Overdrawing the soul demanded a long convalescence.
So where was that long stretch of time supposed to come from?
Only from a dream.
And if dream-time was going to be converted into real time, he had to find Hirano Yuji, the man locked away in prison.
In fact, Amamiya Rin had not spent the entire day shut up in the Police History Compilation Office, leafing through files and studying records of curses and uncanny phenomena.
Once he had secured Indou Ranko's protection, he had left the Metropolitan Police Department, looked up the procedure for visiting an inmate, and gone to file the paperwork.
Under normal circumstances the application would never have gone through, and even if it did, it would have taken a good while.
But with the Brahma-Sound Illusion Art, every light turned green for him — not that any of it was particularly legal.
Since he still had the Twilight Kintoki duo to deal with, Amamiya Rin had not gone straight over after filing; he had meant to slot the trip into the following day. Now that his needs had grown more urgent, though, he had no interest in waiting any longer.
A little over half an hour later, the jeep pulled into the prison parking lot.
Amamiya Rin opened his eyes. Tomie helped him out of the vehicle, and they followed a guard into the visiting room.
They waited only a few minutes before Hirano Yuji was escorted in.
He wore prison clothes, his hair shaved down almost to the scalp, the bluish-white skin showing through. His face was thinner than in the file photo, and everything about him sagged with a worn-out listlessness.
Hirano Yuji sat down on the far side of the glass and looked at Amamiya Rin and Tomie through it, confusion flickering across his eyes.
He picked up the handset and got straight to the point. "Who are you? What do you want with me?"
"You don't need to know who I am. All you need to know is that I have questions for you, and I'd like honest answers."
Amamiya Rin lifted his own handset, and his voice traveled down the line into Hirano Yuji's ear.
For an instant Hirano Yuji's gaze went unfocused, his pupils widening slightly, his posture going slack.
"No problem. Ask away," Hirano Yuji answered obediently. On the surface, nothing about him had changed at all.
"You come from the Dream World?" Amamiya Rin asked, cutting straight to it.
"That's right. I came out of Hirano Yuji's dream." The answer came just as bluntly. He nodded without a moment's hesitation.
"I've said this many times already. You can interrogate me all you like, I've got no other story to give. When I came out of the dream, the original Hirano Yuji and Mari both went into the Dream World through my body. If you don't believe me, there's nothing I can do about that."
"No, I believe you. I came here because I want to know how to swap the self in the dream with the self in reality," Amamiya Rin said calmly.
The words hung there, and Hirano Yuji's face went blank with astonishment, as though such a question was the last thing he had expected.
"Swap the dream self with the real self? Heh heh heh heh, and here I am hearing that from you. What, do you want to run away from reality? Escape into the Dream World and let another you live your life for you?" Hirano Yuji sneered.
"Don't romanticize the Dream World. Mari used to think dreams were freer than reality too. Complete nonsense. Dreams are more real than reality. There's no difference between that place and this one."
"Save your breath. All I need is to know how to swap the dream self with the real self. That answer, and nothing else." Amamiya Rin's expression never shifted.
"No, no, no. It isn't a swap. It's a theft. The one in the dream steals the life of the one in reality." Hirano Yuji shook his head, a mocking smile spreading over his face. He lunged forward, palm flattening against the glass between them.
"Making that happen is simple. Nothing could be simpler. You just turn your body inside out. Make the outside the inside and the inside the outside, like pulling the lining out of a pocket."
He said it with a mockery so relaxed it was almost cheerful, and yet the description itself was precise.
"Hey. Do you understand what that means? Your organs fall out. Heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, all of it dangling on the outside. The bones come loose from the body too. You become a hollow man with nothing left inside."
"An ordinary person in that state would die without question. But you didn't die. Why? Because what you're describing is a physical process rather than a supernatural one?" Amamiya Rin was unmoved by the imagery. He watched the man across the glass and calmly pointed out the crack in the story.
As for becoming a hollow man — worst case, he could simply scoop out the organs and bones beforehand.
He possessed the Tomie constitution as well. Even with his organs removed he would not die for a while, and if they failed to regrow in time, well, wasn't that what the Soul Reviver's Sword was for?
Swordmaster Tomie could feed him life force from a distance. She could bring him back even if he was thoroughly dead. Throwing out a few organs hardly ranked as a problem.
"Because I have no organs, and no bones either. Before the turning inside out, I was already empty."
Seeing that Amamiya Rin refused to flinch, Hirano Yuji lost interest, and his face flattened out. No — not flattened. It turned uncanny.
"That Hirano Yuji in the real world always believed he'd been born without organs. He was wrong. I wasn't born that way. Think about it for half a second. How could a man with no organs grow up at all? How would he pass a physical without anyone noticing?"
Hirano Yuji laughed under his breath, as if jeering at the stupidity of his other self.
But hearing that, a strange look came over Amamiya Rin.
Because this world contained someone in a comparable situation.
Layers of Fear. How exactly had the heroine's younger sister gone her entire life without a single person discovering that beneath her skin there was more skin?
Amamiya Rin could not make sense of it, yet that girl had risen to become a famous idol with her condition still unknown to anyone, right up until an injury peeled one layer away.
Was it some kind of cognitive interference?
Everyone around them fell under the curse's distortion of perception, so that even the most easily exposed truth stayed hidden.
"So how did Hirano Yuji manage it? How did his organs disappear?" Amamiya Rin had no intention of chasing that anti-logical, anti-commonsense riddle any further, and went straight to the question that mattered most.
Barring surprises, the reason Hirano Yuji had no organs, the reason his real life had been stolen by his dream self, lay in whatever incident he was about to disclose.
"A ritual. On the day my parents died, I found a black magic grimoire in the house. It described a ritual for summoning the Dream God. Complete it, and I would enter the Dream World and go on living there with my family."
Hirano Yuji's gaze darkened. His mouth split open into that eerie, heatless smile.
Another ritual?
Amamiya Rin let out a sigh.
Those higher-dimensional demons were forever scattering their summoning rites around like litter, and worst of all, the rites were never difficult to perform. Even some destitute country boy, handed the method, could call up a demon capable of ending the world.
Indifferent to why Amamiya Rin was sighing, Hirano Yuji went on.
"I followed the instructions and went back to the apartment I used to live in. That building has a passage leading into the dream dimension. There, the boundary between reality and dream goes blurry. So I performed the ritual, and when it was finished, a small spider appeared. That spider crawled in through my mouth and down into my body. It ate my organs. It gnawed my bones clean. I became an empty shell with nothing inside, and I was still alive. Don't ask me why I was still alive, I don't know. If you insist on an answer, it was the power of the Dream God."
Kawakami Tomie's brow creased.
Letting a spider devour your organs and your bones? Just hearing it sent a chill crawling over her.
Amamiya Rin frowned as well.
Dreams? Spiders? That combination felt like something he had come across somewhere before.
He could not place it, and did not waste more effort on it. Instead he asked, "I wasn't going to ask why you're still alive. What I want to know is this: entering the Dream World and living on there with your family — wasn't that your wish? Why come back out?"
"Because Mari wasn't in that world…"
As he said it, Hirano Yuji's face twisted, the corner of his mouth jerking several times before he could continue. "An offering! The god demanded an offering. The god demanded that I offer up a woman to him, to become the god's bride."
"An offering? Let's be plain about it. That's a sacrifice." Amamiya Rin's frown deepened, and displeasure edged into his voice.
The man certainly knew how to dress up his own actions. God's bride, indeed — might as well call her a river spirit's wife. He had handed the woman he once loved over to a deity as a sacrifice, and after committing an atrocity like that he still wanted to paper it over with pretty words.
Amamiya Rin shook his head, done wasting conversation on Hirano Yuji, and simply asked how the ritual was performed and what precautions it required.
With anyone else, Hirano Yuji would never have talked. But the man across from him was Amamiya Rin, a master who had honed Hypnosis all the way to mind control.
However unwilling he was, he had no choice but to lay out the exact procedure.
Once he understood the contents of the ritual, Amamiya Rin did not linger.
The jeep rolled out through the prison's heavy iron gates, the cold perimeter walls falling away behind them. Amamiya Rin leaned back in the passenger seat with his eyes shut, regulating his breathing. The hollowness left by the soul's overdraft still spread through his marrow, and every breath carried a weariness he could not put into words.
Flesh-Mod Tomie kept a steady hand on the wheel, driving toward the old apartment building where Hirano Yuji had once lived, following the address Amamiya Rin had looked up beforehand. Along the way she picked up the supplies the ritual would need.
Twenty minutes later, the jeep pulled into a visitor space outside an apartment block.
It was a seven-story building, a plain rectangular box faced in small beige tiles, the sort you saw everywhere. The ground-floor entrance was an old aluminum-framed glass door, its handle wrapped in a faded fire-safety banner.
They got out and went inside, and Amamiya Rin called first at the manager's room.
A middle-aged man in dark blue work clothes sat within, head down over a newspaper. He looked up at once at the sound of them.
"Excuse me. Is anyone living in room 407 at the moment?" Amamiya Rin asked politely.
"407? That one's been empty going on two years now. Are you looking for someone? Or after a rental?" The manager sized him up and folded the newspaper down onto the desk.
"Lend me the key, if you would." Amamiya Rin gave no direct answer, only asked for the key outright.
"Remember to return it when you leave." The manager's eyes lost focus for a moment, then cleared again. He took a key from the board on the wall behind him and passed it through the window.
"Thank you." Amamiya Rin took the key and inclined his head.
The manager settled back down, picked up his newspaper again, and read on as if nothing had happened.
"You're getting more and more flexible about how you do things," Tomie remarked beside him, amused.
"As long as it does no harm and costs no one anything, a little flexibility hurts nobody," Amamiya Rin answered evenly, climbing the narrow, dim stairwell with her supporting him.
Fourth floor, end of the corridor. He pushed the door open and a chill breathed out at them, air sealed away for years.
The room was small and dim, the furniture blanketed in thick dust, fine webs strung across the corners. Wind slipped in through the gaps in the battered window frame and the webs swayed gently, as though something living were breathing there.
Amamiya Rin stood in the entryway, his gaze sweeping the room, then holding a moment on the webs in the corner.
"Spiders…"
He thought back to what Hirano Yuji had described.
Summon the Dream God, and what appears is a spider. The spider crawls into the body and eats the organs clean.
Were these ordinary cobwebs, or did they have something to do with that so-called Dream God — which was in truth a Sandman?
Amamiya Rin studied them closely, but however long he looked, no conclusion came.
Tomie drew the night's ritual supplies out of the backpack — candles, salt, a mirror, thread — and arranged the space according to what Hirano Yuji had specified.
"Listen, are you really going through with this?" With the setup finished, Tomie could not keep the question back.
She had reason to ask twice. The ritual out of Hirano Yuji's mouth was more than a little revolting.
What kind of procedure was summoning a spider, letting it crawl inside you, and letting it eat your organs?
"It's nothing worth making a fuss over."
What Tomie found disgusting, Amamiya Rin regarded as fairly ordinary.
The four elements are empty, as the saying goes. He could not yet claim to have set everything down, but swallowing one live spider hardly registered.
"Whether it works or not, it's worth trying. There won't be any side effects I can't undo," he said mildly.
Where the mind was concerned, a century of discipline was no joke. Even if that demon meant to rewrite his perceptions, it would not find the job easy.
Just as Swordmaster Tomie had been eroded by the Soul Reviver's Sword — when it came to it, several hundred Tomie acting as one could keep even a demon from reshaping what lay at his core.
Where the body was concerned, Kawakami Tomie's immortality was already terrifying enough, and today he had gained the Soul Reviver's Sword on top of it.
With the Soul Reviver's Sword, even a wound beyond his own healing could be reversed by an infusion of life force.
"So there's nothing to worry about."
Amamiya Rin walked to the center of the ritual space, nodded to Tomie, and spoke with unhurried composure.
____
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