東方プロジェクト二次小説・オリジナル小説サイト
Chapter 7:Urban Legend in Limbo

—19—


That night, the night after we parted ways with Mr. Fortune-teller, Renko and I had gone home to our rented room as usual. We were both about to crawl into bed, but Renko looked wide awake, her eyes shining with excitement. I wondered where the lethargy that had been dragging her down for the last few weeks had gone.

"Are you excited, Merry? We've completed the Youkai Sage's request, so I'm betting she'll be contacting you tonight."

"Who knows? If you stay up waiting for her to appear then she definitely won't."

"Don't say that! If that's the case then I'll never get to meet her!"

"Well that can't be helped, Renko. She's clearly intentionally avoiding you."

"What kind of person would come by a detective agency with a case then refuse to actually meet the agency's chief investigator? You hear that, Miss Youkai Sage? Show me your face already! Come on, Merry, you try calling your lookalike too, maybe she’ll listen to you."

"I’m not doing that."

I let out a sigh as I stared at my partner's hopeful face and lowered my eyes.

...There's something that's been bothering me for a long time now, a doubt that I have never and likely will never be able to put into words. I have a theory as to what the Youkai Sage's true identity might be.

I don't think I'm anywhere near as prone to delusions as Renko is. I'm certainly not the sort of person to take a theory like this and spin it out into some grand overarching narrative that explains all of the mysteries surrounding me. But even if my theory was correct, it wouldn’t explain why she would be asking me to communicate with Renko on her behalf.

"Well at the very least, we’ve definitely completed her request at this point, right Merry?"

"...I'm not sure about that. We don't really know if it was her or your great aunt who brought us to Gensokyo in the first place. We don't even know that anyone brought us here intentionally. This whole business with the fortune-teller might have only involved us because we were convenient and easy for her to manipulate because of his connection to Usami Sumireko. It might be that there's no connection at all between the Youkai Sage and your great aunt. You really don't have any proof that there is, after all. When it comes to other people you can theorize all you like and it doesn't really matter, but if we start believing that every aspect of our own lives is part of some grand plan that's just megalomania, isn't it? Or at least a self-centered sort of determinism?"

"I'm surprised you're not more excited, Merry. This mystery concerns the both of us directly. That means we need to give it everything we've got, right? "

"Unless the Youkai Sage decides to appear in front of us to confirm or deny your theory, thinking about it is pointless Renko. You’re never going to know one way or the other, so why not just give it a rest?"

"What? We can't do that! That would mean leaving the biggest mystery of all unsolved!" Renko cried, grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me lightly. I didn't have the energy to get mad at her. I just sighed again.

"Renko, it's entirely possible that Sumireko Usami met us in Gensokyo then planted the amber in her room to make sure that in the future we would travel back in time and be here to meet her. Time might be just operating in a fixed loop of causality, like something out of a sci-fi story."

Renko let me go and drew back a little. "Don't say something clichéd like that, Merry. It sounds way too plausible. I'd hate to think that the truth of our presence here could be anything as boring as that. Though I suppose we don't really have any evidence to prove that that 𝑖𝑠𝑛'𝑡 the case." Renko thought for a moment then let out a heavy sigh, collapsing onto my futon as she did so, spreading her body out exactly where I was about to lay down.

"Ugggh. This is so frustrating. I like it better when something weird happens and then we can just go with Sanae to find the mastermind, talk to people and figure out the truth."

"Well the Youkai Sage hasn't shown up yet and Sumireko hasn't either. The fortune-teller has gone off and become Kasen's apprentice so maybe this whole investigation is over. Maybe there won't be anything like an incident this time."

"No way! I can't accept that! I won't!"

At that point she started thrashing around on my futon, kicking her legs and pounding her fists. To think that this girl was a full-grown adult. I bent down to grab the edge of my futon and hauled with all my might. Renko spun over and flipped onto the tatami.

I looked over at her as she lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling. Her eyes still held that same utterly baseless confidence that had always been her trademark. My partner is the sort who believes—who has always believed, that if she can just gather enough clues, she can reveal the truth. A truth that serves to make the world a more interesting place. Maybe that sort of confidence is required to be a great detective.

Perhaps in the end, it was that wholly unearned confidence that had saved the fortune-teller. Back when I had first met Renko in the Scientific Century, she had been just like this: possessing an unlimited, childlike curiosity combined with an unrestrained assertiveness that was enough to drag others along behind her. It allowed her to force timid people around her to realize that the world is a more interesting place than they had ever imagined, whether they wanted to or not.

I wouldn't ever say that to her directly though.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then scooted Renko out of the way with my foot and laid my futon back down. As I was placing the blankets back on top, my eyes fell to the end table in the corner of the room. Renko had placed the fortune-teller's book there, the last remnants of his plan that he had left to us. I wondered how exactly he had expected a book to be able to turn him into a youkai?

He had said that he expected to be resurrected as a youkai after giving up his life. Was that the sort of thing that could really happen? Was the boundary between human and youkai the sort of thing one could so easily cross?

"Hey Renko?"

"Yeah?"

"What do you think it would take for a human to become a youkai?"

In response to my question Renko sat up, back straight, and turned to face me, staring me straight in the eyes.

Renko's deep, dark eyes. I saw my face reflected in them, but I wonder what it was that Renko really saw when she looked at me.

"Well, taking into consideration everything we know about Gensokyo, I think we've found eight answers to that question."

"Eight answers?"

"Yes, based on eight different demonstrative cases, each with a different combination of three factors: physical form, self-perception, and the perceptions of others."

—Ah, I immediately grasped what Renko was getting at. Gensokyo is a world where perception holds power, so having a body that was both beyond the bounds of common sense and was perceived as being so would be a requirement for any youkai.

"If you have someone whose body, self-image and the perceptions of others all say 'this is a human' then obviously that person is a human. That's case one. Similarly, if you have someone where all three of those things say 'that's not a human' then there's no question of that being a youkai. That's case two."

"Sure."

"Number three is someone whose body is inhuman but their self-perception and the perception of everyone around them sees them as a human. That would be Keine. She's unquestionably a were-hakutaku, but because she's sure that she's a human, and everyone agrees with her, she's allowed to live in the village. Compare her to example four though. Mokou has an inhuman body, and she's considered inhuman by others. Even though she still sees herself as a human there's enough different about her that she can't live in the village."

"Alright, I'm following you."

"Then let's move onto the next example, number five. Someone with the body of a monster and the self-perception of a monster, but who's seen as just a human by almost everyone around her. That's Sekibanki. Because she's accepted here, she gets to live in the village despite not being a human. Her exact opposite would be example six: Izayoi Sakuya. She has a human body and sees herself as a human, but everyone else... Well, anyone who's met her probably wouldn't think of someone who willingly works as a maid in the Scarlet Devil Mansion as a human."

"That's probably true…"

"Right, so onto examples seven and eight then. Someone who has a human body, but thinks of themselves as something other than human. This would be Sanae and Youmu. Sanae of course would immediately say that she's a living god, not a youkai, but the point remains that she still considers herself to be something other than a normal human. As for perception, well people might think that Sanae is human at first, but most people would probably assume that Youmu wasn't immediately."

"Well she does live in the Netherworld, so it's hard to think of her as a fully-living human. Looking at those eight examples though, it definitely seems like the boundary between human and youkai is pretty blurry.

"Exactly. Having an inhuman body isn't necessarily a requirement in order to be a youkai, and having one doesn't necessarily mean you are one either, as Keine demonstrates. Someone like Sanae can believe wholeheartedly that she both counts as a human and is something other than completely human, and no matter how much people might think of Sakuya as being inhuman, she still is one in most ways. The only one of those mixed cases I would be confident in saying was definitely a youkai would be Banki."

"...Yes, I agree."

Sekibanki. A rokurokubi who lived in the village and could fly her head around completely detached from her body. She pretended to be a human and lived among them, but her powers and self-conception clearly marked her as a youkai, even if nearly everyone who knew her believed otherwise...

"With these eight cases, we can sort of derive the shape of the boundary between human and youkai. I think the essential requirement for someone to be a youkai is for them to have both an inhuman body and inhuman self-perception. Just being able to do the sorts of things that Keine and Mokou can isn't enough to make them into youkai since they still believe themselves to be human, and having everyone around you believe that you're a monster isn't enough to change things either, which is why Sakuya is still a human and Sekibanki is still a youkai. Sanae sees herself as both a god and a human, and Youmu sees herself as half-human and that seems to be enough that neither of them count as youkai either."

When you think about it like that, becoming a youkai actually sounded like it was a pretty high bar to clear. By that standard, both Byakuren and the Crown Prince would be cases that would be hard to classify on one side of the boundary or the other. Maybe that distinction is why the two of them were both accepted enough in the village that they could come and go as they pleased and were allowed to gather faith from the village's inhabitants.

"So in that case, if a creature were born as a youkai, but completely thought of themselves as a human, would they become one?"

"I wonder about that. We don't have any examples of someone doing that though, so who can say?" Renko shrugged then let out a long yawn.

"Just change into your pajamas and go to bed already, Renko. It's late and we have classes to teach in the morning."

She snorted at me and scowled in frustration. "You're going to run off with the Youkai Sage and have another tryst as soon as I do, aren't you?"

"I don't know. It's up to her whether she abducts me again or not. I'm just being dragged around by her whims"

—Just like I was always being dragged around by Renko.

I didn't say that. I just shook my head as Renko turned her back towards me and changed into her pajamas. While I was waiting, a question suddenly came to my mind.

"Hey Renko, what sort of a situation do you think you would have to be in to consider giving up your humanity to become a youkai?"

"A situation where I'd be willing to give up my humanity? That would be a pretty hefty decision."

Renko finished changing without saying anything, but once she had, she turned and crept towards me, crawling over her futon until she was kneeling on the edge of mine. Outside the window the moon shone bright and round as she raised her hand and laid it gently on my cheek. A broad cat-like smile spread across her face.

"I think I'd be willing to do that if it meant I got to stay with you, Merry."


—20—


That night I had a dream. It was a terribly realistic, lucid and all-too-believable dream, and yet it was very clear that it was, in fact, a dream. How could it have been anything else when it took place somewhere that had once been real to me but was now more distant and dreamlike than any of the worlds we had visited?

It was a dream of the Outside World. Specifically, a dream of the place where all of this had begun for us. Renko's grandparents' house, in the lower district of Tokyo. I found myself on the second floor of that house, standing in a hallway, with no recollection of how I had come to be there. Was it actually Renko’s grandparent’s house? Something about it was different. There was something about this place that didn’t match my memories, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. As far as I could tell the floorplan was the same, but something was definitely off. It felt as if I were somehow standing in a different house altogether.

What was I doing here? Had I crossed the Great Hakurei Barrier in my sleep? If I had, was this the Usami household of the modern day? Or the one Renko and I had vanished from in the 2080s?

If it were the version of the house that existed in the Outside World now, then it should look newer, shouldn't it? The dull, old-fashioned feel of the construction was just as I had remembered it, but something definitely felt different than I remembered. But if this wasn't the Usami house that I had been to once before, then where was I?

While I was pondering such questions, I heard the sound of footsteps coming from somewhere downstairs. For some reason I immediately felt compelled to hide from whoever might be coming. The desire to not be spotted was strong in my head, though I couldn't have told you why I felt that way.

I found myself diving through the nearest door to get out of sight. The room I had darted into was one I didn't recognize. It looked a lot like Sumireko's room, the one that had first led us to Gensokyo.

But like the hallway, it was somehow different. The atmosphere that had permeated Usami Sumireko's sealed room was absent. It felt like a perfectly normal everyday sort of room, with everything placed in such a way as to suggest it was in daily use. There were bookshelves in the room overflowing with books and a general messiness to the way everything was placed, but the messiness had a sense of purpose to it. It was a room that belonged to someone, one that carried a sense of their presence.

As I was looking about, the footsteps I had been hearing drew closer. They ascended the stairs and came into the hall I had just been standing in, where they stopped. I heard voices speaking softly and cautiously allowed myself to peek through the slight crack between door and doorframe. There were two shadows standing in the hallway, but I couldn't see anything about them clearly. The hallway was not particularly dark though no lights were on, but the people standing there seemed like they should have looked like something other than the featureless black silhouettes that I could make out.

"Oh, I think that room over there is..."

"Yeah, that one is dad's room."

"Okay, so what do we do? Where do you think we should put it?"

"The best thing to do would be to put it back where it came from and leave it in a dream, right?"

"If I could come and go between dreams and reality that easily, we wouldn't have to do all of this to begin with."

"That doesn't really sound very believable right now."

Somehow the voices of the two figures seemed far away, even though they were less than two meters away from me as I stood behind the thin door.

"Let's just put it in one of those cardboard boxes in the storeroom."

"Would that be okay?"

"Who knows? It's supposed to be a key that transcends boundaries and connects worlds. Where does something like that get kept? It's as good a place as any as long as it ends up back where it needs to be, right?"

"Yeah, I guess so."

At that point the two shadows turned and walked away from me, entering a different room. I didn't follow them, but they left the door to that room open. I could still hear them speaking, though they sounded just as distant as they had before.

"There are three boxes here, which one should I put this in?"

"This one looks like it's for everyday items. That one's for... occult stuff, I think. This one looks like it's all books."

"Then I'll put this in the occult items box, yeah?"

"Oh, wow, look at this cloak."

"What are all those symbols it's covered with? Runes?"

"It was in the everyday items box, but it definitely belongs in the occult box."

"That makes sense. Hey, that hat looks familiar. I guess she really is related."

"It kinda feels like we've done this all before without realizing it, somehow."

"Its fine. We'll be taking over from this point on."

"I know, I know. This is the plan of the person who's responsible for all of this after all so we just have to do as we're told."

"...Do you think this will really be okay?"

"Probably? Let's go back now."

"Yeah."

The two shadowy figures then left the room and came back down the hall. I waited until I had heard their footsteps descend the stairs and move far enough away that I could no longer hear them before I dared move a muscle. Then, slowly, moving as quietly as I possibly could, I stepped over into the room they had just left.

The room was clearly not anywhere that anyone lived, and looked like it was just being used for storage. Inside the room, just past the doorway, three large cardboard boxes lay open on the ground. My eyes were drawn to the one in the middle.

There, on top of everything else a black cloak had been neatly folded. On top of it sat a very familiar looking black hat. And sitting next to that, all on its own, was the amber jewel with the insect sealed inside of it. The same amber the Youkai Sage had forced me to deliver to a young Usami Sumireko. Why was it here, and now? Where even was I at the moment, or when for that matter? The moment I thought that, the amber gleamed, catching the scant light filtering into the room.

—

And then I woke up, in a stranger and even more dreamlike place.


—21—


It felt just like I had woken up from sleeping, but I found myself somewhere strange again. Was I dreaming still? Or had that vision of the Usami house perhaps been reality and I had somehow passed out in the middle of it and ended up in a dream? Or had both been real and I had simply slipped from one unfamiliar place to another one?

One thing was certain: wherever I was now was not anywhere in Gensokyo. Directly in front of me an ocean stretched toward the horizon, spreading out as far as I could see, its waves lapping gently along the shore.

I sat up, listening to the pleasant sound of the waves and feeling the sand I was sitting on shift underneath me. There are no oceans in Gensokyo, that was a simple and straightforward fact. Did that mean I was in the Outside World? I had never seen an ocean quite like this one before. Where in the world, or rather where in which world had I ended up this time?

I stood up and brushed the sand off my dress. It was exceptionally fine and I noticed with mild surprise that I was wearing a dress, rather than the nightgown I had gone to bed in. So this must also be a dream then, I reasoned.

I took a moment to take in my surroundings. Above the surf, the sand disappeared into an expansive grove of peach trees. Only peach trees. All of them growing in neat clusters, without a hint of variation or undergrowth. The peach trees reminded me of the ones I had seen in Heaven, but there was no ocean there, was there? A Heaven with an ocean in it? That sounded like...

"Merry!"

The voice calling my name was instantly familiar. I turned toward where it had come from and saw Renko popping out from behind a tree. Like me, she was in her usual clothes, hat, trenchcoat and all, looking as she always did as if she were trying to cosplay some detective from a movie. It was my Renko, the Renko I had spent the last decade of my life with, someone I could never mistake for anyone else.

"I finally found you! What are we both doing here? The last thing I remember was going to sleep, then suddenly I found myself in a grove of peach trees!" she cried as she dashed out of the woods and across the sandy slope to run toward me, scattering sand all the while. Once she drew close, she slowed down then stopped beside me, mesmerized by the sight of the impossible sea. A sea that couldn't exist in Gensokyo.

"Merry, that's an ocean, isn't it? This isn't the shore of the lake at the Moriya shrine or anything, right?"

"I've never known that lake to have waves like these on it, have you?"

"Wait a minute!? So we're not in Gensokyo then? There's no oceans in Gensokyo, so we must be in the Outside World. Or rather, since we're supposed to be sleeping at home, we must be in one of your dreams again, right?"

Renko had come to the same conclusion I had. We had gone to sleep in one place and woken up in another, wearing our normal clothes, so we had to be dreaming. But the only time I'd ever been in a dream with Renko by my side since coming to Gensokyo had been the times that we had met with that baku youkai, Doremy Sweet, who had claimed to be the Administrator of the Dream World. Maybe she was about to appear and explain what was going on? This dream felt different than the one we had shared back then though...

"Merry, are you touching my face while we sleep?"

"How would I know, Renko? I'm asleep. Also, haven't we had this conversation before?"

"We have, but this place looks completely different from the Dream World, doesn't it? Could we have crossed the barrier and returned to the Outside World?"

"I don't know..."

I couldn't, really. Just a moment ago I had been in the Usami family home, either the one that exists now or the one from 80 years in the future. I couldn't tell which but that had felt just as real as this beach did.

Just then I realized that I had been holding something in my hand this whole time. I looked down and stared, dumbstruck, at the object in my palm. A smooth, hard chunk of amber, in which some sort of large prehistoric insect was suspended.

"Whoa! If you have that, then that means...? Wait, where did you even find that? What's going on? I can't keep up with everything that's happening!" Renko's eyes went wide as she stared at the jewel and ran her fingers through her hair, tousling it and dislodging her hat.

I didn't have answers to any of her questions. So many things had happened in just the last few minutes that I couldn't keep up. Why was all of this happening now, without any warning? Or had there been warning signs that I had missed?

"Renko... does this look like the amber we found in Sumireko's room to you?"

"I...I only ever saw that thing for a second, and it was a long time ago, so I can't be sure... Why do you have it, Merry?"

"I found it in my dream... the one I was just having just before this."

"But you're still dreaming now, aren't you? Were you having a dream inside your dream? This is like 𝐼𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑝𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛."

"Oh, I remember that old movie. Should we try spinning a top or something to see if we're awake?"

"Before we do that we should figure out where we are. Even if this is a dream we should try to discern that first."

"Well it’s not daytime right now, shouldn’t you be able to tell by looking at the moon?"

We both tilted our heads up to look for the moon.

We didn't find it. There was no moon hanging in the sky.

Instead of a moon something else appeared suspended above us.

An elegant blue marble streaked with swirling tendrils of white. It was just as gorgeously blue as the first man in space had described it.

The Earth was floating in the sky.

We stared at it, horrified, mystified, stunned into silence with awe.

There's a limit as to how many sudden and unexpected developments one can stand. Writing these words on paper, I am insulating you, dear reader. There is no way that my mere writings could ever convey to you what it felt like to be starting up at our home planet. It was a hopeless, senseless and utterly baffling development. Upon seeing it, one question immediately came to mind.

Could my eyes really have done something like this?

"...Hey Merry?"

"...Yeah, Renko?"

"Are my eyes lying to me?"

"I have no way of knowing. But if what your eyes are seeing is the same thing as what my eyes are seeing then we've established a consensus between the two of us that we can consider to be our reality."

"Really, Merry? You're going to do this now? I'm not talking about Relativistic Noology here."

"Well if you're asking that question then you're probably seeing the same thing I am."

"...Well, I guess that's to be expected. This is your dream after all, so I must be seeing whatever you're dreaming about." She sighed and adjusted her hat.

"That's the Earth, right?"

"Absolutely. It's Earth."

"There's only one celestial body we could possibly be standing on and have Earth be hanging in the sky and looking that big: the satellite Jules Verne tried to reach with a cannon, right?"

"Yeah. That puts us roughly 380,000 kilometers from where we went to sleep, in a place where some people expect to find 50,000 year old human remains."

"But there's air here. And water too."

"Well that shouldn't be too surprising, really. We know a few people who came from here. There'd have to be at least this much for them to live, right?"

"I suppose we have to think about it from Gensokyo's point of view. But that still leaves one question."

"I'd say so, yes."

Standing on the sandy beach, staring up at our home hanging in the sky we spoke at the same time.

"Why are we on the moon!?"