Leaving the ruins of the market behind, the three stepped into the desolate "Beach of Ruins," a wasteland where "drifting memories" accumulated like silt in the hollows.
It had once been a vital waypoint leading to the Port of Charts, but now the tides of the World’s Principles had gone utterly mad. Countless shipwrecks lay scattered across the sand like gargantuan tombstones, choking the shoreline.
The sea breeze carried no scent of salt. Instead, it was thick with the distinct "stench of death"—the smell of rusted iron and rotting seaweed. Even the sound of the waves felt wrong; with every ebb and flow, the shhh... shhh... of the water sounded like a rhythmic, whispered curse.
None of the wreckage strewn across the beach retained its original form. Figureheads were half-buried in the dunes, their once-exquisite carvings scoured by the salt air until they were as white and brittle as bone.
The deck plating had rotted into a dark, mottled brown, leaving only rusted nails jutting out like thorns. Koyoi nearly caught his foot on one and stumbled, lurching sideways.
Asahi’s hand shot out, catching his arm and pulling him back.
His hands were calloused and rough, yet his grip was surprisingly delicate. Koyoi offered a small word of thanks and continued on, watching his step with renewed caution. Beneath the sand lay more than just nails; shattered glass and fragments of old documents were buried everywhere.
With every step they took, the sand let out a dry, grinding groan.
In the distance, a solitary mast that had somehow kept its shape let out a low wail as it caught the wind. Koyoi wondered if the memory of that sail—of when it once swelled with the breeze to race across the open sea—still lingered somewhere in this place.
Along the water’s edge, "black foam" washed ashore in a ceaseless crawl.
Distinctly different from ordinary sea foam, these clusters seemed to swallow the light, darkening the space around them. Whenever a bubble burst, it released a sound like a faint, stifled moan. One patch of foam left a heavy, viscous trail upon the sand, like the final breath of a soul that had failed to reach the Port of Charts.
Koyoi reached out a hesitant hand toward the foam, but inside his drawstring pouch, Shizuku pulsed sharply. It was a cold, piercing warning that made him freeze.
He yanked his hand back, a shudder running down his spine as he realized his fingertips had already begun to turn black. The darkness had even seeped beneath his nails. Panicking, he rubbed his fingers against the sand, trying desperately to scrub it away.
It wouldn't come off completely.
The lingering regrets haunting this beach were so thick they could stain the very skin of the living.
Kuon sat down on the bleached keel of a shipwreck and reverently opened the golden book upon his knees—the Catalogue of Truth. He focused the eerie blue light emitting from his prosthetic left eye onto the black foam drifting at the water's edge.
Whenever the blue light touched the foam, patterns resembling script flickered momentarily across its surface.
Whether these were the names of ships or fragments of crew manifests, only Kuon’s artificial eye could discern them. He narrowed his gaze, tightening the focus of the prosthetic lens. The streaks of blue light crawling across the pages accelerated, and the paper of the Catalogue began to emit a faint heat.
The sea breeze tried to violently whip the pages around, but Kuon’s thin fingers pinned them down firmly.
"Look. This is the 'stagnation' of the Principles," Kuon’s voice rang out.
His tone was cold and clinical, stripped of all emotion. Yet, Koyoi didn't miss the slight tremor in the blue light of his eye. Kuon, too, was feeling the sorrow of this place; he simply refused to give himself permission to put it into words.
The pages of the Catalogue turned as if moved by an invisible hand, and the names of the ships written there began to vanish, one by one. The characters sank into the depths of the paper as if the vessels were foundering in real-time. Kuon stared at the disappearing names, his jaw set tight.
Tens of thousands of souls.
Every single one of them had a name, a destination, and someone waiting for their return. Kuon’s grip tightened on the edge of the book, his nails leaving faint crescents in the golden cover.
"...Regrets? If that's what they are, then if we could return these ships to the sea... would their souls finally be saved?"
Koyoi’s question was soft, yet it wasn't swallowed by the sound of the waves. His words carried a pure sense of mourning for the countless spirits sleeping on this shore. Inside his pouch, the three gods shifted simultaneously, their vibrations sending a wave of warmth through his body. Shizuku, the Rain God, pulsed with particular intensity, as if resonating with the lament of the ships that yearned for the ocean. The cold presence of the River God overlapped with it, and the two differing temperatures clashed gently in the palm of his hand.
Koyoi knelt in the sand and gently touched the half-buried figurehead.
Behind the sensation of cold iron, a faint warmth remained. It was the memory of a hand that had once steered this ship, still dwelling here after all this time.
That warmth felt so much like the pulse of the droplet in his pouch that tears pricked the corners of his eyes.
Asahi rested his right hand on the hilt of his sword, his gaze fixed on the distant horizon. There was nothing to be seen at the boundary where the leaden sea melted into the gray sky. Yet, Asahi’s eyes remained sharp and unwavering, as if he were certain the "answer" lay in that very void.
The wind kicked up the sand, stinging his cheeks. His bangs clung to his forehead, and crystals of salt glittered white on the guard of his sword.
Without blinking, he continued to watch the sea. His back, square and solid as a wall, took the full brunt of the salt spray, shielding Koyoi and Kuon from the wind.
"...Let’s go. The answer is waiting on the other side," Asahi declared, his boots planting firmly in the earth.
The sand cried out beneath his soles, the vibration seeming to ripple through the entire beach. There was no superfluous emotion in his voice—only the pure declaration of intent.
Kuon quietly closed the Catalogue and brushed the sand from the golden cover with his fingertips. His knees let out a faint creak as he stood, but he ignored it, flicking the hem of his coat and glancing briefly at his own footprints in the sand.
Koyoi released his hand from the figurehead and stood up. The coldness of the iron lingered on his skin, but he curled his hand into a fist as if to hold onto it.
Without stopping to brush the sand from his knees, he hurried after the other two. They left the beach behind and began the ascent up the stone steps leading toward the Port of Charts. Behind them, a particularly large bubble of black foam burst, and the sound of the waves cut out for a single, fleeting second.
In that silence, it felt as though the final breath of the sunken ships lingered in the air.
Koyoi resisted the urge to look back and kept his eyes forward. Inside his pouch, Shizuku continued to radiate a faint warmth, as if responding to the black stain that still remained on his fingertips.
The sea breeze pushed at their backs, stretching their long shadows across the stone steps. The countless footprints they had left on the beach would likely vanish without a trace when the next tide came. But the sensation of the sand beneath their feet was now etched into their memories, carried forward with every step.