Chapter 25

I wandered the garden, wondering what I had done wrong. I tried looking at more trees. I tried eating more roses. I noticed that they didn’t taste beautiful, but also realized that I never seemed to grow hungry in this place.

Nothing worked. There was no purple flame when there was no Nyarin. Truck-kun was going to kill me, since he was sitting outside of this reality, holding the gears of the spell and preventing them from moving forward. Would Nyarin come back?

Had Nyarin gone back to him to let him know that I had failed to appreciate beauty? I didn’t know the details of how these places worked. Maybe she’d restart time for him and explain everything.

Or did she go back and tell him that there was only one thing I could look at to generate that purple flame? How would he react to that?

Nyarin’s plan would fall apart unless I learned to worship the goddess voluntarily. Hers was a simple plan.

First, she would teach me to worship the goddess intentionally, instead of as a hypnotized stooge. Thus this place where I could touch this stone and learn to produce a high quality purple flame good enough that her boss would never question how Nyarin had gotten the results.

Second, Truck-kun would change the Isekai spell to grant me complete control. Then I could release Truck-kun and Nyarin from the malfunctioning spell and spend the rest of my life jumping voluntarily between worlds, doing as I pleased.

It would be like a super-mega Isekai experience.

That’s what I wanted.

It was what I still wanted, right?

I sat in the garden for what felt like hours. Maybe days. Truck-kun had warned me to be careful here, since time would flow differently. It was Nyarin’s job to keep time flowing in a stable pattern. When would she come back?

Truck-kun had been worried I might get stuck in a particular mental state and end up trapped in a hole in time for who knew how long. Actually he said, “Don’t go wandering in there because you’re an idiot and you need Nyarin to guide you.”

So I had time to think. What had it been, a day or two since I’d seen Nyarin? Perhaps it had been almost a week?

Truck-kun had said, before he killed the dragon Sycoran, that there were three ways one could force an Isekai reality to dissolve. In the first one with the dragon and the game world my belief in the premise of those realities had become unstable, so they had dissolved. He had shot me in the last one, killing my manifestation in the Isekai and forcing a reset. The final option required regaining complete control of the spell itself. But that took time.

I had time. Truck-kun might have been right about me being a idiot, but I had plenty of time to think. And boy, did I come up with an idiotic idea.

Looking between the white stone and the roses that had not yet been eaten, I thought.

During our planning meeting, Truck-kun had told me that taking control of the spell was difficult for an outsider like him. It could be much easier for me, but I wasn’t a master of magic.

The Isekai spell actually existed in my mind, and spirits like Nyarin were hired for the often dangerous job of entering the victims mind and making sure the spell stuck. That was why the Isekai lost stability if the customer didn’t really believe in it or didn’t want to stay. The Isekai were a product of my own mind under the spell’s influence.

For the plan to work, I had to learn to worship the goddess of beauty, fertility, and happiness while controlling my own mind and desires. It was all very zen actually.

I started walking, maybe a week after Nyarin had left. I wandered the garden, failing to worship or master my mind, until worrying about Truck-kun’s plan completely bored me. I wandered past trees until it became inevitable. I couldn’t avoid it any longer. I thought about Sachiko.

It hurt. The worst part was, in this place I learned to access all of my memories, even the ones I had long forgotten. Even the ones that hurt.

The memories of Sachiko hurt. Every last one hurt. The things I never said hurt. The things I had said hurt even more. But the thing that hurt worst is, as I walked with wet eyes thinking about her, I noticed a small yellow ring of flame burning at the edges of the disc.

It wasn’t fair. She was still, as far as the stone cared to say, the only bit of happiness in my life. And she was gone. I had convinced myself of excuses, but she was gone and it was all my fault.

I struggled to make purple flame come from the stone. I was pretty good at failing to make purple flame. I also tried to not think of Sachiko and avoid making any yellow flame. I was pretty bad at both of those things.

Truck-kun had it right to worry that I’d lose myself in this strange place. I kept losing track of myself, spending weeks at a time wandering. Eventually I cried every tear and felt every pain that my memories of Sachiko had to offer. I sat in the garden for what felt like ten eternities.

Truck-kun had been worried it would make me go crazy. Maybe I did go crazy, but I certainly came out changed.

I focused. It was hard to summon the red flame of True Vision here, but not impossible. This was all in my own mind.

Time passed. Days, weeks, months.

Years.

Mastering magic takes time. And I had plenty of time.