Toyokawa Sakiko let out a long sigh and rubbed at her throbbing temples, but it did nothing to ease the irritation gnawing at her chest.
In her world, the core logic was brutally simple: cognition decides everything.
If enough people believed a rule was real, that rule could be burned into the world's "source code." And once that happened, you got phenomena that simply refused to play by common sense.
Just like the Shadows in the subway's cognitive space—pathetically weak on paper, yet thanks to collective belief, some of them were outright immune to certain attribute damage. The truly outrageous ones could even reflect an attribute back at the attacker.
Even now, days later, Sakiko still wanted to curse out whoever had ever fed the world that kind of idea.
Which idiot raised people to believe something this stupid?!
And now she was face-to-face with another one of those rule-born monstrosities.
In the northeast, Gojo Saki stood before the opera house's enormous curtain, her Six Eyes fixed on the façade with a cold, clinical stare.
"Blue."
A hyper-compressed azure sphere formed instantly at the spawn point, crushing a newly emerged doll before it could even take a step.
"Red."
She swung her hand, and a violent scarlet repulsion swept the entrance. Another wave of dolls was blown apart and erased on the spot.
She had turned the opera house's doorway into a meat grinder.
And yet—every ounce of that overwhelming power died the moment it touched the opera house itself.
Gojo Saki had tested it again and again. Pure energy bombardment, physical destruction, brute-force output—everything that struck the opera house's metal exterior or the curtain simply vanished like mud sinking into the sea.
Not even a ripple.
It was as if there were a wall of sighs between her and the building.
Not a wall made of matter.
A wall made of absolute rules.
Under its definition, the opera house was indestructible—and unenterable.
No matter how high your numbers were, in front of a rule-type object like this, you were simply refused.
On the other end of the city—before that cathedral of sanctity and wrongness—Sukuna had already unfolded her domain: Malevolent Shrine.
Dolls were still "growing" from the cathedral's doors, windows, even its walls—
Only to be slaughtered the instant they appeared.
The air screamed with a continuous, scalp-prickling whine as countless invisible slashes shredded everything inside the domain's radius.
But the cathedral itself?
Nothing.
Those supreme cuts that had flattened the steel forest like grass left zero mark on the stone walls, stained glass, or bronze doors.
Not even a scratch.
"Tch… rules."
Through the shared livestream, Sakiko felt Sukuna's situation too, and clicked her tongue in disgust.
Still—maybe because Gojo Saki and Sukuna had been demolishing the city so violently for so long, something finally shifted.
The opera house's spawn point was being suppressed nonstop. The cathedral's surroundings were being reduced to powder again and again. That scale of destruction seemed to cross some threshold—enough to shake the Palace's deeper foundations.
Even the omnipresent grand BGM trembled.
The tempo hiccupped—just for a fraction of a beat—like a record skipping.
And then, as if a seam in cognition had been pried open, the world developed an indescribable sense of wrongness.
Far away from both battlefronts, Flame Pillar Shinobu continued to move through the streets with light, rhythmic steps.
She felt something had changed… and yet nothing had.
The metal-and-wood roads were still there. The dolls still wandered their routes in silence.
But she had the unmistakable sensation that she'd been overlooking something vital.
She stopped abruptly, brows knitting.
Then she took a few steps back and stared into the shadowed corner she'd just passed.
There, tucked in the darkness, lay a cucumber.
It was a miserable-looking thing—dark green skin, limp and lifeless. One end had shriveled and collapsed inward, and the middle had a crude, awkward bend that made it look warped.
If you put that cucumber in a market stall, nobody would choose it.
But inside Wakaba Mutsumi's Palace, its existence was so out of place it was practically glaring.
Everywhere you looked in this mechanical city was either forged metal, precisely cut wood, or manmade fabric-and-cotton dolls.
Everything reeked of deliberate construction.
And yet here was this ugly, limp cucumber—the only natural object in the entire Palace.
Flame Pillar Shinobu frowned harder, unsettled.
When did this cucumber appear? Why did I clearly see it… and yet completely ignore it?
It felt deeply wrong—like her brain had been forced to accept an instruction: cucumbers do not exist.
As her gaze swept over it earlier, her mind had automatically filtered it out as meaningless background.
She remained still and replayed every detail since entering the Palace.
Around her, the dolls continued to wander. Because she was moving on beat and showing no hostility, they ignored her completely, continuing their endless patrols.
In the distance, Gojo Saki's explosions and Sukuna's shredding domain roared faintly through the city.
Memory rewound at high speed…
And a chilling truth surfaced.
These cucumbers had been there the whole time.
From the moment she entered, she'd passed them—at street corners, beside metal benches, beneath gear piles. They'd been in her line of sight.
But until now, her awareness had been blinded. She'd looked straight at them and still treated them as nonexistent—auto-blocked, erased by cognition.
Only now, with the Palace under sustained high-intensity assault, a tiny fissure had appeared in the cognitive layer—
And that fissure finally allowed her to notice.
Then what do these cucumbers represent?
She crouched and gently touched the shriveled skin with her fingertips.
Then she followed the vine sprouting from the cucumber's stem.
The vine snaked along the street edge, curling deeper into the city—like an arrow pointing the way.
Without hesitation, she stood and resumed her rhythm-stepped motion, following the vine's direction to trace it back to its source.
Even if it was a trap, so what?
A Possibility Double could be resummoned at any time.
Tracking wasn't complicated, but the vine's path wasn't always obvious. Sometimes it vanished beneath metal pipes; sometimes it wound through heaps of discarded gears and scrap. It demanded patience, careful eyes, a willingness to search.
Soon, she reached the end.
The vine didn't lead to a grand building or a dramatic gateway.
It simply stopped—abruptly—at the roadside.
Her heart sank for a heartbeat, but she didn't give up.
She searched the surrounding area centered on that break point.
And within a few steps, she found it.
In another shadowed corner lay a second cucumber—similar shape, similarly limp—its own vine extending in a new direction.
Shinobu didn't pause. She pivoted immediately and followed the new vine.
So it went, one cucumber after another, weaving her through the mechanical city like a breadcrumb trail.
At last, she stopped before an utterly unremarkable house.
It looked no different from the buildings lining the street—square silhouette, metal framework set with dark wooden panels, windows sealed with thick metal plates that blocked any view inside.
But the vine that guided her here was unmistakable.
It squeezed out from beneath the door through a narrow gap.
So this was the destination.
Shinobu inhaled once, then pressed her hand to the metal door and pushed.
The hinges gave a faint creak, and the interior opened before her.
The space inside wasn't large, but it was alive with something that had no right to exist in this city: a sense of ordinary life.
The first thing she saw was a small, almost shabby vegetable patch.
Soft soil covered the ground. A few simple trellises made from sticks and rope stood crookedly, and cucumber vines crawled up them.
Here and there hung cucumbers of different shapes—some plump, others bent or lumpy—while the air carried a clean scent of dirt and plants.
The instant Shinobu stepped fully inside, the metal door behind her clicked shut on its own.
And with that closing sound, it felt as though the outside world had been severed.
A strange calm spread through her chest, loosening knots she didn't realize she'd been carrying.
It wasn't just "quiet."
It was safety—a deep, instinctive certainty that no harm could reach her here, that all malice and threat were barred outside that door.
The distant chaos—Gojo Saki's explosions, Sukuna's slicing shriek—fell away as if trapped in another time.
More than that, the grand BGM that had haunted her consciousness since entering the Palace stopped completely the moment the door closed.
Total silence.
In this tiny garden room, she could hear only her own heartbeat.
"So this is the rule-protected safe room inside the Palace," Shinobu murmured, truly letting her guard down for the first time.
She walked slowly through the cramped space.
Besides the cucumber trellises, her eyes soon caught on something else:
A corkboard mounted on the wall, old enough that its edges had darkened. Several photographs were pinned to it with colorful thumbtacks, their corners curled, their surfaces faintly yellowed.
The colors had faded, but the moments inside them had been preserved.
Two little girls—
Toyokawa Sakiko and Wakaba Mutsumi.
In the photos, young Sakiko's smile was bright as summer noon, eyes curved into crescents, teeth flashing.
And Mutsumi stood half a step behind her, quiet, plain dress, gaze timid and uncertain.
Yet if you looked carefully, you could see it—
The faintest hint of a smile on Mutsumi's lips.
In the void outside, Sakiko watched through livestream.
The moment those sealed memories projected into her mind, a fierce ache surged up into her throat.
Her eyes burned, her vision blurring, and she thought:
For Mutsumi… are my memories the safest part of her entire life?
So Mutsumi had kept these moments—moments Sakiko herself had nearly forgotten—treasured and intact.
Those childhood days hadn't drifted away like smoke.
They'd become the Palace's strongest shelter, a harbor against the storm.
But alongside the warmth, Sakiko was instantly drowned by rage and unwillingness.
Rage at herself—for taking out her Ave Mujica stress on Mutsumi, for crushing her under pressure, for "breathing" at her like she was some burden.
That was what had driven Mutsumi to lock herself away in sleep, handing her body to Mortis.
And the unwillingness was worse:
They still couldn't do anything about the Palace's key structures—the opera house and the cathedral.
They had no way in.
Meanwhile, Soyo stared at the wall of photos through Shinobu's shared feed.
"So Saki and Mutsumi… really were close when they were little," Soyo whispered, almost dazed.
Even in the photos, compared to the energetic Sakiko, Mutsumi was still quiet, still subdued—
But compared to the present, where Mortis had completely sealed her away?
The girl in these photos was already so much better.
Then Soyo's gaze dropped to the cucumbers in the safe room's garden.
She'd never imagined cucumbers could matter so much to Mutsumi.
The safe room's two symbols were painfully clear:
One was warmth—memories Sakiko had given her.
The other was the cucumbers Mutsumi had grown with her own hands.
Old memories crashed back into Soyo like a wave.
She remembered Mutsumi once placing a carefully picked cucumber—the best-looking one—backstage during her performance.
And Soyo, back then… had pushed it back with cold hands.
Because Mutsumi had calmly said MyGO!!!!!'s performance was "pretty good," Soyo convinced herself Mutsumi didn't care about CRYCHIC at all.
So she returned the gift with a flat, almost disgusted dismissal.
"I don't need this anymore."
The words—and the gift she'd handed back untouched—now stabbed into her chest like a blade.
Looking back…
Maybe that had been Mutsumi's plea for help.
If Soyo had dropped her prejudice and simply said thank you—accepted it—
If she hadn't kept cornering Mutsumi for information about Sakiko, hadn't selfishly used her as a messenger between herself and Sakiko—
Would things really have collapsed into this?
Guilt swallowed her whole.
Staring at the cucumber vines, Soyo finally understood:
The harm she'd done to Mutsumi might not be any less than Sakiko's.
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 155)
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 (Chapter200)
"Is this chat group even serious?" (Chapter110)
I, Lord Ravager, Utterly Loyal! (Chapter230)
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 200
Honkai: Is This Still the Prev 42
Elf: My Starter Pokémon Is Inc 65
Warhammer: My Primarch Is Remi 180
From Demon Slayer to Grand Ass Volume2/5
The Way the Umamusume Look at 68
Uma Musume, but My Cheat Power 230
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 220
Uma Musume: A Calamity Born fr 154
I, a Reincarnation-Loop Player Volume4/30
The Violent Girl Group Is Beat 120
Uma Musume: The Horse Girl Who 67
Uma Musume: From Beginner 135
Becoming a Horse Girl, I Will 85
Uma Musume: I Want All 110
I Can Copy Unique Skills 100
Summoning an Evil God, but the 70
Supernatural Multiverse 100
My Harem Is Indescribable 90
Jujutsu Kaisen: Heroic Spirit 95
"I'm just a Valkyrie passing through." 68
Uma Musume: Today Is Another Romantic Battlefield 105
Still playing traditional Honk 69
The Most Filial Son Under Heav 80
What Should I Do After Switchi - Volume2/3
Reincarnated as a Demon, Skill 70
Hell-Difficulty Dungeon? 55
Transmigrated as Sukuna 75
Checking In in Demon Slayer 80
The Reincarnating Trainer of Tracen Academy 85
I Refuse to Become a Heroic 70
My Best Friend Into a Slime? 65
A Saiyan Stands Above Marvel 70
What Do You Mean by Using a Lab Mod to Be the Hero? 70
Tanya Starts from Re:Zero 65
Why did they assign me to Uma 65
MYGO Beauties 65
DanMachi: Emiya the Giant Hero 55
The Gacha Merchant Who Started 65
Honkai's Otherworld? Wait—Who Are You People?! 45
Emiya Shirou, Determined to Slay Every Curse and Evil Spirit 45
The Uma Musume Who Became 40
I'm Definitely Not the King of 45
After Maxing Out Every Class 45
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