Blink!
Huh?!
Yohan's eyes opened with inkling.
His murky room where he had initiated that strange ritual—filled with ocassionally used and nearly useless clutter, containing the elusive musky odor and the crude cot he had a reluctant attachment to...
...none of it was in front of his eyes. Instead, a mesmerising grotesquery.
The acquainted enormous Moon, its white luminance almost blinding against the absolute dark, carving a silver path across the black sea.
For a fleeting moment, he glimpsed a passing apparition of his room.
Standing on the cool sand, he stared perplexed at the horizon for a few seconds and subconsciously turned around, repulsed by that reflected light.
No. No, wait— f*ck!
Before he could think properly his body had already pivoted instinctively, fuelled by a spark of inquisitiveness, only belatedly realising he shouldn't have turned. Mid-pivot he instantly wrenched himself back toward the sea.
However, his premonition had come true. There was no moon or sea anymore. Just the same enclosed eternal passage with its abyssal end, the same slope stretching upward, same as before, same as he had anticipated.
As the realisation dawned that he had blundered again, his legs trembled slightly, and simultaneously he felt something warm washing over his soles.
The eerie warm fluid, flowing beneath his feet all the way down the slope.
Yohan looked at the his feet and then to his whole body. There was no impalement on his chest, no damp clothes and no emaciation hollowing him out.
Then he looked at the fluid flowing downward and a faint flicker of hope stirred in him.
...what if I've to follow the direction of flow? Yeah, it does make sense, crap, why didn't I think of this before?
Following this revelation, he began walking down the slope approaching the abyss which never seemed to draw any closer no matter how far he walked.
In the end he had emaciated himself to the brink once again. Yohan buckled at the knees, then fell over, eyes frozen open and staring at nothing with hollowness.
There was no end to this nor he could turn back.
So he stayed still for hours until he finally pulled out his knife and sluggishly brought its edge to his neck and that was all... he could manage before he succumbed to exhaustion and fainted.
After an ambiguous interval of unconsciousness he opened his eyes with reluctant expectation and again — nothing new. The same foreboding Moon.
This time he held his composure sturdily and fell into long deliberation, keeping his eyes on the Moon despite the foreboding repulsion he felt looking at it.
He didn't move an inch from his place nor moved his eyes. But after roughly an hour or less, something caught his deliberation. The silver path the moon's luminance carved across the black sea kept drawing his eye.
There was nothing he could think of. With a bit of prudence he raised his right foot and stepped into the black sea, expecting the ground to be firm at the edge at least. And for a brief moment something solid met his foot beneath the surface. But the instant he relaxed his weight onto it he was dragged straight down. He grasped at the water but it slipped through his fingers as though the shore had ceased to exist entirely. He kept drowning and drowning and drowning without pause, every effort to keep himself above the surface culminated in wain. Yohan didn't know how to swim, and beyond that some invisible force was pulling him downward, making his body feel heavier than it should. Only one outcome awaited him.
...Death.
Inevitably, it happened so...the most agonizing nightmare-like death yet. Suffocating, muffling, struggling, hoping, regretting, flailing for a long stretch of time before losing consciousness, thus...dying.
BLINK!
He opened his eyes to the same eldritch Moon hanging in the vista, standing on the same shore.
He stood frozen, gathering himself from the residual terror, barely keeping himself from dropping to his knees. His gaze stayed fixed straight ahead, an eerie emptiness visibly settled in his eyes. He was hesitant to even think too loudly about anything, let alone hear his own voice. A cold, harrowing dread ran through his body, making his blood feel close to frozen.
Yet again he had to make a choice. After a while he kept his body facing the moon but gradually, carefully turned his head to the right — not all the way, just to the right — hoping it wouldn't trigger the transition, and decided to move along that direction, hugging the very edge of the shore. Not forward, not backward, but sideways along the boundary between the world behind him and the one ahead.
However the moment he commenced moving in that direction—
"Curses!!!!!!"
His vision lurched and swam momentarily as though pressed by some forceful psychic influence.
"Just kill me for eternity rather!! What's with this
torment?!"
He gritted his teeth, teetering on the edge of either breaking down or bursting into tears, holding his composure by the thinnest margin.
He looked around to find the familiar expanse and felt the same eerie liquid streaming beneath him, flowing past toward the abyss down the slope.
Once again Yohan was left with only two choices — climb or descend. Without much deliberation he chose to descend, not because he expected anything to change this time, but because descending felt easier if he was going to die either way. Though deep down he was still hoping for something new — some fresh hint, some new path to carve out.
So he walked and walked, for an indefinite stretch of time he simply walked. Yet...
...there was no end to it, no way to turn in that enclosed passage, and no possibility of climbing the cage-like trees with their sinister branches bending and coiling into each other. He was again destined to die here either by rotting or...
SHHK...
...Forcing himself to die instantly and so, emptying his head with any lingering thoughts and doubts and even abandoning his lifelong petrification of blood in the face of this tormenting, abyssal despair, he sliced the side of his neck in one swift motion—thus losing consciousness within seconds followed by looming death.
He endured this mental and physical torment three more times. Once he drowned again in the black sea attempting to find a different way out of that tranquil hell. The second time he killed himself by slicing his carotid artery the moment he resurrected, simply to confirm whether dying immediately upon respawning would change anything. And the third time he succumbed once more to the endless road of despair and desperation.
On his next resurrection he fell to his knees with an uncanny grin, with empty bleak eyes fixed unmoving on the Moon like an alabaster statue.
Staring at it, something surfaced in fragments from the back of his memory, something he had once read:
Someone asked, "What is insanity, according to you?"
Someone replied, "A repetitive state of doing the exact same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. True insanity is not screaming randomly. Real insanity feels lucid."
These phrases had drifted up from nowhere, read somewhere years ago and long since shelved. Back then they had been just sentences — an explanation of insanity he had always assumed he understood well enough.
Maybe, at this moment, he was beginning to understand what they actually meant. Maybe what he was living through right now was closer to that definition than anything he had encountered before or maybe... it was something he had yet to fully grasp.
"Die..." He drove his forehead into the damp sand, arms sprawled over it, voice muffled and irregular. "Let me die, please, let me die! If I can't live then at least let me die for good..." He slammed his head into the sand repeatedly, gripping his hair in fistfuls, a hysterical, choked snicker muffled beneath him. "I— I can't keep killing myself over and over again. This...hurts...too much...Too much.
You were right X. I want to live... I really want to go back to living if death feels like this, or at least just let me die forever... I'm...s-sorry, I'm sorry—"
As Yohan murmured his apologies into the sand, fragments of certain faces and memories flashed through his mind — his family among them. And every time he had killed himself and opened his eyes again before that foreboding moon, in the interval between dying and resurrecting, he felt an agonising, indescribable sensation as though his soul were being wrenched out of him like a tunic dragged over a bed of protruding nails, shredding apart with every inch it was pulled. That was what dying felt like here, every single time.
Yohan dug his fingers into the sand and clutched it, his laugh growing more unhinged, a wide surreal grin spreading across his face beneath widened eyes. "It's my fault... I shouldn't have— I shouldn't have been so hasty. I tried to take a shortcut without knowing the consequences, forgetting there's no true detour to..." He covered his face with his palms, pressing his fingertips hard into his skin.
"I can't take this anymore...kill me!!!!" He dragged his fingers slowly down his face. "Kill me...!!! I just wanted to live a simple, lucid life. I still do— what have I gotten myself into?!"
"KILL ME!!!"
Yohan seized the knife and screamed it out with a raw, hoarse, distressed voice — a peculiar expression twisting across his face and...
TCHK!
Yohan stabbed the side of his neck and died.
He respawned in the same place and without a moment's hesitation, with that same unhinged expression, drove the knife through his chest with a crying chuckle. "Kill me..."
He resurrected and impaled the knife through his heart. Then again. Then again and again and again, rashly and erratically, each time moaning something caught between sobbing and laughter, telling himself to die with every breath between.
"Let me kill myself... at least." Yohan collapsed to the ground, tilting his head toward the shore, the knife resting against his chest. His hollow eyes welled with tears, a wavering downward smile on his lips as he spoke softly into the empty expanse of that tranquil hell.
"Why can't I rest... Why!!!!" He raised the knife high and drove it toward his eye—
Calm down! Calm down, Yohan!
—and halted just before it pierced.
It's not your fault. But letting yourself be consumed by hopelessness will be. Keep your composure and think. If there's an entrance then there must be an exit. If you can't find it, carve one.
Yohan lowered his arms like a broken puppet.
"Oh really...Then what I'm supposed to do? I've tried everything I could...there's no way out. I dunno..."
You don't have to know everything to accomplish something. What matters is how much of what you know is correct, and how well you can connect it.
Remember your goal. Why you came here. Why you took the detour. And what it is you've been overlooking.
Yohan covered the left side of his face with a loose palm, staring with bleak, frozen eyes directly at the Moon.
-Don't let yourself possessed by anything- that was one of the admonitions. And yet you're letting yourself infest by hopelessness.
Why... why did I come here? What was it I needed to do? Wait... I have to awaken my core. That's why I came here. No, wait— this ritual was supposed to help me seek the essence of my core and...hahaha...
You had to find the essence. Before anything could take hold over you. Find the essence to escape, and kill yourself only when something tries to consume you...
His grin widened. He began digging the fingers of his right hand repeatedly into the sand, and staring at the moon he noticed something monotonous he had never registered before.
What he had assumed was a semicircle of moon above the horizon was not a semicircle at all. The arc it carved above the horizon was too long — geometrically, the portion above the horizon comprised a minor segment, which meant the greater portion of the moon was submerged below it, forming the major segment beneath. He had been looking at it this entire time and simply never noticed, assuming it to be a half moon out of idle habit.
Kill yourself before something tries to consume you...? Haha...how can I be this hubristic .The thing consuming me wasn't a monster or a human — it was despair. Or death itself.
Without hesitation or deliberation, Yohan sat cross-legged at the shore, placed both hands over his solar plexus forming a loose cage-like triangle with his fingers, and closed his eyes.
***
He, Yohan, opened his eyes after a nebulous stretch of time, a crooked grin spreading across his face, his eyes gleaming with a manic brightness, and whispered.
"Got it..."