Kayako's bloodshot eyes bored into Amamiya Rin.
She understood.
She understood the thing in Amamiya Rin's gaze—that all-embracing pity, the natural outflowing of Bodhicitta, the great compassion of shared substance that covers all living beings.
And so, Kayako raged.
Flames of fury, like the drool of a venomous dragon, scorched her from within.
What was that pity worth?
Feigned sympathy? Hypocritical pity? Sorrow that cost him nothing? Condescending regret?
By what right? By what right did he sympathize with me? By what right did he pity me? By what right did he use a gaze like that to look with compassion upon this hatred of mine, soaked through with pain and rage?
The sound in her throat turned shrill, no longer a monotone rasp but a demand laced with endless resentment, driving straight into Amamiya Rin's mind.
What do you understand?
Do you know what it feels like to be ignored, swept into a corner like dust?
Do you know the taste of having even your own breathing feel like a burden?
A person like you… someone who is needed, who is loved… by what right do you pity me?!
The resentment, like tangible filthy water, drowned Amamiya Rin's consciousness.
His awareness kept sinking, the scene around him beginning to shatter, the setting replaced by somewhere else.
All at once, sharp pain shot up from his waist, then his back, and the back of his head slammed hard against a rigid floor. Everything went black. A man's coarse roar rang in his ears, his hair was yanked brutally, and his scalp tore with pain.
He opened his eyes.
Before him was a man with thinning hair and a savage face—Saeki Takeo.
Amamiya Rin had seen this man in the files of the Police History Compilation Office, both the perpetrator and a victim in that killing at the Saeki house.
Amamiya Rin wanted to move, but found his hands bound behind his back, coarse rope biting into the skin of his wrists, the other end tied to a heavy bedpost, his mouth full of iron-rust blood.
His gaze dropped, and he saw a white dress stained with blood, blood spreading from the chest down to the belly, the hem rolled up to the thighs, the right knee scraped and oozing, the left leg twisted at an unnatural angle. Warm blood trickled into his eye sockets, tempting him to blink.
But Amamiya Rin couldn't move.
In that instant, he grasped his situation.
This was Kayako's memory—or rather, Kayako's past. She had cast his consciousness into the very moment of her death.
"All right, Kayako, tell me now, won't you?"
Saeki Takeo crouched down, his bloodshot eyes fixed on Kayako.
"Whose child is Toshio, really?"
The words weren't even finished before Saeki Takeo's right hand cracked down hard.
The face was knocked to one side, half-dried blood flung from the forehead. The left eye took a heavy punch right after, the faint crunch of breaking bone clear inside the skull, vision instantly dyed red with searing pain.
Amamiya Rin stayed silent, enduring this malice and agony forced upon him.
"Always like this! You think playing dumb makes it all fine?!"
Saeki Takeo's roars and fists and feet fell like rain.
A heavy blow struck the belly, stomach acid mixed with bloody foam surging up the throat, the back slamming against the rigid bedpost, the hair wrenched up viciously, the scalp splitting with pain.
Amamiya Rin felt every fraction of the pain with perfect clarity.
The burning of torn flesh, the cracking of bone, the cold of blood draining away.
He felt Kayako's fear in that moment, her helplessness, and the resentment buried deep within.
He did not resist the sensation. Under the radiance of that clear light of self-nature, the pain grew only more vivid.
At the same time, a woman's voice sounded in his head: "You understand now, don't you?"
It was Kayako's voice.
"I was in such pain, so wretched, so miserable… you should understand a little now, shouldn't you?"
It was a question and a grievance poured out like a flood.
"From the moment I was born, I lived in nothing but pain. Ignored by everyone, forgotten, unwanted… like a little bug living under a stone by the roadside… Let you taste it! Taste the suffering I endured!"
A fist landed squarely on the jaw, teeth biting the tongue, the mouth flooded with a metallic sweetness. Saeki Takeo seized that long hair, forcing Amamiya Rin's face upward, and the cold gleam of a folding knife flashed before his eyes.
"Being ignored, forgotten, told endlessly that I wasn't needed—that pain—do you understand it a little now?"
The folding knife swept down. With the cold touch came scalding pain, born as fresh blood sprayed out.
"The pain of being ignored, of being forgotten, of being told forever that I wasn't needed… do you understand it a little now?"
Life ebbed away with the blood, and Amamiya Rin's breathing grew faint.
"No! How could you possibly understand? A man like you… clever, handsome, healthy, resolute, confident and proud, scattering goodwill and pity everywhere like the sun—how could you ever grasp what I feel? You could never understand it!"
Kayako's voice brimmed with fanatical resentment.
Of all human emotions, hatred is the only one that can fundamentally and over long stretches of time exert a fierce hold on humankind.
And the proof is this: two thousand years of blood feud searing again and again into the sands of the Middle East, generational curses taking root in a mother's whispers to her infant.
In the shadow of the fourteenth-century Balkans, the descendants of those forced to convert turned the wounds of faith into a gash between peoples that would never heal, torn open anew in the memory of every generation.
The eta and hinin of the Edo period, deliberately shaped by the system into vessels gathering all loathing, so that the anger and grievance of commoners had sinners to pour themselves upon.
Deep in the forests of Uganda, kinsmen with the very same blood in their veins, because of fabricated boundaries and inflamed memory, turned the slaughtering blade upon faces they had once smiled at…
Human history is, in truth, a history of hatred.
How fragile and fleeting love is; only hatred can cross the centuries and remain sharp as new.
It can bind loose sand together, it can grant a coward the strength to raise a blade, it can make the lowliest soul erupt with heat enough to burn everything down. It is the true power, the crimson pulse that circulates without end across this earth.
So, hate! Now is precisely the time to hate. You must hate someone, hate something. The reason you met with misfortune is that very thing.
The breath of death rushed against his face. The despair and terror of this body drowned every inch of perception, yet could not turn back the arrival of that moment.
A deeper sense of separation was taking place.
Consciousness seemed to float up, drawn out of this dying body, the five senses like a poorly connected circuit, the signal flickering in and out.
The world was fading, sounds drawing distant, the body's pain gradually growing muffled, as if behind thick frosted glass.
Amamiya Rin felt a cold of the utmost extreme—not a chill wind blowing from outside, but a cold seeping out from between his bones.
Life's warmth was draining away at speed, like sand in an hourglass, flowing off beyond recall. The body grew heavy, stiff, no longer his own.
Thought was like something mired in a bog, slowly congealing, sluggish yet drawn out, and all that remained around him was resentment.
Admit it… you should hate too! Hate this world, hate those who hurt you, ignore you, seize away what you cherish… like me, like these countless multitudes! Loathe it all, despise it all. When one person meets with misfortune, there must be another who has gained happiness—their happiness is built upon your misery.
The venomous mire churned and boiled, trying to drag Amamiya Rin's spirit into the abyss of pain and despair.
But all this resentment, flowing through his mind-consciousness, stirred no personal fear, resistance, or loathing in Amamiya Rin.
It was clearly reflected, wholly accepted, like a hundred rivers returning to the sea, pouring into that understanding of and compassion for suffering itself, a compassion beyond personal joy and pain.
The light of self-nature kindled a single lamp of the heart.
All living beings suffer. Amamiya Rin illuminated all this suffering, and bore in full every ordeal Kayako had endured, feeling her despair in every second, every fraction of a moment.
His compassion did not waver. The terrace of his heart stayed ever clear.
No hatred, no resentment, no anger, no fear.
For he saw the causes of this pain: Saeki Takeo's fanaticism and violence, Kayako's twisted obsession and the severing of all communication, Shunsuke Kobayashi's unintended blunder, and—further back still, seen at a deeper place already before all this—the intertwined attachments and karma of all beings in this impermanent world.
(I understand, Kayako. I understand your pain, your grievance, your loneliness. Precisely because I understand, I find it all the more pitiable; precisely because I understand, I am unwilling to hate.)
Amamiya Rin let the corner of his mouth curve faintly. It was not a smile, but comprehension and acceptance—the heart that draws out suffering, flowing forth of its own nature after breaking free of all hindrances and cleansing all the stains of karma.
(Resentment, apart from prolonging pain, apart from forging a prison of even deeper despair and turning oneself into both eternal jailer and prisoner, has no meaning at all. To stop hatred with hatred has no end. Rather than sinking within that chain of resentment, why not rise and act?)
Within Amamiya Rin's heart, that light of self-nature grew warm and vast, like a dawn rising silently in the dark night—not glaring, yet carrying the gentle power to melt solid ice, spreading out without sound or trace.
(Whether one accepts the resentment, or severs the chain of resentment, so long as one advances holding to such a conviction, one day the pain will be left behind—even if that day is far off, even if perhaps it can never be reached, even if it is an unknown, wayward path. After all, we are not omniscient, omnipotent gods and buddhas; we cannot see the distant future. But so long as every step moves forward, so long as one can see the present, so long as one knows one is walking the very path one has chosen to tread—that is enough.)
Saeki Takeo's savage, contorted face, his arms brandishing the weapon, the entire brutal vision—like a thin mist bared to the noonday sun, dissolving inch by inch in the light, turning to nothingness.
Amamiya Rin opened his eyes.
The vision receded; reality returned.
He still stood at the foot of the staircase on the first floor of the Saeki house, his posture unchanged. The tachi was in his hand, his breathing steady. There was no wound on his body, no trace of blood; the white dress and the bone-deep pain seemed to have been nothing but a vivid nightmare.
His vision refocused, and the first thing to fill his eyes was a face so close it nearly pressed against the tip of his nose.
Kayako.
In that posture of joints twisted the wrong way, she had halted midway up the stairs, her bloodshot eyes staring straight at him, so near he could make out the murky red threads in her pupils and the blue-black veins beneath her skin.
Through the gaps in her black hair, those swollen, bloodshot eyes now held no longer pure venom, but a strong bewilderment and incomprehension mixed in.
She seemed still immersed in the painful memory she had woven, not fully drawn out of it, and even less able to comprehend Amamiya Rin's reaction.
Why did he not hate? Why had he not sunk into hatred and died as she had wished?
She had made him experience her deepest pain and resentment.
She had tried to use that pain as a seed, to plant the same malice within his heart, to draw out his hatred toward the living, toward injustice, toward the happy, toward the whole world.
Just as she had once done to another victim.
But… there was nothing.
Nothing at all.
In the depths of that man's consciousness, after being scoured by every one of her painful memories, not only had no poisonous sprout of resentment taken root—that ground of compassionate, luminous emptiness had instead grown even clearer.
That compassion was not the sympathy of ignorance, nor the pity of a foolish Madonna, but understanding and acceptance still chosen after coming to know all cruelty.
And this was harder for her to bear than any resistance!
She did not understand! Nor was she willing to understand. From the depths of her being she refused to accept such a person and such a state of heart.
And just then—
"Hey! I'm telling you! The two of you… you really are in this together, aren't you!"
Ago's shrill voice came up from downstairs, cutting through the eerie stalemate.
She had just witnessed the strange light bursting from Amamiya Rin's body, and then seen Kayako crawl out to confront him—so of course she lumped them together as accomplices.
Fury and the shame of feeling toyed with stripped away her last shred of patience.
She held nothing back now. The air around her twisted violently, and more Ikiryo gushed out from within her body.
This time, though, she did not let them scatter and charge up separately.
The white phantoms gathered, compressed, and fused in the air.
A dozen, dozens, over a hundred… countless Ikiryo, as if forced together by an invisible mold, a great mass of Ikiryo crushed by force into a single one, their color turning from half-translucent pallor into something solid, like a lump of over-compressed luminescent matter, radiating a heart-shaking pressure of spirit.
Ago rarely did this. That vast power of souls could rival an entire nation, but when she released it, it always came as a great many individual Ikiryo, never as a single whole formed from all her power.
As for why, she did not understand it either—probably a lack of willpower and focus, and thus a lack of control. She could not release all her power in one breath, so the Ikiryo she sent out were too scattered.
In the past she had never met an enemy that even tens of thousands of Ikiryo couldn't handle, and those enemies rarely struck at her with the aim of killing her—after all, a dead her would be far more dangerous.
Still, though she had never faced any truly terrifying threat, that didn't mean she had never tried to concentrate her power further.
Since she had never received any orthodox training, forcibly kneading the released Ikiryo together was the sum of her achievement.
And now, that more solid Ikiryo, trailing a tail formed of countless Ikiryo, rushed up the stairs like a giant, its hugely enlarged fists covering both Amamiya Rin and Kayako at once.
Kayako's hollow, dazed gaze was instantly replaced by rage.
Whether or not she understood Amamiya Rin, this incoming attack was a blatant provocation, and it triggered the instinctive malice she bore as a curse-grudge.
____
👻🔥+40 ch on Pátreon: Walnut-chan🔥👻
🔥 New history: Zenless Zone Zero: Rewriting Fate in New Eridu — read it on The_Mikudayo
📚 Forty chapters of advanced reading at Walnut-chan, and it goes straight into keeping the translations on schedule
Let's achieve our community goals:
🎯 100 Powerstones = +1 extra chapter for everybody