8-10 minutes
How long had I been walking?
I had lost my sense of time long ago. It felt as though a hundred years had passed, and at the same time I’d only walked for ten minutes. Occasionally the ground turned to quicksand and flowed between my feet. The next moment, it became a swamp, swallowing me up to my ankles. The spirit world looked different than before. It was often the case that the appearance and textures did not match. Right now it felt like I was walking through mud, but the ground was level as a hard floor.
The goldfish alone remained unchanged as it swam. Whether I walked fast or slow, the goldfish stayed at the same position, flipping its tail fins just a little ahead of me.
As I walked deeper into the spirit world, I glanced at the red wall beside me.
There was a deep tear in the wall. Red flickered inside, and a bit of white light spilled out.
I saw a child sitting down inside.
I froze in my tracks. The goldfish also stopped moving. A small child was crouched on the other side of the crevice. Curled up in a ball, hiding under the porch, it reminded me of a cat.
Clothed in a kimono, the child looked familiar. Big eyes flickered.
It was a young Yuri.
My breath caught. Why were her memories being projected in the spirit world? The scenery shifted. It was like watching images through a camera. Yuri crawled out of the dim space and climbed up onto the porch. She opened the shoji a little and peeked inside.
Suddenly there was a loud cry.
Then it stopped.
Yuri shivered. She dashed under the porch. The shoji opened, and a man with menacing eyes appeared. He must have heard the noise.
The man looked around warily. His hands were wet with blood and amniotic fluid. Yuri was shaking violently. Moments later, she squeezed out an animalistic squeal from deep inside her throat.
Meow.
It didn’t sound human.
The man nodded to himself. “Just a cat.”
The footage ended. There was only wet flesh in the tear. I stood there, stunned. I tried to process what I just saw, barely managing to stop my feet from moving toward the tear. I pulled my eyes away and followed the goldfish. The man’s bloodshot eyes appeared in my mind’s eye. The fox whispered in my ear, asked me a question.
An animal will give birth to an animal. Don’t you think so?
What was the point in asking me this?
I silently continued on my way. I didn’t look to the side any more. I didn’t know what was being shown in the numerous cracks. My chest was astir. The goldfish moving at a constant speed was my only source of comfort.
Suddenly, the goldfish stopped, froze mid-air.
I lifted my head to see if I had made it to my destination. Before me was a narrow path, like a birth canal. My sense of distance was unreliable here, but I should’ve covered quite a lot of distance already.
But the fox was nowhere to be found.
Why did the goldfish stop?
“Hey… why did you—”
The moment I tried talking to the goldfish, something passed in front of me.
Ting.
I heard what sounded like a bell. My vision momentarily blurred. I saw white noise, like a damaged videotape. It felt like my retinas were burning. Frame-by-frame, images were seared into my eyes. And I saw it.
A person passed right in front of me.
Ting.
It was a woman, dressed sensationally like a prostitute.
Loose kimono exposed her shoulders, partially revealing her ample breasts. Her milky, glossy skin arrested attention. Her long black hair fluttered in the air, stirring elegantly in the absence of wind.
On her shoulder was a black parasol.
Big eyes turned to me. Her eyes narrowed, and her vermilion lips twisted.
I faced her, forgetting even to breathe. Pain blazed through my burning retina. The footage went on frame-by-frame. The woman blinked. Tilting her head, she put on a bewitching smile.
The parasol twirled. Black lace stirred.
A repulsive smile appeared on her red lips.
“My, an unusual guest,” the woman said, wearing an animalistic smile. “Nice to meet you, Odagiri-kun.”
Her voice sounded familiar. The woman came closer. I couldn’t hear her footsteps. She seemed to be gliding across the surface of the spirit world. She extended a pale hand, and her vermillion lips curled up.
Fear filled my mind. Fear of being eaten.
Emotions were catching up to me. There weren’t supposed to be people in the spirit world. This realm was Mayuzumi’s playground. No one else could come to this place without a guide.
Then who was this woman before me? Was she a hallucination created by the spirit world?
The woman extended a hand.
Right before she touched me, someone pulled my arm. The next moment, the ground beneath me collapsed. It felt as if I had stepped on glass. Missing my footing, I fell through the soft ground. The woman’s silhouette moved further and further away. Her figure unraveled like a thread and fell into darkness. The light faded from around me, and I was engulfed in a sea of flesh and the smell of iron.
I searched for the crimson goldfish, but I couldn’t spot it. I couldn’t even tell which way was up or down.
I had failed. I strayed from the path shown by the goldfish. No human could survive in the depths of the spirit world.
I would keep wandering around, lost, or worse, lose my mind.
Fighting it was pointless. I didn’t even know if I should stand up or down in this place. There was nothing to guide me. How could I even flounder around when I didn’t even know where the ground was? Like a bug thrown into a hole in the ground, I continued fumbling.
Right when I was forgetting even how to breathe, my ears caught a clear voice.
“Do you want to eat my heart, Hamlet?”
My eyes widened.
A second later, I fell into the sky.
I fell upward and slammed my shoulder hard. The rotting floor creaked. Soft ripples—not like glass, but marks of wading through grass—appeared on the ground. Breathing out in pain, I studied the woman standing before me.
She looked a bit blurry, her contours gone.
As if she had lost her physical body.
“…Ah.”
Memory stirred.
She was already dead.
“You’re such a hopeless man, cutie.”
Yuri Jingu was looking down at me with a smile.
“Hello, cutie. You’re quite the tenacious man, coming all the way here. No one likes clingy men. Especially cat-like women like me.”
Yuri spoke in the same detached tone she used when she was still alive.
I stared at her. She was watching me in the same uniform I saw her in before. Her belly was normal. It didn’t seem like there was a child inside. Her appearance was far different from her grotesquely bloated figure.
Holding my gaze, Yuri chuckled. “Don’t give me that look, cutie. It’s my body that’s pregnant. I, the soul, fulfilled my duty of strengthening the link between the spirit world and my body. And now I have nothing to do. There’s nothing more to be done either. I’m bored, so to speak. Except for the womb, I’d been relieved from my post.”
Yuri raised her hands. I recalled how her belly swelled rapidly immediately after her death. By abandoning her body, she moved to the spirit world to reinforce its connection to her womb, but at the cost of leaving her soul trapped in the spirit world.
She couldn’t even disappear.
“So I was wandering around this place when I spotted you. I sensed something bad, so I pulled on your arm. I need to talk to you. Let’s take our time, shall we? Hup!”
She sat down on the ground. But her hips were in the air. She crossed her legs and looked at me. I thought back to the moment when she pulled my arm.
The red woman was smiling in the spirit world. Picturing her beautiful figure made cold sweat trickle down my back.
Who was that woman? I tried to think hard, but it felt like a fog was hanging over my head. After racking my brains for a while, I gave up.
There was no point in thinking about it.
Events that occurred in the spirit world were more than I could handle.
“You want to talk to me?”
“Yes. You should go home,” Yuri said, resting her hand on her chin.
She smiled. But her eyes were pregnant with fierce rage.
“Be a good boy.” She sounded like she was persuading her own child.
But my answer was obvious.
“No.”
Silence fell. Yuri regarded me quietly. A crooked smile appeared on her face.
“I see.”
Meow.
I heard a cat’s cry. A second later, something soft brushed against my leg.
I quickly looked down and saw a black cat with lovely fur rubbing its head against me. I could hear it purring. It wanted to be pampered. All the hair on my body stood on end.
What was a cat doing here?
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