Chapter Four
1.
WHEN NAOMI WAS YOUNG, he would sometimes look up at the moon and reach for it. He used to think he might just barely touch it if he stood on top of Kyoto Tower.
Back then, he hadn’t known that the moon was 380,000 kilometers away from Earth, and since learning that fact, he’d never reached at it again. He wasn’t a child anymore, after all.
But now, he found himself reliving that experience. It was a peculiar feeling.
“Now! Imagine as hard as you can!” shouted Sensei, his voice echoing across the forested hill. He needed to shout to make himself heard; their training ground, in a secluded part of the Narabigaoka forest, was currently a very noisy place. “Let your mind run wild!”
Naomi’s glove vibrated fiercely. The roaring sound that filled the air was produced by the God Hand when it was operating under a heavy load. Fierce winds whipped around the area and lashed the trees back and forth; clods of soil were pulled out of the ground. The world groaned in protest as he rewrote it.
Naomi closed his hand, clutching at nothingness. His fingers wrapped around a small gray-white orb. He’d created it in a split second, simply by picturing it in his mind’s eye.
He’d realized his childhood fantasy. He was holding the moon.
“More! Stretch yourself even further. You can do anything!” shouted Sensei.
Dropping the small sphere to the ground, Naomi immediately began his next creation.
Sensei was right. Naomi had caught the moon in his hands; surely they could stretch even further. The air swirled violently once more as he rewrote reality, defining mass and volume out of nothing. His knowledge fed his imagination and gave his mental image greater precision.
He shaped a complex mixture of heavy metals and silicon into a reddish-brown lump of rock. He had created Mars.
“Whatever you visualize can be made real. There’s nothing, literally nothing, that can stop you.”
Naomi tossed the small planet aside. Pulsing with excitement, driven on by Sensei’s words, he reached out even further into the universe. Every time he created something new, he felt like his brain might break down under the strain. Still, he kept pushing further, testing the limits of his mind. He brought forth liquid iron and nickel and surrounded them with silicates. In the blink of an eye, in the palm of his hand, he reproduced a core, mantle, and crust that had taken eons to form in space. Venus.
“Tell yourself this world is yours. Tell yourself…”
Gritting his teeth, Naomi squeezed the last few drops of strength from his brain. This wasn’t impossible. He wasn’t at his limit. He could push past this—he had no limits.
Something new took shape in the palm of his right hand.
He gathered hydrogen, the simplest of all elements. He created it, concentrated it, and created even more.
The little object began to grow hotter and hotter, denser and denser. And Naomi just kept going.
Sensei shouted once again, “You’re going to be its god!”
And then, there was light.
It was like seeing the beginning of the universe—not that he could compare it to the real thing. Finally letting himself relax, Naomi felt the blood begin to drain from his overheated, exhausted brain. Its job was done now. He’d finished his creations.
Vacantly, he looked down at his hand, at the blazing ball of heat resting in it. Its surface was a single great river of flame, flowing slowly in multiple directions; every now and then, a pillar of fire would burst from its surface.
It was a tiny sun.
He looked up and met Sensei’s gaze. For once, the man wasn’t scowling at him. In fact, he was smiling.
“Not bad,” he said, offering Naomi a thumbs-up. “I’ll give that a passing grade.”
It was July 2nd, and this was their final training session. Naomi had passed his examination and become a god.
2.
[July 3rd—The Uji River Fireworks Festival]
THERE WERE TWO TRAIN STOPS in the Uji area: the Uji Station on Japan Railway’s Nara line, and an identically named station on the Keihan Uji line. And today, both of them were absolutely packed with people.
The sun was nearly set; evening was giving way to night. The flow of people from across the city to the festival was reaching its peak. There were couples in yukatas, families with children in tow—people of all ages, in all kinds of different clothing, all heading in the same direction.
Some among the crowds were shooting uncertain glances up at the sky; the weather was the one point of concern at the moment. The area around the festival was covered in typical summer clouds, seemingly undecided whether they were going to rain on everyone’s parade or not.
The people moved forward nonetheless, silently hoping for the best. But this time, Ichigyou Ruri wasn’t among them.
“On July 3rd, we went to the Fireworks Festival together.”
The voice seemed like it was coming directly into Naomi’s ear. Reflexively, he reached up and touched the frame of the glasses he was wearing, which apparently had a small speaker built into them. Sensei was actually standing on top of a nearby utility pole.
The two of them waited just outside Ichigyou Ruri’s house in Shimogamo. Sensei was using his perch to keep an eye on her second-floor window.
“The weather took a sudden turn for the worse in the middle of the fireworks, and it turned into a thunderstorm. The exact time of the event itself was 8:01 p.m.”
“Right. I didn’t invite her this time, though.”
Naomi could keep up his end of the conversation without shouting, fortunately; the glasses must’ve had a built-in microphone, too. This was Naomi’s first time wearing the things, which he’d made with the God Hand to Sensei’s precise instructions. In all honesty, he didn’t quite understand how they worked. Making any sort of electronic gizmo was an extreme challenge for Naomi working on his own. But these glasses were connected to the God Hand by a cord, and the crow was apparently handling a lot of the more complex functions through that connection. He hadn’t had to implement a lot of the technology himself.
Trying to ignore the unfamiliar weight on the bridge of his nose, Naomi looked up at the darkening sky. There were a few clouds visible, but it didn’t look likely to rain.