Without his quite noticing it, as Amamiya Rin's consciousness floated up out of the chaos and he opened his eyes, the familiar furnishings of the room came into view—but a subtle sense of detachment let him quickly judge that he had already entered the Dream World.
Lifting away the two arms draped across his chest, Amamiya Rin sat up, stepped over Tomie's body, got out of bed, and drew open the curtains.
Clear sunlight poured into the room, carrying the clean texture unique to early morning, and the air itself seemed to begin flowing along with the inrushing light.
Amamiya Rin drew a deep breath; the cool, crisp air flooded into his lungs, thoroughly dispelling the last lingering trace of drowsiness.
A new day, a new life, had begun. [Writing up to this point, I hope readers will note down our domain—when you have spare time to read, choose Tiantian Kan Xiaoshuo (Read Novels Every Day), ttks.tw, it's super pleasant.]
The goal was perfectly clear. Step one—the voice.
Or rather, music.
Music conservatories from reality, professional musicians, even the singers in the streets and alleys—all were perfectly reproduced by the Dream World, becoming an inexhaustible library of raw material for him.
The earliest lessons were tedious in the extreme, but for Amamiya Rin they were not exactly difficult either.
It was not about learning to sing, but about learning to use his own vocal organs.
Abdominal breathing, diaphragm control, the steady output and instantaneous bursting of breath—basic training of that sort.
Having already practiced breathing techniques for several decades, Amamiya Rin mastered these in less than a week.
Only after finishing the breathing training did he begin to touch on vocalization. Starting from the simplest single vowel, 'a,' with pitch-accuracy training carried out in parallel, followed by simple scales and vocal exercises…
He spent ten years laying down a solid foundation for himself.
After ten years had passed, Amamiya Rin's control over his voice was no longer what it once had been.
He could easily hold a steady, sustained note for over three minutes without the pitch wavering in the slightest, could precisely sing complex melodies and harmonies, and could switch among several markedly different vocal timbres as the need arose.
Now warm and mellow like a fine aged wine, now cool and ethereal like a spring from a snowy mountain.
His command of rhythm and dynamics had become instinct; complex melodies and dynamic variations came almost effortlessly to hand.
Over the long span of his training, Amamiya Rin also joined several bands—inside the school, drinking afternoon tea and playing light, lively tunes with the club members; in the performance halls outside the school, joining a rock band to take the stage; and even, drawn in by Gravity Field, accepting an invitation to form a band for life.
How to express his own emotions with a simple singing voice, how to use that singing voice to stir the emotions of others—after countless times of pushing an atmosphere toward its climax or drawing it down into stillness, Amamiya Rin completed the first stage of his training and entered the second.
Observe, analyze, match, insert—a more rational kind of observation.
His gaze turned toward the vast, teeming life of the human world.
In a café, a couple was talking in hushed tones. The girl's voice was soft, with an unconscious little upward lilt. The boy's voice was low, his pace even, his gentle words brimming with doting affection.
In a subway car, an office worker leaned wearily against the railing, eyes glazed and empty, breath shallow and ragged, carrying the rhythm of a weary sigh.
In an Izakaya, a few company employees who had gotten off work were grumbling about their bosses and their jobs; their voices were noisy, their emotions worked up, their words full of complaints and an alcohol-catalyzed abandon.
At an open court hearing, the powerful, inflammatory tone of the lawyer's defense interwove with the heavy voice of the judge reading out the verdict.
At a university public lecture, the professor used an authoritative vocal line to firmly seize the attention of the several hundred students below the podium.
...
Time flowed past amid this day-after-day observation.
Amamiya Rin was like a sponge, absorbing the vast, disordered samples of vocal frequency that surrounded him.
The clinginess of lovers, the listlessness of office workers, the composure of the elderly, the tenderness of a mother… He no longer merely listened with his ears, but received with his whole being the emotions, states, and intentions attached behind these sounds, along with their connections to breathing and micro-movements.
Then he tried to insert himself.
He spoke at the junctures where his target's breathing shifted, picking up the conversation while the trailing tone of the other's sentence had not yet fully dissipated, mimicking the other's vocal frequency, letting his own voice be set into the natural gaps between the other's words, as though it were the continuation of that person's own thoughts.
This process was full of failures.
More often than not, his insertion had no effect at all, or its effect was the complete opposite of what he intended, drawing puzzled or wary looks.
But he had enough time to make mistakes, adjust, and make mistakes again.
It was precisely in this repeated grinding—long enough to drive an ordinary person to despair—that Amamiya Rin once again confirmed, with utter clarity, one thing.
Murata Yukichi was a genius—a genius who surpassed all reason!
No—'genius' could no longer encompass his talent.
Giving a voice magical power, letting a suggestion persist even beyond death… Was this truly entirely a mere technique?
It was utterly supernatural Hypnosis.
Before he had studied it, Amamiya Rin had not held any very concrete sense of it, but after he had spent several decades in study, he came to a correct realization of just how terrifying this technique was.
Still, in a world like this, such a situation was not impossible to occur, was it?
Amamiya Rin quickly made his peace with it.
After all, speaking into the ear of a sleeping person could let one enter the target's dream, and a woman possessed of powerful resentment could release her own Ikiryo—in this world these were all common phenomena that anyone meeting the conditions could accomplish.
It did not require an especially special person; among the teeming masses, anyone at all, so long as they happened to meet the conditions, could do supernatural things.
Having spent more than twenty years, Amamiya Rin stepped across the threshold of this Hypnosis.
He could now, within a brief conversation, through observation and guidance, make a target treat his voice as an extension of their own thoughts.
In other words, he could—without any tools, and even when the target had no intention of cooperating with him—implant a suggestion into that target in the span of a few minutes.
And this practically magical feat was, in Murata Yukichi's theory, nothing more than the threshold.
As for the training beyond the threshold—though Murata Yukichi had spoken with him about it too—it was far too vague, carrying a sense of the profound and unfathomable.
It was no longer a technique that could be refined simply by relying on talent and the accumulation of time, but one that required a flash of inspiration in some single instant—or rather, a certain ineffable resonance.
At this stage, the accumulation of experience, though important, was no longer the most important link.
So then, how was he to seek out that flash of inspiration?
Amamiya Rin, together with several Tomie who held an investigative interest in the matter, spent over a year carrying out all manner of attempts and reflections.
In the end, Amamiya Rin found it.
That faint glimmer lighting the road ahead of him was to be sought not without, but reflected within.
A knack he had long since encountered and studied—one day, while passing by Kikoku Temple and chatting idly with the Dream World's Abbot, it suddenly surfaced in his mind.
It was Buddhist study—the Dharma Gate of Perfect Penetration through Hearing!
____
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