Wizard of the Deep Sea

TL/ED – Miso

“…”

There was no need to even extend my Current Sense.

When I raised my head, I could see countless white specks studded across the sky.

The blizzard that had been pouring down from above had frozen in place. Struck speechless by the scene, as though someone had sliced time itself and frozen it solid, I slowly swallowed when I realized just how eerily quiet everything around me was.

It felt as if I were the only one left in the entire world.

That was a big delusion. The moment I took one more step forward, the clear ring of a bell echoed through the air.

-Ding…

“?”

There were Threads buried in the snow. And those Threads were a kind of trap, rigged to sound a bell the instant they were disturbed.

Most likely, it was a sound meant to summon someone. I spread my Current Sense around me in alarm, and sure enough, the soft crunch of approaching footsteps reached my ears.

I was about to prepare for a fight, thinking it might be Decay, but…

When I saw through my Current Sense who the familiar figure was, I let out a sigh of relief.

In the distance, atop a hill, Dersia had appeared.

“Master, so this is where you’ve been…?”

I started toward her, face brightening, but then noticed something odd about her appearance and tilted my head.

It was nothing major, but she was wearing clothes that looked surprisingly lived-in. To be precise, instead of the robe she usually wore, she had on a fluffy white coat.

“…Jern. So you did come here after all.”

The moment Dersia saw me, she let out a sigh that was half I-knew-it and half exasperation, then slowly descended the hill.

“Yes. Where is this place? I was meeting with Decay and talking to him just a moment ago, but when I came to my senses, I was suddenly here. And that coat, did you bring it with you?”

This was the woman who had insisted on nothing heavier than a light robe even when coming to this frozen wasteland. When I tilted my head and asked, noticing that the shadows under her eyes also seemed deeper than usual, she heaved a sigh as if she were sick of it all.

“There’s been quite a lot going on. Would it be alright if I gave you a detailed explanation once we reach the hideout?”

“Hideout?”

“It’s nothing grand. Just a small pile of snow, really.”

Wondering what she meant, I followed her, and…

What greeted me was a castle.

A white, elegant manor that looked like it belonged in a movie.

“Uh, um…”

Whether to call it modesty or bad taste, describing this as a pile of snow…

Standing at the entrance of the massive manor sculpted entirely from snow, unable to find the words, I mumbled.

“You’ve been busy building this.”

It was far too large to have been made overnight. But with her magic, she could have made it possible.

Why she had built it, though, I had no idea.

Dersia didn’t seem particularly proud of it. She arrived at the room serving as the parlor (a brief sweep of my Current Sense revealed that nearly every room in this manor had been fully realized) and sat down matter-of-factly at a table made of ice.

“When you have nothing to do for three years, you end up pouring yourself into things like this. Just a trivial hobby.”

“Three years? What on earth do you mean by that?”

A sudden gap in time.

An uneasy feeling surged up for some reason, and when I asked, Dersia met my gaze and answered.

“You must have seen the sky. You noticed that the snowflakes had stopped mid-fall, yes?”

“Ah, yes.”

“What do you suppose caused that to happen?”

“…Acceleration of thought. Something like that, I’d guess.”

The exact opposite of deceleration of thought. If it could be slowed, could it not also be accelerated? That was the train of reasoning behind my answer.

Thought accelerated to an extreme produces something similar to deceleration. One could perceive everything, but since it was only thought that had been accelerated, nothing could actually affect reality.

In that sense, it was similar to deceleration. If slowed thought produced slowed movement, then to Decay, it would look like the movements of a turtle.

If thought were excessively accelerated, no matter how much one tried to act, it would take an agonizingly long time before that action was actually reflected in the body.

From the frozen snowflakes, from that sight of a raging blizzard seemingly paused in place, that was the sense I had gotten.

That this World was flowing as if it had stopped.

But if that were the whole picture, the current situation still made no sense at all.

Because this place, where only Dersia and I remained, felt as though it had been cordoned off from the real world entirely.

“You’ve gotten about half of it right.”

Dersia gave a slight nod and explained the situation.

“Jern. Right now, we are dreaming. If we define a dream as something futile and devoid of any meaning.”

“…A dream?”

“A dream you die from if you don’t wake up.”

“Then… we’re asleep?”

After Dersia dropped that ominous statement, she paused to think for a moment before adding further explanation.

“That’s not quite it. To use a more precise term, Death’s Flashback… yes, that would be the right way to put it.”

This new term wasn’t particularly pleasant either.

When I tilted my head in confusion, she sighed and gazed out through a window made of ice.

“Are you aware that people dying of hypothermia experience a very brief Death’s Flashback just before death? Their entire life unfolds before their eyes all at once, and every single one of them, without exception, enters Death Slumber. Their eyelids fall shut beyond the reach of willpower, and they never rise again.”

“And you’re saying that’s the situation we’re in right now.”

“No. We can think for ourselves, act on our own, and we are aware that this place is abnormal. Therefore, we have not yet frozen to death.”

Having stated that with certainty, she pressed her lips together tightly before continuing.

“The one experiencing the Death’s Flashback is the other party.”

“Then…”

As realization gradually dawned on me and I furrowed my brow, Dersia nodded in agreement.

“Yes. We are inside Decay’s Death’s Flashback.”

The final dream of a person dying of hypothermia.

That was the last puzzle piece Decay had been hiding.

***

Trapped inside a dream.

Before I could even begin to process such a bizarre statement, Dersia said something even more absurd.

“As I mentioned earlier, I have been trapped in this space for three years. At first, like you, I simply assumed my consciousness alone was moving within an accelerated world.”

“W-wait, hold on.”

Watching her speak as if this were the most natural thing in the world, sipping some unidentifiable tea from an ice cup, I couldn’t hide my alarm.

“You’ve been alone in this place for three years?”

“The flow of time within this Death’s Flashback is not normal. It may seem strange, but…”

“Never mind that… were you alright? I mean, any mental distress, or longing for other people, anything like that?”

“…Jern.”

Any ordinary person would have gone mad within days if locked in this white prison for three years.

My question came from that very concern, but Dersia set her teacup down with an incredulous look and replied.

“Three years may be significant for a human, but for my kind, it is hardly a long time. Does my mind appear unsound to you?”

“You seem the same as always.”

“Precisely. There is no need to worry about me.”

…An elf really is an elf, I suppose.

Seeing her completely unfazed despite having been trapped for a full three years on a Snow Mountain with nothing but white in every direction, it hit me anew that Dersia truly was one of the Long-lived Races.

“In any case, there were far too many things that couldn’t be explained if this were merely an accelerated world. Why could I move? If time had stopped, I shouldn’t be able to leave any trace, yet why did footprints appear in the snow? And above all else, why did no space exist beyond this Snow Mountain?”

“What?”

“No matter how far I walked, and walked, and walked some more, I could never leave the mountain range. The Dwind Mountain Range is vast, certainly, but not that vast. This space is formed from something that repeats infinitely.”

After saying this calmly, she locked eyes with me and stated with conviction.

“From that, I traced my way back to the underlying structure of this world. Worlds, the Fallen, and… if the man called Decay possesses a World of such immense scale, what is the Burden he suffers in return?”

“And that Burden is this space… is what you’re saying.”

“Yes. Decay is trapped in an eternal Death’s Flashback. A Purgatory with no end and no escape.”

The final dream of a person on the verge of freezing to death.

The kind of thing where an entire lifetime flashes by in a single instant, less than a second.

What kind of sensation would it be, to endure that for an entire lifetime?

As I struggled to suppress the unsettling feeling, Dersia answered with a grave expression.

“The problem is that the dream Decay is having is not a happy one.”

“So it seems.”

“The Burden is still bearing down on you as well, I assume.”

Just as she said, I was still feeling the bone-cutting cold.

“No matter what you try, there is no escaping this space. You endure the Burden, and endure, and endure again. But since there is no way out, Decay’s Death’s Flashback ultimately becomes our Death’s Flashback as well. No matter how happy the life reflected in that Flashback may be, the final moment always converges on freezing to death on the Snow Mountain.”

“…”

I gazed up at the sky above the manor in silence.

Watching the snowflakes hanging in the air as if hoping to one day reach the ground, I felt as though I had stepped inside a painting.

“Is there no way out?”

“There wasn’t, until you arrived.”

Dersia murmured evenly.

“If we are to search for a way to escape, then somewhere in this World, there must exist the dying Decay.”

“What?”

“After all, we have been invited into the Purgatory that Decay himself is trapped in. He is most likely lodged somewhere in those Snow Mountain valleys, unable to die or live, sustaining this World. If we can find him and put him out of his misery, we should be able to return. Quite simple, really.”

“I see.”

If this world was a single dream that Decay was experiencing, then he himself had to be present within it.

Because in any dream, the dreamer exists. That was what Dersia was suggesting they deal with.

Before I could even feel encouraged at having found a way out, I sensed something off.

The difficulty of that task and the fact that the elf in front of me was still here didn’t add up.

“…That sounds too simple. Is there nothing else?”

“Hm. Is there some issue with that?”

“No, not exactly an issue, but…”

I looked Dersia up and down and asked.

“Didn’t you say you’ve been in this place for three years?”

“I did.”

“Granted, my Current Sense may be somewhat superior to yours in certain respects.”

But even accounting for that, it was three years.

“If you couldn’t find him in all that time, just how vast is this mountain range?”

I was confident that if I gave Dersia three years, she could thoroughly search at least half the continent.

Which meant this Death’s Flashback was even larger than that.

I asked, my tone carrying a sense of just how long is this going to take, and Dersia answered without the slightest change in expression.

“Jern. Within this Death’s Flashback, there exists a Burden that poses no great issue for you.”

“Huh? What is it?”

“Mana cannot be gathered.”

“…?”

“It seems to be because this is less a proper World and more the mere dream of a madman. For you, someone who can drink the waters of the Deep Sea to replenish your Mana, this does not apply. In my case, however, things are rather different.”

“Ah… you mean…”

“Yes. I am currently an ordinary person, incapable of using magic. That is why three years was barely enough time to check even a single mountain thoroughly. Had you not come, it would have been impossible.”

Dersia, unable to use magic.

That was quite the shock. But something else had struck me even harder than that fact.

I used my Current Sense to examine once more the decorations and patterns left throughout the manor, and the doors that were carved with a level of detail that bordered on excessive, then opened my trembling lips and asked.

“Master. There’s something I’d like to ask.”

“Yes. Go ahead.”

“…When was this manor completed?”

“Hmm.”

Dersia mulled it over as if recalling, then answered.

“I began construction about a month after arriving, and finished roughly a week ago.”

“…”

Many words rose up, but I swallowed them all.

“Follow me.”

Once the situation had been laid out, Dersia led me to a mountain of middling size within the range.

From the top of that mountain, I was reminded all over again just how vast and immense the Dwind Mountain Range truly was.

Mountains beside mountains beside mountains.

Mountains filling every inch of my vision, obscured by the blizzard so that I couldn’t possibly see them all.

Dersia pulled her coat tighter around herself and spoke with a slight edge of worry.

“We have a time limit. Even I found that after three years, enduring this with nothing but my bare body was becoming difficult. It will be a hard task, but you will need to search this entire mountain range within a month at the very least.”

“Hmm…”

“I am aware it’s an unreasonable request. However…”

“No, it’s not unreasonable.”

I gazed down at the mountain range for a moment, then showed Dersia a smile tinged with confidence.

“He’s not on this mountain.”

“…Huh?”

“I just finished checking. On the way up.”

Nothing in this World moved.

Which meant the only things my Current Sense could detect were myself and Dersia, the two of us alone.

No matter how wide I spread it, none of the headaches that came from tens of thousands of sounds and movements flooding in at once.

“I think I can finish this within a week.”

It seemed like it wouldn’t take as long as I’d thought.