! Important: If this story reminds you of a different fanfiction you've read before, don't be surprised! Please read my Disclaimer (Chapter 1)

###

Chapter 24: Lonely Existence

He spent his days, of course, playing go. For variety, sometimes he picked up his biwa or his flute. Although there was no one for him to play go with, and no one to hear his energetic strumming or haunting notes. No matter how far he walked east, west, north, or south, he never found anyone. Just endless fields of ripened grasses and trees with painted leaves and a mountain range he could somehow never reach.

He had no way of determining the passage of time. It was always sunset in this land of eternal autumn. He knew that what he thought was a day might have very well been twenty-four hours or twenty-four weeks.

Still, he liked order in his existence as well as in his go, so he pretended to know and woke up at what seemed the proper time and went to sleep when he grew bored of games with himself.

When he slept, he dreamed. And in his dreams, he also searched and called just as in his waking hours:

Can you hear? Can you hear my voice?

No one ever answered.

So he continued on in the same pattern for what might have been a hundred days or a hundred years.

Until the night he drowned in his dream.