Exploration, shared part 2
A burning clock head comes into view. There's nothing different from the usual, but... why does it feel oddly unfamiliar?
Hm... It's not even budging.
.......
Did you not hear what I said? The door's not budging.
*yawn*
<Heathcliff... I think she's talking to you.>
... The door won't budge, yeah. What do you want me to do about it?
What an absurd question. An obstacle emerges - you and that bat of yours terminate it without any thought given to the risk involved or the tactics available. Isn't that supposed to be your day-to-day doctrine of action?
The location beyond is yet to be screened, Executive Manager. Please fall back to a defensible distance. Heathcliff shall breach the door and scout ahead.
Bloody hell, you've got some nerve telling me to put that door in! One look round and you can tell they spent a fortune on this place... What if they make us foot the bill after I've smashed it to bits?
<... It's fine. No harm in trying. Smash it.>
Huh...?
All right, you wanted it, Clock.
Heathcliff swung his bat with all his might, only to be thrown backward as if something had shoved him away.
Hmm. It seems it can't be broken by physical means, Executive Manager.
<......>
The restroom door is shut. If it can't even be broken down, there's no reason to bother with it.
Can't pass through here.
They are standing by the entrance and refusing to budge, away from everyone else. Probably just anxious because of how crowded the restroom is.
Do we... head out now?
Stacks of fabric lie toppled every which way. Where were they supposed to be taken?
There is no response.
A rotten larva. This can't possibly be used as food ingredient.
Maybe I really was a tree in a past life.
When I encountered the diagram and structure of the mind in arboreal form...
... I felt drawn toward it and concluded it to be the rendering of the soul.
But I wonder... does the soul really take the shape of a tree?
Perhaps a tree is merely one way of representing it. The mind may be too unstable to possess a fixed structure at all.
Yet, the human forms I saw the Wings shape throughout the City converge again and again upon the structure of a tree.
The blueprint for N Corp.'s Sisyphe System alone suggests as much, does it not?
Once, a child descended from a star and rained down as water.
Water that gives the mind material form. Cogito.
The experiments conducted using Cogito gave me the certainty:
The tree bears ten fruits.
The tree is divided into three domains.
And the order in which the tree is ascended carries significance.
Even if the mind does not take the form of a tree,
this method is worth attempting if the mind can be fixed into an arboreal model and interpreted through it.
Is language not the same?
We take mere sonic vibrations, devoid of meaning, and confine them within the form of language - and through it, we communicate.
I define this invisible, unstable mind as a tree.
Cogito draws like from like, taking the form that provokes the least aversion.
But what we need is not something which is drawn up, but that which blooms.
The bucket must become a seed. It must become a will that bursts forth.
The material human body and its structure are built according to a design inscribed in our very genes.
In the same manner, a blueprint bearing the diagram of the tree must be implanted within people.
... But how?
Perhaps Cogito should have taken the form of light, not water.
Because to gaze upon something means that the light has entered me.
Because to gaze upon something is to bear its seed beyond any power to resist.
If you were born again, who or what would you want to become?
I think... I'd still want to be someone with a beautiful voice.
So that everyone would pay more attention to what I say.
Humanity originated from water, and water circulates within the human body. Perhaps this is why...
The star I wished for has already been irreversibly fixed into the form of water.
So long as I continue to think, Cogito will materialize what I desire.
That means if I can stay alive... if the Cogito I create can be made to function as the stars do...
Then there is still a way. A way to heal everyone.
This work is worth it. Perhaps that is why you never asked me to explain myself.
Isn't that right, Ayin...?
I leave it here - "Project Seed of Light Draft". The only way.
You should be capable of enduring it.
Which is why... I entrust this to you.
To my beloved junior, - Carmen.
Therapy or conversation cannot heal the soul.
Measured against this schema, psychotherapy is no more than a primitive stopgap.
But now that I know the shape of the human mind, could I not diagnose and heal it?
If so, it may be possible to heal not only N Corp., where I was born, but also the terrible suffering that has enveloped the City itself.
It may be possible to heal the people of the City who are afflicted by an illness that makes them unable to know who they are in their journey toward death.
The shape of this tree is but an outcome of compiling my eclectic discoveries; I did not prescribe this form.
Just as the human body has an anatomical diagram, this tree is a diagram of the human mind.
To treat the afflicted, one must first understand the body.
Yet no one has thus far completed a visualization of the human soul - or consciousness - let alone devised the means of systematizing its structure.
No matter the manner of its inception, the moment something acquires material existence, it is without exception assigned a structure.
I concluded that this could be regarded as human fate.
This is not fate in the narrative sense. There is nothing metaphysical or grand about it - nothing more complicated than a genetic sequence.
The cells of a fish may differentiate into all kinds of forms, but ultimately, the fish cannot leave the water. Once a fish has abandoned its aquatic existence, it is no longer categorized as "fish."
Such a structure is also observed in human beings. An equivalent fate.
And by some stroke of coincidence, that structure took the shape of a tree.
The tree's name is Sephirot.