Inside the subway Impression Space, Wakaba Mutsumi stood quietly, pinching a ring between her index finger and thumb.
Toyokawa Sakiko's gaze rested on that ring. She said nothing, nor did she look away.
The surrounding noise gradually faded—the wind within the Impression Space, the breathing of the girls, the faint rustle of clothing.
Sakiko's breathing did not change.
But her eyes slowly sank into thought.
Just as Group Leader Eisen had recommended that Kocho Shinobu come to her world first to rest and relax, among all the group members' worlds, Toyokawa Sakiko's world was a special existence.
There was the Honkai: Star Rail world, where the universe had undergone countless cycles of extinction and rebirth, where even Aeons—beings that transcended the material universe and embodied philosophical concepts known as Paths—could fall.
There was also the Demon Slayer world, where humans relied only on their bodies, Breathing Styles, and blades to fight man-eating demons.
No matter how high or low their power levels were, all of these worlds shared one trait.
Aside from Toyokawa Sakiko's world, every group member's world had a complete system for becoming stronger.
Perhaps the upper limit of some systems could be seen at a glance, but the path from a powerless ordinary person to someone who had stepped onto the threshold of the supernatural was clear.
Sakiko's world was different.
The upper limit of her world was extremely high—high enough to touch the sea of humanity's collective unconscious. In theory, it could distort cognition and reshape reality.
And yet, the boundary between the supernatural world and the real world was also distinct and severe.
The two could indeed influence one another, but at least for now, without active intervention from a Persona user, the degree of that influence remained confined within a certain threshold. It would not cause any overt supernatural events in the real world.
So forget a system for becoming stronger.
Ordinary people had no awareness of supernatural power at all.
But thinking about it from another angle, perhaps it was precisely because humanity, on a subconscious level, firmly believed that supernatural powers did not exist that this vast collective cognition cast the rules of the real world, thereby creating the high wall between reality and the cognitive world.
Was it the chicken first, or the egg?
Sakiko shook her head slightly, expelling that unanswerable philosophical problem from her mind and returning her attention to the reality before her.
Her gaze focused once more on the ring.
This ring was produced through the Cursed Spirit Manipulation technique brought by Mutsumi's Potential Avatar, Geto Mutsumi.
It could be said that this technique was extraordinarily compatible with their world's system.
Capture. Cultivate. Fuse.
Even extract and forge captured entities into wearable special equipment.
This was already a complete road leading from the bottom straight to the finish line.
And that was without even trying whether Cursed Spirit Manipulation could affect Personas.
However, for a Persona user, a Persona was far too important.
To be honest, Sakiko did not dare rashly hand Icarus over to Geto Mutsumi for enhancement.
Perhaps after everything settled, after she had free time and had completely mapped out the rules, she might cautiously attempt it once or twice.
Then came the question.
After encountering this path that led straight to the endpoint, what effect would it have on Toyokawa Sakiko herself?
Sakiko's gaze gradually deepened.
Countless faces flashed through her mind.
Her father's broken, listless face.
Her grandfather's stern eyes.
The laughter from the CRYCHIC days.
And those accomplices from the Ave Mujica period.
In the end, humans were social animals. They were profoundly influenced by others.
In Sakiko's world, that social imprint was especially heavy. It could not be severed.
Setting aside sociology and psychology, the real examples were right in front of her.
Those Shadows that had formed vast Palaces because of powerful desires and obsessions had already separated completely from the flow of humanity's unconscious within the cognitive world, becoming masters of their own domains.
And yet their real bodies still had to live in this society of rules and constraints.
They still had to compromise, maneuver, and scheme.
The slightest ripple in society could crush their real selves until they could hardly breathe.
Then there were Wakaba Mutsumi and Mortis.
They too had only been able to be born through other people's expectations and cognition.
No one could exist alone, severed from society.
Not ordinary people.
Not Shadows.
Not Persona users.
Toyokawa Sakiko had indeed joined an unbelievable chat group. She had encountered other worlds and witnessed the vastness of existence.
But because of the rule isolating power between worlds, she was still able to keep her own world as her foundation. She could remain the protagonist of her own life, rather than becoming a dependent of some stronger world or group member.
The life experience carved into her bones over the past decade or more had given Toyokawa Sakiko an ideal—or rather, an obsession—that was very simple and very pure.
She wanted to make music.
She wanted to play in a band.
She wanted to stand onstage and let more people hear her voice.
And she wanted her family—her ruined father, drunk and collapsed in that shabby apartment; her strict and stubborn grandfather—to live better, to return to the proper track.
That was the anchor of her life.
As for how strong she personally became, that had never truly been Toyokawa Sakiko's main goal.
In the end, the society she had grown up in was an utterly ordinary one.
In such a stable, mundane atmosphere, Sakiko had never developed a hunger for the limits of individual power. Words like "destroying the world" or "saving all of humanity" were so grand they became hollow. In the reality she used to know, where supernatural powers did not exist, they even sounded childish.
There was only one direct reason she needed to become stronger now.
She had to save her father.
That was all.
Then why not simply ask the group leader for help?
She knew that with Group Leader Eisen's strength, if she opened her mouth and asked, he could probably solve her difficulties with ease.
But she had not asked.
The reason she had not asked was simple.
Her pride.
Yes.
After joining the chat group, broadening her horizons, witnessing the vast universe and cycles of life and death, her worldview had changed completely.
The debts that once suffocated her, the so-called honor of the Toyokawa family—things that had once been as heavy as mountains—were now, in her eyes, things she could obtain at will if she simply used the cognitive world and the group's items.
If she were willing to abandon her limits, she could obtain material conditions that ordinary people would look up to at any time.
Those things no longer made Toyokawa Sakiko care.
But pride alone—she had never put that down.
Facing a group leader far stronger than herself, her pride would not allow her to ask for help.
If she relied on others to solve everything, then what would she be?
A parasite who could only wag her tail and beg in the group?
A coward who sold her pride for shortcuts whenever she encountered trouble?
Her pride, the arrogance deep within her soul, absolutely would not allow her to casually bow her head like a beggar and request help that felt like charity.
Her own problems, she would solve herself.
Her own father, she would save herself.
Toyokawa Sakiko had not changed.
She was still someone who valued pride more than life itself.
Only the things she cared about had changed.
In the past, she had cared about the same things as ordinary people. She had gritted her teeth and endured everything to preserve the dignity of a young lady.
Now, what she cared about was her soul as an independent individual.
She refused help in order to prove that she could solve the trials of fate on her own.
Then, returning to the original question:
Faced with this road called Cursed Spirit Manipulation, what should Toyokawa Sakiko do?
If she changed perspectives, if an ordinary person from any other group member's world—someone with a clear concept of power—were placed in her position now, what would they choose?
The answer was almost obvious.
They would likely make the most rational choice immediately.
Abandon the real world's social relationships.
Stop going to school and work.
Stop dealing with the complicated emotional entanglements of the band.
Stop facing coworkers' cold looks and rent.
Perhaps even completely throw away the obsessions and family members left in the rain.
Instead, they would immerse themselves in the subway Impression Space every day, sinking day after day into the depths of the cognitive world.
Find Shadows.
Absorb.
Fuse.
Enhance.
Become stronger.
Stronger.
Stronger still.
Until they became an omnipotent god of this world, then fed that power back into reality and crushed every obstacle with absolute force.
That road was far too tempting.
For a girl who had tasted the fall from the clouds into the mud, this feedback mechanism—where effort alone could grant power—was a lethal poison.
Sakiko's breathing grew shallow.
Her gaze gradually lost focus.
Some bewitching whisper echoed softly in the depths of her consciousness.
Give up.
Reality is too exhausting.
As long as you stay here, you will become omnipotent.
As long as she took that step, as long as she shifted her entire focus onto accumulating power, the pain of reality would never catch up to her again.
In the next instant, Sakiko's expression sharpened.
Her muscles tensed.
Every line of her face turned resolute and defined.
Toyokawa Sakiko said no.
The pale gold of her eyes seemed to ignite.
A dazzling radiance exploded from the deepest part of her pupils, flowing like molten gold.
Willpower beyond human limits erupted. In the spiritual dimension, it raised raging waves, crushing her inner greed for power with a near-violent force and pinning it down inside the prison at the bottom of her heart.
No compromise.
After that fierce inner clash, Sakiko exhaled heavily.
With that breath, the molten-gold color in her eyes rapidly receded and disappeared again.
She lifted her head. The muscles in her face softened once more, and her smile returned.
Every Persona user was a rebel against fate.
When fate had tried to crush her with suffering, she had torn off her mask, faced the darkness within, awakened her power, and resisted.
Now, if fate changed methods and tempted her with power within easy reach and a false perfection, she would resist all the same.
If Toyokawa Sakiko truly drowned herself in strength, becoming a slave to power in order to escape the pain of reality—
If she forgot why she had set out, forgot music, forgot the obsessions that had made her cry in the rain—
Would she still be Toyokawa Sakiko?
No.
That would merely be an empty shell possessed by power.
A monster called a god.
Not the girl who felt joy when she sang.
Especially in this world, where cognition could change everything, blurring the boundaries of one's self-perception was terrifying. If, from the bottom of her heart, she believed she was no longer a high school girl who needed family, but an existence that existed only to become stronger, reality might immediately warp in response.
In a world governed by the mind, anchoring the self was an extremely important matter.
Perhaps even a matter of life and death.
In Sakiko's mind, it felt as though she had just experienced a long and brutal war.
But from the others' perspective, Toyokawa Sakiko had merely stared blankly for a moment.
Then a fierce aura had erupted from her whole body.
That aura was pure and tyrannical, bringing a kind of pressure that seemed to bear directly upon the soul.
Then, in the next instant, it was withdrawn completely.
Beside her, Nagasaki Soyo's heart jolted from the sudden pressure.
Kocho Shinobu, relying on instincts honed on the edge of a blade, instantly placed a hand on the hilt of her Nichirin sword, brows faintly furrowed.
Almost at the same time, both of them asked in concern,
"Sakiko, what happened?"
Wakaba Mutsumi's fingers trembled faintly as she clenched the ring into her palm.
Rare concern appeared in those eyes that were usually as still as dead water.
"Saki… just now, you looked like you almost broke."
In that instant, the feeling coming from Sakiko had made Mutsumi feel as if she were seeing the past.
Back then, as Ave Mujica gradually slipped out of her control, as the worldview of Ave Mujica was violently severed by external force, Toyokawa Sakiko had been forcibly dragged out of Ave Mujica's illusory sense of safety and dropped back into the cold, cruel real world.
At that time, Sakiko had stood at the edge of collapse.
She had been like a porcelain sculpture riddled with cracks.
One light touch, and she would shatter into powder.
But the Sakiko just now—
That wavering sensation, that tearing feeling as if her very soul was about to split, had been even more terrifying than back then.
It carried a hollow feeling, as though the person before them was about to be erased completely and replaced by something else.
Hearing her friends' concern, Sakiko smiled and shook her head.
"Don't worry. I'm fine."
To reassure them, Sakiko then explained exactly what she had just experienced.
She spoke of the tug-of-war that had erupted in her mind.
She spoke of the impact brought by Geto Mutsumi's Cursed Spirit Manipulation.
She spoke of the temptation to abandon reality, hide in the subway, and become infinitely stronger—a temptation that had almost dragged her into the abyss.
She deliberately omitted the grander, somewhat sentimental rhetoric.
Her wording was extremely restrained.
She simply described her true state of mind, and the process by which she had suppressed it with sheer will.
After listening to Sakiko, Nagasaki Soyo and Kocho Shinobu instinctively exchanged glances.
Both of them saw confusion in the other's eyes.
In the end, something like this was far too abstract.
This confrontation on the level of cognition and will that Sakiko described—for people who had not awakened a Persona and had never felt a spiritual power acting directly upon the depths of the unconscious—was like describing a sunset that set the whole sky aflame to someone born blind.
They had never stepped into that domain.
They had never personally felt those distorted desires.
So they could not understand how that invisible power could deconstruct a person's self from within.
To them, it might sound like only a brief daydream, or perhaps an unusually intense spiral of thought.
They had no way of knowing how dangerous Sakiko's condition had just been.
It was not physical damage.
It was not poison.
It was a desperate situation where the slightest deviation in thought could cause her self-cognition to collapse completely.
In the world of Persona users, spiritual death meant the total erasure of one's existence.
Sakiko looked at Soyo and Shinobu's confused expressions and was not surprised.
Some things could only be understood by those who had stood at the edge of the cliff and looked down into the abyss.
This was not the first time Toyokawa Sakiko had encountered something like this.
Her thoughts inevitably drifted back to the past.
The last time she had faced such a desperate collapse of both spirit and reality was when Mujica announced its dissolution and she lost everything.
That day, her grandfather had come to find her and demanded that she stop fooling around and obediently return to the family.
If, back then, she had not endured the first wave of spiritual impact with the chat group's Will Glasses—
If she had not burst forth with rebellious will beyond human limits and awakened her own Persona—
What would Toyokawa Sakiko have become afterward?
Sakiko could imagine the scene.
The girl whose spine had been crushed would obediently follow her grandfather's arrangements, return to that cold mansion, and walk through a life whose ending could be seen from the beginning.
As for everything that had happened in the past—the sweat she shed while working, the joyous bonds from CRYCHIC, the struggle and brilliance of Ave Mujica—
She would choose to avoid and deny all of it.
She would build a high wall, cutting away all that shining music, all those dreams and feelings.
Again and again, she would hypnotize herself:
None of that ever happened.
It was just an absurd, unrealistic dream.
That would no longer be Toyokawa Sakiko.
It would only be a doll named Toyokawa Sakiko.
The real her would have been killed the instant she compromised.
And what had happened just now was no different in essence.
That day, the hardships of reality had forced her to abandon herself.
Today, the temptation of absolute power and freedom from worldly troubles had lured her to abandon herself.
If, in that moment, she had failed to withstand the temptation—
If she had allowed even the slightest looseness into her heart—
Then the current her might already have made her decision.
She might have taken Wakaba Mutsumi by the hand and plunged headlong into the depths of the subway Impression Space without ever looking back.
They would have stayed forever in the dark tunnels, far from sunlight and crowds, endlessly subduing Shadows, intoxicated by the pleasure of their rapidly rising power.
They would have lived shamelessly, throwing all of the past behind them.
The monster left behind in the subway depths might have possessed terrifying strength.
It might still have worn Toyokawa Sakiko's face and name.
It might even have retained her memories.
But it absolutely would not have been the Toyokawa Sakiko standing here now.
It would have been a Shadow lost inside power.
After hearing Sakiko dissect the situation in such detail, Nagasaki Soyo inhaled sharply, fear flashing through her eyes.
She had never imagined that, within that brief silence, a crisis had taken place—one that might have erased Sakiko's existence and stolen away her soul.
Kocho Shinobu stood beside them, thoughtful, though no one knew what she was thinking.
"Don't be so tense."
Sakiko's tone was light. She smiled casually and continued,
"Still… I suppose you could call it a blessing in disguise."
"After being washed through by that impact just now, my Persona broke through one of its shackles."
Join here to read ahead.
In Star Rail, Ultra-Beast Armored — Have I Caught "Equilibrium"? l (Chapter 80)
Uma Musume, But I Only Have Five Years Left to Live (Chapter 178)
Zenless Zone Zero: I'm a Doctor, Not a Bangboo (Chapter 165)
Ben Tennyson Wants to Join the Justice League ( 126 )
TYPE-MOON: Redemption Beginning with the Holy Grail War (Chapter110)
Yu-Gi-Oh! — Transmigrated into the White Dragon Girl (Chapter220)
"Is this chat group even serious?" (Chapter125)
I, Lord Ravager, Utterly Loyal! (This matter is completely finished.)
Can Playing Games Save the World? 65
Crossover Anime Multiverse: The Demon Hunter of an Unnatural World 77
From Junkman to Wasteland 66
Weekly Refresh of Overpowered 31
I'm Grinding Proficiency Like 46
From Kiana, Lord Ravager, Onwa 220
Honkai: Is This Still the Prev 42
Elf: My Starter Pokémon Is Inc 65
Warhammer: My Primarch Is Remi 185
From Demon Slayer to Grand Ass Volume2/20
The Way the Umamusume Look at 68
Uma Musume, but My Cheat Power 248
Naruto: Weaving the Future, Be 65
Zenless Zone Zero, but Kamen R 76
Multiverse Crossover: The Perf 66
My Cyberpsycho Girlfriend 65
Uma Musume: The Dark Trainer 230
Uma Musume: A Calamity Born fr 154
I, a Reincarnation-Loop Player Volume4/40
The Violent Girl Group Is Beat 125
Uma Musume: The Horse Girl Who 67
Uma Musume: From Beginner 145
Becoming a Horse Girl, I Will 85
Uma Musume: I Want All 120
I Can Copy Unique Skills 115
Summoning an Evil God, but the 75
Supernatural Multiverse 110
My Harem Is Indescribable 100
Jujutsu Kaisen: Heroic Spirit 105
"I'm just a Valkyrie passing through." 67
Uma Musume: Today Is Another Romantic Battlefield 105
Still playing traditional Honk 80
The Most Filial Son Under Heav 85
What Should I Do After Switchi - Volume2/3
Reincarnated as a Demon, Skill 78
Hell-Difficulty Dungeon? 55
Transmigrated as Sukuna 80
Checking In in Demon Slayer 85
The Reincarnating Trainer of Tracen Academy 100
I Refuse to Become a Heroic 85
My Best Friend Into a Slime? 80
A Saiyan Stands Above Marvel 90
What Do You Mean by Using a Lab Mod to Be the Hero? 75
Tanya Starts from Re:Zero 85
Why did they assign me to Uma 75
MYGO Beauties 70
DanMachi: Emiya the Giant Hero 75
The Gacha Merchant Who Started 80
Honkai's Otherworld? Wait—Who Are You People?! 100
Emiya Shirou, Determined to Slay Every Curse and Evil Spirit 60
The Uma Musume Who Became 60
I'm Definitely Not the King of 80
After Maxing Out Every Class 80
Naruto: I'm Konoha's Local Men 44
Honkai: World Modulation Mode 57
I, the Elden Sword Saint 50
Dio Brando Is Challenging FGO 43
No One Knows Pokémon Better 50
I, Sakazuki, Won't Go Down Tha 45
From Trilobites to Titans 45
Chainsaw Man: Contracted with 55
DanMachi: My Party Members Are 60
An Anime Heroine Darkened 55
My patreon : patreon.com/queen_sin
My patreon : patreon.com/queen_sin