Chương 30: The Midnight Tsubone and the Editor's Creed

The Hour of the Ox—around two in the morning. Heian-kyo was blanketed in a heavy, suffocating darkness and absolute silence. Yet, inside a single room within Empress Shoshi's tsubone —her private quarters—a bizarre, sweltering tension hung in the air. Or more accurately, a stale, lived-in odor that bordered on decay.

"... First, let's get this place cleaned up. The environment dictates the state of the mind." I was currently waging war against a literal mountain of garbage scattered across the room. I picked up discarded, crumpled sheets of wasted washi paper, threw out rotting fruits, and flipped an overturned inkstone back into its proper place. Yari had abandoned me at the threshold, muttering, "I'll keep watch outside. Dealing with mentally unstable emos is entirely outside my job description."

A remarkably cold-hearted boss.

"... Hey. What is your deal, anyway?" MURASAKI remained curled into a ball in the corner of the room, her half-lidded, cynical eyes tracking my every move.

"Lord Michinaga didn't order you to do this, so why are you trying so hard? Whether I write or not has absolutely nothing to do with you."

"It has everything to do with me," I replied, meticulously rolling back up a scattered scroll.

"I am a fan of your work. And for a fan, watching their favorite author break their pen and give up is a pain far worse than dying."

"... Heavy. Gross." She grimaced, but beneath her scowl, a distinct glint of genuine curiosity flickered in her eyes.

"You said it earlier, didn't you? That you love the 'darkness' in my stories.... How could a straight-laced, serious-looking guy like you ever understand the utter despair of a woman?"

"I understand it perfectly." I stopped what I was doing. In the overlapping glow of the room's illumination—the flickering flame of the traditional candlestick melting into the cold, sharp light of my futuristic LED lantern—I quietly opened my mouth.

"Because I... was also someone who belonged in the darkest corner of the classroom." I began to open a wound I had never shared with anyone before—a scar that not even Yari knew about.

"When I was a kid, I didn't know how to smile properly. I couldn't read the room, I was always out of place... and before I knew it, I had become the class punchline. Their human punching bag." Sardonic laughter echoed in my memory. The sensation of a freezing floor. Trash stuffed deep inside my desk. The word"Die" scrawled across my indoor shoes.

"It was agonizing. I hated going to school. Every single morning, my stomach would twist in knots, and I'd feel like throwing up... But I couldn't bring myself to tell my parents or my teachers. Admitting that I was being bullied felt too pathetic. It felt too shameful."

"... Shame," MURASAKI murmured under her breath.

"Yes. In his masterpiece No Longer Human, the author Osamu Dazai wrote a single, devastating line:'Mine has been a life of much shame.' The first time I read that sentence, it felt like lightning striking my soul. I realized, Ah, he's here too. Though our eras and environments were entirely different, right there on the page was a human being who felt that just existing and breathing was a shameful act, exactly like me." This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

I reached into my pocket, pulling out my empty bottle of stomach medicine, turning it over in my fingers.

"From that day on, I buried myself in books. I devoured over a thousand of them. In Natsume Soseki's Kokoro, I trembled at the terrifying egoism and profound isolation of the character Sensei. In Kafka's The Metamorphosis, I felt a deep empathy for the sheer, irrational absurdity of being despised by your own family." MURASAKI listened in absolute silence. She poked her face out slightly from beneath her futon, her gaze locking onto me with fierce intensity.

"The people around me would sneer. They'd say, 'You're just escaping into stories because you don't have a place in reality.'... But they were dead wrong." I raised my head, looking straight into MURASAKI's eyes.

"Stories weren't a hiding place. They were a [Weapon]."

"A weapon...?"

"Yes. Watching those characters agonize over their cruel fates, suffer, and yet refuse to stop fighting—it gave me courage. It told me that my suffering wasn't meaningless. It could become literature.... Because I possessed the weapon known as stories, I was able to survive that hellish classroom and make it to this very day!" I had gotten way too passionate. It was the typical, unhinged rant of an over-enthusiastic geek. I figured she would be completely turned off. But MURASAKI didn't recoil.

Instead, she slowly crawled out from her blankets and sat directly in front of me.

"... You have good eyes." She reached out with her folding fan, gently tipping my chin upward.

"They're rotten. Stagnant.... And yet, something is burning at the absolute bottom."

"I'll take that as a compliment."

"We have places like that in my era too. Those dark corners of the classroom... The imperial court is nothing but a massive collection of them," MURASAKI said, a self-deprecating smile gracing her lips.

"Everyone exchanges poems with brilliant smiles plastered on their faces, but their bellies are boiling with jealousy and contempt.

'That girl's kimono color is tacky,' or'That man will never climb the ranks.'... Just breathing in an atmosphere like that makes my chest tighten. It makes me feel like suffocating to death."

"I know. And that's exactly why you write, isn't it?"

"Yeah. Because vomiting it out onto paper is the only way I can stay sane.... Hey, Kataru. In those future stories you know so much about, do you have a recommendation for me?"

"I do," I answered without a moment's hesitation.

"It's a masterpiece called [Phoenix], created by an author named Osamu Tezuka."

"Phoenix?"

"Yes. If Dazai and Soseki captured the agony of the individual, this work depicts the profound karma of life itself." I flipped open my digital console, displaying a specific scene for her.

"Look at this. This is Gaou, the protagonist of the Karma Chapter. He was discriminated against as a one-eyed, one-armed bandit, and he took countless lives. Yet, he cries out—""...

'I don't want to be a beast forever! I want to become a proper human!'..." MURASAKI read the text aloud, her voice trembling slightly.

"He fought to transcend his beastly nature and become human by carving Buddhist statues out of raw wood.... He is exactly like you. Surrounded by the murky, toxic human relationships of the court, you are desperately trying to preserve your own soul by writing The Tale of Genji."

"..." MURASAKI's pupils quivered. I flipped to another page.

"In HIMIKO's world, the masses shut down their minds to achieve a state of artificial peace. But the Phoenix says this:"'For humans, achieving immortality is not true happiness. Real happiness is finding your purpose while you are alive, and fulfilling it.'

"...!" MURASAKI caught her breath.

"An eternal, painless peace is no different from being dead. To agonize, to suffer, to feel jealousy, and yet to express something through art while you live... that is the very humanity you love so deeply, isn't it?"

"... How frustrating." Her eyes began to gleam with a dangerous, intoxicating light. The defiant, battle-ready smirk finally returned to her lips.

"To think that a thousand years in the future, there's an author who understands my exact vibes so perfectly."

"So... let's write, Lady MURASAKI." I picked up her holographic folding fan from the floor and held it out to her.

"We don't need beautiful lies. Take the murky, raw reality of human nature that only you can see, and slam it onto the canvas. That will become the ultimate code—the supreme incantation to exorcise the 'Onryo' that Michinaga is so terrified of." She took the fan from my hand. At that exact instant, with a sharp, static snap, the entire aura radiating from her body underwent a total transformation.