What kind of person were you?
What kind of person were you in the history you belonged to?
What kind of impact did your existence have on history?
How did the people of later generations view you?
Actually—
Those were all unimportant questions.
Or rather, a historical image was inherently a fragmentation of a complete person, selecting key details and turning them into a simplified, labeled image.
Real history, real people, could never be summed up by a label and two lines of text.
Everyone deserved a book of their own. In fact, for most people, even one book would not be enough to record their tumultuous lives.
Those so-called [historical figures] were merely some of the countless people who had passed through history.
History was nothing more than innumerable people walking side by side. Some fell, while others kept going, but in the end, everyone would fall. Those who fell formed mountains of corpses and seas of blood, and the figures standing at the very peak of those mountains and seas were what people called [history].
A shadow turned around, standing atop that mountain of corpses and sea of blood, looking back at her own past.
She chose to stop. She chose to remain where she was.
To pluck herself from history and construct something beyond it was to create a falsehood detached from history.
That falsehood was for the sake of happiness.
"Was it worth it?"
Pain filled Hoshiguma Yuna's voice—she was a yokai, and she could not understand why anyone would make such a choice.
Because everyone knew that the result of doing so would definitely be failure, definitely another fall.
"It wasn't."
She knew clearly that what she could gain from her choice was utterly disproportionate to the consequences she would bear.
More than a choice,