I stood beneath the torii gate of Hakurei Shrine, looking at the sky.
What should have been the clear sky of Gensokyo was now veined with dark red cracks, like porcelain about to shatter. Spiritual power was draining away—I could feel it, like blood slowly seeping from a wound. It wasn't just me. All of Gensokyo was bleeding out.
Reimu stood beside me, her shrine maiden robes stirring without any wind. It wasn't the wind. It was the boundary trembling.
"How much longer can we hold?" she asked, her voice utterly calm. Too calm.
"Three days," I said. "Maybe two."
It wasn't a lie. I had tried every method—adjusting the boundary between Gensokyo and the outside world, creating buffer layers at the edges, even attempting to draw energy from other planes. All failures. The corruption from the outside world was spreading faster than anticipated. The muddy tide of science had thoroughly polluted every reachable dimension. Gensokyo, this sanctuary I helped establish and have protected for a thousand years, was dying.
"So what will you do?" Reimu turned to me. There was no blame in her eyes, only exhaustion. She understood our situation better than anyone.
"Open a path," I answered shortly. "To a place that can still sustain life."
"Where?"
"I don't know."
That was the truth. I had cast countless probes into the void, searching for any world that could bear us. Most never returned. A few sent back fragmented images—post-apocalyptic wastelands, digitized hells, pure energy storms. Until three days ago, when I captured a set of coordinates. The physical laws of that world were disturbingly chaotic, its spatial structure scarred. But precisely because of that, its tolerance for anomalies was abnormally high. Everything there defied reason, yet maintained a bizarre, precarious stability.
A world built upon madness.
A fitting place for the dying.
"Will you take everyone?" Reimu asked.
"As many as possible."
"As many as possible," she repeated my words, letting out a soft, humorless laugh. "You never promise 'everyone,' Yukari."
I didn't respond. Promises were useless ornaments. In the face of true crisis, only actionable plans held value.
I turned and left the shrine. A gap opened before me—far more laboriously than usual, its edges trembling. I stepped inside. In the moment before it closed, I heard Reimu's final words:
"Don't lose everyone."
By the time I returned to my residence within the gap, Ran was already waiting in the study. Her ears were perked, her tail twitching restlessly. Chen hid behind her, clutching her own tail.
"Lady Yukari," Ran's voice was tense. "Mr. Yōkū sent word. The cherry blossoms at Hakugyokurō withered overnight. Lady Yuyuko, she—"
"I know," I cut her off, walking towards the massive array etched in the center of the room. I had spent seven days and nights carving this teleportation circle, using my own boundary power as ink and the fabric of the gap as parchment. Now it pulsed with a sickly light, like the breath of a dying thing.
"Are we really leaving?" Chen asked in a small voice. "Leaving Gensokyo forever?"
"Yes," I said without turning around. "Prepare. Bring essentials. Abandon everything else. You have two hours."
Ran was silent for a moment. "What if some residents refuse to go?"
"That is their choice," I said. "I will force no one."
"But if staying means death—"
"Ran." I turned to look at her. "Two hours."
She lowered her head, her tail drooping. "Yes."
After they left, I stood alone at the center of the array. I closed my eyes, feeling Gensokyo's pulse—weak, erratic, growing cold. I remembered the original purpose for building this place: a home where the "uncommon sense" could survive. I remembered nights drinking under cherry blossoms, those boring banquets, those foolish incidents. I remembered Reimu chasing after shrine donations in a huff, Marisa's thief's grin after stealing my books, Yuyuko mindlessly eating all the sweets.
Useless memories.
I cleared my mind and placed my hand on the array's core. Boundary power drained from my being, flowing into the runes. The pain was sharp, like someone sawing at my essence with a dull blade. The array brightened. Light rose from the ground, coiled around my arm, climbed towards my torso.
The plan was simple: Before Gensokyo completely collapsed, I would use all my power to tear a rift in the fabric of boundaries and "fold" the entirety of Gensokyo into the target world. Not a physical move—that was impossible—but a conceptual grafting. Making Gensokyo a part of that chaotic world, parasitic upon its insanity.
Theoretically feasible.
Theoretically.
The accident happened thirty minutes before the scheduled time.
It didn't come from within Gensokyo. It came from the target world.
Something—vast, hungry, amorphous—collided with the connection channel I had pre-established. It wasn't an attack. It was more like... foraging. It had sensed the spiritual energy of our dying world, attracted by its fading flavor.
I immediately reinforced the channel, but it was too late. That power had already seeped through, resonating with my array. The entire gap began to tremble. Books slid from shelves, teacups shattered, cracks appeared on the walls.
Ran rushed into the study, Chen close behind. "Lady Yukari! Outside—"
"I know." My voice remained steady, even though the array beneath my palm was growing hot, distorting. The madness of that world was surging back, crawling up my probes. "The timetable is moved up. Now."
"But many are not ready—"
"Now."
I didn't look at their expressions. I pressed the last of my power into the array, forcing activation. The whole of Gensokyo trembled in my perception, like an animal grabbed by the ankle and hoisted upside down. I heard countless voices—terrified, bewildered, angry. I heard Reimu shouting my name. I heard Marisa cursing. I heard Remilia's haughty commands and Sakuya's urgent replies.
Then, I tore the boundary apart.
Not an elegant opening. A violent rending. Like biting through your own skin with your teeth.
Light swallowed everything. Not light, but the bare essence leaking from the torn structure of reality itself. I felt Gensokyo disintegrating—not physically, but conceptually. The shrine, the Scarlet Devil Mansion, Eientei, the Forest of Magic... the very existence of these places was being peeled from the fabric of reality.
I tried to maintain the structure. Tried to pass Gensokyo through the rift as one intact package.
Then, that thing from the other world grabbed us.
Not a hand. An indescribable appendage, composed of chaos itself. It coiled around Gensokyo and—pulled.
The package tore.
I felt the severing. Not in my body, but in my connections to all of Gensokyo. Those meticulously maintained bonds snapped one after another. Countless points of light vanished from my awareness, tossed into the torrent of chaos, scattered to unknown corners of that alien world.
No.
I focused all my will, trying to grasp them again. But the array was crumbling. My power was spent. I could only barely shield the nearest presences—Ran, Chen, a handful of others near the gap. The rest were scattered.
Like grains of sand slipping through fingers.
At the last moment, I saw Reimu. She was in the courtyard of Hakurei Shrine, looking up at the torn sky. She showed no panic, only raised her gohei and formed a seal. To protect the shrine? To stabilize something?
Then, she too was swallowed by the light.
Darkness.
When I woke, the taste of blood was in my mouth.
Not a metaphor. I was truly coughing up blood, dark red droplets staining my purple garments, blooming into deeper stains. I lay on the ground, hot grit beneath me. The sun hung high, scorching everything mercilessly.
It took time to sit up. Every bone screamed. I looked around—desert, endless desert, with the tilted ruins of structures in the distance. The sky was a murky yellow-white. The air smelled of ozone and burnt metal.
The coordinates were correct. This world.
I tried to open a gap. Pain exploded from my spine, but I bore it. A palm-sized black aperture appeared before me, its edges flickering like a faulty lightbulb. I reached in, fumbled—and pulled out a canteen. Half-full. I took a sip. Lukewarm, with a metallic tang.
I stood up. Brushed the sand from my robe. My arms beneath the short sleeves had a few abrasions, not deep. My tactical gloves were still on. My sunglasses were in my inner pocket, one lens cracked, but functional. I put them on.
Then, I assessed the situation.
Power: Less than three percent remained. Gaps could only be opened to minimal size and were highly unstable. My ability to manipulate boundaries was mostly gone, capable only of the slightest adjustments—deflecting a bullet a few degrees, folding space a few centimeters. My perception range was drastically reduced, not exceeding two hundred meters.
Gensokyo Residents: Scattered. I could sense faint traces of a few, dispersed in unknown directions, distances unclear. Most connections were completely lost—Reimu, Marisa, Yuyuko, Remilia...
Ran and Chen: Nearby. Within roughly a kilometer. Alive.
I walked towards them.
Ran found me behind a half-collapsed gas station. She looked terrible—her kimono torn, her fur matted with sand and some kind of black grease, a bloody gash on her left ear. But she was standing, her tail wrapped tightly around an unconscious Chen.
"Lady Yukari," her voice was hoarse. "You're injured."
"Minor," I said. "Chen?"
"She took the brunt of the transfer shock. Still unconscious. Vital signs are stable." Ran carefully laid Chen down in a patch of shade, then turned to me. Her eyes held too many questions, but she asked only one: "The others?"
"Scattered," I said. "Randomly distributed across this world. Locations unknown."
She was silent for a long time. Wind blew across the desert, raising dust that pattered against rusted metal. A distant explosion sounded, muffled, like the earth belching.
"Can we find them?" she finally asked.
"I don't know."
"You don't plan to... try?"
I looked at her. "At what cost?"
Ran opened her mouth, then closed it. Her ears flattened, her tail dragging limply in the sand. I knew what she was thinking—mercy, responsibility, a leader's duty. But she didn't say it. Because she understood our situation: I was now so weak I might not even be able to protect her. Searching for scattered residents meant dividing our already scant resources. It meant everyone might die.
"Survival is the primary objective," I said. "Then, assessing this world. Then, recovering power. Then, and only then, can we search for the others."
Cold logic. Necessary cruelty.
Ran lowered her head. "I understand."
"Take care of Chen," I said. "I need to scout the area. I'll be back within two hours."
"Lady Yukari—" She wanted to say something, but stopped, changing it to, "Please be careful."
I nodded, turned, and walked deeper into the desert.
This world was mad.
I confirmed it within five hundred meters. Everything here defied common sense, but it defied it so utterly that it had formed a new kind of logic.
I saw two modified cars chasing over a dune. The person in the back seat of one was shouldering a rocket launcher, but what it fired wasn't a rocket—it was something that split into colorful fireworks, exploding around the other car with a comical horn sound. And then that car actually flipped. Illogical, but it happened.
I saw a giant robot—at least ten meters tall—digging into the ground, its mechanical arm pulling up a buried water pipe. Water jetted into the sky, forming a brief rainbow in the sunlight. The robot sang in an electronic, off-key voice.
I saw the upper half of a building floating in mid-air, the lower half still rooted to the ground, with its severed midsection exposed between them. Someone had run a rope ladder between the halves and set up a hot dog stand right on the fractured cross-section.
Here, physical laws were a suggestion. Gravity was advice, momentum a reference, cause and effect optional. Bullets could curve, explosions could solidify into sculptures before shattering, the dead sometimes stood up to tell a bad joke before truly dying.
Chaos. But stable chaos—stable in a state of perpetual, meaningless madness.
This was exactly why I chose this place. In a world of such total disorder, the "uncommon sense" was no longer an anomaly, just part of the background noise. We could survive here, like a drop of water falling into a boiling pot of oil—still conspicuous, but at least not instantly vaporized.
The cost was that we had to adapt to its rule: there were no rules.
I found a vantage point—the half-shell of a water tower, severely rusted. I climbed it and scanned the surroundings with my weakened perception.
Three kilometers east, a settlement resembling a town. Buildings looked cobbled together from junk, defenses crude but practical. Vehicles came and went, their bodies painted with garish patterns and cryptic letters.
To the west was open desert, but tire tracks led to an underground facility entrance. A sign stood beside it, depicting a skull and the words "Keep Out," though "Keep" was crossed out and replaced with "Welcome."
To the north... there was something. Not a structure, not a life form. An "anomaly," a fold in space. Like a scar, or a crack in the world itself. I could feel the boundary there was abnormally thin.
Then, I sensed some of the existence traces.
Faint, scattered. One was in the direction of the town, another at the edge of the anomaly, and a third... moving, moving fast, heading south.
I didn't act immediately. I retrieved a tablet from a gap—one of the few technological items I brought from the outside, waterproof, shockproof, solar-charged. I turned on the recording function and began inputting observations:
[Day 1, Unknown Coordinates. Physical laws unstable, exhibiting selective failure. Social structure appears anarchic, but signs of organized activity present. Three possible local settlements/facilities detected. Three Gensokyo existence traces sensed, coordinates logged. Recommendation: Avoid contact until more intelligence is gathered.]
I switched to mapping mode and marked the sensed locations. That's when I noticed the trace near the town was moving—no, being moved. Transported by some kind of vehicle. Fast, heading towards the town center.
A captive? Or going willingly?
Insufficient information. I closed the tablet and descended from the water tower. On the way back to the gas station, I encountered my first local.
He drove a pickup truck welded with steel plates, several oil drums in the back. Seeing me, he slammed the brakes, tires digging deep grooves in the sand. He jumped out, holding a shotgun. A big beard, a missing front tooth, his left eye a mechanical one glowing red.
"New face," he grinned, the muzzle not pointed directly at me, but not lowered either. "Lost, sweetheart?"
I didn't speak, just stood there, my hand under my robe gripping a pistol drawn from a gap. 9mm, fifteen-round magazine, loaded. Safety off.
"Speak up," he took two steps closer, raising the shotgun slightly. "Or are you one of those 'freaks'? Like that dancing tree last month?"
"I'm just passing through," I said. My voice was flat, emotionless.
"Passing through," he laughed harder, his mechanical eye whirring softly. "Ain't no 'passing through' here. There's the living, and the soon-dead. You don't look soon-dead, but you don't look like much of a fighter either. So, what are you?"
"None of your concern," I said.
"It's my concern now," he raised the muzzle, aiming at my chest. "'Cause I'm asking, and you're—"
I didn't let him finish.
In the instant he pulled the trigger, I opened a gap two centimeters in diameter three centimeters in front of his shotgun barrel. Duration: zero point three seconds. Just enough for the buckshot to enter another spatial coordinate the moment it left the muzzle—a coordinate ten centimeters in front of his left foot, angled thirty degrees upward.
The gun fired.
His left foot exploded.
A scream. He fell, clutching the stump, rolling in the sand. The shotgun dropped. I walked over, picked it up, checked it—an old pump-action, two shells left. I ejected the spent casing and tossed the gun back beside him.
"You... what did you do..." he gasped, face pale, blood spreading on the sand.
"Suggest you stop the bleeding," I said, then continued towards the gas station.
I didn't look back. I heard him cursing behind me, then the sound of his vehicle starting—he'd crawled into his pickup and driven off, leaving a trail of blood.
First contact. Conclusion: This world had no room for negotiation, only demonstrations of power. Demonstrate just enough to deter, but not enough to attract greater attention.
When I returned to the gas station, Chen was awake, trembling curled in Ran's arms. Seeing me, her ears perked up, but she didn't rush over as she usually would.
"Lady Yukari," Ran stood up. "Any trouble?"
"Some," I briefly described the encounter. "We need to move. This place isn't safe."
"Where to?"
I pointed north. "First, towards that spatial anomaly. It might help mask our presence."
"And then?"
"Then, we need to learn about this world. Find a way to secure resources. Recover strength." I paused. "And, search for the others—but only after ensuring our own survival."
Ran looked at me. Her eyes held many things—worry, fear, perhaps a flicker of disappointment. She wanted me to act more like a "guardian," wanted me to organize a rescue immediately, wanted me to say "everything will be alright."
But I wouldn't.
"Ran," I said her name.
"Yes."
"Remember: Here, mercy is a luxury. Morality is a burden. Survival is the only morality that holds meaning."
She was silent for a long time, then nodded. "I understand."
No, she didn't fully understand yet. But she would, someday.
I helped Ran carry the still-weak Chen, and we left the gas station, heading north into the desert. The sun was beginning its descent, casting long shadows on the sand. My own shadow, the purple robe flapping in the hot wind, looked like a tattered flag.
Behind us, Gensokyo was now the past.
Ahead, only this mad wasteland.
And between the two, stood me. Yukari Yakumo. The Youkai of Boundaries. Now, an exile stripped of power.
But not for long. I would adapt. I would learn. I would use the madness of this world to weave my strength anew. Then, I would find the lost ones.
Or find their remains.
Whichever it was, I would keep moving forward. Because this was the path I chose—to lead Gensokyo to any place where survival was possible. Even if the cost was losing most of it.
Even if the cost was becoming, in their eyes, a cold and heartless monster.
I adjusted my sunglasses, tightened my tactical gloves. Kept walking.
Step one: Survive.
Step two: Everything else.