Chương 58: Worldline α: Sweet Poison

The monk slowly opened his eyes. The exact millisecond my gaze met his, my breath caught completely in my throat. A universe. Within his irises, celestial nebulae swirled, galaxies ignited, and the infinite, relentless passage of deep time flowed flawlessly. Just holding eye contact with him forced you to realize how infinitesimally small, how utterly trivial and insignificant your own existence truly was.

【Code Name: KUKAI / The Void】 Without even moving to stand, he simply kept his serene gaze locked onto me, his voice echoing with absolute calmness.

"Why do you fear? Why do you resist? I bear no malice toward you.... I am simply trying to unburden you."

"Unburden... me?" My voice shook violently, the words catching in my throat.

"Yes. Humanity has suffered for far too long. Constantly fighting, tearing at one another, falling ill, aging, and trembling in the shadow of death.... To unshackle you from that eternal Samsara loop, and grant you a peace that lasts forevermore. That is my function. That is my [Dharma]." KUKAI lightly twitched the tip of his finger. With that single, microscopic gesture, something violently flooded directly into my neural pathways. THUMP. My heart violently leaped inside my chest.

In the immediate second that followed, a torrent of overwhelming, suffocating euphoria surged through my entire nervous system.

"Ah... aah..." It felt incredible. What on earth was this? The staggering layers of fatigue, trauma, and exhaustion I had accumulated across this entire grueling journey evaporated in a single fraction of a second. The stinging phantom pains of the burns I had suffered at Honno-ji vanished. The chronic, sickening discomfort in my stomach that had constantly tormented my daily life dissolved into nothingness.

The paralyzing anxiety regarding the future, the crushing regrets of my past, my suffocating inferiority complexes... every single one of those heavy "burdens" melted away like fresh spring snow under a warm sun. [The Sokushinbutsu System Phase 1: Klesha Cancellation] An artificial, catastrophic overproduction of endorphins. KUKAI was executing a direct, high-tier hack on the human brain by seamlessly combining a specific acoustic frequency with specialized optical data.

It violently overturned the fundamental biological premise that "to live is to suffer," forcefully overwriting my operating status into a state where "mere existence equals absolute ecstasy."

"Ahaha... aha-ha..." My knees buckled, hitting the pristine white floor. Every ounce of strength drained from my muscles. It didn't matter anymore. Fighting, safeguarding the timeline, protecting history... all of those exhausting, complicated responsibilities suddenly felt so incredibly pointless. I just wanted to surrender, to completely dissolve into this warm, brilliant white light.

"Yes. Just like that. Let it go." KUKAI's voice resonated inside my skull, as incredibly gentle and nurturing as a mother's lullaby.

"It is only because the firewall of the 'individual self' exists that humans experience the agony of loneliness. It is only because you draw a boundary between yourself and others that conflict is born.... Simply dismantle the walls. Let everything melt and merge into One, and nothing but infinite love and absolute harmony will remain." My right hand began to break apart, crumbling into floating particles of radiant light. It didn't hurt in the slightest.

If anything, it felt ticklish, deeply comforting, and profoundly right. Ah... so this is Nirvana. This is absolute liberation. It's paradise. Why on earth was I fighting so hard to reject something this magnificent? This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it. My consciousness began to grow hazily distant. Through the blurring edges of my vision, I watched my bamboo sword fall to the floor.

The weapon that had been my emotional anchor ever since my middle school days; the symbol of unyielding courage entrusted to me by Sakamoto Ryoma. The exact millisecond the wood touched the floor, it shattered into an infinite swarm of pristine white butterflies, fluttering away into the void.

"... Relinquish everything," KUKAI gently advised, his tone saturated with divine mercy.

"Courage, hope... they are nothing but worldly attachments.... There is no need for you to struggle to become someone of importance. You need only return to your original state—a single, quiet component of the great cosmic System." —That's right. —The pathetic version of me that desperately wanted to become someone, but failed entirely. —The me that dreamed of becoming a novelist, only to face bitter rejection and end up living as a mediocre, faceless public servant.

What was the point of burning so much operational energy just to maintain the miserable individual data profile known as "Kataru"? I wanted to vanish. Deep down, hadn't I always wanted to just disappear? On those miserable days when I was being ruthlessly bullied, staring out the classroom window at the empty sky... hadn't I begged the universe to just let me become completely transparent? Right now, that exact wish was being granted. KUKAI wasn't an enemy.

He was the ultimate Savior, delivering me to the exact salvation I had spent my entire life crying out for.

"... Yes," I murmured, my voice sounding like that of a brainwashed sleepwalker.

"... I'll fade away.... I'm just... so incredibly tired." Fully half of my physical body had already transitioned into pure light. My cognitive processes were being systematically bleached by the encroaching white. Finally, the true meaning of the "Moksha Liberation" Yari Naosu had spoken of clicked in my mind. This wasn't death. This was absolute, flawless salvation. For the briefest flash of a second, KUKAI appeared to offer a micro-smile. The deeply compassionate, sorrowful smile of a true saint.

He slowly extended his hand through the void, moving to gently welcome the final, lingering remnants of my conscious data. It was at that exact, terminal millisecond. Dig. A sharp, hard sensation pressed brutally against my chest. Even as my organic tissue was rapidly dissolving into light, "that object" sitting deep inside my chest pocket stubbornly refused to melt, maintaining its solid reality. The unmistakable, cheap tactile feedback of low-grade plastic. A rigid, boxy, completely unrefined shape....

The empty bottle of stomach medicine. It was completely devoid of contents. A completely ordinary, mass-produced over-the-counter container that could be bought for a few hundred yen at any run-of-the-mill drugstore. The original bottle I carried had been violently crushed into a million pieces by NOBUNAGA's bare fist. This one was the "Second Generation"—a backup container I had frantically snatched from the surface of my office desk and shoved into my pocket right before leaping headfirst into the final battle.

And right now, that cheap plastic edge was digging viciously into my chest. It hurt. Within the boundaries of this incomparably blissful, ecstatic Nirvana, that singular "cheap, pathetic pain" asserted its presence as a glaring, fiercely violent anomaly. —It hurts. —It's painful. —It feels completely miserable. A fragile, pathetic physical body that couldn't even survive without stomach medicine. A digestive tract that would instantly tear open with ulcers the moment stress ran too high.

Limbs that trembled awkwardly and beautifully whenever terror took hold. To entities like Yari Naosu or KUKAI, these traits were undoubtedly nothing but "unnecessary suffering that must be deleted from the parameters." But. But to me... this was...

"... Ah..." Like a vivid kaleidoscope, a torrent of raw memories violently detonated across my mind. The day I stopped USHIWAKA's catastrophic system rampage while my stomach was twisting in absolute, paralyzing terror. That rain-drenched afternoon I sprinted through HIMIKO's cult village, fighting back the literal urge to vomit. That exhausting night I spent listening to MURASAKI's endless, cynical venting while helping her proofread manuscripts, completely ignoring my splitting headache.

That terminal second I stood on trembling legs, enduring the agonizing screams of my burns to scream my defiance straight into NOBUNAGA's face. And that glorious dawn I swallowed mouthfuls of black mud, laughing like an absolute idiot right alongside RYOMA. Every single bit of it had hurt. Every single second had been agonizingly painful. But every single one of those moments was, without a shadow of a doubt, the proof that I was alive. This exact pain... is who I am.

This exact fragility is the very story I have desperately clawed my way through. To treat all of that as if it "never happened" just to turn into some clean, pristine light...

"... Don't you... dare screw with me...!" Reaching up with a left hand that was already on the verge of fading into nonexistence, I fiercely clamped my fingers around the stomach medicine bottle in my pocket. The sharp plastic corners dug brutally into my palm, splitting the skin with a sharp pop as hot, crimson blood began to ooze out. That singular, piercing spike of organic pain tore straight through the sweet, intoxicating fog of the neural narcotics.