"Inferior goods."
A contemptuous snicker drifted past his ear. Amamiya Rin tried to turn his head — and found the air thick as glue, clinging to every movement. Even that simple act required enormous effort.
(A dream!)
The realization came to him instantly.
He had sunk into the Long Dream world without any preparation whatsoever. He closed his eyes, drew his entire consciousness inward, then let it unfurl from that single point of stillness outward through his body — and slowly, steadily, wrested his sense of self back from the nightmare.
He turned his head and looked around. Besides himself and the professor at the front, the classroom held a dozen or so girls.
They all wore identical uniforms. Their long black hair was silky and straight, cut in neat, even bangs across their foreheads. Every single face was the same — that same unearthly, bewitching beauty.
Tomie. All of them. Sitting at their desks in neat, orderly rows, playing the part of students.
Except none of them acted anything like students.
One had produced a compact mirror from nowhere and was touching up her makeup. Another had her legs propped up on the desk. A third had her chin resting on one hand, staring blankly out the window with empty, unfocused eyes.
And a few of the Tomies seated near Amamiya Rin were watching him with open contempt.
"You have our cells in you, and you still took nearly an entire hour to regain consciousness. That recovery speed is pathetic."
"Well, he's a man, after all. Come to think of it, no man has ever been able to handle our cells."
"Amamiya Rin is just half-baked. His self-healing doesn't even come close to ours."
...
Listening to the Tomies talk, Amamiya Rin confirmed the full picture for himself.
"I died once... sudden cardiac arrest? And your cells brought me back?"
He forced his arm up and pressed his fingers against the bridge of his nose. Even here in the Dream World, he could still feel the bone-crushing exhaustion weighing down his body.
And yet — unlike the real world — his mind remained clear. He stayed awake.
"Be grateful. Without me, you'd have stayed dead."
Kawakami Tomie sat in the desk beside him. She straightened her posture, lifted her chin, and announced this with all the arrogance in the world.
"Thank you," Amamiya Rin said, and meant it. He turned to Kawakami Tomie and offered his sincere gratitude without hesitation.
That was exactly the wrong response. His complete lack of defensiveness killed every bit of satisfaction she might have taken from the moment.
"Go die."
"No."
Kawakami Tomie spat the words at him. Amamiya Rin declined without a moment's pause, utterly calm, utterly unbothered.
"...Bastard!"
A vein twitched at Kawakami Tomie's temple. She slammed both palms down on the desk and shoved herself to her feet, radiating fury.
For all that aggressive energy, though, she only shot Amamiya Rin one vicious glare — then turned and walked straight out the classroom door.
She wasn't the only one leaving. Very few of the Kawakami Tomies had any interest in wasting their time in a classroom. One by one, they filed out, until only Amamiya Rin and the old professor NPC remained.
NPC or not, even in the Dream World, the professor carried a remarkable depth of intelligence.
He stood at the lectern with an expression of clear displeasure — but he said nothing to stop any of them from leaving. He didn't care about students who refused to listen. As long as there was still one student paying genuine attention, that was enough.
And then Amamiya Rin disappointed him too.
He folded both arms on the desk, dropped his head, and fell asleep on the spot.
Studying was important, yes — but recovering from the kind of exhaustion that had nearly crushed his mind and body was more important.
He slept for three full days and nights. When he finally woke in that same classroom three days later, the weight of exhaustion had lifted from his mind. He stretched his arms wide, rolled his shoulders, found his footing — and then, properly, entered study mode.
In the days that followed, Amamiya Rin was like a dry sponge dropped into water. Every waking moment, he absorbed knowledge.
The Dream World's great gift lay in exactly this: everything the Tomies had encountered and absorbed in the waking world had taken shape here as teachers of different disciplines. Whenever Amamiya Rin wished, he could sit in any of their classrooms and extract whatever knowledge he needed.
The one limitation: knowledge that Kawakami Tomie had merely been exposed to — without truly understanding it — arrived in the Dream World just as hollow as it had started. The professors could only teach what their source had grasped. Amamiya Rin couldn't expect Dream World instructors to match the standards of the real world.
Fortunately, time was the one thing he had in abundance. He estimated at least twenty years ahead of him. With that runway, supplementing through self-study from textbooks was more than sufficient.
Engineering. Materials science. Chemical synthesis. Foundational physics. Electronics. His learning path was sharply focused — everything oriented around two core objectives: survival and destruction.
He poured enormous hours into the laboratory and the engineering workshop, starting from raw materials and working his way up to simple explosives.
First: ammonium nitrate fuel oil — ANFO. Agricultural-grade ammonium nitrate mixed with diesel. Casing from tin cans. Fuse from matchheads threaded onto a cotton cord. After a dozen-odd tests, the finished product was far more powerful and portable than the crude bomb he had cobbled together in his first dream. Light it, throw it — the explosion was enough to blow a steel door apart.
Next: a simple improvised shotgun. A seamless steel pipe machined into a barrel. A mixed black-powder charge as propellant. A spring-and-firing-pin assembly for the trigger — cock it, release the pin, ignite the charge, drive the shot. He worked through it in the engineering workshop with textbooks open beside him, cross-referencing diagrams against physical components, feeling his way forward piece by piece until he had a working prototype.
After that, round after round of testing — varying the chemical mixture ratios, running live tests in open terrain, logging chamber pressure, muzzle velocity, and stability for every iteration.
Blowouts were par for the course. Flying metal fragments shredded him more than once, leaving him covered in wounds. The only mercy was that this was the Dream World. In reality, he would have killed himself a dozen times over.
Through a combination of growing control over the dream environment and steadily sharpening technique, Amamiya Rin endured it all — and eventually produced a working firearm and the optimal ammunition to feed it.
And through all of this, he never set aside his practice of Hypnosis or kendo.
In a private room, standing before a full-length floor mirror, he conducted deep sessions of self-hypnosis.
He needed finer, more precise command over his own subconscious — to resist the memory distortion that the Long Dream induced, to defend against the mental corrosion of supernatural curses, and to explore how hypnotic suggestion could be applied more effectively to others.
The results, unfortunately, were limited. Without a skilled practitioner to guide him, working from books alone could only take him so far.
"It seems like when I wake up, I'll need to track down that legendary master hypnotist."
A character from one of Junji Ito's manga. Someone whose Hypnosis was potent enough to affect ghosts — whose subjects couldn't escape even through death. A technique like that had crossed the line from craft into something closer to fantasy-realm sorcery.
His kendo practice hall was grander in scale. Day after day, Amamiya Rin drilled his sword work and engaged in live sparring.
Kendo, though, was not the priority — it was maintenance. A way to prevent forgetting, to keep from regressing.
His swordsmanship had hit a ceiling. Solo practice behind closed doors was no path forward.
That was one reason. The more pressing one: the inherent limitations of the sword had been laid bare by the battle at the hospital. He had come to understand — truly understand — that knowledge was the real source of power.
If he'd had explosives and firearms during that fight, dealing with Aizawa Yuuma would have been a far simpler matter.
This stretch of Dream World time had one clear purpose: leverage university-level knowledge to master the construction of his own weapons.
____
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