“Not particularly, huh? People in such circumstances usually get angry and bear a grudge. Then their souls degenerate.”
“Yes, but I didn’t even have the energy to seek revenge or to make them suffer.”
“Oh, I see.” Mahito nodded in understanding.
Whether he was able to imagine human emotions or not, Mahito had studied movies, novels, and poetry. By extrapolating from these samples, he was able to grasp the basics of what the old man was saying.
Mahito said, “In other words, you were in such distress that your soul approached death. You blew past grudges and curses and went straight to rock bottom.”
The old man slowly shook his head. “Maybe I was hopeless, but you’re talking about intense despair.”
“Are they different?”
“Yes. They’re all I’ve experienced.”
The old man raised his face as if searching through his past.
“I didn’t experience burning anger or dismal sadness. I think I was just tired. Work, acclaim, status, responsibility, social responsibilities, finances, fame … Those things were exhausting, so exhausting that they emptied me.”
“And that’s why you didn’t get angry at the deception.”
“It was a relief. They say hopelessness can actually make one feel lighter.” The old man’s voice had a cold clarity, like impure water that had passed through a filter. It sounded peaceful. “Light, money, love … I lost everything, so when I walked around town, suddenly everything had lost meaning. In that state, everything looked different.”
“Even though you couldn’t see?” Mahito asked.
“Yes. When you can’t see, sounds stretch to infinity and there’s only the wind. There aren’t even any walls partitioning the city. There’s just a limitless darkness, like a starless night sky. It was the first time I had experienced the world as an open space. And then I realized I was free.”
Mahito blinked.
The old man’s way of thinking was unlike anything Mahito had encountered in a human before. Even hearing of the old man’s past, Mahito was unable to comprehend his way of thinking.
Yet he did appear truly free in Mahito’s eyes. Even in this tunnel, the old man knew the sky was wide. He probably knew that better than all the people walking around town, no matter their status. Precisely because the old man—who looked like nothing more than an outcast and a straggler—had lost his wealth and social standing and every human connection, he had learned the meaning of the word freedom, and he was now living it.
Without attachment, without fear … without cursing. He simply existed. He simply lived.
“Not all those who wander are lost, huh?” Mahito said.
“Isn’t that a bit depressing for a quote from Tolkien?”
Mahito smiled at how the old man had immediately identified the quote, one Mahito had read in a random book he’d picked up.
“Are you a big reader?” he asked the man.
“I read to gather information.”
“A wide range of learning is a good thing.”
Mahito had to wonder that if humans were creatures whose fear gave birth to curses, was this old man really a human being? His feelings at the moment were difficult to describe, but they were peaceful. Since encountering human beings, he had never felt such peace.
“If everyone in the human world was like you, I’d never have been born,” Mahito noted.
He looked at the book in his hands. The old man fell silent and stared into space as he always did.
Humans gave birth to curses, but curses killed humans. There was no possibility of coexistence. Yet a curse and human were coexisting there in this tunnel.
The situation was unusual, but it was a serene time, and together they passed it in serenity.
As a matter of course, people hated and feared others.
They couldn’t see souls, so they had to imagine how others felt. Furthermore, they were at the mercy of their own emotions. They merely reacted to stimuli, never recognizing the fluctuations in their own souls. They didn’t even know where their souls were.
Mahito pondered the matter.
The blind old man had lost all light and all ties to other people, resulting in minimal stimulation to his soul. As a result, the unnecessary dross of the external world had stopped influencing him, so he spent more time facing inward.
“That’s like the ascetic practice of a monk,” Mahito muttered to himself. “Intense introspection, more time peering into your own soul.”
As he walked along the street, Mahito skimmed a worn-out copy of the Heart Sutra. The scripture was like a textbook for controlling the soul. In their own way, people long ago had studied techniques for distinguishing the soul from substance.
Through his manner of living, the old man had unintentionally reached an enlightened state. Perhaps that was how he had learned to sense souls in the dark. That was the explanation Mahito came up with regarding the old man’s detection of curses.
“He must have already had the potential. After all, it’s easy for the talent to bloom in introverts.”
If Mahito pondered the old man further, he might be able to guess the sorcerers’ training methods and techniques for manifesting cursed energy. Then he might be able to turn talented human beings into sorcerers and curse users.
He might be able to spur a curse user he had groomed into becoming a sorcerer.
That would be an interesting experiment. It was easier to upset human souls by making them fight each other than by having them exorcize curses. And he doubted Sukuna’s vessel was any exception.
However …
Maybe I’ll save that for later.
Mahito mulled this over in a leisurely way.
He was free. He moved when he felt like moving and rested when he felt like resting. And at the moment, he didn’t feel like putting any plans into action. For now, he would gather knowledge and lose himself in thought.
He had picked up a few more books, and he wanted to bask in the comfort of the quiet tunnel and read fantasy novels. His gait was light, and he even began humming as he walked with the flow of human traffic.
Then he heard loud voices coming from between the buildings.
“You really piss me off!”
Glancing in that direction, Mahito saw two young human beings: a skinny man with long hair and a well-built man with a shaved head. These types of people were usually described as “rough.”
The man with long hair was grinning sheepishly as he listened to the angry man with the shaved head.
“It ain’t funny! Every moron talks tough, but all they got is talk! Then they make excuses! I’d like to kill every last one of ’em!”
“Sure, but if you ever got, like, super angry, could you actually do it?” asked the long-haired man.
“Yeah! Killin’ ain’t nuthin’!”
“Fer real?”
Mahito’s eyes narrowed as he listened.
He didn’t mind honest impulses, but Mahito knew human beings like this were almost always all talk.
“Yeah, for real!” yelled the well-built man. “I’d snuff out anyone, dude!”
If so, he should shut up and do it.
Mahito thought about teaching the man what it felt like to kill, and he even started to reach out, but then he noticed the weight of the book in his hand and gave up the idea. Instead of messing around with these men, he wanted to hurry back to the comfort of the tunnel and get lost in a book.
“I’ll really do it, dude!”
The shaven-headed man’s words sounded like an incantation, but they were devoid of strength and intention and would become host to nothing. At most, the man was essentially talking to himself, hidden between two buildings. Might as well let these men continue to hole up in the narrow backstreets, all the while under the illusion that they were enjoying the big, wide world.
Mahito turned away and continued toward home.
“Why did Gregor turn into a bug?”
Mahito didn’t look up from his book as he asked the question. He was reading a well-known book by Franz Kafka, the story about a human being who one day transforms into an insect.
“Most people think it’s allegorical,” said the old man.
“Allegorical?”
“An allegory for how society hated him and treated him like an insect. Like an old man who gets deceived and has his eyes burned out.”
“Was that a joke?” Mahito asked.
“No, not really.”
The old man didn’t burn with emotion, but he would respond if Mahito spoke to him. Conversation with him was like talking to a dictionary. He was knowledgeable, and he had the kind of intelligence capable of breaking down that knowledge for conversation. He knew human culture and the subtleties of the spirit. Mahito had been trying to analyze human souls through novels and movies, so he found conversation with the old man to be helpful.
Human beings were prone to sudden anger, and he couldn’t understand why they became sad. What made human beings trust—and betray—each other?