Dry Water had infiltrated his mind while he floated in the water, and now Ayanokouji used that connection, confronting the entity both verbally and mentally.
Even without the passage of time, the cave grew cold, as if it carried its own definition of temporality a time revolving entirely around Dry Water.
Nothing was hearable, yet everything was.
Then, the skeleton's light returned, flickering in and out. One second the cave was illuminated, the next swallowed again by darkness.
It was time to see what Dry Water had decided.
A raw sound emerged from the void.
Was it anger? Was it annoyance? Perhaps both? No. It was something else entirely.
Laughter.
A sound indescribable, impossible to capture, as though the cave itself had come alive.
The skeleton flickered in light and shadow, each pulse rising and falling like a breath taken only to laugh again.
Ayanokouji, still lying there, let out a quiet sigh and opened his eyes.
He could not help the curiosity rising in him.
He had never heard laughter in his own voice before.
He had always wondered how it would sound, and now, even as the echo came from something older than centuries, it did.
It was beautiful. Unearthly. Perfect.
Ayanokouji felt a strange twinge, almost jealousy Dry Water had been the first to wield Ayanokouji own voice in laughter, to claim it and twist it into something else entirely.
The laughter subsided, leaving the skeleton bathed in steady, pulsating light. The presence lingered, patient, amused, satisfied.
Then Dry Water spoke, voice rich with delight, almost playful:
"Oh heavens, when did you notice? Tell this old man everything. Tell me how you played me."
***
The light pulsed again, brightening and dimming as though the bones struggled to maintain a rhythm of their own.
Eventually the flickering slowed and settled, returning the cave to its earlier stillness.
Time did not move here. Nothing aged or shifted.
Only Dry Water and Ayanokouji remained.
A great deal of time passed, though the cave refused to acknowledge it. Every second remained suspended, preserved in a place where time itself was irrelevant.
Even so, absence was never truly empty. Something imperceptible had shifted, something beyond Ayanokouji's present comprehension.
At last, he spoke.
"Before I start, can you answer some of my questions?"
His voice reached Dry Water as it always had, calm and measured. Yet something beneath it resisted settling, an undercurrent that refused to dissolve.
Dry Water had sensed it before, subtle enough to ignore, faint enough to dismiss.
Only now did he allow his attention to rest on it fully, tracing the thread that connected them.
The connection remained open and unchanged, offering access as it always had.
When Dry Water listened more closely, however, nothing followed the words.
Once, he could hear Ayanokouji's thoughts. He could grasp intentions before they fully formed.
Now, the absence lay hidden beneath the calm exchange, quiet enough to escape notice until it could no longer be ignored.
Dry Water pressed further, letting his presence sink deeper into the link. He expected resistance, distortion, some sign of concealment. Nothing answered him.
The path accepted him without hesitation, almost indifferently, as though it had never been meant to carry more than what was allowed.
Understanding came slowly.
Ayanokouji was not hiding his thoughts. His mind had moved elsewhere, operating in a state where intention no longer required conscious structure.
Dry Water had witnessed such states across centuries and countless minds, but never with this degree of stability or control.
What unsettled him most was the ease of it.
Ayanokouji had entered this state deliberately.
And...
He could leave it just as easily.
𓁹𓁹
I did not stumble into this.
Every word I chose was deliberate. Each sentence carried enough edge to suggest resistance, while leaving imperfections that invited correction.
They were not mistakes meant to be caught easily, but flaws that required patience and judgment to address.
Dry Water had noticed them long ago. Only now did he respond, not through correction, but through absence.
That absence was deliberate.
I crossed lines that should have been enforced and leaned on arguments that should have been interrupted.
I left gaps where a single response could have dismantled everything I said.
Nothing came.
Not because he failed to see them, but because nothing needed fixing.
To interfere would have meant engagement, and engagement would have narrowed the distance between us. Instead, his attention settled into the spaces between my words.
I spoke as though I were opposing him. In truth, I was being examined.
The connection between us never wavered. He knew I was aware that my thoughts no longer passed through it, and I knew he had already recognized that awareness.
Neither of us addressed it.
For the first time, I could not see through the one observing me.
His attention carried the same distance I maintain when I allow others to expose themselves while believing they are in control.
Now that distance was directed at me.
I was still permitted to speak, not because it would change anything, but because being allowed was part of the structure. Without saying it outright, he made my position clear.
It felt as though I stood before a more refined version of myself.
Nothing here was coincidence, and nothing was given freely.
He wanted something from me.
Whether it was my life or my freedom remained unclear.
There was only one way to find out.
I looked toward the skeleton and spoke again.
"Before I start, can you answer some of my questions?"
***
After a brief silence, the answer finally came.
"Go ahead."
Was it from behind me? No. While the skeleton was in front of me, I could never pinpoint the source of the voice.
It was as if it was already inside my mind.
I finally asked him.
"What exactly is Nightmare?"
According to the message I received...
[Aspirant. Welcome to the Nightmare _Pell Prepare for your first trial...]
This was nothing but the first trial. I was sure I would get information about whatever Nightmare was once I finished it.
But it would be far more beneficial to get that information from Dry Water himself rather than from someone else.
There was a silence I could not decipher. I could not even use expression reading on him. He was invisible.
Finally, he replied.
"There are two ways for me to explain it. Do you want me to explain it from the eyes of others or from my own?"
Even better.
"Am I asking for too much if I ask for both?"
Silence followed. Even now I could feel Dry Water's presence as a form of absence itself.
When he finally spoke, the explanation came in fragments, never fully offered, as if he were measuring how much I could carry without breaking.
Nightmare, he said, appeared on Earth only a few decades ago. It did not arrive with spectacle or warning.
It crept in quietly, disguised as exhaustion. People grew tired. The tiredness deepened. Within days, they fell unconscious.
Just like I did.
Those who fell asleep were not merely victims. They were called aspirants. People with intent. With something unresolved enough to pull them forward rather than let them fade away.
Ambition.
The first Nightmare was never random. It was shaped around the one who entered it. A single trial. A single opposition.
If the aspirant failed, their body in the waking world would not die cleanly. It would change.
The seed of the Nightmare would bloom through them, and they would return as something hollow, something meant to be erased by others who had survived their own trials.
I listened without interrupting, letting each piece settle before touching the next.
But now this is where things get borderline unbearable.
Nightmare was recent. Only a few decades old.
Dry Water was not.
If something like this had existed for decades, I would have known. Even if the world tried to bury it, it would not have been hidden from him.
My father did not protect people. He protected outcomes.
He would never leave his most valuable creation exposed to chance.
He would have told me.
Which meant either Nightmare had been concealed at a level beyond even him, or Dry Water had existed long before this system ever reached Earth.
Or my theory of entering a new world was correct.
All the possibilities were wrong in different ways.
The contradiction pressed in on me from every side. I could feel it closing, tightening like a door with no handle on my side.
If Dry Water predated Nightmare, then what exactly was he doing here now.
If he did not, then what was he pretending to be.
No matter what I do, I can't wrap my head around this.
Just what exactly is Dry Water.
And what did it mean for something like him to be watching me ask these questions without stopping me.
***
Soon, I asked.
"What does it mean to others and you?"
Dry Water did not answer immediately.
When he spoke again, it did not feel like a response.
It felt like something being recalled, something that would have existed even if I had never asked.
"Ayanokouji. When the Nightmare first appeared, they did not know what it was. For them, it was exactly what it sounded like."
He did not dramatize it. He did not need to.
"Those who fell asleep did not disappear. That was the problem. They remained where they were. They breathed. Their hearts continued. Their bodies were warm. They occupied space."
There was a pause.
"They were just no longer useful."
The word landed with more weight than if he had described violence.
The image formed on its own, without effort or resistance.
Absence disguised as presence. Beds that were still slept in but never shifted again.
Phones that rang until the battery died.
Food left untouched because the person it was meant for was technically still alive.
Entire homes stalled mid-function, as if time had been instructed to wait but never told when to resume.
I had seen this before.
In the White Room, disappearance was not ambiguous. You were trained with the understanding that people would be removed.
You did not ask why.
You did not ask whether.
You learned to adjust, to recalibrate, to keep functioning with fewer variables.
Loss was accounted for in advance.
But this was different.
They came from a world where absence demanded explanation. Where it was assumed that if someone did not return, something had gone wrong.
'Did he got into an accident?' Or 'He must have made a mistake.' wasn't rare.
They had never been taught how to live in a system where subtraction was intentional.
I imagined a mother watching her child over several days, not dying, not deteriorating in any way that could be treated.
SImply becoming slower, quieter, more distant, until one night the child fell asleep while still breathing and did not wake again.
Was she meant to feel relief because the body was intact, or fear because whatever should have ended never did.
Nightmare did not remove people from the world.
It suspended them between states, forcing those left behind to wait without knowing what they were waiting for, or whether waiting itself was already a mistake.
For them, that uncertainty would have been unbearable.
For me, it was familiar.
That was when Dry Water addressed me directly again.
"Tell me, Ayanokouji. How does society collapse."
For a moment, I did not answer.
Not because I lacked one, but because the question itself assumed a scale I had rarely been allowed to observe.
The closest thing I knew to society was not a nation or a civilization, but a controlled hierarchy disguised as education.
A school where outcomes were ranked and discarded under rules that pretended to be fair.
Still, experience was experience.
So I answered from what I knew.
"Most people would say violence."
As I spoke, faces surfaced in my mind.
Horikita and her insistence on order.
Sudo and the way frustration always bled into his fists.
Ryuen, who never bothered hiding that force was simply the fastest language.
"Violence can destroy or create," I continued. "The words change, the framing changes, but the conclusion always circles back to it."
I paused for a second.
"But that is how others think," I said. "They assume violence is the cause. That everything eventually collapses into it."
I exhaled slowly, adjusting the idea as I spoke it aloud.
"In reality, society collapses because of uncertainty."
The logic was simple, almost disappointingly so.
"Violence does not create uncertainty. Uncertainty creates violence. When people no longer know which rules apply, which promises hold, or which actions will still be punished tomorrow, force becomes the only remaining constant."
Silence followed.
Then Dry Water spoke again.
"You're right. Society does not collapse from violence. It collapses from uncertainty. From not knowing whether the rules you followed yesterday will still protect you tomorrow."
I felt his attention sharpen, He was trying to make sense of what I just did.
Only moments ago, I had been deliberately abrasive.
Now I was answering him plainly, without resistance.
He was likely attempting to determine whether this shift was strategic or instinctive.
Whether I was advancing or retreating.
I did not clarify it for him.
"Imagine it, Ayanokouji," Dry Water said. "A mother whose child has fallen into a deep sleep, suspended between life and death."
The image formed before he finished speaking.
"One night, she hears violent sounds from the child's room. She runs toward it carrying both hope and fear. When she opens the door, what stands before her is not her child, but the thing that will kill her."
He did not pause.
"They were few at first. Killing them was not difficult."
The ease with which he said it was more unsettling than the statement itself.
"It began in isolated homes. But hierarchy depends on predictability, and once that broke, panic followed. Families fled rather than confront what slept in their houses. Governments attempted to intervene. Orders were issued to eliminate anyone who had fallen into prolonged slumber."
I could see the hesitation in those orders. The delay between intent and action.
Bonds interfering with logic.
"The families could not do it," Dry Water continued. "They ran instead."
Then his tone shifted.
"And then some of them woke up."
The timing was... Too precise.
"As those orders were issued, some returned. They survived the Nightmare. They came back with power."
I understood immediately.
It was statistically impossible for that many awakenings to align so cleanly with political response.
History had been adjusted but Dry Water must know that such lie would never work on me...
What is he playing at?
"Each day, more humans became monsters," he said. "And more humans became heroes. The monsters were eliminated efficiently. The heroes were not equal."
That inequality mattered more than the monsters ever did.
"Why would the powerful submit to governments that could no longer protect themselves," Dry Water asked. "Some were absorbed. Others formed their own Clans. They named them after gods."
That word caught.
Gods.
Before I could question it, he continued.
"There are six you should be aware of. The Sun God. The War God. The Storm God. The Beast God. The Heart God. The Shadow God."
I don't know how to feel about this.
I had finally gotten my freedom, even if only for 3 years, and I had only used 1... In that 1 year, I made friends, learned a new culture, and learned how to hold conversations and be normal.
Just for it to be taken away in one sleep.
Should I be angry right now?
Or should I be sad? No, the last thing I should be feeling right now is remorse...
But... It hurts.
I will never be able to see something associated with the Earth I once knew...
Not that I particularly had anything good related to it.
But it was still my home.
Can I cope and say that I have finally reached freedom and am truly away from the chains that once held me?
Or should I confront the reality and agree that I have just gone from the chains of one Earth to another?
Those are not the gods I once knew. They might correspond with the title of gods, but I can confidently say we are thinking of different gods.
I... Am not on the planet Earth I once knew...
Even if I can go back somehow... Will I? No, the Earth I enter in the future might be more dangerous than the one I came from... But I felt much more alive here, in this nightmare.
I truly felt like myself... There's no reason to hide myself anymore.
I won't have to sleep thinking about what I should do tomorrow to not be thrown back into the white room.
And he said 6 gods I should know of, yet there are probably more gods that I don't know of.
And each god having a Clan named after them, does the 7th God also have one?
What about the 8th and 9th god?
Am I just overthinking?
After a long silence, dry water continued.
"It did not take long for the clans to surpass governments. Order returned, but it was different. Children were taught how to survive the Nightmare. For those who gained power, the Nightmare _Pell became a blessing."
He is only thinking of it from one side's view. What about those like me, who had everything they once had taken away from them?
I at least got chosen by Nightmare _Pell. What about normal humans? What about those who weren't chosen by it and had their family turned into a monster?
"But it didn't take much for others to realize that the awakened ones were far more dangerous than the monsters they once knew. These monsters wore human skin... But again, for weaklings, everything will be a nightmare."
So this answers it. We must only care about the strong; this world isn't so different from the one I once knew.
What is this tingling sensation?
My hand... Is shaking right now?
Is it fear... No, it can't be.
Why am I feeling excited after hearing of others suffering, or am I feeling excited because I'm about to be thrown into the toughest challenge yet?
Dry Water noticed it.
"Look at you. You don't feel a hint of remorse; if anything, I can see excitement coming out of you."
I really am a terrible human being.
𓁹𓁹
Some time had passed, but time did not exist here.
The cave remained the same kind of wrong it had always been, still, sealed, untouched by the concept of hours.
Dry Water did not speak.
Not at first.
He sat in that silence as if he had lived in it before, as if he had memorized its shape.
Then he let out a long sigh.
It wasn't exhaustion.
It sounded like the kind of breath a man releases when he has just remembered something he spent a lifetime trying to forget.
He stopped.
And then he laughed.
Not the earlier laughter that had made the skeleton pulse with light, not the laughter that had seemed almost theatrical.
This time there was no light.
Only a sound that came out uneven and stripped of any real emotion as though laughing had become the only thing left that could imitate crying.
"That is what I used to think too," Dry Water said. "That I had finally climbed past the low life. That the world had offered me a ladder, and I was clever enough to take it."
He paused.
The cave did not react, but the pause itself felt like something pressing down on the space.
"How wrong was I."
His next words did not sound like an explanation.
They sounded like a confession that had been rotting in his throat for years, waiting for someone who could not run away.
"What I told you before is what others believe," Dry Water continued. "It is the version of the Nightmare that can be endured. A second chance.
A faint shift entered his tone, like mockery.
aimed at Ayanokouji for asking such question.
No... Not at Ayanokouji.
But aimed at himself....
For answering.
"In reality, the Nightmare Spell is a curse."
He did not say it dramatically.
He said it lt like an inevitable conclusion.
"The Spell does not reward you. It extends you."
A short laugh escaped him.
"That sounds like the same thing, does it not? People confuse the two because they cannot imagine time as punishment."
The cave remained still.
Dry Water's voice moved through it like a knife through cloth.
"The stronger you become, the slower you age. The body remains young. The face remains intact. The muscles stay capable."
He spoke as if reciting a rule from memory, not something he had just realized.
"You will still be twenty when your companions begin to change. Their eyes will dull first. Their hands will shake. Their backs will bend. Their voices will thin. They will speak about fatigue the way ordinary people speak about weather."
Dry Water's voice lowered.
"And you will watch."
A pause.
"You will watch, and you will understand that you are no longer part of their time."
The skeleton did not move.
It could not.
But somehow, its stillness made the words feel even more alive.
"You will attend funerals in the same body you had when you first started. You will stand beside graves with the same face you wore when you swore you would never lose."
Dry Water exhaled again.
"You will think you can handle it at first. Everyone thinks that. They call it sacrifice. They call it price. They call it maturity."
He laughed.
"Then you will realize the truth. The Spell does not take your youth. It takes your ability to share it."
His voice slowed, as if he wanted Ayanokouji to understand that this was not a metaphor.
"People think immortality is not dying."
A pause.
"It is not."
Dry Water's tone became quieter, and in the cave that quietness did not feel gentle.
It felt invasive.
"Immortality is being forced to continue when everything around you has earned the right to end."
The silence that followed was thick.
"The world becomes smaller. Not because you lose power, but because you lose people. One by one. Slowly. Inevitably."
His voice did not rise.
It didn't need to.
"You will watch them go, and you will remain."
The air felt heavier.
Not because of magic.
Because of the simple weight of certainty.
"The first betrayal will hurt. The second will educate. The third will stop surprising you."
Dry Water's words fell like cold stones.
"Jealousy becomes common. Greed becomes normal. Love becomes a weakness you learn to hide."
A quiet laugh slipped out again, like a reflex.
"And the cruel part is this, you will still crave connection. Even when you know what it will cost you."
His voice became colder.
"You will make allies. You will make friends. You will even make family, if you are foolish enough."
A pause.
"And then you will outlive them."
The cave did not change.
But something about the space felt tighter, as if the walls had inched closer without moving.
"You will stop making bonds eventually," Dry Water continued, "not because you become wise, but because you become trained."
His voice was steady.
The steadiness was worse than anger.
"You will learn to speak without attaching. You will learn to touch without meaning it. You will learn to smile without feeling it."
Then he said it, slowly, with the kind of calm that sounded like surrender.
"And one day, you will realize that the Spell did not make you strong. It made you compatible with loneliness."
For the first time in a long while, Dry Water stopped speaking.
The silence that followed did not feel like a pause.
It felt like an aftermath.
Ayanokouji remained still.
He did not shift his posture.
He did not interrupt.
He did not offer a reaction.
But something in him had changed.
Not outwardly.
Internally.
The way a foundation shifts under a building without the building falling yet.
Dry Water continued, slower now.
"Others call it a blessing because they are still early in the journey. Because the bodies they bury are strangers. Because the deaths still feel like accidents."
His voice sharpened slightly.
"But once you survive long enough, you stop dying by chance."
A pause.
"You die by design."
The words sat in the air like something poisonous.
Dry Water's voice dropped again.
"You do not die of age. You do not die peacefully. You do not die surrounded."
His laughter came one last time, barely more than breath.
"You die the way you lived after the Spell."
Alone.
Then his voice steadied, as if returning to something controlled.
"And that is why it is a curse, Ayanokouji."
Only then did Ayanokouji's expression shift.
It was subtle, almost unnoticeable.
Not fear.
Not doubt.
Something colder.
Something more precise.
A mind that had just been shown a weapon to utilise.
and then shown the wound it would eventually carve into its owner.
Dry Water watched him for a moment.
He looked like a man who had just handed someone else a fate.
Ayanokouji finally lowered his gaze.
Not because he was overwhelmed.
Because he was thinking.
And unlike before, his thoughts did not move toward power first.
They moved toward an ending.
For the first time since the moment he was born, he imagined something he had never truly desired in the White Room, something he had never even allowed himself to consider as a possibility:
A normal death.
Not because it was peaceful.
But because it was his.
To grow old.
To change.
To weaken.
To be allowed to end.
And in that moment, Dry Water's words stopped being just philosophy.
They became the foundation of Ayanokouji's new character.
A shift so quiet it could not be heard.
A wish so human it almost felt unnatural in him.
He did not say it out loud.
He didn't need to.
But the desire settled into him anyway, heavy and permanent.
Someday, he wanted to die of old age.
***
For a while no one said anything, until one did.
"Can you see my memory if I play it back?"
Dry Water tried to reach Ayanokouji's mind.
...
..
.
Nothing.
It was still empty.
He could not read Ayanokouji's mind.
He replied anyway.
"Indeed I can. Even if it takes time, go ahead. I have forgotten the concept of time centuries ago."
With the confirmation, Ayanokouji finally let his eyes close.
Dry Water shifted his focus, preparing to witness Ayanokouji's internal world.
As he tuned into the forming imagery, the cave around them began to dissolve.
The walls thinned first, their shapes unraveling like stone that had never truly been solid.
The glow of the skeletons dimmed into floating specks of pale light. Not fading, but lifting.
As if even the light was abandoning the place.
The air itself fractured.
Every particle vibrated for a moment, then broke apart in complete silence.
As if the world was being erased without permission.
The cavern floor collapsed into shimmering dust, spiraling downward into nothingness.
Stone, shadow, and stillness crumbled away layer by layer, falling deeper than any lake or any abyss could reach.
Piece by piece, the entire scene vanished from existence, drawn into a vast and soundless void, until not even the memory of the cave remained.
What remained was not emptiness.
It was something worse.
A world of darkness.
***
'How long has it been since I last wanted light?'
That was Dry Water's first thought after finding himself in a world of pure darkness.
This was the kind of darkness that had no surface to rest on.
It was not absence of light. It was a place where light had never been allowed to exist.
Then a sound split it.
TAP
It was too sharp.
Not loud in volume, but loud in intention, like something striking the inside of the skull.
A silence followed.
A gap. A deliberate pause that made the echo stay longer than it should.
TAP
The second one landed with the same precision.
No variation.
No mistake.
Every half second, the tap returned, identical and exact, like a metronome built for torture. It did not come from one side. It came from everywhere at once, as if the void itself was producing it.
TAP
.
TAP
.
TAP
.
Between each tap, there was just enough silence for the mind to begin forming a thought, and just enough time for the next tap to cut it off.
Dry Water did not cover his ears.
He could not.
He did not flinch.
He could not.
And yet something inside him still tightened as if it wanted to.
'I have known worlds quieter than this.'
The thought arrived slowly, carefully, as if it was afraid of being punished for existing.
Then another thought, colder.
'What is the nature of this place? And where exactly has Ayanokouji taken me?'
The taps continued.
And then something happened that made him stop thinking altogether.
Not because he chose to.
Because for a moment, his mind simply forgot how.
There was a sensation.
A wrong sensation.
It was not pain or sound... Or even sight.
It was a pressure spreading through nothing.
A slow invasion.
He stared into the darkness and suddenly felt like shaking.
The instinct was immediate.
But the logic came right after.
How.
He did not have a body.
He did not have nerves.
He did not have skin.
He did not even have breath.
So what was shaking.
What was responding.
The taps continued, indifferent.
TAP
TAP
TAP
And the sensation deepened.
He tried to name it.
His mind reached for old vocabulary like a man reaching into a grave, searching for something he buried centuries ago.
He found a word.
Not with certainty.
With hesitation.
'This... is cold.'
He did not believe it.
He could not.
Cold was something that belonged to flesh. Cold belonged to blood. Cold belonged to lungs tightening and fingers stiffening.
He had none of those.
And yet, the feeling persisted, spreading across him as if he had a surface.
As if he had skin.
As if the void had decided to mock him by recreating the simplest human suffering.
Then he felt something else.
Something wet.
On his face.
A trail that moved downward, slow and heavy, sliding past where his cheek should have been, dragging itself toward where his jaw should have been.
Then it fell.
And he felt it fall.
Not in a physical way.
In a way that made the mind recoil.
His first instinct was disgust.
His second instinct was worse.
Grief.
Because the wetness felt familiar.
Not as a memory.
As a function.
Something the living did.
Something he had lost the right to experience.
The taps stopped.
The silence that followed was not peace.
It was expectation.
Then light entered.
Not gentle.
It arrived like a wound opening.
A dark sky loomed above, heavy and endless, and rain fell all at once, violent enough to turn the world into noise.
The sound of the rain was the sound of the taps.
Not similar.
Identical.
As if the tapping had been a translation, and this was the original language.
The rain struck the ground with such force that it sounded like gunfire. It struck his face. It struck his eyes. It struck his skin.
Skin.
Dry Water tried to turn away.
He could not.
He tried to look down.
He could not.
He tried to look anywhere else.
He could not.
For the first time in a long time, he struggled.
Not with enemies.
Not with time.
Not with hunger or pain.
He struggled with the simple fact that the vision did not belong to him.
He was not watching.
He was being made to watch.
The perspective did not shift because he wanted it to.
It shifted only when the memory allowed it.
And then Dry Water heard a voice.
Not from the sky.
Not from the ground.
Not from behind.
A voice that did not travel through air.
It was already inside him, as if it had been there all along and he had only just learned to recognize it.
The voice said.
[I opened my eyes.]
[The first thing I felt was the cold.]
[Not inside the body—outside. On the skin. A foreign wetness striking against my cheek, dripping along my jawline, soaking into the collar of unfamiliar fabric.]
The words ended.
The rain did not.
The taps did not.
But Dry Water felt something else shift, something deeper than sound.
The world around him did not behave like a place anymore. It behaved like a page being turned.
When Ayanokouji asked him about memory, Dry Water had expected fragments. Glimpses. A few scenes meant to summarize the rest.
But this was not a selection.
This was the beginning.
Not the beginning of the conversation.
The beginning of everything.
And there was something else that felt wrong in a way he could not immediately name.
This was not Ayanokouji's first-hand experience.
It was not raw thought.
It was narration.
As if Ayanokouji was deliberately choosing to speak over his own memories, controlling even the way they were remembered. Shaping them into something watchable.
Dry Water did not understand why.
Why not show the truth as it was.
Why filter it.
Why tell it.
Unless the telling itself was part of the truth.
Dry Water felt the rain again.
Something inside him moved with it.
Nervousness.
Excitement.
A hunger so old he had forgotten it had a name.
He wanted to see how far Ayanokouji had gone.
He wanted to know what parts of the Nightmare had not broken him.
He wanted more of this wrongness, more of this pressure against skin that he did not have.
He wanted to feel tired.
He wanted to feel hungry.
He wanted to feel the kind of exhaustion that came from having a body that could fail.
He wanted to feel alive.
And more than that, he wanted to reach the point where the memory would fold back on itself.
Where Ayanokouji's path would lead to the cave.
Where Dry Water would appear inside his own recollection, and Dry Water would finally see himself through Ayanokouji's eyes.
Not as a legend.
Not as a skeleton.
Not as a voice that pretended it had already understood everything.
But as he truly was.
Ayanokouji had become Dry Water.
And Dry Water had become Ayanokouji.
Dry Water understood something then.
Something that made the rain feel quieter.
Dry Water really is a terrible human being.
***********
Author here, so basically what you all have read until now was not actually from Ayanokouji's POV (Chapters 1 to 14).
It was from Dry Water's POV, who was watching Ayanokouji's memories.
Confusing, right?
Basically, what you have read until now was not a firsthand experience, but Ayanokouji narrating it, and Dry Water can be considered a reader who is reading a story... You are just reading as Dry Water.
A perfect loop, no?
Whatever you have read until now was never the first hand experience.
Lol
******
With this, Chapter 14 ends.
This took time, didn't it? I apologize. I was so ill that I even had to take an MRI test, and somewhere along the way, I lost my motivation to write stories...
But I am back again :)
How was it?
I am so sad that I couldn't end the nightmare in this chapter. I drag things too much, man.
Why am I dragging it until Chapter 15? Oof.
Did you guys wait for this chapter?
What do you think of this story?
The next chapter will be the best, trust me.
Bye.