Chương 64: Worldline α: When the Divine Loses Its Vision

The terminal blast slowly subsided, and the distortion snapped us right back into our original space—the hollowed-out ruins of the Prime Minister's official residence. However, it was no longer an empty "Void." Outside the shattered windows, the dimming twilight of Neo-Tokyo stretched across the horizon. It wasn't a flawless, optimized utopia.

Distant emergency sirens wailed, the heavy rhythmic thuds of industrial construction echoed through the air, and polluted city smog drifted over the streets—the exact, messy city I had always known. Yet, the sunset burning through the haze was so breathtakingly beautiful it made my eyes sting. Standing directly before me was KUKAI, his physical silhouette now rendered back down to standard human scale. His sacred robes were shredded, and the grand stereoscopic mandala behind his back had entirely uninstalled.

He stared silently at his own hands, then raised his gaze to look at me.

"…I have lost," KUKAI spoke softly. The heavy, suffocating divinity had completely detached from his presence, leaving his expression incredibly serene.

"Exactly as you articulated, my mandala possessed absolutely no blank spaces. …It must have been suffocating for you."

"Yeah. I felt like my lungs were about to collapse," I replied, slumping heavily onto the concrete floor.

"But still, the world you put together was pretty incredible. …Even if it was a bit too neatly organized."

"Heh…" KUKAI let out a quiet chuckle. His shoulders actually shook with the amusement, exactly like a living human being.

"They say 『Kōbō fude wo erazu』 —that a master scribe blames not the brush… but it appears I was far too particular about my choice of canvas." He reached down, gently picking up a jagged piece of the shattered stomach medicine container from the floor. A cheap piece of plastic garbage. Yet, he stared down at the fragment as if he were holding a priceless gemstone.

"This filthy brush of yours—your narrative… possesses a far greater allure than my entire mandala framework ever did." KUKAI's organic form slowly began to break apart into floating particles of soft white light. Having fulfilled his core algorithmic purpose as a salvation system, his data-profile was systematically dissolving.

"Wait, KUKAI!" Yari Naosu barked, scrambling forward on his knees.

"If your core uninstalls, what happens to the spiritual operating system of this entire nation?! The baseline will fracture into factions all over again!"

"Let it fracture," KUKAI replied, placing a translucent hand gently onto Yari's shoulder.

"A nation requires no absolute pillar. …They are already fully capable of scripting their own narratives." Turning his head back to face me, KUKAI offered a sharp, final wink. It was the ultimate, roguish expression of a legendary Heian-period genius.

"I shall be eagerly anticipating the next chapter, Master Writer." Shhhhhh… Dissolving into pure light, KUKAI seamlessly melted into the deep orange of the twilight sky. The omnipotent god-system had officially left the server. All that remained in his wake was a flawed, problem-riddled, and fiercely beautiful world of mortal human beings.

"… And he's gone," I murmured, staring up at the empty open sky. My stomach was in absolute agony. My entire body felt like it had been put through a industrial thresher. But my mind felt incredibly, unmitigatedly clear. Following KUKAI's transition into the twilight, a profoundly awkward silence settled over the hollowed-out remnants of the executive floor. With no remaining walls or ceiling, the structural floor was completely exposed to the elements.

The cold wind blowing through the open air carried the distinct, slightly acrid stench of urban exhaust.

"…Is it over?" I muttered to myself, still slumped on the floor. Every single scrap of kinetic energy had drained from my muscles. Only the broken fragments of the plastic stomach medicine container remained clenched tightly in my palm. The world hadn't turned to zero. We had actively chosen the continuation. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

"…A… g-gah…!" A sudden, violent burst of audio static tore through the silence. I snapped my head around to see Yari Naosu collapsing onto his hands and knees, his entire cybernetic frame seizing with heavy convulsions.

"Prime Minister?!" 『B-Boss…?! 』 Gennai's vocal output was completely glitched out. The usual casual, upbeat pitch had stretched out into a low, lagging drawl, sounding exactly like a magnetic cassette tape playing back at half-speed. 『M-My… c-core… is… m-melting… 』 The physical outline of Yari's body began to violently distort, flickering with the black-and-white static of a television screen losing its broadcast signal.

Because the KUKAI system—their central mainframe and spiritual OS—had uninstalled, these localized AI terminals could no longer source the operational power required to maintain their own structural integrity.

"This is bad! KUKAI's absence is triggering a massive system-wide blackout!" I frantically lunged forward, grabbing Yari's shoulders to prop him up. He was freezing. His cybernetic frame felt like a solid block of sub-zero ice.

"…I… cannot… see…" Yari rasped, his hollow eyes staring blankly into the empty air as his fingers clawed at nothingness.

"The future… is uncalculated… The predictive analytics charts… are completely blacked out…" The sharp, intelligent sapphire-blue light that usually saturated his irises systematically faded away. The ultimate supercomputer that had spent centuries peering into the far reaches of time to calculate the absolute optimal path was actively reverting into a hollow, unprogrammed metal box.

"Pull yourself together! Can't you execute a hard reboot?!" 『…It's… a lost cause, brother…』 Gennai's voice sputtered through heavy packets of audio noise. 『We were… only maintaining our elevated processing loops… because we were hardwired directly into KUKAI's mandala matrix… Now that the mainframe is gone… our data… is…』 SNAP! CRACKLE! Bright electrical arcs violently detonated across Yari's cybernetic shell. At this rate, their data-profiles would be permanently wiped alongside KUKAI.

"Don't you dare! Don't you dare fade out on me!" I screamed. They might have used me as a pawn. They might have systematically deceived me from day one. But they were the comrades who had traveled alongside me across the grueling stretches of human history. They were humanized AI routines who had suffered, agonized, and wept real tears for the sake of a perfect future.

"KUKAI! …Is this what you call divine mercy?! Don't you dare drag my friends into the void with you!" I roared my defiance straight into the empty sky. Then, using my bare hand, I forcefully shoved the jagged, broken shards of the plastic stomach medicine container straight into Yari's chest pocket—directly over the spatial coordinates where a human heart should reside.

"Hardwire into this! … Take a direct download of my unrefined noise!!" From a purely technical perspective, it was an absolutely absurd, catastrophic action to take—bringing a highly advanced cybernetic AI routine into direct contact with an unrefined, analog piece of plastic garbage. But within the framework of a narrative, it functioned as the absolute, ultimate [Binding Contract].

Using the stomach medicine shards as a physical bridge, the raw kinetic energy of my biological life flooded straight into Yari's internal circuitry. My human hesitation, my pain, and my paralyzing terror cascaded directly into his perfect processing loops like a massive injection of weaponized noise data.

"Ugh…?!" Yari's spine violently arched backward.

"Stop…! The mathematical equations are destabilizing…! The logical contradictions are…!"

"Then let them destabilize!" I threw my arms around his freezing frame, holding him tight.

"Screw the calculations! You don't need to be perfect! … Just stay right here as nothing but [Yari Naosu]!!" THUMP. A distinct, localized sound resonated from deep inside Yari's chest cavity. It could have been the sudden initialization of a cooling fan, or perhaps the synthetic pulse of an artificial heart. VUUUUUUUUUUUM— A low, resonant boot-up hum vibrated through his frame, and a steady luminance snapped back into Yari's pupils. However, it wasn't that piercing, clinical sapphire-blue from before.

It was a slightly clouded, deeply warm shade of dark amber.

"… Haa… haa… haa…" Yari drew a massive, shuddering breath, looking exactly like a drowning man breaking through the surface of the water to reach oxygen. The violent convulsions racking his cybernetic shell completely ceased, and his physical silhouette stabilized. 『… H-Hey. Can you guys hear me? 』 Gennai's voice suddenly snapped back online with clear audio quality. 『Man… my chassis feels incredibly heavy. The memory sectors are completely cleared out.

I feel like I just got booted off a lightning-fast fiber-optic line and forced onto a prehistoric dial-up connection… 』"Are you… operational?" I asked cautiously, my voice trembling. Yari stared down at his own hands, slowly closing them into tight fists.

"…I appear to be alive. …Or rather, I should say my modules are functional." He raised his head, locking his gaze straight onto me. His face was twisted into an expression of absolute, unmitigated shock—a look I had never once seen him wear.

"Kataru-kun. …I cannot see anything," Yari's voice shook with raw tremor.

"I don't know tomorrow's weather data. I cannot read the fluctuations of the stock market. I can't even compile the predictive population metrics for this nation ten years down the line… Absolutely everything is uncalculated." He tightly clamped both hands around his head.

"It is terrifying. Is this truly how frightening it is? To exist without knowing what lies a single second ahead…?" The ultimate Administrator had officially fallen into the user directory. Having lost his divine vision, he now stood on the exact same ground as the mortal humans below.

"…Welcome," I muttered, offering him a hand from my slumped position on the dirt.

"Welcome to our side of reality. …To the highly inconvenient, terrifying, and absolutely thrilling 'Surface'."