Chapter 38
『 Ooooooooooom(ॐ)----------------- 』
The sound coming from the headphones was too drawn out to be called a voice, yet too distinct in tone and vibration to be called just a sound. The voice rang out for so long and so evenly it was hard to believe it was in a single breath, continuously vibrating the headphones, and it made the cheap headphones tremble and moved Rise's ears with sound alone.
The vibration originating from the ears pierced straight to the brain, and the vibration that reached the brain stimulated her mind, intoxicated by the incense components, showing her a mystical landscape.
* * *
『 ॐ------------- 』
Rise felt as if she was floating in a zero-gravity state. The floating sensation in her body felt like drifting in the middle of space naked without a spacesuit, like being curled up wrapped in amniotic fluid just before birth, and like flying over clouds with her soul having left her dead body.
Her physical body was infinitely light.
Her body was slowly falling like a feather, infinitely escaping gravity's influence and the constraints of air, as if flying through empty space.
When she moved a single finger, it seemed like stirring through sensationless water that was neither cold nor hot. And moving her back gave an infinitely free and liberated feeling as if invisible wings supported her body and she was flying through the sky.
And the vibration heard amidst this further accelerated her sense of floating.
A long, long vibrating sound.
Was this what it would feel like to hear sweet music from outside while sinking into the deep sea?
Was this what it would feel like to hear sounds played for prenatal education while submerged in amniotic fluid?
She felt infinitely comfortable, and at the same time, a feeling of nostalgia.
And finally, when the long, long vibration ended, and the brief pause before the next vibration began arrived, she gently opened her eyes.
"Eek!"
When she opened her eyes, she saw an eye.
An eye.
It was the eye of something so enormously huge that it was beyond what humans could comprehend as ‘enormous’. It rolled its spherical body around, and the massive stripes engraved on the sphere changed their appearance continuously as if alive, with curves becoming straight lines and straight lines becoming curves.
Something infinitely huge.
At the same time, it seemed to possess the same sense of floating as her, and seemed lighter than her body.
Standing in the pitch-black space, it floated alone in that state without air, looking down at the world with its enormous eye. And as it had no mouth it was expressing its existence only through vibrations, looking truly mysterious.
It tried to say something to Rise in an ephemeral voice like clouds dispersing and disappearing, and it rode on something invisible in the black space, approaching Rise's body in the form of vibrations.
『 ॐ------------- 』
It was a vibration.
A massive vibration.
A vibration that shook Rise's brain and stimulated her soul.
Rise's body and soul continuously trembled to the vibration while facing Jupiter's eye. And when she felt her mind being sucked into the eye and condensing into a single point, penetrating its essence–
『 -------------! 』
Rise understood the meaning of the vibration.
Not with her physical body, but with her mind, not with her soul, but with her heart.
Yes.
She accepted and understood it with her heart alone.
And the moment she understood its meaning, her vision exploded like fireworks.
"Ah..."
It was a violence of colors.
Colors more beautiful and vivid than what she had seen at the kimono exhibition she visited as a child, bright and sparkling, burst out in all directions. They spread out in an orderly manner and beautifully painted the universe that had been just black space, and as these colors spread and spread, they became beautiful art in themselves.
How should this be described?
Should it be called the colors of the universe?
Jupiter, too, dissolved the stripes flowing on its body into the colors as if unraveling thread and began to seep into the world, scattering in all directions like smoke flowing out in a single breath.
Only the eye remained until the end.
The eye that had been spinning, flowing, and moving, looked at Rise until the very end displaying its nobility, and as it absorbed the colors of the universe spread all around into its body, it finally began to contract and contract infinitely.
It was getting smaller.
The eye of the giant planet became a typhoon.
The typhoon moved as if swirling, shining brightly with a black light, and emitted spiral light in all directions with the colors it absorbed. Even if the light sparkled and cried out its final death throes, it couldn’t escape the future of contracting along with the point and condensing into a single point.
It was getting smaller.
Smaller and smaller.
The typhoon became a whirlpool.
The whirlpool became a ball.
The ball became a bead.
Eventually, it became a point.
Nothing remained in the world.
It became a world that could only be expressed by blank space.
『 -------------------! 』
But blank spaces existed to be filled.
The point lit up the world with a bright light that could dye even souls, as if it had absorbed everything just for this moment. Like a bomb, the light exploded and filled the world with light, and following it, began to draw shapes.
"A snake?"
It was a snake.
A snake made of rainbow swam in a spiral around her, gradually increasing its speed until only the afterimage of the rainbow remained. With only its afterimage remaining, the rainbow made of light was impossible to grasp its form even if touched, and its essence couldn't be harmed even if stirred with a hand.
Its appearance was truly similar to a mirage.
The rainbow began to bloom flowers everywhere, coloring the world.
Like paint dripping on white paper and bleeding into the shape of a flower, the various colors of the rainbow blossomed into flowers and colored her view. And that shape occurred again and again in a circle like a piece made by dipping in paint and folding paper, coloring the entire world from right in front of her eyes to beyond her field of vision.
And the blooming flowers whispered to her ears in vibrations.
『 What is a god? 』
『 What is faith? 』
『 What is the right belief? 』
『 Is blind faith always right? 』
『 What if you realize that what you've been worshiping is false? 』
『 Is doubt the opposite of faith? 』
『 What is the value of truth reached after doubt? 』
The bursting vibrations asked.
They asked deep in her heart, to the rising unconscious.
The unconscious existing and flying in the colors of the universe could only answer those questions with vibrations, and it could only answer with what she had learned and acquired.
Being able to answer only with what was learned and acquired was an inevitable limit originating from those who had not surpassed the limits as a mind, an unavoidable wall of learning.
She shouted what came to mind in a jumble, without order or coherence.
It was something that couldn't quite become language, couldn't become sentences;,only words floated, trying to color the flowers with their meanings. But the flowers merely asked and asked again to Rise's consciousness floating in the world, just conveying.
Just as the scent approached the nose and spread its fragrance even if it wasn’t desired, just as the stimulating colors of flowers entered the eyes even if they weren’t intentionally looked at, they simply whispered to her ears as if it were natural.
The colors flowed and flowed, forming a shape like Jupiter's eye.
However, the bloomed flowers did not disappear and the rainbow colors spread throughout the world did not fade, so the flowing flowers only asked their respective questions each time they brushed past Rise.
This would have been a truly desirable question-and-answer session for an ascetic, and it was clearly an important nourishment for training the mind. But for Rise, a young shrine maiden, it was truly hard to endure.
She only answered the relentless questions.
Words that didn't become sentences, were cut short, and seemed unrelated.
These words floated endlessly with her body, their meanings becoming light and mixing in. And although there was the occasional miracle of words connecting to form sentences, the continuous whispering never ceased.
And when a certain light reached a flower–
The flower became a mandala.
The mandala bloomed in various colors and affirmed her answers with repeating colors, and with a massive vibration connecting soul, mind, and body, it planted its seed, making her become a flower. And in the process of becoming a flower, white threads approached like lightning and were tied up again and again, tearing apart the colors before her eyes and creating something.
That shape had a truly wondrous, but clearly enormous and prominent form of a star.
『 Wake up. 』
And, she closed her eyelids and threw herself into darkness, accompanied by the colors.
* * *
"Ugh, uuuwegh!"
Rise woke up.
And the first thing she did upon waking was not wailing or blankly appreciating the afterglow, but vomiting everything inside her.
She knelt down and kept retching as if squeezing her stomach to spit out even the gastric juices, and this continued for quite a while.
When she finished retching, Jinseong slowly approached and asked.
"What did you see?"
Rise looked up at Jinseong with a blank expression and said.
"I, I saw a star..."
At that answer, Jinseong smiled slightly.
Then he looked into Rise's eyes and said.
"That is the god you will serve."
Rise's pupils trembled uncontrollably at those words. Her pupils kept shaking as if thinking about something, and her face was full of confusion. But even in that confusion she occasionally appeared detached from reality as if the magnificent scene she had seen just before waking kept coming to mind, and that ungrounded expression gradually increased its proportion within the confusion.
Not long after, she lowered her head that had been looking up at Jinseong, and slowly stood up.
Then she approached the dog-shaped stone lying alone and looked at it for a long, very long time, again and again.
Thus, she just stared blankly at it until the sacred object became a peculiar stone, the peculiar stone became a lump of rock, and the lump of rock transformed into something worthless.
Finally, when she reached the end, she looked at Jinseong and knelt down.
Then she bowed politely and said.
"Please, bestow a new god upon me, upon the shrine."
As her appearance was like that of one with true faith–
"I will dedicate everything."
It was truly a pleasing sight to behold.
"So shall it be."