The trip to Chiba City took an hour in the Sae family's old car. Yuna drove carefully along the winding village roads, occasionally glancing back to make sure Tobio was alright.
Sae sat in the front passenger seat, but her eyes kept shifting to the rearview mirror that showed Tobio in the back seat.
Tobio sat silently with the bandages still wrapped around his eyes. He could see everything—the moving car, the passing roads, the trees widening at the roadside.
He saw Yuna's energy, a blue-green color, stable and warm like a softly burning flame. He saw Sae's energy, golden yellow, bright, pulsing slightly faster because of worry.
'Like little stars,' he thought. Everyone had their own color and vibration.
Chiba City felt very different from Kaminari village. Concrete buildings replaced wooden houses, asphalt roads replaced stone paths, and the sound of horns replaced roosters crowing.
Tobio could feel the change in energy around him—denser, more chaotic, like an undulating ocean.
Dr. Yamada's clinic was on the second floor of a small building near the market. The waiting room was clean and tidy, with white plastic chairs lined up along the walls. Anatomy of the eye posters hung in several places, complete with diagrams of the cornea, lens, and retina.
Sae held Tobio's hand as they sat waiting. Her fingers were warm, slightly sweaty with nervousness.
"Are you scared?" Tobio asked softly.
"Not scared," Sae answered quickly. "Just... anxious."
Yuna sat beside them, occasionally checking her phone for the time. Her face looked calm, but Tobio could see her energy—the blue-green was moving faster than usual, with small sparks indicating suppressed anxiety.
"Number 7, please come in."
A nurse's voice from behind the registration desk. Yuna stood up, taking Tobio's hand.
"Come on, dear."
Dr. Yamada's examination room was simple. One large eye examination chair, several instruments with lenses and lights, and a doctor's desk in the corner with a computer and files.
The doctor who greeted them was a middle-aged man with round glasses and a thin mustache. His hair had grayed at the temples, but his eyes were still sharp.
"Good morning, I'm Dr. Yamada. Please sit down."
Yuna guided Tobio to the examination chair, then stood beside him with her hands clasped in front of her chest.
"Dr. Yamada, please examine Tobio's condition." Yuna's voice trembled slightly. "I'm very worried about him. He... lost his grandmother a few days ago, and we found him unconscious with blood on his face. I hope he's still alright."
Dr. Yamada nodded, his face showing sympathy. "Alright, I'll examine him."
He approached Tobio, his hands moving to the bandages wrapped around the boy's head. "I'll remove the bandages. Slowly, okay."
Sae took a deep breath behind them. Yuna clenched her hands tighter.
The bandages were wrapped in several layers, protecting the injured eyes from light and dust. Dr. Yamada removed them with skilled movements, layer by layer, until the final layer came off.
"Open your eyes, son," the doctor said gently.
Tobio slowly opened his eyelids.
Silence.
A silence so total that Sae could hear her own heartbeat.
Tobio saw the world with his new eyes. And the world he saw was a world without color, without recognizable forms.
What he saw was energy—thin streams of yellow like silk threads floating in the air, connected to something larger out there. And before him, it wasn't human faces he saw.
What he saw were souls.
Sae—Sae's soul—was a silvery light form with a golden-yellow glow at its edges. Its shape resembled a human, but not the face Tobio had known all this time. Not the black eyes that usually looked at him, not the sweet smile he was used to seeing. Only light, pulse, vibration.
And Tobio's heart beat fast. 'This... how do I see normally?'
He couldn't. He could no longer see Sae's face. He could no longer see the color of Yuna's clothes. He could no longer see the world the way ordinary humans saw it.
What he saw was the core. What he saw was the truth behind physical form.
The only way to "see" like an ordinary human was to close his eyelids—relying on his 360-degree vision that focused more on energy and dimensions. But that wasn't seeing with his eyes. That was a completely different perception.
The prolonged silence finally felt heavy.
Tobio realized they had all gone quiet. Dr. Yamada, who had been moving confidently, now stood rigid. Sae and Yuna behind him—he could see their energy vibrating, moving quickly, as if there was a shockwave they hadn't yet processed.
'Is there something wrong with my eyes?'
'Has there been another change beyond prediction?'
He swallowed. With the calmest voice he could muster, he broke the silence.
"Is something wrong?"
His voice sounded strange to his own ears. Calm. Perhaps too calm for a thirteen-year-old child who had just opened his eyes in front of a doctor.
Dr. Yamada didn't answer. His mouth was half open, but no words came out. He stared at Tobio's eyes with an expression hard to interpret—between astonishment, confusion, and perhaps a little fear.
"This..." The doctor finally spoke, but his voice was hoarse. "This isn't a biological condition. Not an illness, not an injury."
Sae and Yuna remained silent. They stood at the back, but Tobio could see their energy—shock vibrations still pulsing, as if their brains were trying to process something that didn't make sense.
Why, since Ageha Ikuse's death, had Tobio's eyes changed like this?
Tobio could feel that question hanging in the air, even though no one spoke it.
Dr. Yamada let out a long sigh—a sigh trying to calm himself, trying to think professionally. He pulled a chair in front of Tobio, sat at an equal level, carefully studying the boy's eyes before him.
"Your eyes have changed." His words were chosen carefully. "Do you feel anything strange about your vision?"
Tobio was silent.
His mind worked quickly. If he answered honestly—that he could see souls, energy, dimensions—what would happen? Dr. Yamada was an eye doctor, not a psychiatrist.
There was no medical term for what he was experiencing. No diagnosis, no medicine. What would follow would only be confusion, perhaps a referral to a psychologist, perhaps a diagnosis of hallucinations, and in the end... only more questions that couldn't be answered.
If he lied, saying he couldn't see at all or his vision was blurry, then there would be more examinations, more instruments used, more inconsistent data.
In the end, the lie would reveal itself, and the situation would become even more complicated.
Tobio chose honesty. Or at least, honesty enough.
"I... can see." His voice was soft, like someone confirming something to themselves. "But not faces."
Dr. Yamada frowned.
"What I see..." Tobio continued, "a shape like a human... white in color. Maybe... a soul."
He turned to look around the room—a movement that felt strange because his eyes could actually see 360 degrees without needing to turn. But he did it to make his words more convincing.
"I can still see this room. But not colors. What I see... white and black lines."
He turned back towards Dr. Yamada—or more precisely, towards the doctor's soul. A bluish-white light form with a steady pulse at its center. Steady. Professional. But there were small wrinkles at its edges, indicating confusion trying to be hidden.
A second silence. This time heavier.
Dr. Yamada didn't take notes. Didn't respond immediately. He just looked at Tobio, making sure he hadn't misheard.
'Complex Visual Hallucination?' he thought. He was experienced with various cases of vision disorders, but this... "Seeing souls, not seeing faces, altered color perception."
He shook his head inwardly. This was too specific. Too... structured to be mere imagination or hallucination.
"So," Dr. Yamada began carefully, trying to formulate the right words, "this isn't loss of vision... but altered perception."
He folded his hands in his lap, studying Tobio more closely.
"You said... you see something beyond physical form?"
Tobio nodded. "Yes. Like seeing the core of a life."
The words felt strange to say. Too poetic, too philosophical for an eye doctor's examination room. But it was the only way to describe what he saw.
Sae, who had been silent until now, finally spoke. Her voice was small, almost a whisper, as if afraid her words would break something fragile.
"...A soul?"
She paused, as if hearing the word that had just come out of her own mouth. Sae's hands twisted the hem of her shirt.
"So... you can't see my face?"
There was something in Sae's voice that made Tobio want to open his eyes wider, want to see again the face he had known since first moving to this village. But he couldn't. All he saw was a silvery light with a golden-yellow edge—the same light, always the same, with no expression he could read.
"No," Tobio answered honestly. "I can't."
Behind Sae, Yuna stood with her hands clasped in front of her chest. Her face showed deep concern—not just for Tobio's eye condition, but for his future. The boy had just lost his grandmother. He had no one else.
'Maybe I could take care of him,' Yuna thought. He couldn't be alone in that big house.
Dr. Yamada moved the examination to the next stage. "Was there any previous incident that caused this change?"
Tobio had prepared an answer for this question. He couldn't tell the truth—couldn't say that he had forced the power to change fate or rather the final outcome beyond its limits, that he had met Ophis in his room, that he had paid for his vision with himself.
"Before, I was just feeling gloomy. Not eating. Not thinking about anything... after my grandmother died."
He paused, letting the words sink in. This wasn't a lie. This was the truth—just not the whole truth.
"It happened at night. My eyes suddenly felt painful and hot. It happened all at once."
He turned towards Dr. Yamada, or at least towards where the doctor's voice came from.
"By the way... have my eyes become creepy?"
The question made the room fall silent again.
Dr. Yamada took a long breath. As a doctor, he had to be honest with his patient.
But how do you explain to a thirteen-year-old boy that his eyes—which a moment ago looked normal—now looked like something out of a horror story?
"Your eyes have an abnormality," Dr. Yamada said finally, his voice careful. "Perhaps very rare. I've never seen a condition like this."
He pulled his chair closer, taking a pen from his white coat pocket—not to write, but as a gesture to calm himself.
"Do you want me to explain further about the description of your pupils?"
Tobio nodded. "It's okay. I just want to know my condition."
Dr. Yamada paused for a moment. Not because of Tobio's eye condition, but because of the way the boy spoke. A child his age should be panicking, crying, or at least showing fear.
But Tobio sat still with an unnatural calmness. Too calm. His mind moved like an adult's—perhaps even more structured than most adults he had met.
'This child... what happened to you?'
"I'll describe it," Dr. Yamada began, his voice shifting to a more professional tone, trying to create emotional distance from what he saw.
"On the outer part, the sclera—the white part surrounding the eyeball. Normally, it's pure white with thin red blood vessels. In your eyes..."
He paused, searching for the right words.
"That part is gone. What I see is only black. But not deep black like a moonless night. There's light—small lights, like stars. They move slowly on the surface of your eyes, like... a small galaxy. Like you're carrying the night sky in your eyes."
Sae gasped softly behind him. Yuna gripped her hands tighter.
"And lastly, the pupil..." Dr. Yamada paused again. This time longer.
He stared at Tobio's pupil—the black circle in the center of the eye that should react to light, dilating in the dark, constricting in the light. But this pupil didn't react. It was frozen, still, like a hole leading to a place never touched by light.
"A crack," Dr. Yamada continued.
"Its shape is vertical, right in the center of the pupil. And in the middle of that gap... there's only darkness. I can see into it clearly, but light doesn't enter. Doesn't reflect. It's like... absorbed."
He covered his mouth with the back of his hand, a small cough to hide the tightness in his throat.
"I need to examine further. This is a very rare condition. Not typical in any medical condition I know."
The examination continued with more advanced instruments. Dr. Yamada examined the cornea with a slit lamp—an instrument with a magnifying lens and bright light that could normally show every detail of the eye's surface. Tobio's cornea was normal. Clear, without wounds, without scarring.
The iris—the colored part surrounding the pupil—was also normal. Pigmentation intact, the iris muscles moved as they should.
But the pupil didn't react. Dr. Yamada shone a bright light directly into Tobio's eyes.
The pupil should have constricted—that was a basic reflex all humans had. Tobio's pupil remained still. Unmoving. As if light meant nothing to it.
Tonometry showed normal pressure readings. The optic nerve, examined with an ophthalmoscope, appeared intact. No swelling, no pallor indicating damage.
But when he tried to photograph the retina and optic nerve with a special camera—an instrument that should be able to capture images of the blood vessels at the back of the eye—the results were strange.
The image appeared. But parts of it were empty.
Not blurry. Not dark. Empty. As if there was part of the retina that refused to be captured by the camera's light, as if it refused to be recorded.
Dr. Yamada ordered additional tests. Visual field test—Tobio sat in front of a hemispherical instrument, pressing a button whenever he saw a light inside it. The result: full visual field. No blind spots, no missing areas.
Electroretinography—an instrument that measured the retina's electrical response to light. Electrodes were placed around Tobio's eyes, lights flashed before him. The instrument detected signals. Normal signals. The retina responded to light as it should.
But there was an anomaly. Those signals... didn't reach.
As if there was an obstruction somewhere between the retina and the brain, as if something was intercepting the visual information before it reached its destination.
After waiting ten minutes, the complete examination results came out. Dr. Yamada read them once, twice, three times, hoping something was missed. But nothing.
Medical Results Summary:
· Eye Structure: Normal
· Basic Function: Normal
· Perception: Not Normal
· Instrument Data: Inconsistent
He let out a long sigh, placing the examination results folder on the desk.
"Medically," he said finally, "your eyes are not damaged. All structures are functioning as they should. But the way you 'see'... cannot be explained by the medical knowledge I have."
He took a piece of paper, writing something in neat handwriting.
"I'll give you this results letter. Don't forget to take care of your health. If anything else happens, come back here."
Yuna bowed her head. "Thank you, Doctor."
Tobio stood up from the examination chair. His legs still trembled slightly, but better than this morning. He walked towards the door, but before reaching it, a hand grabbed his arm.
Sae.
Her hand was warm, gripping Tobio's sleeve tightly. Her voice was small, almost inaudible.
"Are you still not going to tell me?"
There was something in that voice. Not anger. Not frustration. Sadness. Deep sadness, like lake water that never dries.
Tobio turned. His eyes that couldn't see Sae's face remained directed at her, at the silvery light with golden-yellow edges he recognized as his friend's soul. He raised his hand, groping briefly until his fingers touched Sae's shoulder, then pulled her into an embrace.
"I'll tell you when we're in high school." His voice was soft, almost a whisper in Sae's ear. "I promise. This isn't a small matter. Wait patiently. Because when you're an adult... it'll be easier to digest."
Sae bit her lower lip. Tears flowed again, wetting her cheeks still round like a child's. She wanted to be angry, wanted to force him, wanted to know all the secrets Tobio had been hiding. But what came out of her mouth was only a whisper that sounded like a pout.
"As if you know everything."
Tobio laughed softly. A laugh almost silent, only a vibration in his chest that Sae felt because they were embracing.
"At least that's how I survive in this world."