東方プロジェクト二次小説・オリジナル小説サイト
Chapter 9:Urban Legend in Limbo

—25—


As the one-winged woman drew to a halt before us, all of the rabbits stood up and formed themselves into a straight line, standing at rigid attention. It was clear that whoever this person was, she held a position of significant authority in the Lunar Capital.

"Lady Sagume, these are the intruders we captured," Shakka announced crisply.

The woman, called Sagume apparently, looked us over emotionlessly and kept her mouth covered with one hand. The long silence drew on as the rabbits all watched with nervous expressions on their faces.

After a long period of silent staring, Sagume took something like a notepad from her pocket along with a stylus and quickly scribbled something down. She showed it to Shakka, who looked at it with a dissatisfied expression, then passed it to Sakimuni. The peach-haired rabbit then read aloud what was written there.

"Um... Everyone leave. Disperse into the forest and await further orders."

"Eh? What for?" The other rabbits cried.

"Because those are Lady Sagume's orders! Now hurry up!"

There was no further arguing with that. The rabbits all glanced at each other, then retreated in an orderly march toward the tree line. Once there, they all quickly bounded off in different directions. Sagume watched them go, then turned back to us.

She continued to stare at us in silence, her mouth covered. It was hard to know how to react to that, and even my partner seemed to be at a loss for how to begin a conversation. Finally, after what seemed like an interminable wait, Sagume opened her mouth.

"I'm here, I'm here," called another voice before she could actually speak. "I rushed over as quickly as I could."

The voice that had spoken wasn't Sagume's. It was nasally and strangely familiar, sounding like it had come from just beside Sagume. As I looked at the space beside Sagume a fuzzy white something appeared in mid-air there. "Sorry to keep you waiting. It's been a while since I saw you last, good to see you're still working hard." The fluffy little ball unfurled itself, revealing the owner of the voice to be Doremy Sweet, Administrator of the dream world.

"Miss Doremy?" Renko and I both cried in shocked unison.

"Oh good, you both remember me, that makes things easier. Yes, it's me, Doremy Sweet. Hello again, Earthling detectives." She floated before us just as she had in the Dream World, wearing the same black and white outfit decorated with fuzzy balls and paired with a long nightcap that she had worn the last time we had seen her. Aside from being the Dream World's Administrator she was a baku, a nightmare-eating creature that, as far as we knew, could only be found inside of dreams. Which meant...

My partner stepped forward. "Hello again, Miss Sweet. If the Administrator of the Dream World is here, then does that mean that the entire Lunar Capital exists inside of a dream?" Her eyes were shining with interest and one hand was already obsessively tracing the brim of her hat.

When Renko asked that, Doremy's eyes narrowed and she looked decidedly unimpressed. "What makes you think that this is a dream? Everything around you seems perfectly real and believable, doesn't it? For a human to be able to observe the world around them and just flatly declare 'none of this is real' is a sign of a pretty distorted mental state don't you think? Though I suppose you two have always had a rather odd way of dreaming—"

"What do you mean by that?"

"Ignore that, I shouldn't have said anything," Doremy said as she clamped a hand over her mouth. Then she looked us both over, scrutinizing us intensely.

"You shouldn't go around saying 'this is just a dream' to yourself, Usami Renko. Even if you happen to be right. If you get into the habit of denying your own senses and convincing yourself that what you're seeing isn't real, then you may lose the ability to distinguish dreams from reality altogether. A healthy human mind should take whatever it’s presented with as reality, and only think that it might not be when given something that recontextualizes its knowledge—like waking up."

Beside Doremy, Sagume remained silent, but she seemed to be listening with interest.

"You seem to think that you're the sort of person who can make a clear distinction between what's 'real' and what isn't," Doremy continued. "But human perception isn't as infallible as you seem to think it is."

Renko blinked in surprise, her hand freezing where it had been fiddling with the brim of her hat. "I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised to hear someone in one of Merry's dreams saying something that sounds like it came out of her mouth," she said after a moment.

I could only shrug in response. The idea that the more you tried to distinguish dreams from reality the less you would be able to do so was obviously paradoxical—but unfortunately I could say from first-hand experience that it was also irrefutably true. Human perception was always subjective, after all. Our brains naturally made associations and assigned meaning without any conscious thought being involved. As such waking reality and lucid dreams really were no different.

Back when we had lived in the Scientific Century, Renko and I had used the power of my eyes to visit the satellite TORIFUNE, where we had both been attacked by a chimera, but only I had been injured while Renko had been unharmed. Had we actually travelled there? For me the answer was clearly yes. But for Renko, the whole excursion was just a shared dream.

Dreams are dreams, and anything that happens in them will amount to nothing once you wake up. But that belief gets turned on its head the moment someone believes that the real world is just a dream. In that case it would be like something out of a surrealist sci-fi scenario. While we are inside of a dream, treating the world around us as if it were reality is what we’re meant to do..

"Well, putting the Relativistic Noology of it all aside for a moment, the fact that you're here still makes this a dream, doesn't it, Miss Doremy? It's much easier for us to believe that we’re dreaming right now than it would be to believe that we had somehow travelled 380,000 kilometers from Gensokyo in the space of a single night."

"You see, believing you can apply that kind of analysis to a dream is unhealthy." Doremy said in a chiding tone, shaking her head the whole time. "...But, that said, you're right. This is the Dream World version of the Lunar Capital. As the Administrator of the Dream World, I can unequivocally say that it's not supposed to be possible for people from Gensokyo to be here though. No one from Earth should be able to dream of this place at all unless they already knew that a dream version of the Lunar Capital existed..."

Doremy furrowed her brow, looking back and forth between me and Renko. Eventually her unhappy frown settled on me.

"...I'll leave the discussion of how you managed to get here aside for now. You're here, and we need to deal with the mess that that's going to cause. Not that I didn't already have enough on my plate to deal with."

"Oh?" Renko asked excitedly, "Is there trouble in the Dream World again?"

"No comment. What you need to do right now, detective, is to wake up and forget that the Lunar Capital and anything you saw here was anything more than just a silly dream."

As Doremy said that, Sagume reached out and tugged on her sleeve. The baku turned back to look at her and nodded, even though Sagume hadn't said anything. "Yeah, I'm getting to that," she confirmed. Then she turned to address me.

"Maéreverie Hearn."

"Y-yes?"

"You have something strange on you right now, don't you?"

Doremy narrowed her eyes and Sagume continued to stare expressionlessly. As if compelled by the stares of the two women, I opened my clenched fist and looked down at the stone I was holding. The amber was still there, with the insect embedded in it still frozen in time. It almost seemed to be glowing faintly in the light.

"Um, this is..."

When Doremy saw what I was holding, she let out a slow, uneasy breath, and Sagume's eyes went wide. Doremy recovered quickly and looked up at me with an uncharacteristically stern expression.

"Maéreverie Hearn, you are not to bring anything like that into the Dream World ever again, understand?"

I looked down at the jewel in my hand, uncertain what to say.

"...You don't know what that thing is, do you?"

I glanced over at Renko. How could we possibly answer that? The question of just what exactly this jewel was, or where it had come from or what it might do was at the center of our longest-standing mystery.

"Miss Doremy, do you know what that amber is?" Renko asked, leaning forward, her hands once again playing with the brim of her hat.

Doremy shook her head slowly, letting out a long, slow sigh. "It's something extremely dangerous is what it is, at least to us."

"—What do you mean?"

"The best thing you could do would be to wake up and bring that thing back with you right now…"

Doremy and Sagume looked at each other uneasily. After a moment, some form of decision seemed to be agreed upon between them and Doremy turned back to us.

"...But in your case, you'd probably just cause more problems if I didn't tell you what it was, since you're so curious. Well I'll tell you then, but only so you can understand just how dangerous something like that is."

Doremy's tone was uncommonly serious, with none of the whimsy that would normally be heard in her voice.

"That thing is a power stone that contains the concentrated spiritual power of the Outside World. It's also the 𝑔𝑜𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑖 of the Hakurei Shrine."


—26—


For a long while, all Renko or I could do was stare at each other. The 𝑔𝑜𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑖 of the Hakurei Shrine? We had never learned exactly what sort of god was enshrined at Reimu's shrine and it seemed like she was comfortable enshrining just about any mystical object she might happen across to attract visitors.

While the two of us were reeling in confusion, Doremy sighed dramatically.

"I see from your faces that you didn't know that. That thing is supposed to be sealed inside the innermost part of the Hakurei Shrine. Why do you two have it?"

"It... belongs in the Hakurei Shrine?" That isn't where I had taken it from. But where was it that I had found it? Somewhere in the Outside World... probably.

"Hold on," Renko said, interrupting my train of thought. "Miss Doremy, you said that jewel contains the spiritual power of the Outside World, right? Why would something like that be the shintai of the Hakurei Shrine?"

"I don't know either. I just know that's one of the keys that connects both sides of the Great Hakurei Barrier and it's supposed to be kept in the shrine."

Renko was stunned into silence again. I didn't blame her. We had come to Gensokyo when we had first found this amber in the Outside World. How could it be something that belonged in Gensokyo?

"Do you two know how crossing the Great Hakurei Barrier works?" Doremy asked.

Renko and I both exchanged glances and then shook our heads. We had been told by Reimu that Outsiders like us could be returned to the Outside World, but we had never asked about the specifics. She had told us that if we were to leave Gensokyo for the Outside World, we’d eventually end up being forced back though.

"There are two main ways to do it. The proper way to do it is to make an official request from the outside for a hole to be made in the barrier, then you can just slip on through. That's what your god friends and that tanuki did to come to Gensokyo. The other way is to stumble into a natural gap in the barrier. That's what's called being 'spirited away.'"

"...You seem to know a lot about the way Gensokyo works, Miss Doremy."

"Well even if it isn't my world, the dreams of its residents are my responsibility. —Now, back to what I was saying. The difference between the proper and improper ways of crossing the barrier is whether or not it changes the place where you actually belong."

"If you open up a hole properly and pass through, then you can bring the foundation of your existence with you. Wherever you end up is where you belong when you travel that way. If you slip through a crack and get spirited away, however, then you're in one place, but you belong in a different one. The foundation of your existence is still on whichever side of the barrier you came from, and that means that you may have trouble in interacting with the world you ended up in, or in bringing anything with you."

"What's more, when that happens, you're bound to end up eventually getting pulled back to the side of the barrier you belong on. When you open up a hole in the barrier that doesn't happen. Someone who crosses over properly can stay on the side they end up on near-indefinitely, just like you two have."

"So in other words, this amber must have been used as a tool to open a hole in the Great Hakurei Barrier when we first arrived, right?"

"Yes, that amber or something like it. That jewel isn't the only key that can cross the barrier, but one of many."

I desperately tried to wrap my head around what Doremy was saying. When we had found the amber in Sumireko's room, we must have somehow opened a hole in the Great Hakurei Barrier and been transported to Gensokyo along with the foundations of our existence. Otherwise we would have returned to the Outside World by now.

"Let me make sure I'm understanding this correctly. If someone opens a hole in the barrier and crosses properly, like we did, then they physically travel from one side of the barrier to the other. If they don't do that and just get spirited away though, is that more like dreaming? Their spirit enters a different world, but their physical body stays behind?"

"Not quite. The only thing that remains behind when someone is spirited away is the foundation of their existence. Their physical form crosses over along with them."

"So in that case, does that mean that someone who crosses over properly and brings the foundation of their existence with them wouldn't be remembered by the world they'd left? To anyone in that world, it would seem like whoever left had never existed in the first place, right?"

The implications of that question filled me with cold dread.

If Renko and I had travelled to Gensokyo along with the foundations of our existence... Did that mean that all traces of our existence in the Kyoto of the Scientific Century had vanished?

"Ah, I see what you're worried about. Well to put it simply, whether or not that happens depends on how much time passes. That tanuki you know likes to cross back and forth between Gensokyo and the Outside World on a regular basis but it’s not like all traces of her disappear every time she takes one of her little trips beyond the barrier, right? The foundation of someone's existence doesn't fade away that quickly. When someone crosses over the barrier and then stays on the other side for a long time however..." Doremy narrowed her eyes, leaving the words unsaid.

She didn't have to say anything to get her message across. Just how long had it been since we had first come to Gensokyo? Our existence must have faded from the Outside World a long time ago...

Wait, has it actually been a long time? From the perspective of the Outside World, we had travelled into the past. From that point of view, neither of us had even been born yet, much less traveled to Gensokyo. So then... Ah, even now I'm getting confused just thinking about it. Was everything that had happened since we crossed the Great Hakurei Barrier from Sumireko's room something that had already happened? Or something that was yet to occur? From the viewpoint of Relativistic Noology, I would think that we were in the past and everything that should have happened after we disappeared from the Scientific Century couldn’t have happened yet.

Beside me, Renko must have been pondering the same sort of questions. She was deep in thought, her shoulders hunched as her fingers tapped their way across the brim of her hat.

"I think I get it... The reason that there was a Hakurei Shrine in Kyoto during the Scientific Century is because it was there to connect Gensokyo to the Outside World..."

She stopped muttering to herself and looked up. "—So there must be more than one of these ambers."

Doremy's eyes widened. "That's an interesting conclusion to come to. What makes you think that?"

"Well it just makes sense if you think about it. If the spiritual power of the Outside World can be used to make a hole in the Great Hakurei Barrier, then it should be possible for the spiritual power of Gensokyo to do the same thing, right? So it stands to reason that if this jewel contains the concentrated spiritual power of the Outside World, then there must be another amber somewhere containing the spiritual power of Gensokyo that's used to open holes going in the opposite direction."

Instantly, my mind flashed back to the moment that the Youkai Sage, Yakumo Yukari had dropped a piece of amber into my hand to give to Usami Sumireko. Which amber had that been, I wondered? Could it have been the one filled with Gensokyo's power?

If so, then had I doomed Usami Renko into whatever fate now awaited her? Had she been destined to someday visit Gensokyo ever since that moment?

Doremy was silent for a moment, watching Renko with narrowed eyes.

"You continue to be an interesting human, Usami Renko," she said, a slightly sinister smile crawling along her face. "You don't need to worry about those details for the moment though. The important thing for you to understand is that that amber is a dangerous object that could destabilize the Great Hakurei Barrier. You understand why that means that you can't just carry it around wherever you go carelessly, right?"

"...You're suggesting that this amber could also destabilize the barrier surrounding the Lunar Capital, aren't you?"

"You get it then. That thing's too dangerous to stay here. Meaning you need to wake up and get it out of here already, Maéreverie Hearn. Put it back where it belongs."

Doremy knew. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that she knew that I had a history of bringing things I found in dreams back with me to the waking world in violation of the law of conservation of mass. As the Administrator of the Dream World, I wondered what she would think of someone like me?

Sagume tugged on Doremy’s sleeve once again. "Eh? What is it?" Doremy asked, looking up at her.

Sagume leaned closer and moved her hand to conceal her mouth as she whispered in Doremy's ear. I couldn't hear what she was saying at all, but Doremy's face changed color as soon as she heard it. "Are you serious?" Doremy demanded.

Sagume nodded.

"You're right, but letting this go on any longer could be seriously dangerous. But why would a lunarian like you want to do something like that!?"

Sagume leaned closer again, concealing more whispering behind her hand. Doremy listened along, nodding at times and raising objections at others. "Well that's true, we do need to isolate them... No, we can't just send them back.... What? Well I suppose that would be a good use for them... Okay, maybe that would work, but even you can't just do something like that all of a sudden with no preparation, you'd have to... Oh, you're going to take care of that? You're really serious about this, aren't you?"

The two of them continued to converse like this for a while. "...Well in theory, that's possible but ...Yes, that would work out well for you, but only if it works! ...Arrggh this is completely outside of my administrative jurisdiction. I'll do my best to maintain the Lunar Capital just as it is, so you can do whatever you like!"

Neither Renko nor I had any way of understanding what they might have been talking about at all, but their conversation ended with Sagume turning around and walking back toward the peach forest. We had never heard her speak so much as a single word. Doremy remained right where she was. watching Sagume go with a weary expression, then she shook her head and turned to glare at the both of us.

"You two really have a talent for causing all kinds of trouble, you know that?"

"Neither of us have the faintest clue what’s going on, so you can hardly blame us," Renko said sweetly.

"Just forget all about it, I'm not even talking to you. Wake up and get out of here already, you two. Neither of you should even be here. Both of your Dream World selves were already weird to begin with."

"...what do you mean by that, exactly?"

"It's both your happiness and your misfortune that you don't understand just how strange you are, Maéreverie Hearn. You too, Usami Renko. Or have you realized it already? The Dream World is just another reality for humans, but you’re not supposed to be able to bring things back from it! That’s just common sense!"

Renko and I glanced at each other.

"Now, it's time for both of you to wake up! Nap-time's over! If you stay asleep too long, your dreams will eat away your mind."

And then, as if Doremy's words were some inescapable command, darkness enveloped us.


—27—


I awoke to find that it was already morning. I was back in my futon in the home I shared with Renko. I laid there for a while, just blinking up at the familiar ceiling, feeling well-refreshed and enjoying the sensations of my body coming alive. I felt like I had had a great night's sleep. Was that Doremy's doing, I wondered?

It was then that I realized my right hand was clenched around something hard and smooth. I opened my hand to find a chunk of amber containing an insect suspended inside of it, laying there as inert and natural as if it had always belonged there.

"Ahhwwmmn. Good morning Merry. I feel like I had a really long dream last night."

Renko awoke beside me and rose sluggishly to a seated position, her hair in cowlicks that stood up at every imaginable angle. I didn't say anything, but all hint of her sleepiness vanished as soon as she noticed the amber glimmering in the palm of my hand. Instantly her eyes went wide and she lunged over toward me, first staring at the jewel and then at me.

"Merry! That's... so all of that was real!? Or rather, it was really your dream!?"

I sighed. "Renko, you can't blame me for everything that happened in a dream."

"But you did dream of going to the moon though, didn't you?"

"...Well, yeah."

"I knew it!"

She quickly asked a few more questions that confirmed that indeed we had both experienced the same dream. In terms of Relativistic Noology, that meant that the two of us had experienced a shared hallucination. That's beside the point though.

"Okay, it looks like we had the same dream. In that case, let me ask you something I wasn’t able to ask before. Where did you find that amber?"

Staring into Renko's dark eyes, I wanted to be able to give her the answer she so hungrily sought, but I simply didn't have one that would satisfy her. I shook my head slowly from side to side. Even I had no idea where the place I had been before I awoke on the moon was.

"I'm not really sure. I was having a different dream before I met up with you. I was in your grandmother's house, but it wasn't quite the same as when we saw it."

"It wasn't quite the same? How so? Was it a different house? In the time I knew her, my grandmother had only ever lived in that one house in Monzen-Nakacho. Unless you meant my maternal grandmother, but I barely knew her, she died when I was still in elementary school and you certainly never met her."

"No, no. It was the Usami house, the same one that Sumireko had lived in, but it was different."

"Merry you're not going to tell me it was a parallel universe or something, are you?"

"I don't know, Renko. Maybe. How would I know?"

In response to that, Renko looked up at the ceiling and groaned before covering her face with her hands.

"Come on Merry, you can't just drop a bomb like that on me, it's way too clichéd! I guess we’re already living in a cheesy sci-fi cliche since we’ve travelled back in time, though. Wait, how would that even work anyway? The many-worlds interpretation is just supposed to be a thought experiment. Are you saying that in dreams you can observe the entire branching multiverse?"

"I don't know Renko. All I know is that I was in a place that looked like the Usami household but felt completely different. While I was there I saw two shadowy people leave this jewel there, so I picked it up."

"Wait, what do you mean 'two shadowy people'? Who were they?"

"I don't know."

"That's pretty vague, Merry."

She puffed out her cheeks in annoyance. She was right of course, but what did she expect me to do about it? I didn't understand what I had experienced either.

"It was definitely in the Outside World though, right?"

"...Probably, I guess."

"Well if you were in the Outside World, then it would make sense for the amber you found to contain the spiritual power of the Outside, like Doremy said it did.... Hmm.... Hey Merry, the Youkai Sage took you to the Outside World once and made you give an amber jewel just like that to my great aunt, right?"

"Yes, just after the end of the Spring Snow Incident."

"So if that's the same one that you gave her back then, then it should actually be the one filled with Gensokyo's spiritual power, not the power of the Outside World, right?"

"Assuming that this is the same one and Sumireko hadn't lost it in the meantime."

"So if we have this, does that mean that my great aunt is going to come looking for it?"

"Maybe. Or maybe we'll be taken right to her without warning, just like when we first came here."

"Either one of those scenarios would be a problem. I wonder what we should do?" Her hand drifted up to fiddle with the brim of her hat but she wasn't wearing it, having just woken up. Her fingers closed around empty air, which seemed to startle her, just as if she had accidentally missed a step when climbing the stairs.

"Renko, we're in over our heads here. I think we ought to take Doremy's advice and just put this back in the Hakurei Shrine."

"...That might not be a bad idea. Reimu is the closest thing we have to an expert on the Great Hakurei Barrier, but if we just show up with this and it does happen to be the one that belongs in the shrine, she'll probably think we stole it."

"...We could go there while she's gone and just leave it for her to find."

"It seems kind of dangerous to leave something like this unattended." Renko groaned and sat back, crossing her arms and looking up. It seemed on one hand like we had discovered a number of long-sought answers overnight, but on the other hand the real truth behind the mystery of our presence here was no closer to making sense than it ever had been.

Doremy had told us unequivocally that this jewel was a key that connected both sides of the Great Hakurei Barrier, but really we would have assumed that it was something along those lines just based on our own experiences. Having confirmation was nice, but it didn't really get us any closer to understanding what was going on...

And now that I thought about it, she definitely hadn't said anything about the jewel having the ability to travel through time. Even if it explained how we had gotten to Gensokyo, there was still no explanation for how the two of us had slipped 80 years into the past!

So in the end, we were no closer to answering the biggest question before us than we ever had been: would it ever be possible for the two of us to return to the Scientific Century?