Suddenly, the wind vanished from the world.
The saliva in the back of his throat chilled instantly. Even the slight sound of a forced swallow rang out with an eerie, booming clarity in this newfound vacuum. Deep within his chest, a small flame flickered—a momentary spark of primal survival—before settling back into a quiet but fierce oscillation.
He could still walk. His slender legs could still carry him forward.
Koyoi understood the exact moment the wind died because the falling rain suddenly ignored the laws of physics, plummeting in perfectly vertical lines. The countless drops that had been lashing against his cheeks were now cutting the world into segments, like lines drawn with a ruler. The surrounding leaves and branches were frozen in place, devoid of even a millimeter’s tremor. Even the swirling mist ceased its flow; it felt as though the very concept of "time" had ceased to exist.
All that remained in his ears was the monotonous, mechanical tapping of raindrops hitting the layers of humus: thrum, thrum... a hollow, inorganic keystroke.
Reflexively, Koyoi stopped. He searched his chest for the remnants of a breath that had lost its way. The air he drew in was viscous and heavy, stagnating unnaturally before the trachea before finally sinking, like a weight, into the abyss of his lungs. The breath he exhaled moistened his lips, and while still damp, it violently snatched away the warmth of his skin.
Asahi let out a single, heavy rumble from his throat, his voice low and crawling across the earth.
“...The atmospheric density just spiked. It’s like we’ve been shoved inside an invisible wall.”
Koyoi tried to nod, but realized the muscles in his neck had gone rigid with extreme tension. He gave up. The fabric of his kimono, heavy with rain, clung craftily to his shoulders and back, incessantly siphoning his body heat into the void. Though the world was saturated with moisture, the sensation against his skin was unnaturally dry, and the fresh, vivid scent of water had completely withered away.
Instead, a foul, burnt bitterness clung to the back of his nasal passages, and the taste of iron rust lingered on his tongue like a repulsive afterimage. When he gingerly licked his chapped upper lip, the rain—which should have been pure—carried a toxic bitterness, reminiscent of rotting fruit. Every time he inhaled, his chest tightened; before he could fully empty his lungs, the next wave of absolute cold forced its way in with a violent pressure.
“I can’t... I can’t get the air all the way down.”
His own voice was instantly swallowed by the dense fog, sounding startlingly small and frail. This closed space was so cold-blooded it even rejected the transmission of sound, causing Asahi’s response to lag by several beats.
Inside the drawstring pouch at his waist, the God of Wind let out a raspy, agonized scream. The sacred presence that usually danced lightly as if defying gravity was now motionless, precipitating at the bottom of the pouch like something drowned in the deep sea.
Koyoi obsessively checked the inorganic hardness of the hemp knot with his fingertips. Through the cloth, he pressed his small palm against it with the strength of a prayer. The cord, unpleasantly swollen from soaking up rainwater, stuck to his fingers. The coldness of death seeped from his nail beds to the very marrow of his bones—slowly, but with absolute certainty. Beneath his palm, the slight dampness of the cloth stole his warmth, its temperature shifting in an eerie way.
The serene chill of the Moon God, the faint trembling of the Waterway God he had once saved, and the heavy sigh of the now-suffering Wind God—all of them clashed violently within the span of his single palm.
“...Heavy. Everything is heavy... like lead. The laws of the world... are being sewn shut... by someone’s hand...”
The Wind God’s voice wasn't a sound that vibrated the eardrums; it was a sharp awl piercing directly into the depths of his brain. Koyoi desperately steadied his ragged breath, offering back a short phrase intended only for his own soul. He feared that if he gave the words a voice, the slight vibration would shatter the fragile rhythm of his breathing.
“...I’m here. I’m right beside you. I’ll never let go. I promise.”
Hearing this vow, the Wind God shifted slightly in the abyss of consciousness, laughing as if cherishing the memory of a distant, lost paradise.
“...Once... all of these steep mountain paths... were my free song... swaying the trees... flying with the birds... to the ends of the earth...”
The laughter was incredibly weak, yet within the edges of the words, a god’s pride remained like a stubborn ember. Koyoi hugged the pouch close, as if cradling a beloved child, his fingertips tracing the remnants of that fading memory. The serene chill of the Moon God flowed smoothly into his palm, and the Waterway God let out a small, valiant cry deep in its throat.
The overlapping presences of the three gods wrapped around him, allowing Koyoi to maintain his sense of self even within this irrationally heavy air.
Asahi swung the tip of his heavy sword—his lifeline—slightly into the air as a test. There wasn't a shred of the wind resistance that should have been there. He pulled a scrap of torn cloth from his vest and held it high; it hung limp, defeated by gravity, motionless as a statue.
The time it took for a single drop of rain to fall from the edge of the cloth and be absorbed into the muddy ground was unnaturally long and silent. Even the sound of the impact had been thinned and sharpened away by some unseen force. In that absence of sound, Koyoi felt a bottomless terror—as if the world they inhabited was drifting further away with every step.
“...It’s like we’re trapped in a giant piece of amber. All of time has been forcibly stopped.”
Kuon spoke, his blue prosthetic eye darting violently as it pierced through the eerie distortions of the surroundings. The glass eye emitted a flash that seemed to sear the retina, tracking the ominous "cracks" in the world that no human eye could see. Only the raindrops fell vertically and transparently from the sky; the pulse of life that was the wind had been throttled and annihilated by a cold-blooded will.
“It is a boundary... a cruel line drawn to erase the very record of ‘wind’ from this earth.”
Koyoi swallowed the sand-like saliva in the back of his throat. The gulp sounded violently loud and obscene in his ears. The louder the sound, the more the world was silent—the closer it was to death. Within the motionless world, he felt the terror inside him swelling chaotically with a feverish heat.
“...Can we get through? Can we break out of this cage with our own strength?”
Kuon fell silent for a heartbeat, then gave a short, resolute nod.
“I will find the flaw. No matter how precise the ritual, as long as it binds a living god, a mathematical ‘error’ will always occur. I will expose it with this eye.”
Kuon pressed his fingers hard against his left eye and made his breathing extremely shallow. It was a desperate technique—breathing to suppress a gruesome pain that felt as if it were carving away his own flesh. Koyoi couldn't help but step closer, hovering like a guardian just behind Kuon’s thin back. He couldn't touch him to offer support, but he was desperate to convey his will through proximity alone.
The physical rope that once connected them was gone. But to break through here, they needed a synchronization of the soul's "breath" far stronger than any cord. Every time Kuon’s thin shoulders rose unnaturally, Koyoi would delay his own breath by a single beat, exhaling quietly. By emptying his lungs, he fought to keep his soul from being pulled into the torrent of his companion’s erratic breathing.
As the regularity of the falling rain became maddeningly perfect, Kuon’s fingertips trembled—small, but violent with humiliation and pain. To see too much was to have the world’s hideous truths hammered directly into one’s soul. The intervals between the raindrops began to align with mathematical precision. As the surrounding sounds became completely uniform, there was a growing horror that even the flow of time was hardening like concrete.
Koyoi intentionally took a rough, deep breath, awakening the heat from the flame in his chest as a sensation in his fingertips. He had to keep carving his own "movement" into this frozen world. If he forgot his own pulse for even a second, he would be swallowed by this amber darkness in an instant.
Deep in the forest's heart.
In a darkness that allowed not a single drop of light, a pitch-black pillar stood upright. It wasn't so much an object of ancient faith as it was a massive stone monolith—a tombstone for the dead. The stone’s surface, having obsessively absorbed the rainwater, held an eerie, dark luster. At its base lay the cursed remains of offerings: fragments of shattered bowls and mud-caked scraps of old rope, scattered like ritualistic hexes.
The dried dirt clinging to the pottery shards crumbled away at a touch, as if shaking off the dregs of life. The stone pillar was wrapped in layers of old talismans that looked like curses; on the edges of the ink, blurred by moisture, the single character for "Wind" could just barely be read with a sense of desperate loneliness. The paper had soaked up so much rain it had thinned; an incautious touch would turn the soggy fibers into a repulsive slime on the skin.
Yet, they never fell off.
A powerful knot tied by someone remained there, obsessed. For hundreds of years, it had held someone’s earnest "wish" as an unbreakable chain. As Koyoi traced the stone's surface with a trembling hand, he found it held an absolute, bone-chilling cold to its very core, and the unpleasant sensation of grit etched itself into his fingertips. The coldness of the stone felt identical to the desperate temperature of the Wind God struggling inside his pouch.
Only in front of the pillar was the trajectory of the falling rain so beautiful—and so cruelly aligned—that it stirred a violent, visceral loathing in Koyoi. Such perfect, over-ordered regularity was the ultimate proof that something living was being eternally imprisoned within.
Asahi ground his teeth so hard they threatened to shatter.
“...Is this the work of the Observers, too? Have those bastards been binding gods since back then?”
Kuon shook his head slowly, his expression full of agony.
“No... This is something more primitive, more deep-rooted. The humans who once lived on this land... to protect their own stable lives, they feared the god’s fickle ‘freedom.’ They forcibly trapped it inside this stone and fixed it there.”
Koyoi’s lungs stopped for a moment in front of the monolith, paralyzed by terror, but he forced a breath back out as if spitting blood. What was once a "prayer" to protect lives had, after long years, stolen the god’s true song and turned into a cruel "chain." The memory of the empty forest shrine—the one where a god had faded away because its name was no longer called—returned vividly. This was an extension of that same tragedy.
The remaining shape of the stone, though it had lost its intent, continued to obsessively bind someone even now. The wreckage of "goodwill," never intended to harm, had been sharpened by the merciless whetstone of time into the keenest of blades, carving into the god. Koyoi’s throat ached as if it were tearing; he forced back his frustration along with his saliva.
Asahi made the hilt of his sword ring with a force that felt like it could physically destroy the world.
“Shall I cut it? I can smash this damn pillar and its curse to dust right now.”
Koyoi shook his head vigorously, his heart aching.
“...Not yet. Right now, just focus on getting us through safely. If we break it by force, the ‘sorrow’ released in that moment will just become a new curse and hurt someone else.”
As he finished stating his will, the flickering flame deep in his chest regained a measure of calm. His hesitation hadn't vanished completely. But the weight of having made a "choice" gave his slender legs the strength to step forward. Koyoi placed his frozen fingers on the mouth of the pouch and stretched a thread of consciousness toward the Wind God shivering in its depths.
He didn't speak aloud; he simply mixed a sacred breath called "prayer" into the exhale from his lungs.
“...Please. Just a little. Lend me your ‘true breath’... so we can cross this stone boundary.”
As if in answer, the Wind God let out a low, growling cry. The voice was incredibly frail, as if it might vanish like a candle in the wind, but that resonance was the genuine "sound of a god" that no one could fake.
Koyoi matched his breathing rhythm perfectly to that sacred pulsation. At the exact same moment, he exhaled all of his life energy.
At the end of that exhaled breath, in the lightless darkness, a single withered leaf shook violently, as if it had regained the throb of life. For just one moment, the vertically falling raindrops were forcibly swept aside by the will of the wind.
The space pushed back against the three of them as if it were a massive, thick wall of rubber. Their shoulders, their chests, and even the soles of their feet were slowed with every step by an invisible wave of rejection. As the counter-force grew, the depths of Koyoi's ears plugged unpleasantly from the pressure change, and his own heartbeat hammered violently in his head like a bell. The surrounding sound of rain felt like a distant event in a foreign land; the world was utterly rejecting him.
Asahi stepped half a pace forward with the speed of a bullet, using his massive frame to force the invisible wall open. Kuon followed, pushing against Koyoi’s back like a solid rock.
Koyoi bit his lip until blood seeped out, enduring an absolute-zero agony that felt like countless needles piercing his skin. Millimeter by millimeter, he shifted his center of gravity forward. His fingertips were completely numb from the extreme cold; he almost lost his grip on the hard knot of the pouch. Koyoi redoubled the strength in the arms cradling the pouch, using that raw pain as his only guidepost to pull his senses back to the land of the living.
Snap!
Deep inside his ears, a taut membrane burst vividly. Fresh, vivid air rushed into the depths of his lungs. It was cold, yet startlingly light.
The tips of Koyoi’s disheveled hair swayed slightly with a will of their own. The frozen time of the world began to beat with a correct pulse once more. The returned wind was incredibly weak and fragile. Yet, that very weakness felt more precious and beloved than anything else. Not a gale that violently leveled everything, but a sacred sigh intended only to gently caress the cheek of the wounded.
Koyoi exhaled all the stagnant heat in his lungs, then drew in the colors of the newly born world once more—deeply, deeply. The inhaled air passed through the flame in his chest and finally reached the deepest part of his lungs as moisture. In that moment, he felt the bitter, rusty taste that had clung to his throat begin to fade.
“...We can do it. The path is open. Let’s run through while we can.”
Asahi gave a short nod, and the three of them slipped past the cursed stone pillar without a sound.
The wind had indeed returned. Yet, the forest's true "voice" remained silent. Not a single bird took flight; not a single insect’s chirp reached this darkness. Only the falling rain continued eternally, like thin, sharp threads of silver. Under that unchanging rain, the presence of low, crawling thunder grew closer with every step—an inescapable proximity.
The returned wind was nothing more than a faint tremor against Koyoi’s cheek, but it held a clear direction on his skin. That alone made the frozen depths of his chest soften and relax. The scent of rain-soaked bark—green and powerful with life—spread purely into an abyss far deeper than before. When he exhaled, the white mist of his breath unraveled and swayed, torn by the newborn breeze and dissolving into the silvery air.
At the bottom of the pouch, the Wind God let out a small, relieved cry. It felt as though the core of its divine suffering had, for once, been lightly lifted. Asahi, still staring into the darkness ahead without looking back, spoke.
The movement of his shoulder muscles was kept to a minimum; his breathing was the shortest distance necessary for survival. The rain caused his wet hair to stick stubbornly to his forehead, but he seemed to have forbidden himself even the luxury of brushing it away. Kuon silently closed the gap by another step, bringing his cold, sharp presence right beside Koyoi.
Koyoi checked the hemp knot of the pouch again with the pain in his fingertips. He accepted the frostbite-like numbness as a badge of honor—a proof that he was still tethered to life.
The wind had returned. The Laws were moving once more.
Therefore... he could run through this moment with everything he had, without stopping for a single breath.
“Let’s go. That child... is waiting for us, on the other side of that despair.”