What was the Illusory Dream Realm? It was a complete world built jointly out of the collective subconscious, the imagination, and the dreams of every intelligent being — a world with a stable geography, its own physical laws, and its own systems of civilization.
A dreamer of extraordinary mental strength and rare gifts could construct within the Illusory Dream Realm a stable, independent dream-city that endured forever, just as Randolph Carter had built the Sunset City.
But Amamiya Rin's dream-city was something else again.
"Flowers, trees, sky, breeze, clouds, sun, rainbow, ocean, beach, forest, pebbles, sand, earth…"
Amamiya Rin walked to the window, drew back the curtain, and looked out at the city.
His gaze traveled outward, and kept traveling.
Past the street below the apartment building, past the layered ranks of rooftops, he could make out the silhouette of mountains at the city's edge. Beyond the mountains lay a blurred horizon, and beyond that, another sprawl of city.
Behind that second city was a plain, scattered with villages and towns like a spill of stars, and at the plain's far end lay an ocean, its surface glittering under the sun. Beyond the ocean was land again, and on that land more mountains, and behind those mountains another plain.
Land and sea alternated, layer upon layer, extending outward until, at the very limit of sight, the boundary between earth and sky curved gently downward into an arc. Outside that arc was the deep backdrop of space, hung with a full sky of stars.
A city-state? No! This was a nation — no, an entire world!
Compared to an ordinary dream-city, Amamiya Rin's fit the concept of the Illusory Dream Realm far more closely.
The Illusory Dream Realm was built from the collective subconscious, imagination, and dreams of all intelligent beings. Amamiya Rin's dream-city was built from the collective subconscious, imagination, and dreams of Amamiya Rin and several hundred Tomie Kawakamis.
In other words, this dream-city was simply his old Dream World — except that it had been plugged into the Illusory Dream Realm. Shaped by that connection, Amamiya Rin, as the dream's maker, had seen his control over the Dream World rise enormously. He held absolute sovereignty over it now, something close to a creative mode switched on. That was also why he had been able to transform into the Giant of Light against the Haunter of the Dark and wield such overwhelming power — it came down to the peculiar nature of the Illusory Dream Realm.
But die here, and the death was real. Not the death of the flesh, but the total extinction of consciousness.
That counted as the greatest drawback.
As for the benefit, that was the ability obtained from the Haunter of the Dark — Dream Manifestation Specialization. The conversion of dreams into a reality the individual was willing to believe in.
It was one expression of Mind Over Matter. When Amamiya Rin and the Tomies left the dream-city and their souls returned to reality, the growth and change they had undergone in the Dream World would, through the force of their own conviction, reshape their physical bodies as well.
Somewhat inferior to what had happened to Hirano Yuji — but fully controllable, and repeatable an unlimited number of times.
In the days that followed, Amamiya Rin spent most of his time resting.
His body needed to recover, and so did his mind. He slept until he woke on his own, ate proper meals, took walks, read, and thought.
Over that long stretch of time the overdraft on his soul gradually mended, and his thinking about this world — his understanding of it — deepened along with it.
Darkness. The essence of the universe was darkness, and darkness ruled this cosmos. Junji Ito's premise resembled the premises of the Cthulhu Mythos far too closely, and Amamiya Rin could not help suspecting that, just as Hellstar Remina had been modeled on the Star of Judgment from the Cthulhu Mythos, the darkness that ruled the universe had in truth been modeled on Azathoth.
As for the God who created the world, and the light that would ultimately overcome the darkness — those were Junji Ito's own additions as an author.
The Cthulhu Mythos held nothing of the sort. But the framework of this world was the cosmology Junji Ito had built; even the Cthulhu Mythos existed here only in the realm of novels and tabletop RPG campaigns, which ought to make it indistinguishable from reality.
In that case — the one who had sent him back from the void to his dream-city, could that have been the God of Junji Ito's design? Or perhaps… Kyoko Byakuya, who had crossed back several centuries and become light itself?
The knowledge the Haunter of the Dark had given him, together with what he had lived through, left Amamiya Rin with no shortage of guesses. Only… none of it could be verified as true or false, and however much of it he knew, none of it seemed to be much use. The universe remained just as dark and just as full of danger, and the light that would supposedly triumph over that darkness in the end was nothing but a pie in the sky.
While Amamiya Rin recuperated, the other Kawakami Tomies were hardly idle.
Swordmaster Tomie went on honing her swordsmanship, though the Consciousness Slash was no longer the focus of her study. Her current line of research was sword-qi — the fusion of life force with Sword Intent.
Evil Cultivator Tomie, meanwhile, had gone and roped in Armaments Tomie to further refine and optimize the crooked, disreputable methods that Swordmaster Tomie sneered at. Armaments Tomie's own view was that an odachi was simply too small in volume, its output too weak — rather than using an odachi at all, it would be better to build a suit of armor.
By Armaments Tomie's own account, she had joined a research lab at the University of Tokyo. Her supervisor was Professor Tsuchiya, an authority in the field of artificial humans, and Professor Tsuchiya was developing the most advanced bioroid in the world. Every technology involved was top-tier on a global scale, which would be a considerable help toward building exoskeleton armor.
"In that case… could you design me a set of Ultraseven Armor?"
Passing through Armaments Tomie's institute and learning of all this, Amamiya Rin floated an idea.
The strange tale [Ultraseven] cost far too much to use. One transformation and he had to sleep it off, and in the real world its capacity to interfere on the physical level was far too weak.
To avoid swatting flies with a cannon, and to raise his own hard power as an individual, Amamiya Rin figured a set of Ultraseven Armor would be just the thing.
"Don't get carried away."
Having heard Amamiya Rin out, Armaments Tomie lifted her head from a heap of blueprints and rolled her eyes. Her hair was disheveled, her face smudged with ink; she had clearly been at work a long while.
"For a practical suit of Ultraseven Armor, real-world energy technology and materials science would have to advance another fifty years. Do you have any idea how large an energy core you'd need to reach that output? Do you know what kind of alloy could take that load? Nothing like it exists on Earth right now."
"Time is the one thing we've got plenty of, isn't it? One of the Tomies already controls part of that country's government. As long as we develop the technology inside the Illusory Dream Realm, funding won't be a problem either."
Amamiya Rin's manner was perfectly relaxed. Armaments Tomie's was the opposite.
"Don't make it sound so simple. Even with the technology, real-world conditions might not be able to meet the requirements. Blueprints are one thing, actual manufacturing is another… fine, forget it. You spoiled brat. I'll think about some approaches."
Armaments Tomie said it with poor grace, waving a hand at Amamiya Rin in a shooing motion.
After leaving the institute, Amamiya Rin wandered awhile and found himself walking into the medical research center.
The laboratory had everything — test tubes, culture dishes, centrifuges, electron microscopes.
A dozen or so Tomies in white coats bustled about inside. Some were examining cell sections, some mixing reagents, and some lay on the examination tables as test subjects, letting the others take slices for observation.
Vampire Tomie was here as well, using medical knowledge to strengthen her control over blood, hoping to develop a ripple that belonged to vampires.
But it was another key project, rather than the vampire ripple, that made Amamiya Rin turn his head. The Tomies were researching the nineteen organ-modification surgeries; if they succeeded, every last Tomie would gain an additional form of remarkable versatility.
For Amamiya Rin, however, the most important thing in this Dream World was still the pressurized training Flesh-Mod Tomie was undergoing.
Day after day of pressurization sent Flesh-Mod Tomie's physical strength climbing in a straight line.
In under a month her raw power had reached the point where she could beat a brown bear to death barehanded. Another half a month, and her physical attributes had surpassed those of many a Kamen Rider.
But the pressurized fitness pod had also become useless. Flesh-Mod Tomie's body had grown so formidable that the pod's pressure felt to her like a light drizzle.
So Flesh-Mod Tomie went to find the Tomies pursuing advanced study in mechanical engineering.
"What is this piece of junk?"
Several mechanical engineering Tomies crowded around the fitness pod with tools and instruments, tapping here, measuring there, bafflement written across every face.
Their opinion of the pressurized fitness pod was unanimous: the thing had no technical merit whatsoever, and worse, no logic. Nobody could understand why this so-called pressurized fitness could genuinely strengthen a human body. By the principles of physics, simply raising ambient pressure would only place a greater load on the body, possibly damaging cells; it should produce no enhancing effect at all. Yet the fact remained that it worked — on Flesh-Mod Tomie, at least.
"There's no way to modify it?"
Disappointment covered Flesh-Mod Tomie's face.
"It's not that there's no way, it's that there's no principle. We don't know why this thing works, or how it works. Without theoretical support, any modification is meaningless."
"Could it be because you don't believe in it? The power of conviction is very strong in this world."
Amamiya Rin offered his hypothesis.
It was precisely because these Tomies neither understood nor believed in the efficacy of pressurized fitness that they couldn't improve the pod.
"Are you trying to wreck our whole worldview? Don't forget, a large portion of this world's physical constants come from our own cognition. If everything runs on belief, then what's the point of studying science at all? Why not just imagine things into existence?"
one Tomie said with a cold laugh.
"Stop pushing every problem onto belief. That pressurized gym — of the people going in for their first session, how many of them honestly believed that climbing into a pressure cooker would strengthen their bodies? They got stronger anyway. Which means something besides belief is at work, doesn't it?"
another Tomie shot back at him.
"Mind Over Matter, Mind Over Matter… will it ever end? Ever since you discovered how important Mind Over Matter is in this world, you've been interpreting everything through that one concept. But is that really how it is? Mind Over Matter is just one concept out of countless others. The Hanging Balloons, Hellstar Remina, the Long Dream, even the existence of me, Kawakami Tomie — what do any of those bizarre phenomena have to do with Mind Over Matter?"
Yet another Tomie tore into Amamiya Rin, out of patience.
"…Sorry. I was letting a preconception run away with me."
Amamiya Rin raised both hands, surrendering to this crowd of materialist Tomies.
Perhaps he had in fact been wrong. The power of mind and belief accounted for a great deal in this universe, but far too many phenomena couldn't be explained by mind or belief at all.
Those phenomena could only be understood as natural ones — like wind and rain, like the rise and fall of tides, like the movement of the stars. They simply ran on as they ran, and whether anyone believed in them changed nothing about their existence.
"Then why did it work for me?"
Flesh-Mod Tomie mussed up her hair and put the question to the others.
"Who knows? Probably some kind of phenomenon, some kind of meme. You became part of the meme called pressurized fitness, so as long as you do pressurized fitness, your physical attributes improve. But this pressure cooker has a fixed power ceiling. Once its pressure can no longer affect you, cranking it higher won't change your body one bit."
The Tomie shrugged, offering it as a guess.
Perhaps that was it. Amamiya Rin had mentioned the pressure cooker's limits before. Flesh-Mod Tomie wasn't willing to stop here, but reality was reality; a phenomenon outside the reach of Mind Over Matter wouldn't bend to her will.
Amamiya Rin, for his part, was quite satisfied.
Kamen Rider-grade physical enhancement was already tremendously strong. No animal in nature could survive a single punch, and killing off ordinary mythological creatures wouldn't be difficult either. If the Tomies could outfit him with a set of Ultraseven Armor, then whatever kind of enemy he faced, he would stand a chance of fighting and winning.
Ten years, twenty years, fifty years… a hundred years!
This dream lasted a full century, and when Amamiya Rin opened his eyes, what he felt was an emptiness beyond anything he had known.
That sensation of a soul scooped hollow was entirely gone. His head was almost unnaturally clear. But he was so heavy! No — wrong! Not heavy. Empty!
A powerlessness gripped him so completely that Amamiya Rin couldn't move so much as a finger. His stomach growled like thunder, hunger crashed over him, his gut convulsed, and a craving to eat rose up from somewhere deep inside.
At the same moment, his body began to change.
Muscle swelled. Bone hardened. Skin drew taut. Blood ran faster and faster through his vessels, and his heartbeat grew heavier and heavier.
A century of training in the Illusory Dream Realm compressed itself into the instant of waking. His cellular metabolism spiked to several hundred times its normal rate, every cell clawing madly for energy.
Fat burned away within seconds. Muscle tissue began to consume itself. And in the very moment this body was about to be hollowed out by its own evolution, another power woke.
The Tomie-fied cells.
They began to divide in a frenzy.
Cells repaired and regenerated at speed, filling in the tissue that evolution had devoured, until loss and recovery struck a balance.
A moment later, the change finally ended.
The feeling was strange. An instant ago he had been struggling on the brink of death; now he was so healthy that even Amamiya Rin found himself unfamiliar to himself.
He lifted his arm and looked down. What met his eyes was solid muscle — deltoids at the shoulder, biceps and triceps along the arm, pectorals across the chest, the rectus abdominis banding his stomach. Every muscle group in perfect proportion, perfectly distributed.
He raised his arm and slowly closed his hand into a fist.
The muscle tightened with the motion, the lines of it sharpening, a full and solid sense of strength flooding through his whole body.
It could only be called a cheat-code level of enhancement. One night's sleep, and the result outstripped the modifications of a Showa Rider.
____
⚡ BONUS CHAPTER MILESTONES
✍️ 5 REVIEWS = +1 Bonus Chapter 💎 100 POWER STONES = +1 Bonus Chapter 🔥 P@TREON (Walnut-chan): Read +40 chapters ahead & unlock 60+ exclusive stories!
🔥 New history: Mushoku tensei: Speed Run to kill Hitogami — posted on The_Mikudayo