In the Heart of the God

Darkness swallowed her like a tide.

Aoi no longer knew where her body ended and where the void began. She was floating—no, drifting—through an ocean of raw emotion. No water. No air. Only waves of hatred crashing into her like undertows, currents of despair trying to drag her down into nameless depths.

The collective hatred of all Japan was breaking over her.

Not just Tokyo. Every venomous comment posted from Osaka. Every death threat sent from Sapporo. Every toxic obsession born in Kyoto, Nagoya, Fukuoka. Everything converged here, in this inner space where time did not exist—where each second stretched into an eternity of suffering.

Die.
You’re worthless.
Disappear.

The voices were everywhere. Millions of voices. Anonymous, cruel, faceless. They screamed their poison into her mind, trying to drown her, dissolve her, erase her.

Aoi clenched her teeth.

Her golden light pulsed around her—fragile, wavering, but still there. A pitiful shield against this storm of darkness. She clung to it like a lifeline, refusing to be swept away.

Rei.

His name echoed in her consciousness like a prayer. Through the Resonance—that thin thread still linking them—she searched for him. Found only a dying echo. A flame fading somewhere in the real world.

He was dying.

The pain of that certainty almost broke her. But she turned that pain into fuel, into anger, into resolve. She had not come here to give up.

She moved forward.

The inner landscape of the ōyurei was a nightmare of pixels and suffering.

Fragments of screens floated like debris in space—shattered televisions, cracked smartphones, monitors flickering between static and screaming faces. Emotional threads stretched in every direction, pulsing with a sickly red light, carrying their poison from one end of this dark kingdom to the other.

And everywhere—memories.

Not hers. The victims’. Thousands of fragments of broken lives—a teenager bullied for his weight, an idol whose career was destroyed by a fabricated scandal, a salaryman driven to suicide by his superiors. Each story was an open wound in the fabric of this space, each pain adding to the writhing mass of the newborn god.

Aoi advanced through this emotional slaughterhouse, her light pushing back the darkness centimeter by centimeter.

Then she found him.

Kageyama.

Or rather, what remained of him.

The yokai who had destroyed her life was curled in on himself like a terrified child.

His immaculate three-piece suit was in tatters. His skin—once perfect, smooth, elegant—was cracked in places, revealing emptiness where flesh should have been. His red eyes, once blazing with cruelty and arrogance, were now glassy, lost, fixed on something Aoi could not see.

He was trembling.

The ōyurei was not merging with him. It was devouring him.

Aoi stopped a few meters away, her golden light forming a protective bubble around her. She should have felt satisfaction. Joy, even. This monster had orchestrated the destruction of her career, manipulated innocents, caused deaths. He had mortally wounded Rei.

She hated him.

But seeing him like this—broken, pathetic, eaten alive by his own creation—she felt something else.

Pity.

“Kageyama.”

He looked up. For an instant, something of the old predator flickered in his gaze—that cold cruelty, that absolute certainty. Then it vanished, replaced by pure terror.

“You… you came to watch me die?” His voice was hoarse, shattered. “To enjoy my fall?”

Aoi shook her head.

“I came to stop this thing.” She gestured to the darkness around them. “And for that, I need to find its heart. Its core.”

A bitter laugh shook Kageyama—a sound that turned into a fit of coughing.

“Its core? You think you can destroy a god?” He spat the words with contempt. “I tried to control it. To guide it. It’s too powerful.”

He raised a trembling hand. His fingers were already crumbling, turning into particles of black light that drifted upward toward the invisible ceiling.

“It’s consuming me. Little by little. Soon there’ll be nothing left of me.”

Aoi stepped forward. Then another step. Until she stood right in front of him.

Despite everything he had done—his cruelty, his manipulations, his murders—she understood. That terror of insignificance. That desperate need to exist, to matter, to leave a mark. Wasn’t that what had drawn Hikari to him? Wasn’t it, in some way, what she herself had felt during her years of drifting?

She held out her hand.

“Come with me.”

Kageyama stared at her, incredulous.

“You’ve done terrible things. You’ve destroyed lives. You almost killed Rei.” Her voice trembled slightly. “But you can still do one good thing. Help me find the core. Take responsibility for what you did.”

Silence stretched between them.

Then Kageyama burst out laughing. A desperate, broken laugh that rang through the void like a death knell.

“Take responsibility?” He shook his head. “You don’t understand. I’ve never been able to take responsibility for anything. That’s why I created this thing—to never have to face my own mediocrity.”

He looked away.

“I’m a coward, Mizushima. I always have been.”

Aoi let her hand fall. She wanted to insist. To force him to stand, to fight, to redeem even a fraction of his crimes.

But you can’t save someone who refuses to be saved.

She turned away.

“Wait.”

Kageyama’s voice stopped her. She half-turned back.

He had raised a hand—the one crumbling the fastest. A faint glow shone in his palm, like a dying ember.

“The last spark of my power,” he whispered. “Take it. It will let you feel the core. Locate it.”

Aoi hesitated.

“Why?”

A bitter smile stretched Kageyama’s lips—the first sincere smile she had ever seen from him.

He closed his eyes. “Maybe somewhere inside, a part of me always wanted to be something other than a monster.”

Aoi reached out.

The spark passed from him to her—cold, alien, but powerful. She felt the difference immediately. The inner world of the ōyurei brightened slightly around her. And far away—very far, beyond layers of darkness and suffering—she sensed something.

A pulse. Massive. Regular.

The beating heart of the newborn god.

She turned one last time toward Kageyama.

He was gone. Only a few particles of black light floated where he had been, slowly drifting upward into the darkness above.

Aoi said nothing. Did not cry. Felt nothing—neither satisfaction nor regret.

The core was a black sun.

Aoi reached it after what felt like hours of moving through the darkness. Each step had drained her a little more. Each wave of negative emotion had scraped at her light like sandpaper on metal. But she had held on.

And now she stood before the heart of the abomination.

It was immense. A sphere of absolute darkness, pulsing with a beat that made all of space tremble. Emotional threads converged into it from every direction—millions of threads, each carrying someone’s pain, hatred, despair from somewhere in Japan.

Everything gathered there. Amplified there. Transformed into something greater than the sum of its parts.

A god born of collective suffering.

Aoi raised her hands. Her golden light flared brighter, drawing on her last reserves. She knew what she had to do—harmonize this mass of darkness, transform it.

She attacked.

Her light struck the core. For one glorious fraction of a second, the darkness retreated. Golden cracks appeared on the surface of the black sun, letting something through that almost looked like hope.

Then the core regenerated.

Faster than she could heal it. The cracks closed. The darkness swallowed her light. And the pulse resumed, stronger than before, mocking.

No.

Aoi pushed harder. Threw everything she had—her power, her will, her rage. But it was like trying to empty the ocean with a spoon. Every centimeter she purified was instantly re-corrupted by the millions of threads feeding the core.

She couldn’t do anything alone.

It was too big. Too powerful. Too—

Exhaustion began to take her. Her strength drained away like sand slipping through her fingers. Her light faded from brilliant gold to pale yellow, then to a barely visible glow.

And the core, sensing her weakness, began to pull her in.

Aoi felt spiritual gravity seize her—invisible hands tugging at her essence, trying to swallow her as they had swallowed Kageyama. She fought, her feet searching for purchase on a floor that did not exist. But it was hopeless.

Every effort drained her more.

Every second brought her closer to being absorbed.

Rei…

His name echoed in her mind like a prayer. She thought of him—his rare smile, his golden eyes, the warmth of the Resonance when their essences touched.

I’m sorry.

She thought of the idols—Yuki, Akane, Ren, Tsubasa. Everything they had been through together.

I’m so sorry.

She thought of Hikari. Of Kuzunoha.

I can’t do anything. I’m going to disappear.

The darkness swallowed her.

Her light went out.

And the core absorbed her completely.