I'm Not a Flame-Chaser

"Yae Sakura, Miko."

"Yae Sakura? Miko?" The other person gave him a strange look. "There's no Miko or anyone named Yae Sakura in this village."

"..."

The Journey Begins in the Sky: Chapter Fifty-One - How Longer Must We Wait?

To be honest, Lin has encountered too many bizarre events related to consciousness. It's not surprising that anything can happen in the consciousness space, and so far, none of them have had a perfect ending.

But the moment someone gets to know you, they vanish into thin air; a village Miko becomes someone who never existed—this is the first time I've ever seen such a thing.

After asking around, I got the same result: the Miko of Yae Village had died out in the previous generation, and now only the shrine still exists in Yae Village.

This included the villager who went to the shrine to find Yae Sakura. Lin paid special attention to him, but he didn't remember going to the shrine either, so he didn't seem to be acting.

With no other option, Lin took Bella back to the shrine. Looking at the shrine, which had been carefully cleaned and had nothing to do with the "desolation of a severed bloodline," he stood there pondering.

That couldn't be Lin's imagination. The towels Yae Sakura brought were still in the hallway, unless the Yae Sakura Lin saw was...

"Ghost?"

This word, with its strong Far East flavor, came out of his mouth.

"A ghost?"

Unexpectedly, the gray-haired girl next to him shuddered upon hearing his words, shrank her neck, and looked around with a hint of fear on her cute little face, as if afraid that the vengeful spirit of the shrine Miko would rush out of the shrine and drag her away.

... It's quite strange that an Upper-class Honkai Beast is afraid of ghosts.

"What ghost are you talking about? Have you seen that Miko you're asking about here before?" Bella gripped her smooth shoulders, swallowed hard, and her voice was filled with fear. "Didn't they say she doesn't exist? You must have seen a ghost..."

"... I was just using a metaphor."

Lin naturally wouldn't accept the existence of ghosts, which have no scientific explanation. Many supernatural phenomena that humans have witnessed throughout history have been explained, but there is neither any evidence to prove the existence of ghosts nor any scientific principle to deduce them.

However, Bella, who had never been to school and had only received basic knowledge about the Herrscher of the Void, would not understand these things. In this respect, she is indeed a girl who matches her appearance and age.

"Yae Sakura might be a special existence in the consciousness space. Her form of existence is similar to a ghost; she appears at specific times and places, and no one who has seen her except for outsiders can remember her," Lin stated a possibility, but he quickly dismissed it himself. "However, there are traces of life in the shrine..."

By the way, he hasn't been inside the shrine yet to see its layout.

Lin didn't hesitate, opened the sliding door and went inside, while Bella stood alone in the empty courtyard, her petite body trembling uncontrollably. A cold wind, seemingly from nowhere, blew into her already light clothing, sliding up and down her skin like a sticky tongue...

"Ugh————"

Bella's hair almost stood on end in shock. If she were still in her dragon-type Honkai Beast form, her tail would have been standing up like an antenna. She quickly rushed into the room and followed Lin's steps.

Lin glanced at her but didn't say anything more, focusing his attention on the consciousness space for the time being.

There are two ways to leave the space of consciousness. One is to find an anchor point in the space of consciousness. Only when the anchor point actively releases the space of consciousness can consciousness return to reality.

The second option is brute force, but Lin's mental strength is much weaker than before, and Bella is no different from an ordinary person, so this method is not feasible.

The space of consciousness is like a vast ocean; even if you stand on the shore and watch the tide recede, traces will still be left behind.

As soon as Lin entered, he noticed two different sizes of shoes on the shoe rack by the door, which meant that Yae Sakura was not the only one living in the shrine. Could the white-haired girl she mentioned be someone who disappeared before her?

Once inside the shrine, the strange phenomena observed in Yae Village became even more pronounced.

In this village's only shrine, a place that should be the most devout place of faith in the gods, there isn't even a single wooden fox carving. The place that should be used for sacrifices is empty, as if a piece has been forcibly carved out.

Fox statues are everywhere in Yae Village, and no one cleans them.

Having faith in gods, yet not believing in gods at all?

Lin stroked the pedestal that should have been used to place the statue of a god for sacrificial purposes.

... It wasn't moved recently.

There were many rooms in the shrine. Just as Lin had guessed when he entered, he found two rooms that were clearly occupied. Judging from the clothes hanging in the closets, they belonged to women.

What caught his attention was another room, which showed no signs of recent life, but was clean and tidy, clearly cleaned regularly, and the clothes in the wardrobe were noticeably a size too small.

"Have you... finished looking?" Bella was still terrified, especially inside the shrine, where she felt that everything was left behind by ghosts. But she didn't want to get too close to Lin, and she was very conflicted.

Ultimately, Ling was torn between the "hateful human" and the "terrible ghost" in her dream, and she ultimately chose the living.

"Didn't those people all say that the Miko doesn't exist?"

"... What they say may not be true; maybe they are the ghosts themselves."

"Huh?"

Lin's calm words gave Bella goosebumps. She recalled brushing past those people, and her heart started racing.

"Of course, I could also be a ghost. The person standing here might not be the real me, but perhaps just a copy of my consciousness."

However, the probability of such a conjecture, which is closer to unrealistic speculation than wild imagination, is too low to be considered at all.

So far, we have obtained too little information, and the development of events is too bizarre. Yae Sakura, who should have been a key clue, has simply disappeared.

... Wait a minute, it seems we've overlooked an important factor.

Yae Sakura disappeared after the "exorcism" was performed.

There weren't many water tanks in Yae Village, but there weren't few either. In an era when water was not readily available, water tanks were a durable and convenient tool for storing water, so they were quite common.

"The monster in the water tank"—just from this one sentence, Lin knew that the Honkai Beast was not large and was probably a charging type Honkai Beast.

Lin wandered around investigating several public water tanks. The villagers looked at him, an outsider, as he walked around as if he didn't belong, and their expressions were somewhat strange, especially since there was a girl with an even stranger outfit following behind him.

Soon, he found an abandoned water tank that had not been used to hold water. According to the marks on the ground, it had originally been upside down, but now it was turned over and was empty inside.

Lin frowned and looked into the vat.

"How much longer... do we have to wait..."

"Brother Lin..."

The Journey Begins in the Sky: Chapter Fifty-Two -The Tenshu-kaku

"Did you hear anything?"

Lin Ning looked at the empty water tank and asked Bella, who was standing there dumbfounded behind her.

But his words were like drops of water flowing into the ocean, without making a splash. He frowned and looked back, only to find Bella standing there blankly with vacant eyes.

What happened?

"What's wrong?" Lin's tone wasn't particularly concerned, but so far only Bella was in the same situation as him, and in this completely unfamiliar environment, her presence was very important.

Unfortunately, Bella still didn't answer. She lowered her head and muttered something softly. Lin vaguely heard some of the words: "How much longer... do we have to wait..."

This sentence...

Lin reached out and shook Bella's shoulder. She suddenly woke up, slapped Lin's hand away, and looked at him with a mixture of shock and anger.

"... You heard it too?"

"What's that sound?" Bella didn't want Lin to come over, so she took two steps back and asked in confusion after hearing Lin's question.

"What did you mean by 'how much longer do we have to wait'?"

Did I say that?

"..."

She knew nothing when asked, and it was a completely incomprehensible phenomenon. Lin stared at the puzzled Bella. Her behavior just now was as if she were possessed, and what she said seemed to be exactly the same as what he had heard...

However, Lin's behavior was equally inexplicable to her, so her gaze was also filled with confusion.

But now it's certain that Yae Sakura wasn't Lin's imagination; she must have encountered something here, and the faint call Lin heard seemed to come from...

Lin looked up and gazed again at the most incongruous building. After a moment's thought, Lin pointed at the building and turned to Bella, asking, "Can you see that?"

Bella tilted her head, looked in the direction Lin was pointing, and then nodded at Han: "I can see it, so what?"

Don't you find it strange?

"What's strange about it?"

In Yae Village, which is neither shabby nor wealthy, the architecture is maintained at a level hundreds of years removed from modern times. The houses are no more than two stories high and are not even as tall as the cherry blossom trees in the village.

Therefore, when Lin first saw "that", his mind was filled with a sense of incongruity.

Looking at it, it's like a colossal object that has traveled hundreds of years into the future. Even from a distance, you can clearly feel that it covers an area that is probably the size of the entire Yae Village, and its height far exceeds that of half of the buildings. Even the shrine on the mountaintop is not as tall as it.

Lin also recognized this type of building, an important structure known as "Tenshu-kaku" in the Far East.

The angular architectural structure and the use of bricks and tiles far exceeding the architectural level of Yae Village certainly existed in this era, but it was impossible for it to appear in a small rural village like Yae Village.

That's why Lin felt something was off.

Lin Huan asked the other villagers if they could see the building, but his unusual behavior, which made them think he was possessed, made the villagers of Yae Village feel uneasy. So most of them avoided him like the plague, and only when they really couldn't run away did they reluctantly tell him that they hadn't seen the Tenshu-kaku.

The clues now point to... let's call it the Tenshu-kaku for now. I wonder if Yae Sakura also heard a similar call, so she went to the Tenshu-kaku and then disappeared from the villagers' memories.

In this way, entering the Tenshu-kaku would likely lead to encountering even more bizarre events, but finding the anchor point of the consciousness space without entering would be almost impossible.

"Call..."

Lin Shen took a deep breath, and after thinking for a while, he said calmly, "You stay in Yae Village. I'm going there to look for clues."

"Why?" the gray-haired girl asked, looking at the man who was about to leave, puzzled.

"Because it must be dangerous inside, leaving one person outside will at least ensure that one person survives." Lin checked himself to see if he had any usable weapons. Unfortunately, he hadn't brought any weapons when he went through security at the airport, and in this consciousness space, he was supposed to maintain his previous state, so he couldn't even find a small knife and had to go in empty-handed.

"If I can't get out, you'll have to find another way. This is most likely related to the worship of gods and shrines in Yae Village. Investigating related information might give you a chance to leave the consciousness space."

"Why... why did you go in alone?"

After listening to Lin's words, Bella hesitated and asked the man with a calm expression.

"According to you, shouldn't you let me in? I'm Honkai Beast, and you're a human. Shouldn't we be enemies? Would you really want to leave my chance to live to me?"

Her words actually revealed that she didn't believe Lin's story at all.

Lin simply turned away and whispered dismissively, "What's the difference?"

Yae Village is built on a mountain, so its roads are quite rugged with significant elevation differences. Lin and Bella took a long detour before finally arriving at the entrance of the Tenshu-kaku.

Upon reaching the foot of the building, the Tenshu-kaku appeared even more enormous. Lin suspected that even in the next one or two hundred years, it would be difficult to build such a towering and exquisite structure. It was as if it were saying to everyone who could see it, "I am very suspicious."

The Tenshu-kaku's main gate was not closed, but from the outside it was completely dark inside, so even if someone knocked you unconscious upon entering, there was nothing you could do.

Lin didn't hesitate and started walking inside, but Bella called him back.

"Wait a minute, you're just going to go in like that?"

Lin turned to look at the gray-haired girl who was pursing her lips. The hem of her top fluttered in the wind like the wings of a dragon when she transformed. Her sky-blue eyes stared at him with an unreadable expression.

"...Otherwise what?" Lin countered.

"I'll go in with you." Bella walked quickly to his side, biting her thin, jelly-like lips under Lin's scrutinizing gaze. "I want to go back to Her Majesty the Queen's side. I can't stand being left to die alone outside, and I don't trust you, a human, to handle this alone. It would be even more troublesome if you messed things up."

Lin glanced at her clenched little hands. She knew herself that without any power, she was no different from an ordinary little girl—weak and powerless. So he shook his head. "You don't need to..."

"Shut up! Human, why do you talk so much!" Bella rudely shut Lin up, her mouth widening as she glared at him like a wild beast baring its teeth. "If you keep talking nonsense, you'll be the first person I kill after I leave here!"

"..."

Lin didn't say anything more. He had no right to choose for her, but since that was the case, having a helper would increase the success rate of exploring the Tenshu-kaku.

The trench coat billowed in the eerie wind blowing through the Tenshu-kaku, sounding like mockery. The expressionless man stepped inside first, followed closely by the gray-haired girl with her teeth clenched.

After swallowing the two, the gates of the Tenshu-kaku slowly closed.

"Thump!"

Then, it remained as calm as if it had never been opened at all.

The Journey Begins in the Sky: Chapter Fifty-Three - The Beginning of Evil

People always praise heroes and sacrifices, but they don't realize that what they are actually praising is the act of sacrifice and the attributes attached to the identity of a hero, not the sacrifices themselves.

"Here it is..."

Lin remembered walking through the gates of the Tenshu-kaku, then briefly losing his sight and hearing. He could only walk forward without looking back. After walking for a long time, he saw a light in the darkness in the distance. He went forward to catch the light, and then...

Consciousness space is an abstract thing. It is not a "space" in essence. Therefore, all events that occur in it are both regular and abstract. The constraints of time and space are greatly reduced, but it still follows the laws of both. The reason for this is the cognitive limitations of intelligent life forms themselves.

So, when Lin came into contact with the light, his vision blurred, and the originally dark scenery was transformed. The flawless blue sea was reflected in the sky, and he stood under the torii gate of the shrine, gazing at the peaceful Yae Village.