Sealed City (1)
A grave with a bloodstained law code laid before it.
Najin stopped in front of it. Yuel, who had been walking behind him, stopped as well. The mont she saw the grave, her eyes narrowed.
“Najin, what is this...?”
“I plan to go in.”
“Pardon?”
Yuel blinked.
She looked at him, clearly confused, and asked again.
“If I understand correctly, my past is connected to the Star of Forgetting. Isn’t the reason the Star of Forgetting appeared here because I saw its True Body in that past?”
She pointed at the sky. The eye was still moving around up there. Najin gave a short reply.
“Probably.”
That only made Yuel even more confused.
“And you still intend to enter my past? Excuse , Najin, but I have no choice except to doubt your judgnt. Have you gone mad?”
She was not trying to insult him. She was sincerely questioning his ntal state. She circled around Najin, checking him over.
“Did the Carnival King toy with your mind? No... your gaze is normal, so that seems unlikely...”
Still muttering, she pulled out her sword with its sheath from her waist. Since ancient tis, people had said a beating was the cure for hypnosis, and she looked like she was seriously considering giving him a few hits.
In short, she was asking if he was in his right mind.
Not sothing he wanted to hear from the continent’s greatest lunatic, but Najin understood what she ant well enough. He let out a short breath and spoke.
“You are saying that entering that grave now will only provoke the Star of Forgetting and make things worse, right?”
“That is correct.”
“Probably not.”
Najin raised two fingers.
“There are two strange things about the current situation. If you think about it, doesn’t it feel odd?”
“Odd? What do you an?”
“First, that.”
Najin pointed at the eye of the Star of Forgetting rolling around in the sky. It looked like it was watching the entire imperial army, but sothing about it was off.
“It has been about an hour since that eye appeared, and it still has not moved even after seeing you. As if it still has not made a decision.”
Kirchhoff had said that only seconds after that eye appeared, the Star of Forgetting began its invasion. But even after an hour, no invasion had started.
“It still has not made up its mind. Or maybe, for so reason, it is hesitating to descend.”
“That... yes, you are right.”
“And second.”
Najin moved his second finger.
“You said you wandered through your past in this grave, but you only rember the very end, right?”
Yuel slowly nodded.
“Yes. I only clearly rember the end of the dream, where I faced the Star of Forgetting’s True Body. I cannot rember any other scenes. I only feel a vague fear.”
“Why would it show you only that part?”
“...What?”
“It had enough power to show your forgotten past, and enough power to show you the Star of Forgetting’s True Body, so why did it show only that part?”
Najin pointed at the grave.
“If it wanted to give the Star of Forgetting certainty, it could have hamred everything into your head from beginning to end... so why only the last part? The answer is simple. There must be a reason it had to do it that way.”
That was the Carnival King’s play. Sothing was hidden inside. And what was hidden was information that could never be revealed outside. That was Najin’s judgnt.
“So we dig in from this side instead.”
After being toyed with several tis on the stage the Carnival King built, Najin had learned one thing. He must never dance to her tune.
And above all else.
Star’s Tomb, soone’s life, soone’s mory.
Stepping into that kind of domain was a field Najin trusted himself in as much as the Carnival King did. He had done it many tis already, and those feats were engraved into his stars.
“If there really is a mory that must not be seen, I will block it in advance. If the problem is that you saw the Star of Forgetting’s True Body in there, I will cover your eyes.”
The star of Banter and the Star of Requiem shone.
“I cannot stand watching the script that clown prepared, so I will rewrite it myself.”
Najin held out his hand to Yuel. She looked at it and moved her lips.
“...It is a gamble. You cannot be sure, and it is not a rational decision.”
“True.”
“But.”
Yuel slowly nodded.
“But yes. The situation is already dropping toward the worst possible outco. If the fall is guaranteed, there is no reason not to make a gamble. Either way, my life is in danger.”
She reached out and grabbed Najin’s hand. Her slim white fingers wrapped tightly around his.
“I will bet on you.”
Holding Yuel’s hand, Najin stepped toward the grave. The grave containing her past tried to swallow only Yuel, as if it were a stage permitted to her alone.
Flash.
But the star of Banter that Najin carried assigned him a role. Just like in La Mancha, just like on the stage of the Star of Scorn, the star of Banter turned him from audience into actor.
Originally, it was not a star with power this strong.
But now the star of Banter carried the life of Don Quixote, the Star of Mirth. Strengthened by that star’s narrative, the one that stepped into others’ stories and changed their lives, the star of Banter pushed Najin forward.
A great actor never avoids the stage.
The grave swallowed Yuel and Najin whole.
As Star’s Tomb swallowed him, Najin’s eyes turned to a law code resting on the grave. Every grave held an object that symbolized or represented that life.
Then what did a bloodstained law code an?
What kind of life did soone live for a law code stained in blood to beco the object that represented it?
With that question in mind, Najin was swallowed by light.
2.
Najin blinked.
He had experienced many Star’s Tombs, but he still could not get used to the mont of entry. It felt like the flow of air and the rules of the world itself were being turned inside out.
He took several deep breaths.
Trying to adjust to the altered environnt, Najin steadied his breathing and opened and closed his eyes a few tis. Next ca checking his surroundings. He opened his eyes and looked around.
“...”
Then he blinked again.
Najin looked around and blinked several more tis. His vision was not blurry. He simply felt a strong sense of deja vu at the scene before him.
‘This is...’
He looked up, but there was no sky. Only pitch-black darkness covered everything above. Under that black sky, where not a single ray of light leaked in, a city had been built. Dim lanterns hanging from each house were the only things lighting it.
‘This is Artman.’
It looked like the underground city, Artman.
Had he entered his own stage instead of Yuel’s? He was thinking that when:
"No, strictly speaking, it is a little different."
rlin whispered in his ear. She had not been given a role, so she stayed by Najin’s side as an illusion.
"It resembles the underground city in your ntal image. The building style and city layout are similar, but there are no ore lamps... and the things hanging from the houses are lanterns."
Once he looked more closely after hearing her, she was right. It resembled the underground city, but key parts were different. There was no passage leading to the upper district. In the place where that passage should have been, there was only a structure resembling a courthouse.
This was not scenery shaped by Najin’s mind.
Yuel’s past itself had this form.
Without a word, Najin looked up at the sky. The sky here was definitely not a ceiling studded with ore lamps like the underground city.
There was an actual sky.
A black, rippling sky like a night sea. The difference from the sky outside was that there was not even a single star. Looking at it, Najin felt uneasy.
“...”
As he stared at the sky, footsteps sounded from sowhere.
Tok, tok, steady footsteps echoed through the air. They were walking this way with a fixed rhythm. Soone was coming straight toward him through winding, maze-like alleys, as if fully familiar with the place.
Tap.
At last, soone stopped in front of Najin. A woman with pure white hair and red eyes. She held a lamp, and the wavering fla cast her shadow long behind her. She had companions with her, but Najin’s eyes locked onto the woman at the front.
Because she was Yuel Razian.
This was clearly a version of her from the past.
She looked very similar to the Yuel in Najin’s mory. Eyes that showed no emotion. Usually expressionless, with changes in expression so rare that...
“Tsk.”
Rare changes in expression...?
“It is not even ti yet, and another new prisoner has shown up. What the fuck, does this city just run however it wants? What is the point of recording the cycle if it ignores it?”
“T-that is, City Lord...”
“Forget it. This is not the first or second ti.”
She handed sothing to soone who looked like her aide, then waved her hand dismissively. Yuel frowned and swept back her hair.
“Hoo...”
She sighed and pressed her temples. As far as Najin rembered, Yuel’s face had never once crumpled like this, but now it was twisted hard.
She looked deeply irritated.
To put it crudely, she looked fucking miserable.
“Yeah, whatever. Not the first or second ti.”
Tok. Yuel walked up to Najin and held out her hand. He was sitting on a pile of trash, and she offered it as if telling him to take it and stand.
“Welco to Sealed City. I am not actually welcoming you, but we are both trapped in this shitty city, so we might as well get acquainted.”
Najin took her hand and stood up.
“I am Yuel.”
She introduced herself.
“The City Lord of Sealed City.”
3.
What is Sealed City?
“I do not really know either. One day, all 170,000 residents here suddenly fell into this city. I have been here for about five years. I fell in at sixteen, and now I am twenty-one. This city has two major traits.”
What traits?
“One, at fixed intervals, ‘new sacrifices’ fall in. People like you. Two, no one can ever leave this city. Old man Verdik survived here for seventy-eight years and died, proving the second one himself.”
What is a City Lord?
“Simple.”
Yuel stopped walking and turned back to Najin, who had asked the question. She looked straight at him.
“No matter how shitty this city is, and no matter that people fell here without even knowing why, this is still a place where people live. That ans it needs law.”
Her gaze was steady.
“Humans need law. If humans have one thing better than animals, it is that they restrain their own desires according to laws and social norms.”
In other words, she said bluntly,
“If law disappears, humans are no different from beasts. Worse, even, since they kill their own kind. This place is already hell, so there is no need to make it even more hellish, is there?”
She shrugged.
“That is why the City Lord exists. To make laws, enforce them, and cut off the heads of bastards who break them and hang those heads up. Honestly, it is closer to being a judge than a City Lord.”
“You hold an important role. Were you doing this kind of work outside as well?”
“No. I was a mathematician. I was wrestling with unsolved problems in a lab, then suddenly got dragged here. Ah, thinking about it pisses off. I was almost done solving it too...”
Yuel grimaced and sighed.
“Oh, and one more thing.”
She spoke shortly, as if she had just rembered.
“I do not know what kind of person you were outside, but here you will live by the law.”
If not, she pointed sowhere.
“Unless you want to end up like that.”
In the middle of the square, severed heads were hanging.
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