Yumi and the Nightmare Painter(116)

They’d miscalculated, however, because the machine saw all souls—not just the spirits that lived beneath the ground—as a viable power source. When first turned on, it was hungry. It needed strength to follow its instructions to stack stones, and it wanted an overwhelming amount of power to jump-start its work. No spirits were available. So it instead reached out and seized the nearest sources it could find: the souls of the people of Torio.

Let this be a lesson. When you Awaken a device like this, be very, very careful what Commands you give it to follow.

This machine immediately began feeding on them, destroying their bodies and harvesting their Investiture. The result was the shroud, sprayed into the air, left to rain down and blanket the land. A dark miasma literally crafted from the dead, everyone’s Identities evaporated and transformed into this dark force. Imagine it like…the tar that decomposed bodies sometimes turn into over many years of incredible pressure. The shroud is that, except souls, left as refuse from the machine’s initial activation.

A soul cannot be destroyed; it can only change forms. The machine, then, didn’t use people up so much as transform them. They lingered as this blackness, a churning soup made of tens of thousands of souls subject to the machine’s domineering will, held in eternal bondage to something they’d created.

Delightful, eh? Progress, it is said, always disrupts one industry or another. Well, in Torio, progress took a running leap—and instead of just disrupting industry, decided to disrupt the entire planet. Permanently.

Before long, the machine burned through the relatively weak souls of humans and moved on to the spirits themselves. Drawn by the machine’s incredible stacking abilities, the spirits were handily trapped by its power. It eventually gathered each and every remaining free spirit in the land. They finally satiated it, providing a more…vigorous power source. That was its purpose, and the thing fulfilled it with excellence.

Unfortunately, there was almost no one left to appreciate it.

Only wandering refugees who survived the machine’s initial activation—nomads from the edge of civilization. Lucky survivors who eventually came across the results of the machine’s efforts: hion stubs provided in some of the former locations of Torish towns. The blood of enslaved spirits, hidden away, the source of this power never understood.



* * *




Painter stepped alone up to the shroud, holding his painter’s bag with sweaty fingers, watching the shifting darkness. This was the west side of town—where the nightmares would come. It was near his patrol route—the place where Yumi had once pushed back the darkness ever so briefly.

When the nightmares arrived, they would find only him. A single painter.

He trembled, knowing how it would play out. A rush of dark things surrounding him. If he worked frantically, perhaps he could lock down one of them before he was killed. Perhaps even two or three. Then they would rip him apart. Leave him in pieces, like in the stories of what had happened to the painters of Futinoro.

After he was dead, the nightmares would descend upon the unsuspecting city. Rampaging. Maybe…maybe the Dreamwatch would recognize what was happening. Maybe they’d resist. But…but after meeting them, he had to acknowledge how frail a hope that was. How many people would die tonight because he hadn’t been able to persuade the Dreamwatch?

He bowed his head.

Then thought, What am I (lowly) doing?

This was stupid. There was another way.

Yumi’s way.



* * *




You still have questions, don’t you?

All right, let’s delve a little deeper. Let me show you a few events again—but this time through the eyes of someone other than Yumi or Painter. Someone who had been involved in both stories from the beginning.

Here I must admit to you that I’ve lied about one crucial item. Remember how I told you I’d been hearing voices, seeing flashes of images—sometimes as full pictures, sometimes just as lines that quivered in my vision? Glimpses of events as they unfolded through Painter’s or Yumi’s eyes? Well, that part is true, but it wasn’t the whole truth.

There’s a third person whose eyes I’d been seeing through.

Liyun.

In fact, for me, this story began with her. Baffling flashes of her life. (I think that the spirits were watching Liyun in particular. Then some irregularities about my…specific nature tapped into the Spiritual communication, letting me see what was happening.)

The machine evaporated the population of Torio, feeding upon their power and spitting out the shroud as a byproduct. Well, as Yumi and Painter had both guessed (despite lacking all the information), there were some people the machine couldn’t harvest or control: the yoki-hijo.

They were superficially killed during the machine’s initial activation like everyone else. However, after a short time these fourteen souls pulled themselves free of the shroud and re-formed. They came back from the dead, refusing to be controlled.

All fourteen women were beings of incredible willpower. Highly Invested at birth by the spirits, they presented a legitimate threat to the machine. It could not harvest their energy and could not keep them contained in the shroud. The most the machine could do to them was siphon off a tiny bit of their memories.

So, to control them, it created prisons in the form of fake towns. Servants, compelled by the machine, emerged from the shroud. Buildings, plants, and vehicles were recreated from the substance of souls, and a careful perimeter was erected. The walls Masaka found? Those projected (by making images out of the shroud) a perfectly realistic, yet fake landscape.