.
Dry Water tried again.
Harder.
He sent the command with the kind of panic you only feel when you realize you are trapped inside your own limbs.
The muscles didn't even twitch.
It was calm.
***
There was a moment where Dry Water endured everything and didn't think for a single second.
It wasn't when the vowalkers chased him, and it wasn't when fatigue started stalking his limbs.
It was down inside the well, when Ayanokouji began swimming again and again through the dark.
He moved toward each vowalker like the water didn't exist.
The distance was treated like a simple number to erase. Dry Water felt the cold press into the skin, felt the drag against the arms, felt the lungs tighten from held breath that kept being held too long.
The body begged in the only way a body can. Shoulders burning. Fingers cramping. A dull shaking in the legs that had nothing to stand on.
Dry Water felt it all exaggerated, as if centuries without sensation had sharpened every nerve into something cruel.
And still, during that stretch, he stayed calm.
Ayanokouji reached the silt where the organs were.
The hands plunged in. It clung thickly.
Dry Water felt the texture with a sick clarity, the way it gripped and released, the way the water turned heavier around the wrist as the silt stirred.
Then the fingers closed around something.
Something soft.
Something that made his mind flinch even though the hand didn't.
Ayanokouji pulled it free, and the body didn't pause to acknowledge what it had touched. He simply tucked it away and swam again, repeating the motion with other Vowalkers.
Even Dry Water had became calm, he endured whatever he was feeling... Just for this moment he didn't do anything.
He paid respect to the Vowalkers for protecting everyone for so long.
It was finally their turn to rest.
Dry Water promised the dead Vowalkers that Ayanokouji will end the suffering of this land.
***
When Ayanokouji finally climbed out of the well, the body staggered. The legs wobbled and the spine bent for a moment, almost collapsing under the delayed weight of everything it had done.
But Ayanokouji forced it upright anyway.
Dry Water wasn't the same.
He staggered too, but it wasn't his legs that failed first. It was his mind. The memory began to blur at the edges.
And still the body didn't stop.
It kept moving forward.
Dragging him along with it.
Dry Water then realized just how weak his endurance has gotten.
***
[You have slain a dormant beast, Remorse Eater's Vowalker.]
[You have slain a dormant beast, Remorse Eater's Vowalker.]
[You have slain a dormant beast, Remorse Eater's Vowalker.]
[You have slain a dormant beast, Remorse Eater's Vowalker.]
[You have slain a dormant beast, Remorse Eater's Vowalker.]
[You have slain a dormant beast, Remorse Eater's Vowalker.]
[You have slain a dormant beast, Remorse Eater's Vowalker.]
[You have slain a dormant beast, Remorse Eater's Vowalker.]
[You have slain a dormant beast, Remorse Eater's Vowalker.]
Dry Water couldn't rest mentally anymore.
The words kept arriving with the same flat certainty, stacking on top of each other.
Each repetition landed inside his skull like a stamp.
***
When Ayanokouji finally collapsed on top of the hill, Dry Water thought that was it.
He thought this was the one moment the memory would allow him mercy.
Ayanokouji had rested here for hours in the real nightmare.
Dry Water could almost feel the shape of that rest, the way stillness would spread through the body and make the world stop pressing.
So he let himself exhale internally.
He prepared for the silence.
But Ayanokouji had something else planned.
The sun was still high when the body hit the ground.
And then it wasn't.
It slid across the sky like someone had grabbed time by the throat and yanked.
Yellow turned orange. Orange bled into red. The shadows lengthened too fast, stretching across the land like they were reaching for him.
Dry Water's nerves tightened.
He knew where this was going before the body even stood.
[Eventually, I rose.]
[I approached the hill's edge, still holding the three organs.]
Dry Water cursed him without a voice.
Not because it was clever.
Because it was cruel.
Until now Ayanokouji had let everything play out naturally. The pain came when it came, the exhaustion built honestly, the fear had to be endured in real time. Dry Water could suffer through that.
But this...
This was a story technique.
A timeskip.
The body would get the benefit.
Dry Water wouldn't.
His mind still carried every second that had been cut away, like the suffering had been removed from the footage but not from the nerves.
Ayanokouji would go to hell.
***
After Ayanokouji dove into the well for the second time, Dry Water could barely think.
His thoughts didn't flow anymore. They crawled.
He couldn't speak, couldn't form a sentence inside himself without it dissolving halfway through. It felt like his mind had been beaten down to a single instinct: endure, endure, endure.
Half-dead.
Then Ayanokouji walked toward the lake.
And he spoke to him.
Dry Water used all the willpower he had left to listen, dragging his attention toward the words like a hand pulling itself across broken glass.
[Each step I had passed until now... Was gone.]
[Wherever I had stepped through decimated.]
[Every landscape I looked burned under my gaze.]
[Wherever I go, destruction followed...]
[And now, the world bore their weight.]
Dry Water thought, half-dead.
'So... this was it?'
'You did all this because the world took you away from home?'
'You did this to everything?'
His mind tried to picture how far Ayanokouji had seen.
And failed.
As Ayanokouji walked through the ruined world toward the lake, Dry Water discovered something he could not endure.
Pain, cold, the constant ringing of spells inside his skull he had survived all of that.
But this was different.
Hunger.
Thirst.
It scraped him from the inside out, turning the body into an empty thing that still had to move, still had to breathe, still had to keep going as if it wasn't being eaten alive by its own need.
And yet, inside all that misery, something happened that made his chest tighten.
He heard them.
The souls of the vowalkers.
As they passed on, the air seemed to carry it something like crying, but not from pain.
From relief so overwhelming it sounded like grief. Dry Water felt it brushing against the edges of his awareness, as if the world itself was exhaling.
They thanked him.
And every one of them said the same thing.
Their Messiah is finally here.
Dry Water's throat tightened with something he couldn't name.
'Give me all the suffering you want, Ayanokouji.'
'I will endure it all.'
'Just end this nightmare.'
This has given Dry Water the motivation to go on.
***
After that, Dry Water couldn't focus properly anymore.
The world became smeared at the edges, like his mind was losing the ability to render detail.
Ayanokouji's vision was failing too, shadowed by exhaustion and starvation, dark shapes breathing in and out at the edge of sight.
Every fibre of the body begged for rest.
After the parkour, even the arms and legs felt like they were going to snap.
And every time there was a moment to rest, Ayanokouji would time skip it.
He didn't even pretend to be fair about it.
He quite literally jumped from the first village to the seventh.
Dry Water began to feel emotions.
Not Ayanokouji's.
The body's.
He felt how the body didn't want to leave Perla's hand. How it wanted to apologize to Eichiro. How it wanted to sit with Shirou and find a solution like a human would.
Those feelings made him sick, because they proved the body still had something inside it that wanted to live.
Then Ayanokouji killed Perla.
And Dry Water felt the body stop.
Not die.
Stop.
Like something inside it refused to cooperate anymore. Like the muscles were still moving but the will had been unplugged.
The throat tightening like it was trying to choke the grief back down.
And then Ayanokouji time skipped.
Directly outside the village.
Dry Water's mind jolted at the suddenness.
Because something changed.
All this time he had felt a delay in the body, like it wasn't doing what it was supposed to. Like something was resisting Ayanokouji's control in small, broken ways.
After this time skip, that delay vanished completely.
It was as if something had happened in the missing time.
Something Ayanokouji didn't want to show yet.
Then Ayanokouji killed Eichiro.
He ran away from him (Shirou).
And finally, after drowning for so long, after being dragged through memory after memory like punishment, he reached the end.
And the loop began.
'So this is how it ends?'
'So this is how it ends?'
'So this is how it ends?'
'So this is how it ends?'
Time passed, yet it did not. In this lake, there was no concept of time.
'So this is how it ends?'
'So this is how it ends?'
'So this is how it ends?'
'So this is how it ends?'
Time only stayed, locked in place.
'So this is how it ends?'
'So this is how it ends?'
'So this is how it ends?'
'So this is how it ends?'
In his new world... There wasn't concept of anything else.
"So this is how it ends?"
"So this is how it ends?"
"So this is how it ends?"
"So this is how it ends?"
And it kept repeating, again and again, without measure, without end.
Some time passed no, not time. There was no time here to pass.
Then, the rocks stirred. The floor shifted with a low, heavy groan, silt rising like smoke in the dead water.
Nothing came out but the moment nothing was mentioned, it became something.
"҉⟦⟡⟧⟦⟡⟧⟦⟡⟧ ǁ Ϟ͟͟͟ϟ Ѫ҂҈⟊⟁ 𐍈𐌗𐍊 ☉⟁⟁⟁ ✦҉⧫҉⟊ ǁ ҈҈҈ 𒌐𒐫𒌐 ⟦⟡⟧҉"
And timeskip.
***
Now Dry Water had reached it, The very ending of the memory.
["Can you see my memory if I play it back?"]
This has been a journey. Even if he is almost dead, he would never forget it. If he could go back in time and someone offered him to relive it, he would always say yes.
He had truly felt that he was still alive, even though it felt as if his own body had digested him because of the hunger. Even though every single body part could no longer move, he truly enjoyed that experience.
["Indeed I can. Even if it takes time, go ahead. I have forgotten the concept of time centuries ago."]
The walls thinned first, their shapes unraveling like stone that had never truly been solid.
The glow of the skeletons dimmed into floating specks of pale light. Not fading, but lifting.
As if even the light was abandoning the place.
The air itself fractured.
Every particle vibrated for a moment, then broke apart in complete silence.
As if the world was being erased without permission.
The cavern floor collapsed into shimmering dust, spiraling downward into nothingness.
Stone, shadow, and stillness crumbled away layer by layer, falling deeper than any lake or any abyss could reach.
Piece by piece, the entire scene vanished from existence, drawn into a vast and soundless void, until not even the memory of the cave remained.
What remained was not emptiness.
It was something worse.
A world of darkness.
***
There was a poem the habitants of this place used to believe.
There were others, but this one survived the longest, It was less a prayer and more a warning.
A prophecy.
When all is taken beneath Remorse's hand, he shall come.
He who bears a dark past, sealed behind the heart of white.
O Messiah... let us not linger in living.
For we have endured beyond endurance.
Grant us our final endeavor.
One last stride into the afterlife.
To us who were left behind, carrying the burden of protecting others from Remorse...
Even if thought has withered within us...
Struggle.
The end is near.
Dry Water revisited it while floating in a world of darkness.
He was still inside the body, Arms slack. Legs bent slightly. Hair drifting in slow motion that made no sense, because there was no current to carry it.
He tried to test the ground with his feet.
Nothing answered.
He tried to swallow. The throat didn't respond. He tried to blink, but the eyelids didn't move. His eyes remained open.
The fatigue from the nightmare still clung to the muscles.
Dry Water kept struggling anyway.
He waited for Ayanokouji.
And the void stopped pretending to be empty.
At first it moved in tiny grains, black dust drifting without wind, circling as if it had been called.
The particles gathered in one corner, tightening, folding inward, and the darkness around them began to feel organized.
Like a room being prepared.
Then the shape began.
Not a body all at once, but fragments. A pale strip of throat. The curve of a shoulder. A jawline forming in silence. They hovered close, almost touching.
The first thing that fully formed was the clothing.
White.
A uniform too clean for anything human.
Ayanokouji's face formed last.
And when it did, Dry Water felt something cold settle inside him.
It was familiarity.
Ayanokouji floated across from him, perfectly upright despite having nothing to stand on.
The void continued shedding tiny fragments, and every piece that drifted too close to him dissolved into his outline.
Ayanokouji glanced down at his own uniform.
For the first time, something like irritation passed through his eyes.
Then the white changed.
The sterile uniform tightened into a school shirt, a tie, a jacket. The fabric gained weight and texture.
Dry Water watched, unsettled.
A chair appeared behind Ayanokouji.
Then he looked at the body Dry Water inhabited.
And the body moved.
Its eyes opened wider and locked onto Ayanokouji's. Dry Water hadn't commanded it. He felt the movement happen through him, like a puppet being lifted by a string.
His stomach tightened.
If Ayanokouji was in front of him, then whose body was he trapped inside?
His thought came out as voice.
"Is this also part of your nightmare?"
"Yes," Ayanokouji said. "This is the part where I fall."
Dry Water felt the void shift beneath him, Body still sharing eye contact with Ayanokouji as it fell down and Ayanokouji dissapeared in the distance.
A section of darkness hardened into something like floor, and the body dropped.
The legs hit first.
Pain tore through the body so sharply Dry Water's mind nearly blanked, but the scream didn't leave his throat.
The sound stayed trapped inside him, strangled by the same control that kept his eyelids open.
He lay there, twisted, unable to curl, unable to clutch the injury.
The pain was real.
Ayanokouji watched from his chair, unmoving.
Then the void lifted the body again.
Not gently.
The head rose first, dragging the spine, dragging the broken legs, hauling him upward like a corpse being reeled in by a hook. Dry Water felt his stomach turn as the body was forced upright without being repaired.
He was still staring at Ayanokouji.
Still forced to meet his eyes.
Dry Water spoke again, voice shaking with pain he couldn't hide.
"The way you edit your own memories is fascinating."
The words came out sharper than he intended, because pain made honesty leak through.
"But do you think this illusion is enough to trick me?" Dry Water continued. "The one front of me is an illusion, The real one is still in this body imagining all of this which is happening."
And then a genuine question.
"Do you not feel pain?"
Ayanokouji didn't react.
He just leaned back slightly in the chair, as if settling into something comfortable, and the void around him tightened like a noose.
"Watch me," he said.
The body finally moved.
Slowly, like a marionette being granted a single string, its arm lifted until the hand hovered in front of Dry Water's eyes.
"I don't know why," he said calmly, "but my hand suddenly chopped off during the nightmare."
Dry Water didn't even have time to process the sentence.
The cut happened.
One moment the hand was there, and the next it separated at the wrist as cleanly.
The palm dropped away.
Blood didn't spray like in stories.
It pulsed, thick and heavy, spilling in slow ropes that drifted into the void before breaking into dark beads.
The exposed end of the forearm was obscene, Pale bone, torn muscle fibers, a wet shine where tendons had snapped and recoiled.
Dry Water's mind stalled.
Pain should have been the word.
But pain didn't cover it.
It wasn't only agony. It was violation, the sick disbelief of watching your body become something that can be edited.
And the worst part was that this had never happened in the real nightmare.
Dry Water's voice came out hoarse, trembling with something between anger and helplessness.
"Nothing like this happened."
His eyes stayed locked on the stump, on the slow pulse of blood leaving the body like it was being drained on purpose.
"But when someone remembers everything perfectly, what's stopping him from adding new imagination to the end of a certain memory?"
Dry Water forced himself to look up at him.
"Just how high is your pain tolerance?"
He swallowed against a throat that barely listened.
"But more importantly... why are you doing this? All I wanted was to help you."
Ayanokouji answered instantly, as if he had been waiting for those exact words.
"Let's play a game, Dry Water."
His voice stayed flat.
"I'll reveal your hand, and I'll ask questions."
He tilted his head slightly, eyes steady.
"The longer you take to answer, the worse my memories will become."
The bleeding slowed first, vessels tightening, clamping shut as if a tourniquet had been applied from inside. Then the exposed flesh started to crawl.
Tossue formed, bubbling outward in uneven lumps. Thin strands of tendon began to stretch forward, searching for where they were supposed to connect, twitching as they latched onto nothing.
Bone extended in pale increments, lengthening until it reached the correct shape again.
Muscle wrapped around it in thick layers, knitting in a pattern that made Dry Water's stomach turn.
Then skin sealed over it last.
The new hand opened once, fingers flexing experimentally.
Ayanokouji leaned back in his chair, as calm as if nothing had happened.
"So," he said "Let's begin."
***
As Ayanokouji said it, both him and Dry Water broke apart into dark beads, scattering through the void.
The void tore open at the top first.
Color bled through the void, spreading outward until it became a night sky.
Then the floor split.
Water poured into the gap and settled into a stream, about ten meters wide.
Land formed around it.
The world after the stream had dead trees and just dirt.
The word before the stream was a just a barren world with just ridges hill and few patches of grass
Ayanokouji was about to be the destroyer of that world.
On top of that hill was Ayanokouji, looking directly towards the stream.
Dry Water realized something.
Neither of them were inside that body anymore.
They had become spectators, like a drone used for recording.
Ayanokouji began narrating again.
Dry Water listened.
***
Ayanokouji wasn't going to show Dry Water memories again. It was too late for that now.
If he bought time anymore, he might as well die by starvation and dehydration.
And then the world blackened.
Like someone blinking.
When the world came back, his hair was glued to his face, wet, and he was walking with his gaze lowered. The land before the lake had been utterly destroyed.
Blink again.
Now he was sitting by the stream.
Blink again.
He was rushing through the forest, and the thin stream had become a flowing river.
Dry Water watched it all. He didn't ask how.
Blink again, and Ayanokouji was speaking to Shirou.
And then the narration began.
***
Let me walk you through the Contradiction, Consistency and Control I found out.
Dry Water.
I may have lost myself, but I am still me. I can still see contradictions.
I wet dirt, pressed it to my feet, and wrapped cloth over it.
Before I crossed the stream, I foolishly called it a river. That was wrong. Even the smallest rivers are wider than that.
Then after I crossed it, I called it a lake, even though the water was clearly flowing.
And when I met him, he called me out. He said I had put dirt on my feet to muffle my footsteps.
I agreed. I said it really was him.
My thoughts turned colder the moment I heard my own words.
Because using dirt on your feet is something a fool would do.
The dirt and cloth would grind together with every step. A scraping sound. The same kind of sound that awakened the first Vowalker.
It is not good footing either. It ruins your balance. It shifts. It hardens. It becomes uneven, and then it becomes useless.
So when I gained even a little control over my mind, the contradictions started to stand out.
I began reliving the entire nightmare inside my head. Whenever we rested, I replayed it. Again and again, until the smallest details stopped being fog and started becoming evidence.
And you know the worst part?
Before crossing the lake, my thoughts were already prepared.
The world made a noise.
[If the river was deepening like this, then something down there was waiting.]
[Something I wasn't supposed to touch... But had to.]
The world answered for me. It completed the thought.
I continued anyway.
Dry Water, what do you think of that?
It was as if I had already decided to touch the bottom before I even understood why the stream mattered.
But that wasn't all.
After I crossed the river, another thought appeared in my mind.
I thought the treasure was revealing itself.
That is when I understood where the answers were.
Down.
Because most of the contradictions were tied to that place.
Now let's talk about consistency.
***
When the well plan worked the first time, I came out with three organs.
Then I did it again using those three, and I came out with four.
When the stream was ten meters, I only jumped three.
And the plan with the group.
That plan was the worst thing I could have done.
Why would I attack them head on? I had information sharp enough to break them without ever touching them.
Eichiro and Perla both had pasts I could have turned into weapons. I could have forced them into paranoia, I could have outlasted them.
A battle of endurance was simple.
Only I knew the condition to clear the nightmare. They didn't. Even after the villages, even after every search, they were still walking blind. If it looped a few more times, they would have started collapsing mentally.
I could have told them about the Vowalkers too. I could have planted the truth in their mouths and watched it poison their appetite. I could have made them starve with me.
But I did none of it.
The moment we left the seventh village, I struck.
Unlike me.
Even against Perla, I never used the fact that she killed her own teammates. I never pushed the pressure points I could clearly see. I moved like someone refusing to win the way I knew how.
One contradiction was a mistake.
Two could be coincidence.
Three was a pattern.
And all of it began after the seventh village.
It was as if invisible strings had been tied to my limbs, and those strings tightened whenever the number appeared.
Then came the river. When I jumped down to reach, I was fine.
Until the seventh minute.
Only then did my body begin to struggle.
Only then did my lungs start clawing.
Only then did the water feel thick enough to fight me.
You told me you followed those who could not be named, and that those who could be named did not know you existed.
Yet you named six gods.
And your wording had been precise.
I should only be aware of these gods right now.
Meaning there were more.
I tested the thought in my head.
What if the total number was seven?
But it didn't align. You claimed the ones you followed could not be named, but the gods had names. So the answer wasn't in the gods.
It was in the opposite.
The nightmare was built on opposites. Regret given form. Eichiro. Him. The figures that were both my polar opposites and the closest shapes of my own remorse.
Perla, opposite in gender, and the one this body had attached itself to the most.
If the nightmare was my fight against my opposites, then what if the beings you followed were not gods at all?
What if they were the regrets of gods.
The shadows behind divinity.
Seven gods, seven opposites.
Seven regrets.
Seven devils, not as monsters, but as necessary counterparts.
I didn't need you to answer yet.
I would do the questioning myself.
Now.
Control.
***
After the pattern was clear, one question remained.
Why weren't you simply killing me?
And what did "you" even mean?
It was never the nightmare influencing my thoughts.
It was you.
Dry Water.
I am sure of it.
When I first implemented the well plan, I had no intention of paying respect. I was going to drown the Vowalkers, take enough organs to implement second plan, and move on.
But I didn't.
I took out every single organ.
I tried to give them peace.
Why?
I didn't care about them. I had no reason to. Yet my body moved with reluctance whenever I tried to treat them like objects. I handled them like they were people.
Then the stream.
Then the dirt.
Then the contradictions.
And you agreed.
When I made the body fall and break its legs, you were surprised.
When the hand chopped off, you were surprised.
You said it never happened in the nightmare.
But you spoke with certainty, not guesswork.
How were you so sure I had shown you everything?
Unless you had been watching from the start.
***
Ayanokouji couldn't really read anything related to Dry Water here.
After all, everything in this place was just imagination, even the body itself. If a body could be taken inside an imagined world, then the difference between a man and a god became dangerously thin.
Every movement, every pain, every sensation was only being enforced by thought. Dry Water couldn't move anything that gives Ayanokouji an opportunity to read because there was nothing real to move.
Soon Dry Water spoke, his voice still Ayanokouji's.
"You... really have figured it all out, haven't you?"
***
That confirmed it.
So I asked.
"Now answer me, Dry Water. If you can influence my body to that extent, why haven't you killed me and taken it for yourself?"
If he could influence the nightmare to follow the seven, influence my body, influence the contradictions, what was stopping him? It wasn't something simple like he couldn't.
He already had his fingers in everything.
"To put it simply... if I take over your body and complete this nightmare, the moment I get out of the trial, _Pell will recognize what I have done and erase me."
"Ayanokouji, I am not an illusion. I am real."
The world flickered for a second.
It was enough to make my instincts flare.
Real?
"This was supposed to be impossible. You can't enter a nightmare if you've already cleared that number of nightmare."
"Yet I did."
"And I suffer. I've been in this nightmare for decades now."
I understood.
Not fully, but enough.
"Then the seven you worship... are they devils? Or am I completely wrong?"
"I can't answer th-"
Before he could finish, my body formed from dust in the blink of an eye, and the hand chopped off cleanly at the wrist.
Dry Water's scream came out muffled.
"I really can't tell you that."
"Why can't you tell me?"
"If I reveal something more than I should, you will become corrupted."
"Tell me more about this corruption."
"There are certified secrets others shouldn't know. You're already really close to the truth. For your own safety, don't pry into the secrets of the world any longer."
His voice hardened.
"You might figure out more than you should and become a monster."
For some reasons I couldn't take what he just said as an metaphor.
I slowly regenerated the hand.
They moved like nothing had happened.
"Why are you not getting out of my mind?" I asked. "Do you like pain?"
"I'm showing my sincerity. Even if you throw me into the worst torture possible, I won't run away."
There was a pause, then he said it.
"I have decided to make you my successor."
I already suspected it.
I couldn't even decline. If I did, he wouldn't help me reach the surface. And if I reached the surface without him, I would die anyway.
"Are all nightmares supposed to be this way?"
"I've been waiting for you to ask that question."
"I have a theory. Your nightmare is a combination of multiple first trials."
"First trial killing Vowalkers using the well, Second crossing the stream, Third filling the _Pell,Fourth giving salvation to the Vowalkers And fifth killing the Remorse Eater."
It was too much to process at once.
"Is this normal?"
"No. First nightmares are not supposed to be this hard. This is extreme."
His voice lowered.
"I can confidently say you had the hardest nightmare possible."
Yet you survived it.
The sentence wasn't spoken, but it still landed.
"Why me?"
"I don't know the answer to that myself."
I watched him in the darkness, even though watching meant nothing here.
"Why do you want me as your successor?"
"You are the best talent I have ever seen," he finally said. "Anyone would kill to have you as their successor."
I could tell there was more behind it.
I didn't press.
He questioned me instead.
"How did you get rid of the delay within your body?"
So he noticed.
He noticed the shift during the timeskip after Perla.
"I'll show you," I said, "but as soon as I finish, you will have to help me finish this nightmare."
"I can't really interfere..."
I waited.
"However..."
His voice tightened, like he was choosing each word carefully.
"I can tell you one of your memories. By going through the times you got your memories, looking at the context, and going through the _Pell... I can tell you the memory that can help you the most."
"Is that how memories are chosen?"
"I wonder."
A chill ran through me.
I sighed out loud and began changing the environment around us.
The body dissapeared in dark beads again and our vision traveled to huge trees, Right after I had killed perla.
<<<
Ayanokouji walked towards The village... Towards eichiro.
He looked back once.
"Goodbye Perla."
He walked ahead for some minutes.
Step. Step. Step. Step. Step. Step. Step.
I am about to tell a story.
A story about someone who slowly watched everything he cared about get taken away by a demon.
He had no memory of who he was.
No memory of where he had come from.
No memory of what he was supposed to do.
Step. Step. Step. Step. Step. Step.
Unfortunately, he had only one thing left.
Muscle memory.
And a buried hunger to be loved.
Step. Step. Step. Step. Step.
He froze at the sight of monsters, unable to move.
Yet something within him did.
Something inside him awakened.
Something inside him moved.
He called out to the demon inside, hoping for a clue, for an answer, for anything at all.
But the demon heard nothing.
Step. Step. Step. Step.
Whenever he did something miraculous, he began to realize something horrifying.
It was him.
He was the one who had traveled through this world and destroyed half of it.
Even though he had felt nervous the first time he ran toward the well, the second time he did not.
He was tired, starving, and thirsty, but his body still moved.
It moved as if it had done this before.
He thought he must have some...
Hidden potential, man.
Step. Step. Step.
He met people on the other side of the world, but fear followed him.
His body moved on its own and took a girl hostage, and his delays returned in the face of crisis.
Then, for the first time, his body said something.
"Lingua."
He got startled and called out to whatever had spoken.
No response came back.
Step. Step.
There were three people.
One hated him.
And for some reason, he hated another.
But he did not hate the girl.
It was as if she was someone he had known for a long time.
Someone his mind had forgotten, but his instincts still recognized.
She held his hand and showed him the world.
He thought he would not be able to keep up. But somehow, he did.
Whatever was inside him helped.
He thought the one helping him must be his friend.
Step.
Now he was desperately trying to hold himself back from following the girl.
He was trying to kill her even though he did not want to.
He tried his best to stop.
The body became slower at times.
Delayed at times.
But it did not stop.
He cried for help.
He shouted into the void inside his mind, begging the demon to stop.
...
He killed the only one who accepted him.
Then he walked away.
His mind went numb.
***
As Ayanokouji walked away from Perla's dead body, there was no delay for a few minutes.
Then the delay returned, and it returned violently.
His legs began to fail, His vision, already damaged, turned worse. The edges of the world blurred, and the bottom of his sight became unrecognizable.
Moisture gathered in his eyes before he even understood what it was.
Then both knees hit the ground.
His hands rose and covered his face.
The dirt beneath him darkened.
It became wetter.
Tears escaped him in steady drops, and then in a stream, until the ground looked stained by something warmer than blood.
Ayanokouji called out into his mind.
The mental link between him and the man finally weakened.
And in that moment, Ayanokouji confronted him.
Inside the darkness of his own head, he saw a silhouette of himself bowed to the ground, refusing to stand. He could hear the crying.
***
Ayanokouji looked down at the original owner of the body. The man's emotions bled through the mental link, strong enough to force tears into Ayanokouji's eyes. The tears weren't his, but they still fell from his face.
He simply stood there, silent and present.
The man cried into the ground, shoulders shaking, breath breaking. His hands clawed at dirt that wasn't dirt.
Time passed, and Ayanokouji allowed it.
He watched the tears darken the ground. He watched the man's breathing slow. He watched the shaking fade.
When the man finally lowered his hands, Ayanokouji remained where he was. His shadow fell over the man's head even though the void had no true light.
The man's eyes were swollen, his mouth trembling, and his gaze refused to rise.
Ayanokouji spoke without raising his voice.
"Why did you kill Perla?"
The man jerked, as if the name itself had struck him. His lips parted, and for a moment he looked like he might deny it. The denial died in his throat before it could become sound.
"I..." he whispered, shaking his head. "I didn't-"
Ayanokouji cut through it immediately.
"You did."
The words landed with no hint of emotion.
The man's hands clenched against the ground, and his shoulders trembled again. He tried to speak, but his voice kept breaking.
Ayanokouji watched him, expression unmoving.
"Your arms moved," he said. "Your legs carried you. Your hands held the weapon. Your body stood over her."
The man's head shook harder, frantic now, His eyes squeezed shut, and a broken sound escaped him.
"It wasn't-"
Ayanokouji's gaze sharpened.
"Stop."
The single word forced the man's mouth shut. He froze, caught mid-breath.
Ayanokouji leaned down slightly, and the void behind him felt deeper.
"You don't get to hide behind the way it felt," Ayanokouji said. "You don't get to hide behind fear. You don't get to hide behind confusion."
The man's eyes opened, wet and terrified. He stared up now, not because he wanted to, but because he had run out of anywhere else to look.
Ayanokouji's tears slid down his face slowly.
"You killed her," he repeated, and this time it sounded like a sentence being carved into stone. "You were there for every second of it, and you still let it happen."
The man's jaw trembled. His throat worked. His lips tried to form words, but none of them could survive in the space Ayanokouji had created. His breathing became uneven again, sharp and panicked.
Ayanokouji did not raise his voice.
"I watched you walk away," he said. "You left her there and kept moving like your feet already knew where to go."
The man's face twisted, and he let out a choked sob. His hands lifted, pressing against his own chest like he was trying to hold his ribs together.
"I tried," he whispered. "I tried to stop."
Ayanokouji's stare did not soften.
"Trying is what you say when you want forgiveness without paying for it."
The words hit harder than shouting. The man recoiled, his eyes widening, his mouth opening in silent shock.
Ayanokouji's voice stayed quiet, but it became colder.
"Perla trusted you," he said. "She held your hand. She showed you the world. And you repaid her by putting her in the ground."
The man's face crumpled. His body shook violently now, grief and horror mixing into something almost nauseating. He tried to look away again, but the moment he did, Ayanokouji's presence felt closer.
Ayanokouji spoke again, and the words felt too close to the man's thoughts.
"You don't want to be the one who did it," he said. "But wanting doesn't change what your hands did."
The man's lips trembled, and his voice came out thin.
"It wasn't me."
The sentence sounded like a prayer.
Ayanokouji watched him for a long moment, then spoke with a calm that felt almost cruel.
"Say it again."
The man stared at him, breathing hard, eyes shining with panic. His mouth moved, but the words wouldn't come. His face twisted, caught between collapse and denial.
Ayanokouji did not move. He simply waited.
The man finally forced the sentence out, shaking.
"It wasn't me."
Ayanokouji's eyes narrowed slightly.
"Then who was it?"
The man's throat tightened. His gaze flickered, desperate, searching for an answer that wouldn't destroy him. His lips parted, and his voice broke as the only surviving thought in his mind escaped.
"It was you."
The words did not sound like certainty.
They sounded like coping.
***
The man's answer hung between them, fragile and desperate.
"It was you."
He tilted his head slightly, and for the first time his expression changed. His tears still clung to his face.
"You think I'm the demon," Ayanokouji said quietly. "Say it properly."
The man's throat tightened. His mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. His eyes flickered.
"You're the demon."
Ayanokouji nodded once, almost approving.
"Why me?" he asked. "Why not the monsters. Why not the world. Why choose me."
The man's face contorted, and he tried to pull away, but there was nowhere to go. His body remained pinned by the link, by the presence beside him, by the weight of being watched. His lips trembled, and the answer came out in fragments.
"Because... you were there. Because I felt you. Because something kept moving."
Ayanokouji stared down at him.
"Good," he said. "Then listen."
The man swallowed. His eyes were glassy now, his mind trying to build walls out of breath and denial. Ayanokouji didn't touch him, but the man flinched anyway.
"She called it forbidden love," Ayanokouji said. "She thought it was some blessing, some miracle meant to keep her alive."
The man's breathing hitched, and his shoulders shook again. He didn't answer, but the shame in his face was enough.
"It worked because Perla liked you," he said. "Not me. You. The ability responded to her and your feelings, and it latched onto your existence like a hook."
The man's eyes widened, horror replacing grief for a moment. Ayanokouji watched the realization crawl across his face, slow and poisonous. The man's lips parted, but nothing came out.
"It was forbidden," Ayanokouji continued, "because you were always going to kill her. The affection was the fuel, and the murder was the destination."
The man shook his head violently. His hands pressed harder into the ground, fingers digging into dirt, nails scraping. He looked like he wanted to rip himself open and find a different person inside.
"No," he whispered. "No, I didn't want that."
Ayanokouji's gaze did not change.
"You want is irrelevant," he said. "Your body carried the conclusion."
The man's breath broke into a sob, and he lowered his head again. Ayanokouji didn't stop him. He watched him collapse inward, watched him try to disappear into his own guilt.
When the crying dulled into choking silence, Ayanokouji spoke again.
"I have knowledge in medicine," he said. "And I have knowledge in history. That matters here more than your feelings."
The man looked up slightly, confused, terrified, still half dead inside. Ayanokouji's tears had dried into thin tracks, leaving his face unnaturally calm.
"Do you remember the well?" Ayanokouji asked.
The man's eyes twitched. His throat worked.
"Yes," he whispered.
Ayanokouji nodded.
"The first time we ran toward it, you were nervous," he said. "You think that fear belonged to you. It didn't."
The man stared, uncomprehending, and Ayanokouji's voice lowered further.
"I was nervous," Ayanokouji said. "Because I realized something before you did."
The man's lips trembled. His breathing became uneven again.
"What," he managed.
Ayanokouji didn't answer immediately. He looked away, not toward the world, but toward memory, toward the sensation of bone and water and depth.
"When we grabbed the organ," he said, "the weight disturbed me."
The man's face tightened.
"I wanted to stop," Ayanokouji said. "I felt it clearly. The impulse to stop. The disgust. The warning."
His eyes returned to the man.
"You kept walking."
The man's eyes widened, and his mouth opened. His voice came out ragged.
"I didn't know."
Ayanokouji's expression sharpened.
"You didn't want to know," he corrected. "You let the body move, because movement is easier than responsibility."
The man shook, sobbing again, and Ayanokouji watched him like a physician watching a patient refuse diagnosis. There was no cruelty in his face, only coldness, and that coldness was worse.
"That organ weighed about three hundred grams," Ayanokouji said. "The average human heart."
The man froze.
The words sank in slowly, and when they landed, they landed like a corpse being dropped at his feet. His eyes widened, and his lips pulled back in a silent, horrified grimace.
Ayanokouji continued, relentless.
"You carried a heart out of a well," he said. "And you still kept walking."
The man's body convulsed with another sob. His shoulders hunched, and his hands curled into fists. He tried to speak, but his throat couldn't form anything except broken sound.
Ayanokouji's voice did not rise.
"Now," he said, "tell me about the Vowalkers."
The man's head lifted slightly, slow and weak. His eyes were swollen, his face pale, his breathing shallow. He looked like he was being kept alive by the link alone.
"Why were they under the ground before the river," Ayanokouji asked, "and above the ground after it."
The man swallowed, struggling.
"Because..." he whispered. "Before the river they had nowhere to hide. After the river, there was somewhere to hide."
His voice cracked at the end, and he stared at the ground again, ashamed of the answer even while saying it. Ayanokouji watched him for a long moment.
Then he spoke with flat contempt.
"Fool."
The single word cut deeper than a scream. The man flinched, his shoulders jerking, his eyes widening again.
Ayanokouji leaned closer, and the air felt heavier.
"Then explain this," he said. "Why did they never enter the village. Why did they become enraged whenever it was destroyed."
The man's mouth opened, but no answer came. His eyes darted, searching, and the panic returned.
Ayanokouji did not let him recover.
"You don't know," he said. "You walked through it all, and you still don't know."
The man's breathing turned ragged again. He tried to speak, but the sound died. His face twisted, and tears spilled again.
Ayanokouji straightened slightly.
"I do," he said.
The man looked up, trembling.
"The world before the river was a graveyard," Ayanokouji said. "The world after the lake was the world of the living."
The man's eyes widened slowly, dread forming in them.
"Before the river, they were dead," Ayanokouji continued. "That's why nothing came out. Nothing moved. Nothing hunted."
His gaze hardened.
"Until you walked over them."
The man's lips trembled.
"You awakened them," Ayanokouji said. "You dragged your existence across their burial, and you pulled them back into motion."
The man shook his head weakly, barely able to deny it now. Ayanokouji's voice stayed steady, almost clinical.
"I was the one who mustered strength," he said. "I was the one who carried the skull and the water. I was the one who threw it into the ground to avoid them."
Ayanokouji's eyes narrowed.
"And you killed them anyway."
The man's breath caught. His eyes widened, and his mouth opened, but nothing came out. He looked like he wanted to scream and couldn't.
Ayanokouji's gaze shifted, and his voice became quieter, sharper.
"The village," he said. "They never entered it because they used to live there."
The man froze.
"They were human once," Ayanokouji said. "They were tied to that place. They didn't want it destroyed. They wanted to protect what remained of it."
The man's face contorted, and a low sound escaped him, half sob and half nausea. His eyes squeezed shut.
"They became monsters," Ayanokouji said, "because of a vow. Or because someone made them into one. The details don't matter yet."
He leaned down again, bringing his face closer to the man's.
"What matters is that you slaughtered them," he said. "You slaughtered people who didn't even know how to die properly."
The man's entire body shook. His breathing turned frantic, and he tried to crawl backward. His arms pushed against the ground, but his limbs barely obeyed him.
Ayanokouji did not follow.
"You want to blame me," Ayanokouji said. "You want me to be the demon, because demons are easier than mirrors."
The man sobbed, shaking his head.
"I didn't," he whispered. "I didn't mean to."
Ayanokouji's eyes remained empty.
"You killed Perla," he said. "You killed the Vowalkers. You killed the people in the well. You killed thousands."
The man's mouth opened, and he let out a broken cry. His hands rose, trembling, and pressed against his own head.
"Stop," he begged. "Please stop."
Ayanokouji didn't stop.
"You don't even know their names," he said. "You don't know their histories. You don't know their lives. You only know the feeling of moving forward."
The man's sobbing turned into choking. His body convulsed, and his eyes rolled slightly, overwhelmed.
Ayanokouji's voice stayed calm.
"You want forgiveness," he said. "Then carry the weight properly."
The man shook, almost collapsing completely. His voice came out thin and desperate.
"It was you," he whispered again. "It was you."
The words sounded weaker this time, not a defense anymore, just a childlike attempt to survive.
Ayanokouji stared at him.
"No," he said. "It was you."
The man's eyes widened, and the last thing in him tried to resist. His lips trembled, and his throat tightened. He looked like he was about to scream, but the scream never arrived.
His body began to crumble.
Turning into dust, grain by grain, starting at the edges, starting at the hands pressed into the dirt. The man stared down in horror, watching himself disappear.
Ayanokouji did not move.
He watched until there was nothing left.
The last particles scattered into the darkness of the mind, and the space where the man had been became empty. The link snapped without sound, and the silence that followed was clean.
Ayanokouji stood alone inside the body.
The delay was gone.
And for the first time in a long time, the body moved like it belonged to him.
"Fool, Didn't even let me talk about how desperately he wanted to eat the Vowalker."
>>>
As the memory ended, Ayanokouji and Dry Water appeared in the void again, as dark beads gathered and gave them form.
Dry Water stayed quiet for a while.
He had many thoughts, and he was genuinely frightened of Ayanokouji.
"Perhaps the sixth Nightmare was to overcome yourself?"
"Then what's the seventh Nightmare?"
Dry Water had no answer. He simply remained silent.
"Dry Water, are you the seventh Nightmare?"
"I don't think so."
Ayanokouji sighed out loud.
"So you were going to show me a memory that can help me?"
Ayanokouji didn't have much time left. He could see how weak his body had become.
Dry Water answered soon after.
"Before that, are you not curious about how the Vowalkers came to be?"
Ayanokouji went silent again. He was curious, truly curious... but he didn't have enough time.
It was either he chose himself and cleared the Nightmare in time, or he chose curiosity and struggled to clear it before his body gave up.
He remembered a certain quote.
Curiosity killed the cat.
But that wasn't the whole quote. The whole quote was...
Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
"Very well."
Dry Water asked something.
"Now I want you to trust me and give me enough power here to show you the truth."
Ayanokouji reviewed their meeting. Dry Water could have killed him at any moment, yet he hadn't.
Ayanokouji hesitated for a moment, but in the end, he gave him control, and the void changed shape once again.
***
A village formed around them, medium in size, but dense with life. Artistry was everywhere, carved into doorframes, painted onto clay, woven into cloth. Even the tools looked handmade with pride.
Ayanokouji's eyes narrowed. He recognized the layout, the slope of the paths, the way the houses curved inward to shield the center.
This was the third ruined village they had passed through.
People moved normally, unaware they were being watched. Children ran between adults. A woman hung fabric to dry. An old man repaired a chair with slow patience. None of them looked like they were waiting to die.
Then the first scream came.
Not from inside the village.
From the edge of it.
Ayanokouji turned, and he saw people from other villages rushing in. Their faces were blank, their eyes too focused, their mouths too still. They moved like bodies carrying someone else's intent, and the first blades came down without hesitation.
The village didn't understand at first. The defenders hesitated, thinking it was a misunderstanding, thinking it was a raid.
By the time they lifted their weapons, the streets were already red.
Dry Water's voice entered the air without a direction.
"All of them were controlled," he said. "Every village. Every hand that struck. The Remorse Eater made them war with each other until they forgot what peace looked like."
Ayanokouji watched a man try to shield a child with his own body.
He watched a woman swing a farming tool like a soldier, her arms trembling from terror.
He watched blood soak into stone that had once been painted with patterns.
His jaw tightened, but he did not speak.
The scene blinked.
The village vanished.
A new one replaced it, massive and beautiful, built with the confidence of a civilization that believed it would last forever.
Towers rose over wide streets. Banners hung from balconies. There were canals, markets, and large communal halls.
Ayanokouji recognized it instantly.
The seventh ruined village.
The one that had looked less like a village and more like a fallen capital when he had walked through it.
A ruler stood on a high platform, armor polished, voice loud enough to cut through fear. Around him were soldiers, messengers, and citizens forced into the shape of an army.
"Prepare for war," the ruler ordered. "Burn what cannot be carried. Take what can. No hesitation."
His gaze hardened.
"And dump the dead beyond the river. The ground there is open. We do not have time for graves."
Ayanokouji's eyes shifted to the river in the distance. It was wide, slow, and deceptively calm. Beyond it was a large open stretch of land, empty and pale, like a place the world had forgotten.
This was the same river he had crossed to get here.
They followed the order.
Bodies were dragged and carried, sometimes by soldiers, sometimes by families who had no one left to mourn properly.
They crossed the river and laid the dead down one after another, leaving a few meters between each corpse.
No one buried them.
No one had the strength.
The war came again.
Not once, but repeatedly, Village fought village. Every victory was temporary, every loss returned in a different shape, and the dead kept piling beyond the river.
Ayanokouji watched the dumping continue.
The open ground on the other side turned into a graveyard without graves. The dead lay under sun and rain, watched by nothing but the wind, and still the living kept bringing more.
Dry Water spoke again, quieter now.
"Even the victors were being fed into the same machine," he said. "The Remorse Eater wanted the world to rot from the inside."
Ayanokouji's gaze stayed fixed.
The beautiful village won again, and for a moment, the streets filled with exhausted relief. People leaned against walls. Soldiers dropped their weapons. Children stared at the sky like they had forgotten what it was.
Then the leaders gathered.
Their faces were hollow. Their voices were heavy. They looked like people who had lived too long in the same nightmare, and had finally reached the point where even pride had collapsed.
"We submit," one of them said.
A vow was prepared.
They spoke the vow together, and the air changed. It was subtle at first.
Skin tightened.
Eyes dulled.
Limbs stiffened.
The living became Vowalkers, tens of thousands, then more, until the numbers felt obscene. The village that had once stood tall turned into a factory of monsters created by desperation.
Before the final change fully took him, the ruler of the largest village raised his head. His voice did not tremble. His eyes were wet, but not with fear.
He spoke a prophecy.
Not to save the world.
To beg for an ending.
"When all is taken beneath Remorse's hand, he shall come," he said. "He who bears a dark past, sealed behind the heart of white."
His voice cracked slightly, then steadied again.
"O Messiah, let us not linger in living. For we have endured beyond endurance. Grant us our final endeavor, one last stride into the afterlife."
The people listened without moving. Some cried silently. Some bowed their heads. Some looked relieved, as if the idea of death had finally become a mercy.
"To us who were left behind, carrying the burden of protecting others from Remorse," the ruler continued, "even if thought has withered within us, struggle."
His eyes lifted to the river, to the open graveyard, to the sky that had watched everything.
"The end is near."
The vow sealed.
Dry Water said while looking towards Ayanokouji, "That is why I am willing to take any torture you send towards me, Just end this nightmare, Messiah."
Ayanokouji was silent, He had been called many things... But Messiah felt weird.
The prophecy remained.
Time moved.
Not in days, but in centuries.
The Vowalkers dwindled from hundreds of thousands to only a few thousand. Some tried to cross the river when the stench of bodies became too strong, drawn by something that resembled memory. The water trapped them, and they crystallized, frozen mid-step.
And that's how the river became a stream.
Others simply stopped moving one day.
Their bodies sank into the earth, and trees grew out of them, tall and quiet.
Ayanokouji's throat tightened.
Dry Water did not speak.
Another blink came, but this one felt different. The memory tried to shift again, and Ayanokouji sensed resistance. A deliberate refusal. Something being hidden from him.
Dry Water's voice returned, calm, too calm.
"You shouldn't see what comes next for your own good."
Ayanokouji looked at him sharply.
Dry Water did not show it.
The scene still moved, But Ayanokouji neither heard or saw any of it.
What Dry Water had hidden was...
A second prophecy.
One that was not spoken by a king.
One that sounded like it was written by someone who had already accepted damnation.
"A demon will come," it read.
"With each step he takes, the land will be decimated."
"Every landscape he looks upon will burn under his gaze."
"Wherever he goes, destruction will follow."
"And the world will bear the weight of his existence."
"But he will walk on, as though he did not destroy everything."
Dry Water was truly a terrible human being.
***
They were back in the void.
Ayanokouji went completely silent, his eyes unfocused, revisiting everything he had just watched and replaying it until the smallest details began to rot into meaning. He found clues. Too many.
Then he stopped.
"How did the rulers know of the Remorse Eater's existence?"
It didn't make sense. How could they have known what a vow truly was, how it would turn them into puppets, how it would stain their future until even death refused to take them.
Ayanokouji's gaze hardened.
"Answer me, Dry Water."
Dry Water finally spoke.
His voice carried a quiet sadness.
"They saw it," he said. "They saw all the remorse those wars had gathered. They saw the remorse take shape, and they understood what it was raising."
Ayanokouji didn't move.
"What exactly did they see?"
Dry Water's answer came without hesitation.
"They saw a god given form. Something born from their own remorse. Something that would destroy everything if they did not submit."
The void around them trembled, and Ayanokouji felt the world itself resist those words. The Nightmare did not want this spoken aloud. Dry Water spoke anyway.
He didn't stop.
"The Vowalkers are not killing humans because they wish to," Dry Water said. "They are killing humans because they are trying to save this world. They kill so none of the remorse slips through."
Ayanokouji's fingers twitched once, then stilled.
Dry Water continued, mercilessly steady.
"The god has awakened once again, but he is weak. He lost his powers. The rulers foresaw it. The vow was their solution, their last attempt to seal the world by force."
His voice lowered, almost tired.
"They decided the safest world was an empty world."
Ayanokouji's chest tightened.
He had no response ready. The logic was twisted, but it was still logic, and that was what made it unbearable.
Dry Water spoke again.
"Nothing is black and white in this world," he said. "Those people lost themselves, but they still held the world dear enough to refuse letting it die easily. So they suffered for centuries, and became villains in someone else's story."
Ayanokouji remained silent.
He was foreign to sacrifice. He understood obedience, survival, and calculation. He understood endurance.
He did not understand choosing pain so that someone else could live, then accepting hatred for it.
Dry Water's voice softened, but the words did not.
"You gave them salvation, Ayanokouji Kiyotaka. Now end this nightmare and kill the Remorse Eater."
Ayanokouji's eyes narrowed slightly.
Dry Water's form began to crack.
The void around him started to peel away in fragments, and the darkness behind him looked deeper than it had before.
Dry Water kept speaking while he disappeared.
"He is still a kid," he said. "He will try to show you your closest regrets. He will try to squeeze remorse out of you. Do not let him."
Ayanokouji's throat moved.
He wanted to say something. Not gratitude, not a farewell, but something that would confirm Dry Water had been real, that their time had mattered, that this wasn't another lie designed to weaken him.
No words came.
Dry Water's world crumbled further.
His face blurred at the edges, and for the first time, Ayanokouji realized how much he had relied on him. Not for comfort, but for direction. Dry Water had become a mentor in the only way Ayanokouji could accept, by giving him information without warmth.
Dry Water spoke one final time.
"When you wake up in the cave, destroy the skull of that skeleton," he said. "Then mutter the name of your memory."
Before going he gave Ayanokouji one warning.
"But remember that memory shouldn't exist, It's memory of a ruler only use it if it's really necessary."
His voice thinned into silence.
And he was gone.
The void collapsed, and the last thing Ayanokouji felt was the sensation of falling through a place that was not supposed to exist.
Then his eyes opened.
He woke up in the cave.
***
Slowly, vision seeped back into Ayanokouji's eyes.
The first thing he saw was the cave ceiling, jagged stone blurred by a thin film of tears.
His body no longer screamed.
He drew a shallow breath. The air was stale, cold, and tasted like old dust. His throat tightened.
Ayanokouji tried to push himself upright.
The moment his weight shifted, the cave lurched.
Not literally, of course.
The stone did not move. But his world did. It spun in a slow, sickening circle, the ceiling rolling like the surface of water.
His stomach clenched instantly, and his vision smeared at the edges.
He swallowed, but it did nothing.
Nausea rose like a wave.
A dull headache settled behind his eyes, spreading across his skull. It wasn't as vicious as the one _Pell had forced on him.
He gagged.
His body folded forward, and he retched until his throat burned. Something scraped up from deep inside him, but there was nothing to give. Only saliva spilled onto the cave floor, stringing from his lips before dropping in pathetic, thin strands.
He stared at it for a second, breathing through his mouth.
Headache. Nausea. Dry heaving.
A classic case of dehydration and starvation.
Even his bones felt wrong.
Just… weak. Each movement carried a deep ache, His legs trembled as he forced himself to stand.
He did it anyway.
Slowly, he began to walk.
Each step was careful, like he was crossing a floor that could collapse under him. The world still swayed, and he had to blink hard to keep the skeleton in front of him from doubling.
The closer he got, the more his expression flattened.
He raised his hand.
Then he brought it down.
The skull struck the ground with force.
It shattered.
Fragments scattered across the stone, pieces skittering away into the shadows.
Ayanokouji stared at the remains, breathing slowly, as if expecting something to happen.
Then, abruptly, something surfaced.
Not a memory of this place.
A memory of a Memory.
The knowledge arrived whole, as if it had always been waiting behind his thoughts.
He remembered how to use it. He remembered the words, the shape of the promise, the cost.
He remembered it despite never having done it before.
His lips moved.
His voice came out weak, stripped of power, but still steady enough to form words.
His headache worsened.
The cave spun again, and saliva clung to the corner of his mouth.
Ayanokouji muttered, almost soundlessly.
"Vow of Life & Death."
It was a peculiar Memory, one that required a chant and a promise. For reasons he could not explain, Ayanokouji knew exactly what it was.
He began to speak, each line dragged out of him like thread from a wound.
O you who accepted sacrifice as law…
Take my hearing.
Take my scent.
Take my taste.
Take my touch.
Strip the world from me, layer by layer, until nothing remains but sight.
But do not take my gaze.
Do not take the last thread of who I am.
In return, grant me power.
I swear it on what remains of me.
I will bring an end to this nightmare.
Today.
***
The moment the last word left Ayanokouji's lips, something answered.
Pain did not arrive like a stab. It poured into him all at once, as though his nerves had been seized and twisted. His spine arched, and his vision collapsed into a trembling blur.
The lower half of his face failed first.
He felt it soften, then melt, the sensation so vivid it turned his stomach. Skin sagged. Flesh shifted. The outline of his jaw lost its shape, and heat crawled over his lips.
Darkness swallowed his eyes.
For a moment, his mind offered him an ending.
He refused.
Ayanokouji forced his consciousness back into place. He dragged himself awake by will alone.
He tried to mutter.
Nothing came out.
His eyes widened in pure disbelief. His lips were gone. His mouth was gone. The flesh had melted and fused, sealed flat against his face like a cauterized wound.
He tried to gasp anyway, and the attempt became a silent convulsion.
He slammed his palm against a nearby rock, Wishing to hear the impact.
The motion happened.
The sound did not.
A second ago, his hand had been burning. Now there was nothing. His fingers struck stone and his eyes watched the collision, but his body sent nothing back.
Touch had been erased.
He stared at his hand with calm. He pressed his nails into his palm until the flesh dimpled.
Nothing.
Then his hearing vanished.
His ears sagged, cartilage losing strength like wet paper. They slid downward, and before his mind could catch up, skin flowed over the gaps. It closed smoothly, sealing him into silence.
Perfect silence.
His nose went next.
A sharp tearing sensation flared through the center of his face, then his nostrils softened and dissolved. The bridge sank. Skin stretched over the place where his breathing should have entered.
Yet he still lived.
Air moved in and out through nothing, a miracle that existed only to keep him conscious.
Blood began to leak.
It pushed out from under his skin in thin lines, running down his cheeks, dripping from his chin, sliding across his neck. It seeped from his arms and shoulders, appearing without cuts.
He watched it happen, and he could not taste the iron.
Taste was gone too.
His stomach lurched, not from nausea, but from wrongness. A human being was not meant to exist like this.
A human being was not meant to stay alive while every doorway to the world was sealed.
Then his sight changed.
At first, it was a flicker at the edge of vision, a second perspective that did not belong to his eyes. He blinked hard, but it only sharpened.
He saw the cave in front of him.
He also saw the corner behind him.
Another angle stared at the ceiling. Another stared at the floor. Another fixed itself on the skull fragments. The perspectives multiplied until the cave was no longer a single space, but a map drawn from every direction at once.
His breath hitched.
His body began to grow eyes.
They opened through the bleeding skin like blisters splitting. Where blood had been running, pupils formed. Lids unfolded. Glossy spheres pushed outward and stared into the dark.
Dozens.
Then more.
His arms, his chest, his neck, his shoulders, even the ruined smoothness of his face began to bloom with them. The cave flooded his mind from every angle, every crack in the stone, every shadow.
There was nowhere left to hide.
Tears spilled from every eye.
They ran down his skin in countless trails, mixing with blood, dripping to the floor in a steady rain. The tears were not born from pain.
Pain had been taken from him.
That did not mean the damage had stopped.
His body was still breaking. He could see it. The tremor in his hands. The swelling beneath his skin. The faint purple bloom spreading along his ribs. Something inside him was bleeding, deep and unseen.
He could not feel it.
He could not even flinch.
Ayanokouji stood in the cave as a thing that should not exist, breathing without a mouth, living without senses, watching everything with too many eyes.
The vow had been answered.
***
It took Ayanokouji a few minutes to adapt to his own vision.
A second ago, he had been ripped apart. Now he was forcing control over it. Each eye was a separate window, and at first they fought each other, filling his mind with too much information.
He learned how to shut them.
One by one, he closed the eyes scattered across his body until only the ones on his face remained. Even then, the strain did not leave. His head felt heavy, and his thoughts began to slow.
The nausea continued.
It rolled inside him, dull and constant. He could not taste it, could not smell the damp cave, could not hear his own breathing, but he could still feel the sickness in his gut.
Then he noticed something worse.
The nausea was moving slowly.
Not inside him.
In front of him.
Ayanokouji watched a thin line of saliva slide down his sealed face. It fell toward the stone floor like it had all the time in the world.
He took one step forward.
The cave moved in slow motion.
Dust drifting through the air looked almost frozen. The faint sway of his body took too long. His own movement felt normal, but everything around him lagged behind.
The world had slowed.
He had sped up.
Not by a little. By a lot.
Ayanokouji turned toward the cave mouth. Outside, the water was still pressing upward, the river trapped in an unnatural surge. Even the water looked delayed, its motion stretched and thick.
He stared at it, and the vow repeated itself in his mind.
Today.
He had promised today.
Ayanokouji stepped into the pressure.
The water slammed into him. It should have crushed him back into the cave. Instead, he pushed through and let it carry him, using the force like a path.
He swam up.
He emerged, and the river lost its pressure almost immediately. The wide flow collapsed, shrinking down until it became a stream again, thin and weak.
This river had become a stream once before.
Originally this river had become a stream because in the past thousands of Vowalkers absorbed the water.
A shadow fell over him.
Ayanokouji looked up.
The tree stood there, massive and unnatural, rising from a mound of bodies. Its trunk was straight and smooth, like a pillar made from dead wood and dried blood. There were no branches. No leaves. Only height.
At the top was a flat surface.
Someone stood on it.
Shirou.
He was still, looking down at the ground below as if he was making sure nothing moved. The bodies around the base were scattered and broken. The fight had ended here.
Only a few hours had passed in this place.
Shirou's head snapped toward the stream.
His eyes widened.
His face shifted into something close to disbelief.
Ayanokouji watched him form words.
He had no ears, but he did not need them. His sight was sharper now, cruelly sharp. He focused on Shirou's mouth and read the movement with ease.
"Have you become a Vowalker?"
Ayanokouji shook his head.
Shirou's stare did not soften. It only turned heavier, as if the answer made things worse.
His gaze moved over Ayanokouji's sealed face, the blood, the wet skin, and the eyes that looked too awake.
Ayanokouji looked at the tree again.
Then he remembered the vow.
Today.
He moved.
His body shot forward, and the world dragged behind him. The vision was moving at normal speed before it was very slow.
Yeah he went fast.
Ayanokouji reached the tree in few seconds.
***