"Seals are a wide favorite of diviners for a reason. It is not used because of something you are unable to kill, but it is because you shouldn't."

-Zhou Bai, from the section of his contributions in the Book of Changes

東方千樓倒 (Touhou Chirodou) ~ Madness Inducing Blossom and Paper

Chapter 1 – The Melancholic Writer from the Consumerist Era

Have you ever find yourself at a situation where it's so grueling, so torturous that it hurts to even just live? I'm sure you have, it could vary from a very literal situation of being the unfortunate victim, or purely as a hyperbole. For me, it's the latter.

General Calculus II. My second college course for mathematics, and in my opinion, costly, complex, and boring.

Dull.

"Here equation. Find X. Use solution. Too late. Here answer. Next slide." That pretty much summed up the entire lesson. I sighed and closed my laptop. The Word processor on it was blank, not because I did not take the all mighty important notes from the impatient professor, but it's that there was little to none inspirations I had during the last forty-something minutes.

I never was, and perhaps never will, be the straightforward math or science kind of guy. No, I'm more of the philosophical and romantic type. I think, not in the direction of a way to cure carcinoma, but why is there carcinoma. Is there more to carcinoma? Basically, I am that weird kid who talked with ambiguous metaphors and sometimes spoke to himself.

Being the current reincarnation of Socrates, I tend to think a lot. And often my imagination would manifest my thoughts into something intelligible. Then my hand would crave to jot down the brief, fleeting thought onto paper. After that, my brain goes through a session of "what ifs", checking and crossing out the elements I've conjured up for the idea. Basically, my own way of drafting an initial idea. To save time, I am a writer, fiction mind you, and I sometimes despaired at myself, wasting away on paper instead of joining my Facebook friends' hiking trip in this informative age.

Well fuck. Another day of going through my evening classes, evening classes that I sometime despise, and yet not a single worthy speck of inspiration came up. Inspiration for my latest magnum opus I've been working on. Ugh, great. Time to head back to my dorm. On the bright side though, as compensation, I gained a few inches of EXP to my Healthy Adolescent Character Growth bar.

My friend Bill once asked if I aimed to become a writer, an author, when I get out of college. My response? Yes, but I said it with such a tone you might think I'm depressed. Personally, I feel like the twenty-first century is one of the worst times to be a writer. Everyone had access to everything anywhere online, with my generation being too lazy to read a single paragraph due to their murdered attention spans. Oh yes, I'm the special snowflake this generation deserves. Still, looking at the other authors, it seemed like this occupation meant little as a viable career. But hey, you don't do it for the money right? I might be uncertain about my future in this day and age, but at least pursuing my dreams would be better than working as a burger-flipper at Wendy's.

What else could I do with such untameable imagination?

The hallway. Crowded like your local mall at a Black Friday, except it's for two-hundred eighty or ninety some days instead of one. Everyone moved like as if they were in a bad, unnecessary slow-mo scene, but they were just like me, the lesser evils who wished to keep the traffic moving. The real threats here are those that for some reason stops in the middle of three-hundred something people and begin to either text, talk to their friends who are doing the same, or both.

I rolled my eyes for like several laps at the sight. Those people have a special place for them in the afterlife, because of their nonexistent spatial awareness as well as their inconsiderateness toward the rest of us. Traffic jam simulator 2013.

After a Long while, by that I mean grade-A Long with a capital L, I finally got to my dorm. I threw my stuff onto my messy bed and shut the door. A nice hot shower later I took out my laptop and booted my Word document for the story I've been working on for the past few months. All right, so I wouldn't hide it: I'm a huge anime nerd. Bill suggested I should become a movie or TV director, seeing on how I loved to write fiction. Well, it's not a bad idea, but being the geek I am I was more interested on how the latest episode of this anime would play out (which, by the way, was the epitome of the high school cliché).

Well I never really took his advice to head, but I did start writing my current story. It's a fan fiction of the last anime I watched, mostly to fill up the plot holes to satisfy myself. I admit, it was kind of fun. Everyday I thought of ways to improve it. But because I didn't have any idea on how to proceed through the latest scene (and it stinked, because I was really counting on myself to think of a way to deal with the famous deus ex machina in the show), I mostly spent the rest of my afternoon editing the previous chapters/episodes.

Which was unnecessary, really. They were all perfectly polished on my first attempt, devoid of any obvious plot holes, damaged prose, and spelling errors. Heh, it's kind of weird, writing down a Japanese medium entirely in English. I'm confident that I might actually make it in there if I submit my writing in.

You see, I'm just an average guy. College student living off instant noodles and Bs. If I may have sounded so arrogant on my writing abilities, it's 'cus I just am. A more harsher individual once commented that my works were the only redeeming factor to the random nobody known as Miles Franson. Can't say I disagree with that.

Writing's had, and will always be, my life. There is a reason why everybody who read my works thinks they were phenomenal.

And the same reason of why they all had died.

Okay, I suppooooose I'm not so average after all. I'm Average, Average as in how the main characters in anime are "average" aside from their broken abilities and powers. Man, I am exactly like those guys.

There is more to my writings. I don't really know how to describe it, nor I know how exactly it works, but it seemed like whatever I write on paper, so long as they form proper sentences and convey a certain imagery, people will die from reading them. They just, die. I don't know how, but I've been taking to call this strange "ability" of mine demonic writing. Not exactly demonic in the traditional way, because I don't know how to rewrite the Necronomincon, but it was the unsettling coincidence that literally everyone who had read my physical works on paper had died that deemed it devilish. Think of it as...some weird alternation/rip-off attempt from Death Note.

A good example-and demonstration-of this ability was during my early days in the pre-K. I was six or seven or something, when one day our young, happy-go-lucky teacher Ms. Jener told us to bring something for the Show and Tell. Well, to me it was a Write and Tell, because instead of bringing my stuffed animal or valued blanket or whatever Ms. Jener expected us to bring, I, for some reason, decided to write down a favorite memory of mine on paper. It was a messy paragraph of my father riding me peacefully down the summer coast, on a bicycle.

When it was my turn for the Telling, I simply passed up my paper to Ms. Jener.

Stared. That really was what I remember about the scene. She stared at middle of the paper, not reading its contents. But she looked as if she was in a spell. She was dazed. For the duration, which I think lasted for a minute, my teacher was absorbed at the squiggly, curvy lines that resembled letters.

"Wow," she said, her mouth emphasized on the first w longer than it should, "Miles, that was the best story I've ever read. Really, the picture I see in my head seemed to be so real." She handed me back the paper, personally, and then told me of my potential as a writer and such. I dunno if it was her compliment, but ever since that day I felt something had awakened inside of me. My passion, from that moment, became writing. Perhaps I wanted to wrote just for more praises, perhaps I wrote to satisfy myself who knows.

What I do know is that I was somehow responsible for what happened to her afterwards. The next day, a new teacher walked into our classroom and told us that Ms. Jener had died from a gas explosion in her house.

It was a gut feeling. I knew it was me that killed her. So for the rest of the day, while my peers were complaining over the difficult complementary arithmetics lesson, I choked on the yet defined feeling of guilt, barely hanging onto the torturous, stomach twisting moment.