I forgot about the cigarette I was smoking and stared blankly at the moon hanging in the sky.
"Why is the moon blue?"
The drizzling rain pelted my face. The smoking area next to the recycling bin had an awning, but there was nothing I could do about the raindrops carried by the night breeze.
Strange.
According to the laws of web novels, the moon's color and number were proof of another world.
But mistaking fiction for reality was an early symptom of schizophrenia, and since I didn't have any mental illness, it was just a natural phenomenon.
Come to think of it, I saw a red moon once before.
Back then, I'd been so amazed that I searched it up and learned it was caused by light scattering in the atmosphere.
Probably the same reason here.
I lit another cigarette and searched for "blue moon" on my phone. Right before I did, knowledge from an old game I'd played suddenly came to mind.
In that game, if the blue moon targeted you, you'd just reset everything.
Sometimes it was faster and easier to start over than to solve the problem.
With that thought, I checked the search results for blue moon, and they were just as expected.
[Moons that actually emit blue light can appear when the concentration of dust in the atmosphere increases due to volcanic eruptions or large forest fires.]
Damn fine dust. Looks like I'll die of lung disease because of the fine dust before my time comes.
Huh?
On my way back inside after finishing the butt, I spotted an earthworm that had been stepped on and crushed by someone.
Even with its body split open, it was wriggling desperately to survive. The sight was both gruesome and pitiful.
I stepped on it. Sorry.
After confirming a piece of the worm stuck to my shoe sole, I apologized and headed back to my room.
With such a vivid blue moon, there should be some buzz online, right?
I checked various communities for reactions. But not a single post about the blue moon existed anywhere.
Maybe it's just visible in our area.
Is our neighborhood the only one with this much dust?
On a whim, I tried to post a question, but I couldn't write anywhere.
[Your ID is banned. Ban duration: 99,999 hours. Reason: Trolling.]
[This ID is banned for 999 days. Reason: Malicious posts.]
[Your IP is banned. Reason: 'Crazy bastard, stop trolling.']
As I'd half-expected, no community had lifted my bans.
Trolling? I only posted healthy debates and my personal thoughts.
Everyone else does the same to use communities, don't they? Why are the mods so strict only with me?
Guess I'll have to check there after a long time.
Time to use the computer instead of my phone. I got out of bed, turned on the PC, and logged into a community made up of multiple boards.
Banned here too, same there, this one as well, and that one...
Each board was like its own site, but like other communities, my IP and ID were banned on almost all of them.
Is this the corruption of power?
I'd heard that board admins were unpaid volunteers—regular users given admin rights by the site operators.
Normally, work ethic depends on compensation, so why did they work so hard for free?
Probably got a taste for power, and I was one of its victims.
Time to check the new minor galleries.
I looked at the "New Minor Galleries" listed at the top.
My purpose for using boards was to build knowledge and debate it with others, so I preferred boards with a decent user base.
I'd rarely checked new minor galleries since they usually had few users.
This one looks good.
The unfamiliar board name was a relief—it had a lot of people and was active.
[Crazy, please stop!]
[Aargh! Stop posting gross pics!]
Half the active posts, however, were repulsive content.
New board's getting terrorized.
Corpses from accidents or bodies killed by drug cartels. Filth like urine, feces, food waste.
And photos catering to sexual tastes outside the norm.
Business as usual.
As I read through the terror posts one by one, a thought suddenly struck me.
Everything here is just digital data.
All we receive is visual information; it can't actually harm us in any way.
In other words, we can feel emotions similar to real contact just from images constructed of 0s and 1s.
It's not real, but it feels real. And our society despises those who treat the unreal as real.
The prime example being otaku. We mock, scorn, and ignore how they love and adore unrealistic beings from anime or comics.
The difference between anime, comics, and photos is just between reality and depiction.
So what if people drew these hated photos as illustrations and posted them?
They'd probably hate them just the same. Just as otaku pour affection into drawn characters, people would pour rage and disgust into gross art.
There's no difference between normies and otaku. Just a difference in interests.
Why did this problem arise?
Because of humanity's base instinct to find social weaklings and assert superiority?
Or the bullying culture born from Japan's otaku discrimination after horrific kidnappings, now inertia spread online?
Or maybe the black-and-white thinkers who see the world in binaries, rampant on the internet?
Could be all of it.
The Buddha said: All arises from the mind.
The hatred toward otaku doesn't come from them being hateful—it's from our own desire to hate them.
Same with gross pics.
Digital photos made of 0s and 1s have no substance, yet they hugely impact our minds as if real.
It's no different from my mind stirring at empty space.
Form is not different from emptiness, emptiness is not different from form. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
Everything depends on the mind.
I'd gained another lesson today. I couldn't keep this wisdom to myself.
Time to post.
I saved the gross pics from the new gallery.
Including gross pics will make it easier to understand.
Just posting gross pics is terrorism. But as reference material to enlighten others and elevate debate as a true debater, gross pics become teaching aids, so it's fine.
Like how stripping in public is indecent exposure, but if it's art, there's no punishment.
Next, I drew illustrations of the gross pics too. I attached both the pics and drawings to my draft post.
[Is the World Empty? What's Real and What's Fake? On Otaku Hate, Digital Terrorism, and Defining Digital vs. Reality]
[Writer: IAmTheDebater]
I posted and waited. After 10 minutes, plenty of time for people to read, they'd leave comments with their thoughts.
Let's check.
After showering, I looked at the post.
[ID banned by Yoho Online Manager.]
[Ban duration: 9,999 years / Reason: Spreading gross pics and spouting nonsense]
Banned from yet another gallery today.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
...The moon's blue again today?
Two days in a row. I'd been wandering communities since yesterday looking for a new haven, so this phenomenon made even less sense.
No mentions of the blue moon anywhere.
I smoked and searched diligently on my phone. But still, nothing about a blue moon.
[Half moon looks pretty today.]
[How does it split so perfectly in half? Like a waffle.]
Unbelievable stories filled the feeds instead.
Half moon?
The post with a photo was from 10 minutes ago.
[Pretty photo.]
[I prefer half moons over full ones.]
[Clear skies today—perfect for pics.]
[How long's it been since nationwide clear weather? No fine dust, no rain—great for night walks.]
Comments were all about that. I looked up at the sky again.
Blue full moon.
And raindrops hitting my face in the night breeze.
...
Nothing matched.
Could it be?
A crazy thought, but I recalled the first time I saw the blue moon.
The first thing that came to mind wasn't a natural phenomenon—it was a "blue moon" entity from a certain game.
Surviving the Entities.
An indie game where the goal was to survive as long as possible against entities—urban legends, superhumans, aliens, anomalies, monsters.
A game I'd once enjoyed, and the blue moon was one of its entities.
Maybe...
My next thought was possession. But no—my body was the same, my home unchanged, the world unaltered.
Then the game's entities became real?
Insane idea. Reality and fiction must be separated; no chance this madness was true.
But curiosity led me to check the [Surviving the Entities Gallery].
This one-man indie dev game had created a gallery because it was hard to invent special characters like entities alone, crowdsourcing ideas from users.
It ranked high among minor galleries.
Users posted their creations, and if lucky, the dev added them—lots of posts, lots of users.
[No search results.]
But the board was gone.
I'd been banned from similar boards around half a year ago and lost interest in the game and boards since, so maybe it closed in the meantime.
[No search results for 'Surviving the Entities.']
Google had nothing either. It was a somewhat famous indie game that had won awards, yet all traces vanished as if it never existed.
[The game does not exist.]
Even the game I'd downloaded from Steam was gone from my library.
It had become a game existing only in my mind, as if it never was. ... I looked up at the sky again.
The blue moon was brighter and larger than yesterday.
This is crazy, but if...
I stubbed out my cigarette in the ashtray. On the way in, I stepped on another earthworm at the studio entrance.
If that blue moon is the one I know...
Two this time.
In five days, I become a mass murderer.