For several days, Junpei kept going to Mahito for lessons.
As long as he didn’t reveal that warped nature of his, Mahito was an excellent teacher. Though he was only a newly born curse, his talent was extraordinary enough that, thanks to his unusual origin and power, he had risen to the position of leader among special-grade curses.
Because of that, the innate sense he had possessed from the moment of his birth was passed down intact to Junpei, his first disciple.
Junpei, who had once struggled even to adjust the size and intensity of his shikigami, could now summon a [Moonlit Wave] large enough to swallow a person whole.
And the poison carried by that beautiful, dangerous jellyfish grew even more lethal in step with Junpei’s denser output.
After focusing on practice for a long while, Junpei wiped the sweat from his forehead and sat down.
“Haa.....”
“Good work.”
Mahito, who had been reading while lying in a hammock, smiled at Junpei.
“You’ll get used to it more and more.”
“I guess so. The more I do it, the more fun it gets.”
“Ever heard of an upward graph? Once growth picks up momentum, it’ll explode even more than it is now.”
Junpei nodded and chewed on his lip.
Even though, by his own sense of time, quite a while had passed since he met Mahito, he still didn’t really understand him. They talked often, and every now and then he caught glimpses of something inhuman, but he had never heard the truth of what he was from Mahito’s own mouth.
“Isn’t it about time you told me what you really are, Mahito?”
“You curious?”
“Yeah.”
What exactly was this person?
Watching Junpei’s eyes shine with interest, Mahito slipped a bookmark into the page he had been reading and closed the book.
“There’s a kind of curse called a ‘special-grade vengeful spirit.’ Curses are conglomerations of cursed energy leaking from humans. Even if something doesn’t exist in reality, if the image of fear is commonly recognized, it can easily take shape and manifest as a powerful curse.”
“An image of fear commonly recognized..... You mean famous yokai or ghost stories?”
“Exactly. The Hanako of the restroom, the nine-tailed fox, and plenty of others. Sorcerers register those things as special-grade vengeful spirits and keep them under watch. If an unidentified powerful curse gets classified as a special-grade vengeful spirit too, you could say they just shove anything and everything into the category.”
-But the things people always fear aren’t those dusty old stories, are they?
Junpei vaguely sensed Mahito’s true identity from those words.
Special-grade vengeful spirit. A being humans feared. But not some outdated ghost story. There were beings that had long lived close to humanity, revealing their existence and receiving both awe and terror.
There were several candidates, but Junpei picked the most likely one and answered.
“Um..... natural disasters?”
Apparently that had been the right answer, because satisfaction curved Mahito’s eyes.
“Talking to you is easy on the nerves. You get it right away.”
“No..... it’s not that big a deal.....”
“Humans have always feared the earth, the forest, and the sea. The cursed energy poured toward them was so immense that, before they even took shape, they learned wisdom and have lived in hiding ever since. They’re all my proud comrades.”
As he said that, Mahito thought of each of those comrades.
The earth, quick-tempered and prone to clashes of opinion, but the strongest of the four and rich in experience.
The forest, quiet but heavy, dependable.
The sea, adorable.
Imagining them, Junpei swallowed hard. Natural disasters that humans feared had gained selfhood—how terrifying would that be?
Mahito called them proud comrades, but Junpei silently prayed he would never have to meet them. Just as humans feared and opposed them, they would surely harbor no fondness for humans either, so there was no way it would end well.
But if that was the case, what kind of curse was Mahito?
Earth, forest, sea..... once you removed those from the great forces of nature that caused disasters, there wasn’t much left.
“What kind of curse are you, Mahito?”
“Human.”
For a moment, Junpei felt an incomprehensible fear at Mahito’s utterly indifferent answer.
He shook it off quickly, thinking it wasn’t a feeling he should have toward his benefactor, but at least until that moment, he had never found Mahito more frightening.
“I’m a curse born from the ‘process’ of humans hating and fearing other humans.”
-------------------------
By the time Junpei had grown used to handling cursed energy as naturally as his own body, his attitude toward Mahito had become much more relaxed.
Mahito’s power, which Junpei had once been wary of, still showed no sign of turning toward him, and Mahito always treated Junpei kindly. Even if he said with his mouth that he expected nothing from other people, it was effective for Junpei, who had been thirsty for recognition and kindness somewhere deep inside.
The nameless fear he had felt that day while talking about Mahito’s identity was dismissed as nothing more than an instinctive rejection of an inhuman being. A curse that hated humans or whatever—none of his business.
What mattered was the fact right in front of him: Mahito was his benefactor and teacher.
Beyond training in cursed energy and techniques, the time they spent talking privately also increased.
Mahito was smart and knew a great deal, so he could talk with Junpei about almost anything, and he was a wonderful listener who paid close attention to what Junpei said. There was no trace of the ridicule or contempt other people had once shown him.
With enough time and the layering of that relationship, the boy’s thorns against the outside world gradually dulled.
The closer they became, the more Junpei felt that even the ugly past he never wanted anyone to see, the private beliefs he had carried in his heart, might be something he could speak aloud before Mahito.
“Did the person who first said ‘the opposite of liking someone is indifference’ go straight to hell?”
Junpei opened the conversation while fiddling with a toy that looked vaguely like a wooden doll Mahito had been playing with.
“It makes no sense that treating people with malice is better than not dealing with them at all. The opposite of ‘liking’ is obviously ‘disliking.’ Japanese people really seem to love that kind of thing. Taking a simple answer and making it needlessly complicated just to feel a thrill.”
“People just like wordplay. Because humans—”
They can’t live without making excuses.
With those words, Mahito showed Junpei something he had been kneading while propped against the sewer wall.
Junpei remembered Mahito saying he had been doing ‘experiments’ and guessed that this was probably the result.
A giant body covered in sagging flesh.
Its features were bloated and grotesquely bulging, and filthy saliva dripped from its mouth. It twitched now and then, so it seemed to still be alive, but aside from that there was no sign of life left in it, as if its intelligence and everything else had already been stripped away.
At the bizarre sight, Junpei was momentarily speechless.
“.....What is that?”
“An experiment on how far you can enlarge a human being.”
Mahito then turned away from it and pointed at the doll in Junpei’s hand.
“And that one is the reverse—an experiment to see how small you can make one.”
“This is..... a human?”
Junpei turned the shrunken human over and over in fascination.
Unlike the huge lump over there, this one showed no trace of life at all. It didn’t seem as though only the size had been reduced in the shrinking process; its color was dark and muddy, and its texture was hard, with none of the feel of touching skin.
Watching Junpei poke at it like that, Mahito asked a question.
“Junpei, are you used to corpses?”
“.....I don’t know.”
Junpei handed the shrunken human back to Mahito.
Used to corpses? Of course not. No one around him had died, and he had certainly never seen a corpse with his own eyes.
But what did that matter?
They were strangers. People he had never even met.
There was no reason for him to grieve their deaths. He didn’t really feel sad, either.
Someone close to him..... like his mother, maybe, if she died, that would be different.
“If that had been my mom just now, I might have lost my mind and hated you, Mahito.”
“Oh?”
Junpei didn’t pay much attention to Mahito’s face as he smiled like he had found something interesting.
“But I know how ugly humans are. That’s why I expect nothing from other people, and I don’t feel anything at all when someone else dies.”
In his first year, he had started a movie club with two friends who shared his tastes and got along with him.
At a high school with a tough cutoff score, he had thought the trash he’d met before would naturally be filtered out.
But the fun didn’t last long. Before long, familiar violence came crashing down on him.
They took the clubroom from him. It was the work of some rich piece of trash named Ito.
The other two friends gave in, but Junpei didn’t. If he bowed his head this time too, he would spend the rest of his life with his head down, and if he fought at the front, the people around him would naturally recognize his effort.
That expectation was beautifully betrayed.
No one stood on his side. No one helped him when he asked for help, and the more fiercely he resisted, the more injuries he got on his body.
The trash who pressed a cigarette into his forehead. Classmates who turned their heads away as blood dripped down his face. Teachers who hated troublesome situations and only repeated the hollow sermon that “friends shouldn’t fight.”
And yet they had the nerve to proudly hang up a slogan about a “violence-free school.” It was unbearably disgusting.
So now he expected nothing from anyone.
“Indifference is the virtue humans should reach.”
“And you want revenge?”
“Are you trying to say that’s contradictory?”
Junpei knew it well enough himself.
There was no logic to it. He had simply spoken whatever his heart told him to. Maybe it was a kind of self-hypnosis.
He had chosen escape because he didn’t want to be hurt anymore.
Mahito probably understood that too. He was smart, after all.
But Mahito still didn’t answer Junpei’s question, only asked one of his own with a meaningful look.
“Junpei, do you think humans have a ‘heart’?”
“Huh.....? Don’t they.....?”
“They don’t. They have a ‘soul.’ But that isn’t a ‘heart.’”
It was becoming more and more incomprehensible.
What was the difference between a soul and a heart?
If humans didn’t have hearts, then what were the emotions they felt as they lived their lives made of?
“Then these feelings of mine are.....!”
As if to make him listen to the end, Mahito cut Junpei off.
“I’m the only one in this world who understands the structure of the soul. And by touching it, I can change the form of living beings. Joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure are all the result of the soul’s metabolism. Don’t you think it’s too mechanical to call that a heart?”
Junpei felt as if he had been struck on the head.
The long-debated question of free will. To think that emotions, and the actions they triggered, were nothing more than the byproducts of the soul’s metabolism inside the machine called a human being.
If Mahito was right, then all emotion and human will were worth no more than a handful of trash.
“Humans place far too much importance on things they can’t see. From where I stand, though I can see it, the soul is no more special than the body.”
-It’s just there.
“Do you understand what I mean? Life has no value or weight. Like water everywhere around us, life just keeps swirling in circles. That goes for you and me too. Meaningless and worthless.”
So do whatever you want. You’re free to live however you like.
Don’t get trapped by the ideal of ‘indifference.’ Life doesn’t need consistency.
When you’re hungry, eat something. When you hate something, kill it.
I affirm everything about you.
Yoshino Junpei was
saved by those words.
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