Chapter 67: Yume
"He needs it to manifest fully."
Tami nodded slowly, his eyes still on the page.
"Based on what we just read," he said, "we need to make sure he doesn’t get reincarnated." He looked up. "So we’ve got even more motivation to reach the gemstone before Shinto does."
Nobody disagreed with that.
They kept flipping.
The book was old in a way that went beyond age — the kind of old that felt deliberate, like the thing had been made to outlast everything around it. The pages were thick and slightly rough beneath Yuto’s fingers, the texture of something that had absorbed decades of dust and come out the other side unchanged. The ink had faded in places, darkened in others, and the illustrations were rendered in a style that was precise without being comfortable — detailed enough to be unnerving, flat enough to feel wrong.
Page after page of scattered records. Diagrams of creatures he didn’t recognize. Maps of terrain that may or may not have matched where they were. Passages in the same half-readable script that required patience more than knowledge to decipher.
Then they paused.
The illustration on the left page was familiar.
The statue. The one that stood outside the cave entrance, worn smooth by time and whatever this realm used instead of weather. The stone woman with the cloth drawn across her eyes, rendered here in careful ink strokes that captured the folds of the fabric, the stillness of the face beneath it.
"There’s the woman outside the cave," Maya said.
They read the passage beneath the image.
Her name is Yume.
That was all.
No history. No origin. No explanation for the blindfold or the posture or why she had been placed there, outside a cave in a barren wasteland, rendered in stone large enough to dominate the entrance. Just the name, sitting beneath the illustration in ink that had faded almost to the color of the page.
Yuto stared at it.
*Yume.*
He thought about her face — the way the stone had been carved, the expression beneath the blindfold that he hadn’t been able to fully read when he stood in front of her. Not peaceful, exactly. Not pained. Something in between, or something else entirely that didn’t map cleanly onto either.
Was she actually blind?
Or was the blindfold a choice? A symbol meant to represent something — refusal to see, or the absence of judgment, or something he didn’t have the context to understand yet.
He found no answers in the page.
The book offered the name and nothing else, the way this realm seemed to offer information in portions just large enough to generate more questions.
They kept flipping.
The pages turned with a faint, dry sound, each one releasing a faint smell of something old and mineral, like stone that had been sealed in a room for a very long time. Then they found it.
The illustration stopped him immediately.
A gemstone, rendered in careful detail on a full page. Green — even in ink, even in the muted palette of an old drawing on yellowed paper, something about the color felt wrong in a way that was hard to name. Too present. Too intentional. The illustration showed it cut in a shape that suggested depth, facets that implied interior structure, and around it the artist had drawn faint lines radiating outward in a pattern that could have been light or could have been something else.
It looked alive.
Yuto had the distinct and uncomfortable impression that if he touched the page, the paper would be warm.
He read the text beside it.
The name was partially faded — the first word clear, the second eaten by time until only the general shape of it remained. A divine artifact. Crafted by a god whose name was barely legible, the letters worn to suggestions. A gem with the power of beginning and finality.
He read that twice.
*Beginning and finality.*
They read further. The gemstone was located underground, further southeast of their current position. It was guarded by two obstacles. And only those deemed the most malevolent could survive the trials and reach it.
The words settled into the silence of the cave.
Yuto’s gaze stayed on the page for a long moment.
He thought about what finality meant. The gem could send them home — that much had been established, that was the reason they were moving toward it at all. But it could also allow Shinto to manifest physically in this world. A permanent presence. An irreversible one.
Maybe that was finality. The ability to make something complete. To take something that existed partially, conditionally, and lock it into permanence.
The logic held, loosely. He wasn’t sure it was right. But it was the only shape the information assembled into, and he didn’t have anything to replace it with.
Maya continued through the remaining pages. The book gave nothing further — no maps with more detail, no additional names, no explanation of what the two obstacles were or what the trials demanded. The last pages were blank, or damaged beyond reading, or simply empty by design.
She closed it.
The sound of the cover meeting the back page was flat and final in the still air of the cave.
"Well," she said. "That seems to be all we’ll find here."
"Good enough," Yuto said.
He exhaled slowly.
"Now we know who Ōinaru Mono is. Why Shinto needs the stone. Where it is. And that there are two obstacles before it."
"And that only the most malevolent can pass," Tami added.
He scratched the back of his head, the sound of his nails against his hair small and ordinary against the surrounding quiet.
"I wonder what that means."
Yuto had an idea.
He hoped he was wrong.
The word malevolent didn’t suggest a test of strength, or endurance, or even cleverness. It suggested something else. Something the gem would require rather than something you could simply survive. A sacrifice. A betrayal. An action that could not be taken back.
Something irreversible.
He pushed the thought down.
Not yet.
He became aware of Maya.
She hadn’t moved since closing the book. She sat with it in her lap, her hands resting on the cover, her gaze directed at nothing specific — or at something interior that wasn’t visible from the outside. He almost didn’t notice it. The shift was small, the kind of thing that would have been invisible on a more expressive face.
But it was there.
Not confusion. Not fear.
Understanding.
The clear, settled look of someone who had already arrived at a conclusion and was not surprised by it.
And beneath that, something colder. Something that had no warmth in it at all, but a great deal of direction.
Determination
