Echoes of the White Cell

The darkness wasn't black; it was... nothing.

(Where...?)

Shija found himself suspended in a state of fuzzy consciousness, a formless presence floating in a place his mind couldn't categorize.

(What is... this?)

He had no body, no voice; he couldn't even feel the weight of his own thoughts.

(It’s a... strange sensation...)

It was like being a whisper in the middle of a hurricane of emptiness.

(The last thing I remember is...)

His thoughts were shards of glass breaking in slow motion.

(¡¡YUMEMARU!!)

He tried to scream, but there was no throat to vibrate; he tried to move, but there was no space to move into.

(¡What is happening now?!)

He felt like he was nothing and everything at once: a speck of cosmic dust imbued with an infinite perception that overwhelmed him completely.

(No... I must stay calm... steady...)

Little by little, the "nothingness" began to take on a haunting shape.

(First, I must understand what’s going on.)

The environment stabilized into a white room, polished and terrifyingly aseptic. Walls reinforced with light-absorbing materials, fluorescent lights buzzing at an unnatural frequency, and reinforced glass suggesting constant surveillance.

(This place...)

It looked like a high-security containment cell; a place designed not to protect whoever was inside, but to contain "something" within... or rather, "someone."

(Why am I here? Is this a dream? Yumemaru... the pain... the plaza... it feels so far away...)

Shija's confusion grew as time passed, threatening to dissolve his consciousness back into the void, until a sound tore through the sterility of the silence.

"Ji... ji-ji-ji! Hee-hee...! AJA-JA-JA-JA!"

It was a laugh; however, it wasn't a happy one. It was a broken, hoarse laughter devoid of vitality; a sound that dripped with pain and seemed to be dragged through a throat full of scars.

(¡¿?!)

At that moment, Shija noticed that despite the agony it denoted, the tone was feminine. He immediately focused his "presence" and saw her.

"The King watches! The King laughs! Put more red on the cake, ji-ji!"

In a corner of the aseptic room, a girl rocked back and forth with rhythmic violence. She was wrapped almost entirely in yellowish, grimy bandages; a dirty patch covered her right eye and her hair—a cascade of neglected tangles—crawled across the white floor like a dead creature.

(¡¡¡SCRATCH... SCRATCH... SCRATCH!!!)

The girl wouldn't stop laughing as her hands sank into the wall. Her fingers, bandaged and soaked in the characteristic fresh, sticky red of blood, dug into the surface, clawing at the walls with inhuman strength.

"It’s not there! Ji-ji! The wall doesn’t exist, the white is a lie!"

Her nails continued to bleed, but she used that blood to trace erratic lines across the icy whiteness of the room.

"If I draw it in red, maybe it’ll become real! But nothing is real! I’m not real, you’re not real! Everything is a crystal dream drawn by someone else that is breaking! JA-JA-JA!"

The girl screamed with a hoarse voice, her head tilted at an unnatural angle in a sickly ecstasy.

(¡¡¡THUD... THUD... THUD!!!)

Suddenly, she ceased her movements and began slamming her forehead against the wall with a force that would have killed a normal human.

(¡¡¡THUD... THUD...!!)

As a result, the sound of her skull colliding with the aseptic material was dry and rhythmic.

"Out! Get out of my head, you silly thought! The void is better!"

She babbled between laughter and blows, her gaze lost in a dimension only she could see.

"Look how I paint the air! Red is the only color that doesn't lie because it tastes like metal! Ji-ji-ja! Nothing exists, only the hunger of the line that never ends!"

Her words were a stream of shattered consciousness, a maniacal energy reminiscent of a broken doll whose mechanism had been forced to collapse and beyond.

(¡¡¡THUD... THUD... THUD...!!!)

The rhythmic sound of the girl's skull against the wall seemed to be the only real thing in that white void, until a second voice—weak and laden with eternal fatigue—filtered through the air.

"Stop... sister... please..."

The effect was instantaneous.

"...."

The banging stopped.

"Sister...?"

The girl in bandages froze, her forehead pressed against the red-stained wall and her fingers still buried in the cracks.

"........"

The silence that followed was so dense that Shija felt his own consciousness vibrate from the tension.

(Sister...? There’s... there’s someone else suffering here...)

Upon reaching that conclusion, Shija shifted his attention to the other side of the room, where the shadows seemed to thicken.

"Do you still remember who you are?"

There, sitting against the wall in absolute stillness, was a boy.

(He looks the same...)

His appearance was a mirror reflection of the girl's pain, but with a stillness that was even more terrifying.

(No... It's worse...)

He was covered in as many yellowish and dirty bandages as she was, wrapping his torso and arms like a shroud. However, his condition was much more precarious: he was missing a leg, and the stump was covered by layers of cloth hardened by old blood.

(Those eyes... They’re empty)

His gaze was vacant, unfocused, as if his eyes were two glass pits that no longer reflected the light of that world.

(¡¡¡CLINK... CLANK!!!)

It was then that Shija, while evaluating them, noticed the heavy metallic sound that echoed when the boy made a slight gesture to move.

"Don't paint anymore..."

A thick, rusted chain circled the ankle of his only leg, firmly anchoring him to a bolt in the reinforced wall.

"The wall... isn't going to open... even if you use all the red..."

He was trapped, mutilated, and reduced to a purely vegetative existence; yet, he still possessed enough strength to try and stop his sister's madness.

"He... h-h..."

In response, the girl in bandages let out a small whimper, a mix of a sob and a choked laugh, but she did not hit herself again.

(They are chained... Even here, where nothing seems real, pain is the only thing keeping them together... No... there’s something else.)

Witnessing the scene with growing horror, Shija realized that those two presences were victims.

"Hey~"

At that moment, the girl in bandages slowly pulled away from the wall, but her body did not move in a human way.

"What was my name?"

She twisted her torso while her feet remained still; her head tilted back at an unnatural angle, cracking, until her healthy eye locked onto the chained figure of the boy, with a twisted smile etched onto her face.

"Have you even forgotten that...?"

In response, the boy looked up with a supreme effort. His eyes, pits of infinite sadness, blurred upon seeing the physical and mental distortion of his sister, letting out a heavy sigh from his cracked lips.

"I think..."

But instead of answering, the girl let out a short giggle and fell to the floor erratically.

"I think my name was Jennifer."

She crawled a bit and lay down on the icy surface, ignoring the blood that continued to stain the bandages on her fingers as she looked at the white ceiling, kicking her bare feet in the air.

"That’s not your name."

However, the boy shook his head from side to side; a slow movement full of a bitterness that Shija could feel vibrating throughout the white space, refuting the memory that probably didn't even belong to her.

"That's not what you're called."

Hearing the answer, the girl's expression changed instantly.

"And you?"

Her smile vanished, replaced by a vacant and icy gaze as she turned slightly toward him from the floor.

"What was your name, brother?"

The question was like an ice dagger thrown into the middle of the cell.

"....."

"....."

Silence returned to the room, heavier than before.

"I don't know."

Finally, the boy looked down at the chain imprisoning his only ankle, observing the rusted metal as if searching for the answer in the links.

"I just... don't remember."

After what felt like an eternity, he simply closed his eyes and let his head drop against the wall.

(.....)

Witnessing the scene from his ethereal and helpless state, Shija felt emotions he didn't even understand how to process, remaining silent even in his thoughts.

"Maybe..."

The girl, still lying on the floor with the blood from her fingers tracing abstract puddles on the clinical shine of the floor, let her forced smile return in the midst of the heavy silence.

"Maybe we never had names, brother."

It was a mechanical grimace; a distortion of muscles that didn't reach her healthy eye.

"Maybe we were born like this, made of threads and bandages, waiting for someone to paint a number on our foreheads. Wouldn't that be fun? Ji-ji! Nothing to regret if we were never anyone."

She laughed while stretching a bandaged hand toward the ceiling, as if trying to catch the light from the fluorescents.

"No..."

The boy did not laugh. His gaze, fixed on the stump of his lost leg, became even more somber.

"We had them. I remember... I remember she called us."

The mention of "never having been anyone" seemed to trigger a painful mechanism in his fractured memory.

"She?"

In reaction, the girl stopped moving her feet.

"Who was she?"

Her head twisted again with that unnatural crack, pinning her vibrating pupil on him as she asked with a piercing curiosity.

"I think... it was grandmother."

The boy answered, closing his eyes tightly, as if trying to hold onto an image that was dissolving between his fingers.

"Wait... No... It wasn't her... The one who said it was... Who was it?"

Unfortunately, the sentence hung suspended like an open wound that couldn't be closed, despite the boy's desperate attempts to remember.

(¡CLINK-CLANK!)

The boy grit his teeth, and the chain on his ankle let out a metallic groan as his body trembled from the effort of remembering the forbidden, bringing silence back to the place once more.

"Hey..."

The girl remained motionless for a long time, watching as her brother sank back into that vegetative mutism, until she asked:

"Do you believe in reincarnation?"

Then, with a fluid movement that defied gravity, she propped herself up halfway on her elbows and launched a question that made even Shija's fuzzy consciousness shudder.

(¡Is that the question?!)

The question about reincarnation hung in the air, vibrating like a dissonant note.

(¡¡¡CRASH-SHATTER!!!)

That vibration was lost when, before the boy could answer, a sharp and crystalline sound tore through the reality of the white room.

(¡WHAT IS THIS?!)

The whiteness of the walls cracked like old porcelain and, in a blink, everything vanished into absolute blackness.

"No, wait!"

Shija's eyes snapped open. Air entered his lungs like bursts of fire, and the pain in his battered body returned with overwhelming force.

"¡¡¿?!!"

But before he could even try to move, terror froze his blood.

(¡¡¡KRA-TAK-TAK-TAK-TAK-TAK-TAK-TAK!!!)

Before his eyes, in the gloom, rose the figure of a giant centipede of titanic proportions, its segmented armor glowing with a dark crimson hue.

(¡¡¡SKREEEEEEEE-CHHHH!!!)

Its body rose several meters above the ground, waving in a serpentine motion while its legs, sharp as scythes, scratched the stone, producing a constant metallic echo.

"¡¡!!"

Shija, still weak and lying on the ground, understood in that instant that his encounter with death had not ended; rather, it was just changing form.