"The owner of that face is Kawahara Miyuki. Speak to me with your own face."
Gazing at Takaichi, who was mere inches away, he saw the greed and desire churning in those eyes—so thick it seemed about to congeal into something physical, dense enough to suffocate.
Yet, facing all of this, the lake of Amamiya Rin's heart did not stir even a ripple. No sorrow, no joy; no anger, no hatred. There was only a clear, still limpidity that came after seeing through everything.
He did not even raise his voice. In a tone as flat as if discussing the weather, he spoke this simple demand.
These words, falling upon Takaichi's ears, produced a strange effect.
They did not feel like a command from the outside world. Rather, they were like some dormant thought risen from the depths of her own heart—without any buffer of thought, her body had already carried it out one step ahead.
She raised her hand, her fingers unconsciously touching the sash at the waist of her silk robe.
A gentle tug.
The slick fabric slid like a stream that had lost its support, quietly crumpling onto the luxurious carpet. The light poured, unobstructed, over the body she had bared.
At first glance, that body did indeed appear well-maintained—the skin glowing with a fine, soft luster, the curves full and undulating, brimming with a kind of nearly perfect, youthful vitality.
She seemed quite satisfied with the visual effect this shell provided. A curve tugged at the corner of her mouth as she raised a hand and stroked her flat, taut belly, the fingertip probing into her navel and drawing out a metal pull-ring so tiny it was almost impossible to notice.
Her fingernail hooked the slightly protruding edge beneath the ring and pulled downward.
"Rrrip—"
That skin, which had looked so tight and young, parted neatly to both sides along the line she had torn open. The edges of the split were smooth, revealing a wholly different texture beneath—just like peeling off a human-shaped bodysuit that had been far too tight.
After she had stripped off this entire bodysuit, several pads of padding fell to the floor as well, and her true body, naturally, was now fully exposed to the air.
It was a woman nearing sixty.
The skin was slack, the eye-bags swollen; the jut of her cheekbones made her face look rigid, her features coarse. The nasolabial folds on either side of her nose ran from the wings of her nostrils all the way to the corners of her mouth, dragging the flesh of her cheeks outward, giving that already less-than-gentle face a brutish, masculine cast—the kind that easily called to mind the Cart Titan woman from Attack on Titan.
Had the man lying on the bed been someone other than Amamiya Rin, watching wide-eyed as the person who intended to take him transformed from a beautiful, nationally beloved idol songstress into a smaller-scale Cart Titan woman, he would likely have gone limp on the spot and carried a psychological scar for months.
"Hehehehe! I think you'll like this appearance even more. And if you don't, that's fine too—on this bed, over the course of a month, I'll make your body remember mine."
She displayed her true form to Amamiya Rin without the slightest concern.
Her twisted lips split open, baring uneven teeth, and undisguised malice and bottomless desire glittered in her murky eyes.
That aged face, contorted by excitement and greed, in the bright light truly resembled a demon crawling out from a scroll depicting hell.
She walked toward Amamiya Rin, reaching for the first button at his chest.
"Don't move."
Amamiya Rin said flatly.
The words had barely left his mouth when Takaichi's hand froze in midair.
She was not bound by any external force, nor seized by some invisible power. She had simply stopped.
As though she had suddenly not wanted to move—as though, halfway through the motion, a thought to pause first had welled up naturally in her mind, and so her body had obediently complied.
She held her stooped posture, fingers still loosely hooked over the button, her whole body frozen there. Only her eyes rolled faintly, betraying confusion, as if pondering why she had suddenly stopped. Did she have something else she was supposed to do?
"The people attending the party—are they all like you? Aged and powerful?"
Amamiya Rin sighed softly and, as if idly chatting, asked Takaichi.
Takaichi's hand stayed frozen there, her gaze going vacant for an instant, as though she had suddenly been distracted.
"Of course. What else?"
She pursed her lips, her face looking even uglier.
"Most of them are about my age—some are even over a hundred. They all look glossy on the outside, but on the inside they've long since rotted through."
"So, you've been stripping the young of their looks?"
Amamiya Rin asked.
"Naturally. The fresh, living flesh of young people is such an eyesore. But it's fine—so long as we can transfer their vitality onto ourselves, I actually rather like them."
Takaichi's murky eyes fixed on Amamiya Rin as she spoke words of utter viciousness in the most casual of tones.
"We are the masters of this country. Money, power, the rules—we define them, and they belong to us. We control everything, we enjoy everything. That is only natural and right. Those young children are nothing but walking property, born to sustain us, to offer up their beautiful skin to become our garments. That is their privilege, and their duty."
"Is that what you think?"
Amamiya Rin slapped aside the hand before him and sat up straight. The effect of the muscle relaxant, worn down by time and the working of his breathing technique, had gradually faded away.
"How truly ugly."
He spoke calmly, his voice as steady as if discussing today's weather.
"But it isn't the appearance."
"Ugly...?"
Takaichi tilted her head, Amamiya Rin's face reflected in her murky eyes. She seemed to be struggling to understand the words, but her thoughts were like something mired in a bog, and she only murmured after him by instinct.
"Indeed. The human body is nothing but the false union of the four great elements, the aggregation of the five skandhas. The beauty or ugliness of this fleshly shell is a flower in a mirror, a moon in water—a thing that vanishes in an instant."
Amamiya Rin's gaze swept over Takaichi's slack skin without the faintest ripple of emotion.
"Earth, water, fire, wind—when causes and conditions gather, the body is born; when they scatter, the body perishes. What is this carcass worth? True ugliness has never lain in flesh and skin, but in that heart, gnawed full of holes by the three poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion."
Amamiya Rin spoke evenly, his voice without inflection, yet carrying a coldness that pierced straight through the heart.
"Buddhism teaches that all living beings possess Buddha-nature, that evil is merely dust settling upon the mind. But dust can be brushed away—if the heart has utterly rotted into mud, then not even the Buddha can deliver it. You plunder the flesh of the young, treat the lives of others as straw dogs, carve greed into your very marrow and take cruelty as your birthright. How is this still human? You are nothing but demons wearing human skin, squatting atop the rotten meat of power."
As if stating a fact too obvious to require saying, Amamiya Rin spoke.
"At birth, human nature is fundamentally good. Even one who has carelessly strayed down a crooked path can still be pulled back. This universe is just so—though shrouded in darkness, that one sliver of light which struggles against the dark is striving to protect the humans in whose hearts light still remains. I too have received no small amount of help from people like that, and I am glad to lend my own strength so that the universe may become more beautiful.
So, I do not kill. But a demon should have a demon's ending."
Amamiya Rin's gaze fell upon Takaichi's contorted face, clear as a mirror, reflecting all her present ugliness and frenzy, yet untainted by even a trace of emotion.
He formed no mudra, chanted no incantation, and deliberately gathered no power of any kind.
He merely sank his mind and spirit into the deepest depths of his heart, letting the awakened self-nature—like the bright moon upon a water's surface—reflect of its own accord.
All contrivance ceased; there was only the light of the fundamental nature, pure and clear, manifesting itself.
"Please—go down to hell."
He spoke, and his voice was no longer the vibration of ordinary sound waves.
It was a revelation—the natural manifestation of the light of self-nature through that single aperture of sound, shining into the depths of Takaichi's consciousness. Like a seed falling into soil, taking root and sprouting, as though this were the ultimate thought that had long lain dormant within her, surfacing naturally at this moment when the dust finally settled.
Takaichi's murky eyes suddenly went wide.
Within her field of vision, a light appeared before her eyes, emanating from where Amamiya Rin was.
It was not any kind of visible light of this world—not dazzling, not scorching, not even possessing color. It was a sense of clarity pure to the utmost extreme, an awakened illumination that saw through all falsehood.
It spread silently, and wherever it passed, the luxurious surfaces of the bedroom—like morning dew exposed to the noonday sun—let out a soundless wail and vanished without a trace.
But what replaced them was by no means anything beautiful.
What surged up was a sticky, dark-red mist of karma, accompanied by scalding sulfur and the endless wailing of sorrow and suffering, brutally flooding every one of her senses.
"Where is this..."
Takaichi was bewildered, then furious. The abruptly transformed surroundings left her at a total loss.
"The first level. The Hell of Tongue-Ripping."
Amamiya Rin's voice sounded beside her ear, and countless fragments of memory flashed through Takaichi's mind—all the times she had sown discord, slandered and harmed others, spoken with oily flattery, twisted words with clever tongue, lied and deceived.
Her tongue thrust out beyond her control, stretching longer and longer, while her throat gave off a strange "hgg, hgg" sound.
The next second, an unimaginable, searing pain exploded from the root of her tongue!
"Gaaahhh——!!"
Two demonic wardens with ferocious faces clamped her tongue tight with red-hot iron tongs and, bit by bit, slowly dragged it outward. The agony of flesh tearing was utterly real, blood seeming to flood her mouth and windpipe. The suffocation and the pain sent her whole body into convulsions.
"The second level. The Hell of Scissors."
The scenery before Takaichi did not change; what hurt was still her tongue. The unimaginable agony left her mind lucid beyond imagining.
It seemed she had not committed the corresponding sin.
"This is... hell?!"
Having tasted the agony of having her tongue ripped out, Takaichi finally came to her senses.
Pain this genuine, this real, could not possibly be an illusion!
Which was to say—she had truly fallen into hell?
How could that be?! She didn't remember dying!
In Takaichi's heart, alongside shock and rage, terror and panic began to spread as well.
"No! I'm not dead! I don't want to die! I still have a hundred years of life left! I can keep on living! My lifespan can keep increasing! Send me back!"
Takaichi's face turned savage. She screamed madly and ran toward the invisible distance ahead, trying to flee this terrifying hell.
"The third level. The Hell of Iron Tree!"
At that moment, the scenery before her shifted again. Takaichi suddenly felt a sensation of weightlessness, and accompanied by a whistling rush of wind, her body plunged from a great height.
As for what lay below—it was a forest.
But those woods were not made of trees. They were iron trees, each one with branches like sharp, long spears.
"Aaahhh!!!"
Her body was run through by multiple iron branches at once, the agony robbing her of her voice in an instant. Takaichi's frame hung suspended in midair, the weight of her organs dragging at the wounds, every faint breath bringing heart-rending pain.
"The fifth level. The Hell of Steaming Cage!"
After who knew how long, the dense forest of iron trees vanished, replaced by scalding steam surging into her face.
Takaichi's body was curled up inside an enormous steaming cage, everything around her a blank white haze, the wet, hot vapor pouring into her mouth and nose.
Her skin reddened rapidly as though doused with boiling water, blistering; the blisters burst in the high heat, exposing the raw, red flesh beneath.
She wanted to scream, but the scalding vapor clogged her throat. Every breath in was like swallowing a red-hot blade, the burning spreading from her windpipe all the way into the depths of her lungs.
"The sixth level. The Hell of Copper Pillar."
The scene of the steaming cage shattered on cue, and Takaichi found herself standing on a patch of scorched black ground. Not far off rose a thick copper pillar, its shaft heated red by charcoal fire.
Her hands and feet carried her toward that copper pillar beyond her control, while into her mind surfaced the memory of secretly setting fire to a rival's company in order to seize their assets.
The image of flames devouring life now overlapped with the crimson copper pillar before her.
"No... don't..."
Takaichi begged in terror, but she could not stop a single step. Her chest pressed involuntarily against the scalding copper pillar.
"Sssssss——!!"
The stench of charred flesh spread out, accompanied by a heart-rending scream.
She wanted to break free, but her body seemed welded to the copper pillar. She could only feel, through every inch of her pain-sensing nerves, the sensation of her skin carbonizing, sticking, and peeling away in the high heat.
...
Level after level.
The Hell of Sword Mountain, the Hell of Ice Mountain, the Hell of Blood Pond, the Hell of Volcano, the Hell of Stone Mill...
The punishment of every level of hell corresponded precisely to some particular crime, or some category of crime, from her past.
Those evils she had forgotten, or taken for granted, now transformed into the most genuine suffering, fed back onto her body at a hundred, a thousand times the intensity.
Time within the illusion was stretched out infinitely; every second of agony seemed to last a thousand years, and it cycled again and again.
The real world.
The cloying sweet aroma pervading the bedroom was now disturbed by a faint scent of scorched flesh and the reek of blood.
Takaichi lay collapsed on the carpet, her eyes rolled back to the whites, saliva dribbling uncontrollably from the corner of her mouth, her throat giving off that strange "hgg, hgg" sound, her limbs trembling ceaselessly as though electrified.
Her protruding tongue was already swollen and ulcerated; her skin showed large patches of crimson blotches and blisters, as if scalded by steam. Her chest bore an eerie dark-red puckering, as though branded by a hot iron; the skin of her hands and feet had split and oozed blood, corresponding to the phantom pains of the sword mountain and the iron tree...
The wounds she had suffered within the illusion had actually been fed back onto Takaichi's flesh!
"It can go this far?"
A flicker of surprise passed through Amamiya Rin's eyes.
He had never imagined that his Hypnosis—the Brahma-Sound Illusion Art—could inflict harm even upon the physical, material body.
"Right—this should be called... psychogenic somatic symptoms?"
After a moment's thought, Amamiya Rin found the corresponding theory among the knowledge in his mind.
The body deceived by the brain, showing injuries where none actually existed—there had in fact been similar cases in the real world.
In medicine, this is largely associated with psychogenic somatic symptoms: the brain, influenced by factors such as emotion, cognition, or psychological suggestion, can cause the body to manifest pain, redness, swelling, and other symptoms resembling injuries.
But under ordinary circumstances, substantive damage like the skin splitting open would not occur.
It was simply that the power of Amamiya Rin's Brahma-Sound Illusion Art was too strong, and compounded by the special conditions of this universe, the harm inflicted upon Takaichi's flesh exceeded the bounds of psychogenic somatic symptoms.
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