"The saddest stories are the ones we forget we once lived."
The illusion didn't end.
The world darkened, colors fading into the pale gray of a long-forgotten morning.
The clock ticked softly on the wall. Dust drifted through the light.
Asura blinked once — and realized he was still Shun Yamamoto.
The same cracked desk.
The same smell of ink and iron.
But the calendar on the wall — it read 45 years later.
He wasn't a boy anymore.
A middle-aged man sat hunched at that desk, hair graying, back curved, eyes hollowed into half-moons of exhaustion.
The room was filled with books stacked in teetering towers — ancient occult texts, photocopied mythologies, torn notebook pages, and blood-stained sigils drawn across the wallpaper like murals of madness.
He wore a cheap suit, sleeves rolled to the elbows, a tie loosely hanging around his neck.
The faint hum of the city seeped in through the cracked window, a life that had long outpaced him.
"He's… me," Asura whispered, horrified.
The mimic said nothing this time. The world itself told the story.
✦ The Salaryman Who Forgot How to Dream
Shun Yamamoto sat in silence.
The faint flicker of an old CRT monitor cast a dull glow on his face. His fingers hovered over a keyboard, but he hadn't typed in hours.
The desk was cluttered with coffee cups — some half-filled, most molded.
He had spent twenty-five years working for the same company. A nameless salaryman.
He never made friends.
He never married.
He never left that house.
Every day the same:
Wake up. Work. Return home. Bleed into the circles again. Sleep.
Every night he'd whisper to himself,
"Please… take me this time. I'm ready now."
But nothing ever answered.
Not even the silence.
His hands shook as he drew one more symbol on the floor — lines looping and crossing, half-legible incantations written in both Japanese and English, smeared with crimson fingerprints.
This wasn't the study of a scholar.
It was the den of a man who refused to stop dreaming.
✦ The Promise
A framed photograph sat on his shelf.
Dust clung to it thick as skin, but the faces still shone beneath:
his mother and father, smiling.
And beside them — a little girl. His sister.
Mary. A name he would later hear again… but never in this way. He reached for the frame, tracing her face with trembling fingers.
"You'd be my age now…" he whispered. "If you were still here."
The world dimmed.
His eyes closed, and the illusion shifted — pulling him backward, years earlier.
✦ The Day the Light Went Out
It was raining.
Shun was twenty-one, fresh out of school, still living at home, still muttering summoning chants in secret at night.
His parents had grown tired of it. His father barely spoke. His mother prayed.
Then came the scream.
He remembered hearing it — his mother's voice, breaking through the house like shattered glass.
He ran down the hall, heart pounding.
She was on the floor, clutching something in her arms, wailing so loud the neighbors gathered outside.
He froze.
The world went mute.
Mary's body lay still in her mother's lap — small, fragile, far too still.
Her school uniform soaked in rain and blood.
A single piece of paper was clutched in her hand.
His father rushed past him to call for help.
Shun just… stood there.
He couldn't breathe.
Couldn't move.
The paper slipped from her hand — fluttering to his feet.
He picked it up.
✦ The Letter
The ink was blurred, the writing small but careful.
"Onii-chan,
I know what you were doing back then.
I know why you fell out the window.
You were trying to go somewhere else.
Somewhere you could be happy."
Tears burned in his eyes.
"I wanted to tell you I wasn't mad.
I just wanted you to stop hurting yourself.
I know you promised, and I promised too — that I'd stay alive for you.
But I can't anymore.
They don't stop. The words. The hitting. The laughing."
His hands shook violently.
"I hope… wherever you go… you aren't alone."
That line broke him.
He dropped to his knees, clutching the paper against his chest.
A howl tore from his throat — not human, not animal — just pain, pure and raw.
His mother's sobs filled the house. His father's footsteps faded down the hall.
And Shun stayed there, unmoving, as the rain painted his sister's hair darker.
Gray skies.
Cold wind.
A black umbrella trembling in his grip.
Shun stood before the coffin, silent.
His mother wept against his father's shoulder, whispering prayers to a god who never answered.
But Shun couldn't cry.
His eyes were dry, his face blank.
He wanted to scream, to beg her to wake up, to apologize — but nothing came out.
A priest's voice droned on, the rain mixing with incense smoke.
"May her soul find peace beyond this world…"
Beyond this world.
Those words hit harder than they should have.
Something inside him cracked.
Night again.
Shun sat on the floor of his room, back against the wall, blood dripping down his forehead.
He'd been hitting it again.
The walls were covered in sigils — drawn not with ink, but with his own blood. Circles, triangles, spirals — none complete, none working.
"You left first," he whispered to the air.
"You broke our promise."
He stared at the stain of his sister's old note on the desk.
"But I'll keep mine. I'll find another world. I'll find you again."
He pressed his palms to the ground, smearing new lines into the old.
The house creaked. The lights flickered.
For a heartbeat, he thought something answered.
He looked up, eyes wide — but it was only the hum of the refrigerator.
The sound that killed hope.
He laughed.
A quiet, broken laugh that turned into tears halfway through.
"Guess even other worlds don't want me."
He slammed his head once more into the wall, leaving a dark mark behind.
The room stayed silent.
Only his breathing filled it — shallow, uneven, fading.
And the illusion lingered.
Inside the vision, the watching Asura clenched his fists so tight his knuckles cracked.
He could feel the weight in his chest, a sorrow that didn't belong to just a memory — it was him.
He was Shun.
He had lived this.
He had forgotten what despair felt like — and now it swallowed him whole.
The mimic's voice finally returned, whispering softly:
"This is what you ran from.
The world that gave birth to you.
A man so desperate to live a dream that he bled himself into one."
Asura's breathing turned sharp. His eyes trembled between gold and red.
"That's enough," he whispered. "Stop showing me this."
"No," the mimic purred. "You need to remember why you wished for another world in the first place."
And in the flickering dark, Shun Yamamoto's silhouette knelt once more, forehead pressed to the floor, muttering the same broken plea he'd whispered for fifty years —
"Another world… please… just another world."
Asura dropped to his knees.
His hand shook.
Tears burned through the illusion like fire.
"I made it… but I don't know how."
The illusion flickered violently.
Golden cracks split through the vision.
[ EMOTIONAL LIMIT REACHED ]
[ NOTE: Emotional resonance exceeds predictive models. Outcome unstable. ]
The mimic hissed.
Reality buckled.
"You're not supposed to feel this much!"
Asura lifted his head slowly, golden tears streaking down his face.
"That's where you're wrong…" he whispered. "Feeling too much… is what makes me human."
The illusion shattered.
The blood, the house, the sorrow — all ripped away in a burst of golden light.