Chapter 64 The Struggle

A dread that exceeded every fear he had ever felt — combined, totaled, multiplied — struck him like a hurricane descending from a mountaintop, like a tidal wave crashing over a beach. Ma En kept his head down, face hidden in the shadow of the hood, and felt this immense terror cease to be something that merely rose from within. It had become a physical force, slamming into him from the front. His body was shaking. His mind was shaking. His brain and every nerve he possessed were shaking. The drug couldn't resist this — this wholesale stripping, this tearing at every layer of his being. Even without looking, he felt certain that in the next instant he would simply die.

The thin grey robe could no longer offer comfort. He felt like a mountaineer facing an avalanche head-on. Like a sandcastle on a beach about to be obliterated by a wall of surf. People in terror screamed — he wanted to scream and couldn't, his lips bitten shut, because he knew that if he opened his mouth, the thing whose true form he still didn't know would sweep him away, and whatever followed would be worse than this.

Ma En fought to keep his footing. He nearly fell — nearly exposed himself among the thousands — but he held. He stared at the paper ball on the ground, and felt that it had given him something he couldn't rationally explain: a miracle. Right now it was his only lifeline.

He could feel the entity ahead of him. His spirit, his psyche — their fragility had been laid completely bare under this pressure, and he hadn't even had time to reflect on that exposure, let alone shore it up. In the wreckage of his reason — shredded by the storm of dread — a single thread remained: not clearly rational, not clearly instinctive, but trembling, the last line still intact. That thread was what told him, wordlessly, that looking at the paper ball was his only chance. Not of survival — of surviving long enough to have a chance at survival.

He understood now: he absolutely could not imagine what this entity was. Could not attempt to picture it. Could not let his mind's eye sketch even the vaguest outline. Because the moment he thought about it, the moment he processed it, the moment his thinking crossed even slightly into that territory, his fragile mind would shatter completely. What was before him was something deeper, more terrible than unimaginable or bizarre or indescribable could convey.

If a human couldn't think, they were no different from any other animal on this planet. And humans were fragile — against this entity, without recourse. If human thought was itself a manifestation of objective physical processes, if cognition was itself a manifestation of objective natural law, then this nameless thing was something that directly targeted that law. Perhaps its targeting quality was itself another kind of natural law.

No. No! Stop thinking. Stop.

He screamed inside his own skull. Even as he fixed his gaze on the paper ball, even as he commanded himself not to go there, not to follow those thoughts deeper — the objective limitations of being human meant he could not simply will it and have it done. The enormous dread, growing from within and crashing from without, pulled at his thoughts like a fundamental force. The entity — the it — was a black hole, and every thought was light, and no light escaped.

He knew he was fighting. But this fight was nothing like any fight he'd known.

He couldn't acclimate to it. No one could. Because human cognitive ability was the crowning achievement of millions of years of evolution — the species' foundational asset. And he found himself thinking of meditation, of emptiness as invoked across philosophies and religions — but was emptiness really empty? Had anyone truly stopped thinking? Could such states resist the gravitational pull this nameless entity exerted on the activity of thought itself?

He didn't know.

— I thought about it again.

— I can't get free.

When Ma En recognized this, he felt only absolute despair. He felt that dying now — killing himself right here — would be better than whatever was about to happen next. If he could just die, the fear would end. Only the most total death — the annihilation of everything that constituted self and thought — could bring peace.

He could sense, further: the entity had mostly emerged from the stone building now, its unguessable outline covering the flat, barren ground. He didn't know what had become of the thousands of creatures in its presence. He only sensed that the entity and these creatures were fundamentally different from each other, and that the entity did not necessarily care whether they lived or died — the way nature did not consider humanity. Humans respected nature's patterns and consciously avoided nature's dangers; natural disasters, however, gave no thought to humans, held no contempt for them. They simply existed, and simply occurred.

This nameless, horrifying entity was probably just... occurring. Naturally. As itself.

In that moment, Ma En finally understood what the creatures had been doing. Their worship was exactly like humanity's worship of nature — born of fear, reverence, and longing.

Could the thousands endure this fear? What was happening to them? Ma En, buried in his own struggle, couldn't see and had no attention to spare. Keeping the majority of his focus anchored to the paper ball at his feet was already everything he could manage.

He could no longer consider whether this was a dream. He could clearly feel that every time the entity surfaced in his thoughts, it seemed to draw one step closer. He'd lost count of how many times his mind had circled it, and he had no way to measure the remaining distance.

Only: the entity was vast. Unimaginably vast. The distance between them had perhaps never been great. If the entity was natural and objective, then it might simply exist beside every person at all times — and it was only that people could not, under normal circumstances, perceive it this directly.

The noise inside his head was unbearable. His trembling body lost its strength and he dropped to his knees, unable to consider whether this had exposed him. He was closer to the paper ball now. His head hung forward; his nose nearly touched it. He wanted only for this pressure and this terror to stop growing.

And then — a question flashed across his mind, and some reflex caught it:

What I "know" about this entity right now — did I construct it from imagination, or does it objectively exist? Could it be nothing more than a hallucination, a projection born of psychological stress? Could it be... simply a manifestation of my own fear?

The thought was a single drop of water in a desert. Ma En felt the urge to raise his head — to look, to confirm. No — for safety, not to look first, but to feel. To use the psychological analysis methods he knew best to dissect the sensation.

The impulse inflated like a balloon, rapidly pulling his attention away from the paper ball. It was a hideous tug-of-war.

He'd already begun to lift his head. He was allowing himself to sense the entity more fully than before, trying to apply every analytical framework he knew. And something astonishing happened: as he leaned into this, his memory became extraordinarily clear. Knowledge he'd long since stopped attending to rose from the sediment of his mind like riverbottom silt churned by a current. However obscure, however peripheral — even a stray fact someone had mentioned once in passing — it was indexed and organized in his head like a library's catalog.

The instant he reached for a concept, the relevant knowledge flew out of the stacks and wove itself into the high-speed machinery of his thinking, cross-pollinating, extending, generating. The expansion was dizzying: new hypotheses, new theories, new knowledge — any single one of which could overturn existing science. He was stronger than the person who discovered addition. Stronger than the person who formalized mathematical systems. Stronger than the person who proved one-plus-one doesn't equal one. Stronger than the person who derived mass-energy equivalence, stronger than whoever first hypothesized quantum mechanics —

He knew that thinking alone led nowhere; you needed the means to measure and verify. And it happened that every one of his new theories was measurable, verifiable. He could become the founder of a new era's theoretical framework.

— No! No! This isn't real! This isn't real!

He came back to himself and slammed his forehead into the ground, as though the impact could expel the madness from his skull. But the harder he fought, the less he could resist the euphoria of that perfectly ordered thinking — the sense of achievement was simultaneously terrifying and impossible to let go of.

In the end, Ma En smashed his head against the earth until blood ran down his face. He understood, more viscerally than ever before: he was finished. The entity had pulled him into its gravitational well, and no matter how much mass this little asteroid absorbed, no matter how rapidly it grew, it could no longer escape the black hole.

And then — like a miracle — a pain erupted simultaneously from his body and from somewhere deep in what might be called his soul. It was as though a brute force were prying apart every quark that composed him. In this agony, in this sensation of being broken open, in this brush with death, a new fear joined the old — but the pain was new. He could feel something like a soul, and that soul was stirring, inching free of this shell, rising toward some "above."

The pain and the sense of soul-departure gave him a brief pause in the madness spiraling through his mind. He clung to the paper ball on the ground with everything he had. In the next instant, he felt his consciousness detach entirely from his body and ascend toward a "higher world" — accelerating, like riding a rocket, faster and faster. Then his consciousness, naked, bearing a force that felt like exceeding the sixth cosmic velocity, plunged into total darkness.

"Ahh!" Ma En cried out and his eyes snapped open. He was drenched — clothes soaked through, sweat still dripping from his hair. His face was chalk-white, bloodless; his lips were blue. He looked as though he'd lost ten kilos.

The fear's aftertaste arrived late, but it still drew a shudder from him. Two or three seconds passed before he was lucid enough to check his surroundings. No forest. No creatures. No stone shrine. No entity. He was still on the train. Outside the window, clouds pressed low and black — it looked like full night. Rain hammered the glass; the noise penetrated even the sealed car.

Just a nightmare?

Ma En wiped the sweat from his face, hands unsteady. At this point he was almost grateful for the physical pain — the agony that felt exactly like the aftermath of taking the drug, a tearing of flesh, a soul ripped loose — because the fear could disorient, but pain made the present feel real. By comparison, the entity was receding into nightmare.

He glanced right and ahead. The other three passengers in his compartment were all asleep, expressions peaceful. His own wrecked appearance seemed to have gone unnoticed.

His nose burned suddenly; something wet slid out. He pressed his hand to his face and it came away red. He fumbled out tissues — went through four before the bleeding stopped. The nosebleed cleared quickly, but his head still swam, and a vicious nausea was pressing upward.

He grabbed the vomit bag he'd pre-staged in the seat pocket, and was about to stand when the solidly built man across from him stirred, yawned, and opened his eyes.

"What time is it?" he mumbled. "Are we there yet?"

Then he looked out the window and said, half to himself: "When's this rain going to stop? I don't want to be stuck at the station."

Ma En didn't know the time either. He checked his watch: past six in the evening. Full dark. He frowned.

"Does the train to Kanagawa really take this long?"

"Kanagawa?" The solidly built man sat up straighter, apparently awake now. "You're going to Kanagawa? This train's heading for Tokyo."

Ma En crushed the vomit bag into a ball in his fist. He didn't speak. He stood, turned, and walked into the aisle.

He knew that whatever expression was on his face right now had to be terrifying.