Best enjoyed with the music: /gi-uIpSf9yQ


Chapter 6 - 霊人の休日 ~ Ghostly Person's Holiday

In the following months, Boundaries became my obsession. In the end, I managed to convince my peers of them, not by being a firebrand rubbing against science, but by presenting it in a way that they themselves wanted Boundaries to be true. It wasn't very long after until Boundaries were being worked into nearly every facet of physics, and then soon enough I was heading the development of the first machine to utilize Boundary Mechanics.

The Probability Spacetime Hyper Vessel. As things would turn out, Boundaries would be a solution to many of the final problems of physics. We called it something akin to "shutting the eyes of the world so they can't see our violations." After all, if the universe can't observe you going faster than light, it can't make you obey its laws. No, within the Hyper Vessel, its captain was the sole observer of his own universe.

The apprehension I felt when entering the machine was like none I had felt before. Both, my life and career could've ended at the exact moment of ignition. But nonetheless, I was determined to see the whole venture through. I linked into the non-invasive brain interface control system, and lost consciousness the moment I started the machine.

I have no recollection of what happened in the Hyper Vessel after I started it, but I awoke to find that it was still intact, albeit without power. I tried the sound powered intercom, but nothing. The Hyper Vessel had no windows, so I had no idea what the outside looked like. At first I was scared to open the manual hatch, as if I were in a vacuum, the depressurization would surely have killed me. But for some reason, I felt compelled to open it, as if something was calling me on the other side. So I did, and my eyes were graced with a scene of a warm and gentle flower field. And then I saw someone, in that field standing with their back toward me, as if having waited a while for me to exit the Hyper Vessel. Her golden hair flowed with the breeze as she turned to see me. She seemed familiar, somehow.

"Wonderful, isn't it?" she said. "How wonderful it is when one is out of place and out of time!"

"I'm afraid I don't exactly understand what you mean, miss," I said. "Where am I, anyway?"

"Oh, but you surely do! How else would you be here, if you didn't understand?"

She took my hand and led me up a hill. She was surprisingly strong, despite appearing to be rather thin and dainty.

"The people who live in this world, and the people who come to live in it too, are all people who are out of place and out of time as well," she said as we sat on the top of the hill looking over the pristine landscape before us. "But not like you and me, you see. When we forget them, so too does the universe turn them a blind eye. As water flows from high to low, they flow from the outside to here."

"So then this is some sort of mirror world?"

"No, just a pocket of dark space, and of dark mind."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I see that in your time, scientists were still willfully ignorant of the truth. Think if someone were to observe all this from the outside. Would they even understand what they were seeing? You might believe you have created a perfect scientific method of manipulating Boundaries, but the only people with the entire set of knowledge required to completely understand it are us. To anyone else, they're something non-understandable, you see."

"How could that be? I've published so many peer-reviewed papers, and put out so much of the theory, it'd be impossible for someone not to understand."

"But how many will have taken the journey you have to get here? And not just here physically, but the mental journey? Have they asked the same questions, made the same connections? Of course not. In the end, Boundaries are only yours and mine. To all else, they are simply magic. Too convenient to have been real, too unexplainable to have been scientific, and you, so confident in them that you died trying to prove them."

"Dead? But I'm here, so I'm alive right?"

"Yours is a death of factuality. The logical boundary that separates this place from the Outside World is the Boundary of Fact and Fiction. And since you hold the true nature of Boundaries, that nature too has crossed from fact to fiction."

"Well, if I crossed it once, then I should be able to cross it again. I just have to restore power to the Hyper Vessel and I'll be out of here."

"I myself could bring you back," proving her point, she opened a gap in the boundary with a gesture. It was then that I realized who was talking in front of me.

"But think about what that would mean for the world. With your return would be the return of magic. And indeed you would not return to the scientific world you knew, but a wholly unrecognizable human civilization of magic, a civilization of superstition and faith as truth. Could you survive in that? Could you live with that choice?"

I had no immediate answer. Before me lie the exit from this strange place I found myself in, but I couldn't move myself to go back. It was then I realized the most ultimate truth of them all: reality is only half truth, the other illusion. No matter what I chose, I would keep that truth with me, and with me I would bring the magic of Boundaries.

"I think," I said.

"I think I'll be fine no matter what truth I find before me!"


Man, next time I do a story I should actually decide whether or not it's just going to be a story or an album. Scope creep is real, and can add over an entire year onto a project's production time lol.

I guess it kind of goes without saying that this is my first (kind of?) published writing project, at least when it comes to Touhou. That said I can't really say I'm a newcomer either. The entire basis of this story came from that whole bird speech in the second chapter. That's a real thing! I had seen it by chance in my YouTube feed one day and thought hmm, that's a lot like Maribel's ability. After a bunch of research, consulting with people who know way more about all this than I do, and writing, we're finally here.

Honestly, I feel like this ending is kind of a mess. I set a limit to how long this story was going to be from the start, and it wasn't a very long limit so I suppose it was going to be unavoidable. Besides, it is still actually how I planned the ending to be, so it's a kind of controlled mess. As for why I would plan it out that way, I didn't want this to end up as a story that goes on indefinitely and then gets abandoned, although I don't think this story's premise could really go on much longer than what we have. That's also why this author's commentary is here, since I didn't want people who would be reading the story from start to finish to be interrupted by all of my thoughts on the story lol.

It's also kind of a bummer that the whole Q&A thing didn't really go through, but there's always next story to try it again. And there will be a next story, although that will have to come when it comes.

Thank you, everyone who has read Quantum of Magic to its end, and have a happy holiday season!