A commission from the Pantheon.
It had to be carried out somewhere no other eyes could reach.
Sirin moved through the darkness toward the city’s most secluded corners.
A robe that covered her entire body.
A little suffocating, but there was no other way to avoid unnecessary trouble.
This place was known as the Alley of the Silent.
A narrow, damp path stretched on, so cramped that even sunlight struggled to squeeze through.
The decrepit buildings on either side leaned against each other precariously, blotting out the sky.
A place like an abandoned vein of the city, where shadows ruled even at noon.
The Empire lacked the capacity to handle all its public order demands, and the inevitable result was that back alleys sprouted like mold in every city.
The more unauthorized private armaments proliferated, the wider the city’s shadows grew in proportion.
But that was none of Sirin’s concern.
If anything, it could be seen as a stroke of luck.
Sirin was a former beggar.
A beggar was a quantum-mechanical existence—everywhere and nowhere at once.
When Sirin didn’t want to be noticed, she simply wasn’t.
She pushed open the worn door of a building with practiced ease and stepped inside.
She climbed the creaking stairs, gripped the handle of the innermost room on the second floor, and heard the latch click open from within.
She’d found the right place.
The room smelled of mold and stale dust.
But that was fine.
Sirin, being a proper modern person, always wore a mask.
She coughed.
“Ugh, damn fine dust…”
Half fine.
Because Sirin’s sharpened senses picked up the smell right through the mask.
She tossed off the cumbersome robe and dropped into a creaking wooden chair.
A black shirt that clung to her body left the elegant lines of her chest on full display, and tight leather trousers showed off the long, smooth curve of her legs.
A few strands of loosely tied hair fell across her snow-white neckline, lending her a decadent air.
Sirin crossed her legs, tilted the chair back, and rocked herself idly.
The kind of pose that would’ve had donations rolling in if she were a streamer.
A little while later, slow footsteps echoed from the end of the corridor.
The owner of those footsteps flung the door open without knocking.
Sirin looked up with a bored expression, and the figure in the deeply pulled-down robe spoke.
“Show reverence, woman.”
A low voice resonated from the shadows.
“What stands before you is a proxy of the Pantheon.”
“Hmph.”
Sirin snorted.
Not a shred of reverence to be found—but the priest, surprisingly, showed little reaction.
The tone suggested that while the words had been said, the priest couldn’t care less whether she actually complied.
The priest sat down across from Sirin, reached into their robes, and placed something on the table.
A block of wood.
Fine-grained, top-quality laurel.
“A sacred object to be placed upon the altar.”
The priest spoke.
Not a trace of emotion in the voice.
“If you play any irreverent games with it, I will cut off your wrists and burn them.”
Sirin let the threat slide off her and asked, “Yeah, yeah, got it. So what do you want this time?”
The priest was silent for a moment, then murmured in a low voice.
“The Lady of the Moon and the Hunt.”
Sirin nodded, drew a small carving knife from inside her clothes, and began to whittle the wood.
—Scrape, scrape.
In one year, her wood carving had achieved a miraculous level of growth.
Five hundred percent experience gain.
A multiplier that let her accomplish in one cycle what would take five, compress five years of practice into one, and finish in a single day what would normally take five.
But Sirin’s growth had been even faster than that.
If Sirin had taken up wood carving from the start, she’d have been hailed as the second coming of Michelangelo.
Stone, and she’d have been called the reincarnation of Rodin.
Metalwork, and she’d have been treated as a living Hephaestus.
A proficiency that could make her anything—and the system only gave her five hundred percent?
Whoever designed this system clearly had no head for numbers.
But that was fine.
Sirin was a beautiful woman with a generous heart, capable of magnanimously overlooking such mistakes.
Generosity.
Generosity.
That is a generous heart.
One must forgive those who are bad with numbers.
For that is generosity.
Forgive those who are bad with numbers.
Please.
“…”
The important thing was, at any rate, that Sirin learned fast and adapted fast.
She carved the wood and thought to herself.
‘Life really is unpredictable.’
How had she ended up in this strange arrangement with a Pantheon priest?
The story went back to when Sirin had first arrived in this city and sunk into a post-reality crash.
Her martial arts had hit a wall, and her motivation had bottomed out.
In the grip of that crash, Sirin had wandered the city aimlessly, spending money without a care.
Modern people relieve stress through shopping and binge eating—that’s just how it works.
Sirin faithfully followed the behavioral patterns of a modern person.
First she walked into a restaurant and ordered a mountain of food, devouring it all ravenously.
Then she made the rounds of the market stalls, buying up every useless thing she could find.
And then she threw it all away.
In the sense that she paid money for junk only to turn it back into junk, Sirin could truly be considered a modern person who had achieved Body Enlightenment in the art of recycling.
After repeating this a few times, Sirin one day noticed wooden dolls being sold at a street stall.
The wooden dolls were, to put it plainly, absolutely terrible.
Sirin had, quite literally, with no particular thought, out of pure boredom, plopped herself down nearby and started carving a figurine from a block of wood.
The form she chose was a goddess’s statue she had happened to see once before.
The problem was that a Pantheon priest had ‘happened’ to be passing by at the same time and seen it.
The priest had erupted in fury, calling it sacrilege.
Under normal circumstances Sirin would have fought back just as fiercely, but at the time she was deep in her post-reality crash mode.
She’d flung the half-carved block of wood straight at the priest’s face and gone back to the inn to sleep—and that very night, the priest had shown up at her room.
And then came the absurd demand: make the statue again.
The strange arrangement had continued ever since.
Looking back on it now, it didn’t seem like it had been a coincidence.
—Scrape, scrape, scrape.
Sirin kept carving.
The decadent, languid air that had surrounded her was gone.
The blade never worked against the grain of the wood.
Like water finding its way to lower ground, it slid along the most natural path.
No excess force.
No trace of hesitation.
This was no longer the domain of technique.
An ordinary craftsman who hasn’t reached a higher level fights the material.
Cutting, shaping, forcing a form into existence.
But not Sirin.
Sirin was in conversation with the material.
She felt she understood.
The form is not inside the material.
The form is not inside the sculptor.
The form belongs to both.
Sirin’s eyes drifted half-shut.
What mattered was immersion.
What mattered was forgetting consciousness.
As if the carving knife in her hand were no longer a blade, as if the block of wood before her were no longer timber.
A pianist ruins a piece the moment they become aware of the keys; a tightrope walker loses their balance the moment they think about the rope beneath their feet.
A person becomes obsessed with the need to breathe the moment they think about breathing, and an office worker faces a sleepless night the moment they tell themselves they have to fall asleep.
Consciousness is nothing but an obstacle.
Every great wonder humanity has ever wrought was dredged up from the other side of the river of consciousness—from the world of the unconscious.
Perhaps consciousness is nothing more than a glitch in the brain, a byproduct of evolution that mistakes itself for the master.
Everything is like this.
Performance, painting, sculpture, and…
—Scrape, scrape.
The tip of the blade flows along the grain of the wood.
No resistance.
No forcing of form.
It merely liberates the ‘Lady of the Moon’ who was already sleeping within the wood.
Sirin thought, in a daze.
The sword dance she had performed on a moonlit night, forgetting every thought.
The Sirin of that moment had not been Sirin.
She had simply cast aside consciousness, surrendered herself to where her body led, to where the sword flowed.
Consciousness must be forgotten.
As the painter forgets the brush, as the musician forgets the string, as the stonemason forgets the chisel.
Forget.
Forget what you hold in your hand.
Forget.
Forget yourself.
Forget.
Forget the other.
Forget.
Forget the distinction between self and other.
—Scrape.
Scrape.
Scrape.
Sirin gazed at the wood in a state of selfless absorption.
Sirin looked at the wood, and the wood looked at Sirin.
The two were never truly two.
不二, non-duality—
Two and yet never truly two,
一切唯心造, all things arise from the mind—
All things spring from within my own mind,
空 and 無我, emptiness and no-self—
One must forget the self and forget all distinctions,
物我一體, the unity of thing and self—
Only then can one grasp the martial—
合一, union—
Only then can one become one…
“Focus.”
“…Hmph, I know.”
Jolted back to her senses by the priest’s words, Sirin turned her attention to the block of wood.
The carving was finished not long after.
—Thunk.
Sirin set down the carving knife and slid the finished piece across the table.
What had been completed was…
[ ‘Lady of the Moon and the Hunt’ 1/6 Scale Wooden Figure, wearing a see-through evening dress with 75% chest exposure ]
The sort of object that would earn awkward coughs and sidelong glares in any gathering of cultured, educated people on the peninsula.
The priest looked at the goddess figurine and erupted.
“This… how is this in any way the noble image of the Lady of the Moon and the Hunt?! This is nothing but a harlot wallowing in lust!”
Sirin clicked her tongue and took the figurine back.
“Alright, alright. Hold on. You’ve got some picky taste, honestly.”
—Scrape, scrape.
A few strokes of the knife, and the goddess figurine transformed in an instant.
[ ‘Lady of the Moon and the Hunt’ 1/6 Scale Wooden Figure, wearing a super micro bikini and striking a sensual pose ]
This time it was the kind of obscene idol that would have intellectuals reaching for clubs to beat her with before calling the police, and the responding officers would shoot her on sight.
That’s how serious a crime producing obscene material was on the peninsula.
“…”
The priest said nothing.
To Sirin’s eye, it looked less like anger and more like a calm that had come from crossing some threshold of fury.
The priest opened their mouth.
“Woman. Are you not afraid of the hellfire that awaits you?”
“…”
Sirin shrugged.
The priest closed their eyes.
The look of someone deliberating over how exactly to report Sirin’s sacrilege.
When the priest opened their eyes again and fixed Sirin with a glare, the words that came out were:
“…Carve me one.”
“No.”
“…”
A moment later, the priest and Sirin clicked their tongues in unison.
“…Tch.”
Sirin spoke to the priest who was still glaring at her.
“Forget the money. I want to find a child. I need an oracle.”